‘In which case it would have rotted almost away by now,’ says Nicholas, edging past the little boat towards the steps.
‘Do we have to go in there now?’ asks Bianca, wrinkling her nose at the pungent stink of river ooze.
‘I thought you were intent on coming with me. Losing your nerve, Mistress Merton?’
She mutters something in Italian – an insult, by the way it’s delivered. He hears it even above the noise of the gulls. But he’s already climbing the steps.
Nicholas is standing on a trodden path amid a wilderness of dead and dying vegetation. Some thirty paces off to his right is the wall that adjoins Bianca’s physic garden. To his left – about the same distance away – he can make out the sagging roof of the Magdalene almshouse above the opposite wall. And ahead of him, rising like a grim stone bastion into the winter sky, is the river-facing side of the Lazar House itself. Only now can he truly appreciate the size of the place. The towering grey rag-stone is as solidly buttressed as a cathedral. A row of tiny windows pierces the wall high up below the eaves. Most are either empty or boarded up. What glass remains is grey and opaque, like the eyes of an old blind dog. In places the roof has fallen in, leaving gaping black wounds that let in the rain and the snow.
Steadying his nerves, he glances back to see that Bianca is close behind him, her face twisted in displeasure. As he begins to wade through the rotting ferns and stems of dogwood he imagines melancholy eyes watching him from the windows. He thinks he can hear the murmuring of long-dead monks praying for the desperate souls in their care, but it is only the sighing of the wind through the bare branches of an old hornbeam tree.
Reaching the louring face of the old hospital, he sees an ancient door, the timber faded to the colour of dust. One hand placed against the timbers tells him that although it may be ancient, it’s as stout as the day it was hung. But when he inspects the lock, he discovers it’s almost new. There’s just a thin colouring of rust on the iron. And, judging by the bright edge to the barrel, it’s been used recently.
And your diagnosis, Mr Shelby? says a voice in his head, sounding uncomfortably like Sir Fulke Vaesy’s.
This is the door the killer uses. He’s waiting behind it now. And though I told Bianca leprosy is a sickness, not a sin, now I’m not so sure. His skin is black like a toad’s, his eyes ablaze with hatred for everything that is clean. And when I step across the threshold, he will cut out my organs and toss my carcass into the Thames.
‘Nicholas, I’m really cold now,’ says Bianca in his right ear. ‘Have you seen enough? The door’s locked. Can we leave?’
‘We could get an iron crow from the Jackdaw: prize it open.’
Bianca’s olive skin has taken on the same wintery grey as the sky. ‘I suppose we might,’ she says, drawing her cloak closer around her shoulders. ‘But then we’ll announce to everyone that we’ve been here – including, if you’re right, the killer.’
‘Does that matter?’
‘He’s not likely to drop by the Jackdaw and ask you to repair the door frame, is he? If he knows he’s discovered, he’ll put as much distance between himself and this place as he can. And, on that particular count, I wouldn’t blame him.’
‘I suppose you’re right,’ says Nicholas despondently. Looking around for another way in, all he can see is the great hornbeam tree rising to the Lazar House roof. He’s never had a head for heights. He’s not even sure the higher branches would bear his weight. Reluctantly, he steps back from the door.
A wooden skiff and a new lock. It’s not a winning hand, and Nicholas knows it. Who’s to say how long the skiff has been lying in the culvert? It could be a year or more. And the lock could have been put there by the parish, or by a vagabond to safeguard the profit of his felonies. The Lazar House might be hiding nothing more life-threatening than a house-diver’s haul of stolen pewter.
But something tells him he’s wrong to dismiss it so quickly. Perhaps it’s just his sensitivity to its ancient, tortured atmosphere, but he can easily imagine the killer’s next victim lying chained in the darkness somewhere beyond this locked door. He tries to put himself inside the killer’s mind; asks himself what kind of place he would choose for a secret prison. Instantly, the Lazar House slips into place within the puzzle.
‘There’s no point in freezing to death out here in front of a locked door, Nicholas,’ Bianca says, interrupting his thoughts. She claps herself vigorously for warmth. ‘We need to think this through – form a plan.’ Nodding in the direction of the river, she adds, ‘And we need to go before the tide turns and traps us on the wrong side of that wall.’
He knows she’s right. The answer to his questions will have to wait awhile. Reluctantly, he turns and follows Bianca back towards the culvert.
The door opens so quickly that Elise barely has time to rise from the mattress before two men – she recognizes them as the Devil’s minions she’d fought so tenaciously yesterday – tower over her.
She has spent the long hours since waking wondering when they might return, when they will show their true nature. But to her surprise, they appear to be bearing nothing more satanic than a trencher of bread and cheese. Behind them comes the tall, mournful-looking man with the spade-cut beard who, by his demeanour and the way the men defer to him, is clearly their master. He seems to Elise an unlikely disciple of Lucifer.
‘God give you a good day, Mistress No-name,’ he says with a surprisingly warm smile for one whose face looks so full of sorrow. ‘Yesterday we feared we’d cornered a tigress. I trust we find you in a better humour this morning. Is it safe to lay this trencher down beside you? I’d prefer to keep my eyes in their sockets, if it’s all the same to you.’
Elise recalls the battle proudly, as though she’d been the victor and not the vanquished. She had clawed and flailed and bitten. She had kicked out like a terrified foal until her legs felt as heavy as lead. Struck home, too – more than once – if the resulting cries and curses had been anything to go by. But the months of living like a feral creature had sapped her strength, robbed her of the capacity to resist for long. And as she had felt her strength fading, she had decided her only hope was to surrender herself so that these minions of the Devil might not think to search the hedge from which they had dragged her, and where – in her fevered mind – little Ralph and moon-faced Jacob and the others are sheltering still, wondering where she’s gone.
‘Come now, child,’ says the mournful man with the beard, ‘what shall we call you, if you won’t tell us your name?’
But Elise knows how easy it is for the Devil to disguise himself. So she answers the question with the only weapon left to her: silence.
26
John Lumley does not know what to make of the bedraggled, half-starved young maid his servants have dragged from the hedge at Cheam church. His compassion, however, will not allow him to throw her back into whatever mire of misfortune he’s plucked her from.
But what to do with her?
Clearly the girl is one of the vagrant poor. Should he hand her over to the parish authorities? He knows what they will do with her.
But a maid is not to be kept like a lost dog you might throw in with your hounds and forget about. If she won’t say a single word about who she is, or where she’s come from, what is a man to do?