by Alys Clare
‘Don’t worry, dog, I have no intention of coming down on your side,’ I said quietly. The growl intensified.
The house looked deserted, although surely there must be at least one or two servants in residence. I let myself down again and jumped off the barrow. Then I returned to the front of the house and knocked very firmly on the door.
The noise echoed through the house. Nothing happened, so I knocked again, even more forcefully. There was an outbreak of violent barking – the dogs had picked up the sound – running feet, and a voice from within called out, ‘Who’s there? What do you want?’
‘I will not conduct this conversation through an oak door,’ I called back.
‘You’ll bloody well have to,’ the voice said – it sounded like that of a youth – ‘because I ain’t opening it. I’ve got my orders, see, and I’m not to unbar this door no matter who comes knocking!’
‘Is Sir Richard at home?’ I demanded.
There was quite a long pause, then the young man said, ‘No.’
‘He’s gone to Slapton, then?’ Perhaps sounding as if I knew all about Hawkins and his comings and goings would encourage the servant to trust me …
‘Might have done,’ the voice replied cagily.
‘Ah, I’d hoped to catch him before he left,’ I went on. ‘But there’s so much to do, and he’ll no doubt be supervising the work.’
‘Aye, that he is,’ the voice agreed. The ruse seemed to have won him over. ‘He left at first light. He hadn’t planned to go till the end of the week, but—’ Abruptly the brief rush of confidences dried up. ‘But then he did,’ he finished lamely.
‘Well, no matter, I will seek him out there,’ I said.
‘Want to leave a message?’ the voice asked.
‘No. Good day.’
I set off back to the inn where I had left Hal, thinking.
One of the Falco fugitives had been killed as he ran away from Sir Thomas Drake’s house. Another had been savaged by dogs as he jumped down into Sir Richard Hawkins’s back yard. Was this no more than men of wealth and property protecting what was theirs?
But then Jarman’s remark about Thomas Drake not welcoming ghosts from his family’s disreputable past equally applied to Richard Hawkins.
So what was the truth?
I was in the muddle of streets behind the quayside, almost at the inn, when a woman’s voice called out anxiously, ‘Are you the doctor?’
I turned to see a slim woman dressed in sombre grey standing in the doorway of one of the tall, narrow houses that lined the street. She wore a large white apron over her gown and her hair was neatly covered by a white cap. She was of early middle age, her face set in lines that suggested a chronic worrier.
‘I’m a doctor,’ I said, walking over to her.
She sighed in relief. ‘Oh, good, that’s good,’ she breathed. ‘My neighbour down the street pointed you out to me, and I hope I haven’t caused offence by hailing you so rudely, only I’m that desperate, and my daughter’s been on at me to do something about it since it’s really affecting my other lodgers and I have my living to earn after all, and it’s not easy when all said and done when I’m on my own, and—’
‘What can I do for you?’ I interrupted gently. She did not look unwell; other than the worry lines, in fact, I’d have said she was pretty healthy.
‘Well, not me exactly,’ she said hesitantly, confirming my assessment, ‘it’s – well, it’s him.’ She jerked her thumb upwards.
‘Perhaps I should come in?’ I suggested. One of her lodgers was unwell, I guessed, his distress disturbing the others.
‘Oh, yes, if you please, Doctor,’ the woman said, standing back to let me over the step. ‘He’s right at the top, I’m afraid.’
I did not have my bag with me but I was willing to look at the patient. If what ailed him was straightforward, I could send the woman to the nearest apothecary for a suitable remedy.
She had gone on ahead and she led the way up three flights of stairs. A narrower flight led off the top landing, and at the top there was a single door.
The woman pointed. ‘He’s in there,’ she whispered. ‘They asked for privacy – said they’d be attending to business matters – so I put them up at the top.’
‘They?’
‘Three of them.’ She tutted disapprovingly. ‘Leastways, there were three. Merchants, they are, although that can cover a multitude of things, eh, Doctor?’
‘Indeed it can,’ I agreed. I ran up the flimsy steps and tapped on the door. There was no reply. I opened it a crack, and instantly the smell of sickness flowed out to greet me. I pushed the door fully open and went inside.
The sick man lay in the bed furthest from the door. Two further beds had been placed either side of the door, as if their occupants wanted to be as far away as possible. The man was elderly and lay in a half-sitting position, pillows behind him. His face was deathly white except for two spots of colour on the sunken cheeks. His eyes were shut and I could hear the crackle of his breathing from where I stood.
I went over to him, kneeling down beside the bed. He was struggling for each breath and the effort was exhausting him.
‘I need very hot water in a wide bowl, and a cloth,’ I said quietly to the woman – she had crept to stand just behind me – ‘and send someone to fetch white horehound oil.’
‘White horehound oil,’ she repeated, ‘yes, I’ll send the boy, and I’ll put water on to heat.’
I would put drops of the oil into the hot water and hold the bowl before the old man’s face, I was calculating, and the cloth draped over both the bowl and his head would mean he’d inhale the steam, and—
But then the man’s dark eyes flew open and he stared right at me. I thought for a moment that it was fear that was twisting his features but then I realized it was anger. Fury.
He shot out a hand and grabbed my wrist. Even in his high fever he was strong. He muttered something in a foreign tongue, the words indistinct, then said abruptly in English, ‘Who are you?’
‘Gabriel Taverner,’ I said. ‘I’m a physician.’
The fury erupted. ‘I do not want a physician! I told them, I—’
‘You may not want one but you need one,’ I interrupted calmly.
He looked at me for a long moment, his face working. Then he said in a very different tone, ‘Where are they? Am I left here alone?’
In a heartbeat he had changed from resentful aggression to the pathos of sick old age.
And as he leaned forward against me I thought I felt him sob.
I stayed with him while obediently he breathed in the steam from two successive bowls of steaming water laced with white horehound oil. The congestion in his chest seemed to ease, and as his tired old body relaxed he settled against his pillows and fell asleep.
The woman said she would repeat the treatment later, and I undertook to return the next day. As she saw me out she whispered, ‘Will he die, Doctor?’
‘I hope not,’ I replied. I thought at first that her concern was for her business – it doesn’t encourage trade if dead bodies are observed being carried out of lodging houses – but then I saw the deep pity in her eyes.
‘Poor old man,’ she muttered. She reached into the purse at her belt, but I stopped her.
‘No need,’ I said quietly. She had been the one running up and down the stairs, and she’d paid for the horehound oil.
She nodded her thanks. ‘I only hope the other two come back soon and take over the care of him,’ she said worriedly. ‘It’s not right, truly it isn’t!’
With a murmur of agreement, I hastened on my way.
The afternoon was now well advanced. I was very hungry and I wanted to see Celia. She had still been upstairs in her own quarters when I’d left that morning, and I hadn’t yet apologized for having left her and Jonathan so abruptly the previous evening. Not that she’d appeared to mind, I thought now as I urged Hal on. Neither had he, come to that.
I wanted to be back well before nigh
tfall.
I hadn’t forgotten that strange moment late the previous night when I’d thought I heard the hiss of a whisper. And there had been the earlier incident out in the yard, where I’d run at a phantom intruder with a muck fork. I’d told myself repeatedly that I was allowing my imagination to get the better of me, but my unease seemed to have lodged in my mind.
However, it was only a short detour to call in at Tavy St Luke before I went home, so that was what I did.
Jonathan was in his church. He was standing quite still, looking up at the stained-glass panels set into the top of the wall between the body of the church and the side chapel dedicated to St Luke.
‘They still fill me with joy,’ he said without turning round, ‘even though we know their story and its sorrows.’
‘How did you know it was me?’ I said, going up to stand beside him.
‘It’s the determined way you walk,’ he replied.
‘I’m sorry I had to abandon you last night.’
‘No need for apologies. Did the man survive?’
‘Yes. He was well enough to slip out of the room in the coroner’s house where he’d been left and make his escape under cover of night.’
‘Escape? He was a wanted man then?’
‘No, not really. It’s true he climbed a wall into the rear yard of a private house, but I don’t think anyone had it in mind to accuse him of any crime.’
‘Then why did you say he escaped?’ Jonathan repeated.
‘Because he was one of the fugitives from the Falco.’
There was a brief silence. ‘You are sure?’
‘I am.’
Jonathan nodded slowly. ‘So you wanted to talk to him.’
‘I did, very much.’
There was another, longer, pause. Then he said, ‘Gabriel, I am uneasy in my mind about that ship; more accurately, about who, or what, hid down there in the deepest hold. Their presence … haunts me. I dream of—’ But he stopped abruptly, apparently not willing to share the secrets of his sleeping mind with me. ‘You will think me foolish and over-imaginative, I suspect, but sometimes I think someone’s watching me. Following me while I go about my daily round, and always keeping just out of sight, so that when I spin round and call who’s there? there is no reply and nobody – nothing – to be seen.’
I sighed. ‘I do not think you’re either foolish or over-imaginative, Jonathan. For one thing, I don’t think either fault, if faults they are, is characteristic of you as I’m coming to know you. For another, I’ve been experiencing exactly the same thing myself.’
TWELVE
Jonathan and I left the church and went to his house, where he poured measures of brandy for us both.
‘I too have the sense that somebody is watching me,’ I said as we settled either side of the hearth. Jonathan had stoked up the fire, and the heat and, more importantly, the light were providing their age-old comfort and reassurance. The brandy, however, was the best restorative. I have often wondered who provides our vicar with such fine French brandy; someone, presumably, who values him as much as I do.
‘And as soon as you mentioned dreams,’ I went on, ‘I knew we had to speak.’
‘You too?’ he asked.
‘Oh, yes.’
There was a pause, then he said cautiously, ‘Would you like to talk about them?’
I wasn’t sure where to begin, so I started with the prosaic. ‘They began the night after I’d first gone to see Captain Zeke on the Falco, so that’s …’ I thought back. ‘Roughly a week ago.’
Jonathan shot me a sympathetic glance. ‘If your experiences have been anything like mine, that is a long time to have suffered,’ he said quietly.
‘I haven’t dreamed every night,’ I replied. I smiled briefly. ‘Only most of them.’
‘To describe what you see might help to disempower its force?’ Jonathan said tentatively. ‘And I take it that you have not mentioned the dreams to – to anyone in your household.’
I assumed he meant my sister. ‘No,’ I agreed. Then, for I felt he might ascribe my reticence to some fallible quality in Celia, I added, ‘I share many things with my sister, Jonathan. More, perhaps, than I should, but she is a strong woman and has endured much without breaking.’
Almost inaudibly he murmured, ‘I know.’
I stored away that soft, revealing comment, for it was not the moment to respond to it, and anyway I wasn’t sure Jonathan had intended me to hear.
‘The reason I have not confided in her concerning these wretched dreams is that I am ashamed,’ I plunged on. ‘Ashamed of my terror, ashamed of the instinct that would have me keep a light burning all night; most of all, ashamed of my new reluctance to close my eyes and yield to sleep because I am so afraid of what will come to me when I am helpless in the dark.’
Oh, but it was good to speak of it at last. I had been keeping it to myself as a way of pretending it wasn’t really happening, and the strain had been considerable.
‘You describe it well,’ Jonathan said. ‘What will come to me. It is precisely what I feel, too.’ He paused, thinking. ‘Something lurks, patiently waiting, until I cannot fight it, and then it slips into my dreams and it is as if somebody is pushing it.’
I nodded eagerly. ‘Yes, precisely that. I see a huge animal, just out of sight among a tangle of trees and undergrowth – a jungle, for there’s a sense of great heat and humidity. It moves with the sinuous stealth of a great black snake, but when I turn to look at it I see two brilliant pale green eyes staring straight at me, and then I can see it’s a panther.’
He nodded. ‘Go on.’
‘I see myself within the dreams, but I seem to be performing acts I have never performed in life, nor had any desire to. I make strange potions, I blow a cloud of some weird dust into people’s faces, so that they cannot help but breathe it in through nose and mouth. I am cruel, Jonathan; I use others for my own sinister purpose, and it is this aspect that disgusts me most. That and the dead bodies.’
‘Ah,’ he breathed. ‘Yes. The dead bodies.’
‘I watch as the ground opens and the dead crawl back up to the surface,’ I plunged on, barely registering his quiet comment. ‘Then it is no longer I who am in control, and I am helpless to resist as the figure in white commands me to—’ I stopped. ‘And then I am neither the controller nor the instrument but the victim, and that is the worst of all.’
Silently he reached out and poured more brandy into my cup.
‘What you describe is horribly familiar,’ he said quietly after a long pause, ‘for I have seen similar violent and disturbing scenes. I believe,’ he went on, the confidence returning to his voice, ‘that some power which came here on the Falco is indicating its presence to us; to you and me.’
‘Why us?’
‘Because we are the most involved.’
‘What about Theo?’
‘You are quite sure he is not being sent these dreams?’
‘Yes, he’d have—’ I stopped. ‘Well, no, I’m not sure, I suppose. I’m just assuming he’d have told me.’
‘Yet you have not told him.’
‘True.’
‘Let us assume for now that he is free of this horror, as I fervently hope he is,’ Jonathan went on. ‘If it is only the two of us, then I suggest it is because we are closest to whatever lies at the dark heart of the matter: you because you have examined the bodies of two of the fugitives—’
‘Three,’ I interrupted. ‘Only the third one wasn’t dead.’
‘Ah, yes. The man you treated last night. And, of course, you studied the tiny female corpse that was left on board the ship.’
‘So that explains the interest in me,’ I said. ‘What about you?’
‘I entered their alien world,’ he replied. ‘Down in that dark little hold, I had to approach whatever lurked there in order to communicate the wish that it should leave. I think—’ But he did not go on.
I recalled what he’d said as we rode home after the purification ceremony. He�
��d described two battling forces, one that was protective and the other malign: powerful, ancient, sinister, dangerous, and emanating from the darkness.
Dear God, and he had opened himself to it, whatever it was, and now it had latched onto him …
‘Jonathan, this is appalling!’ I said urgently. ‘You came to carry out the ceremony at my request, and it has brought to you this terrible danger! Have you no means of protecting yourself?’ I stared wildly round the little room, as if searching for a sword or a dagger.
And Jonathan said calmly, ‘Of course I have, Gabriel.’
I turned to face him. He was holding up the wooden pectoral cross that hung on a leather thong above his heart.
‘I will admit, however,’ he added with a wry smile, ‘that I have been spending a great deal of time in the church of late.’
‘I might just come and join you,’ I muttered.
‘You would be most welcome.’
After a moment I said, ‘Why are we being visited by these dreams?’
‘The power that has come here is showing us its strength, perhaps. Letting us know that it is not to be lightly dismissed.’
‘No fear of that,’ I said. Then I was struck by a new thought. ‘Jonathan, what of the fugitives? Do they have the dreams, do you think? Are they as afraid as I am?’
‘As we are,’ he corrected. ‘I imagine so. I sense that these poor souls are in torment. They succeeded in their aim of reaching England – if, indeed, that was their destination, and—’
‘It was,’ I interrupted.
‘How can you be sure?’
‘Because it seems likely they seek particular people. Their presence has been recorded in two very specific places: the residences of Richard Hawkins and Thomas Drake.’
I watched as Jonathan absorbed that. ‘Both of whom have strong links with the Caribbean, which was the point of departure for the fugitives,’ he observed.