‘And if it’s not?’
‘If you put the child before a magistrate she’ll likely revert to her former silence. What use will this supposed testament of hers be then?’
‘It’s all we have,’ says Nicholas, ‘and it fits with everything I know.’
‘Which is precious little of substance,’ Quigley says contemptuously. He turns to Lumley. ‘I make the observation only as a lawyer might, my lord. She didn’t even see the face of the man she claims had done these things.’ He scans the sheet of paper. ‘Here it is: Lord Lumley asks the child if the Devil manifested himself to her. Her reply: “No, sir, he did not.” There – she didn’t actually see anyone. If the Devil is at work here, I suggest he has done nothing but toy with a young girl’s powers of imagination.’
‘She’s telling the truth,’ Nicholas counters. ‘I’ve seen three of the bodies myself.’
Quigley looks at him sharply.
John Lumley turns to his secretary and says, apologetically, ‘Dr Shelby told me of Elise’s story, privily, while you were waiting outside the chapel. It would appear that everything the maid says is true – God forbid.’
Nicholas holds up three fingers of his left hand. ‘I saw Ralph Cullen’s body on the dissection table at the College of Physicians last August,’ he says. ‘He’d been pulled from the river by a waterman. I saw Jacob Monkton’s body at Mutton Lane stairs last Accession Day. And I saw the corpse of a preacher who’d been found by Battle Abbey creek just after Twelfth Night. All three had the same wounds to the leg. One victim had been bled dry, one bled out and the liver excised, one victim wholly eviscerated.’
Lumley frowns. ‘And the marks you and Master Sprint saw scratched into the soot by the bread ovens, what of them?’
‘At first I thought they described the wounds on the bodies. Now I think she was drawing what she saw in that cellar – the man hanging on the frame like an inverted crucifixion.’
‘So these wounds have nothing to do with devilry?’ Lumley asks.
‘They’re just the way the killer makes sure the artery is properly found and severed.’
‘Someone is going to have to tell Elise about her brother, Dr Shelby,’ says Lizzy. She shudders. ‘The poor, poor child – to have witnessed such a thing.’
‘I suspect she already has a pretty good idea of what’s happened to Ralph,’ Nicholas says. ‘But I think we should wait until her mind is strong enough to bear the burden.’
‘A justice of the Queen’s Bench must hear of this,’ Lumley says, reaching out to take the testimony from his secretary. ‘Or, better still, the Privy Council.’
Quigley shakes his head, giving up the papers almost grudgingly. ‘Again, my lord, I must counsel you to caution. I need hardly remind you how tenuous this will appear if you present it before a jury. Just look at the witnesses: a vagrant female child, a mortuary clerk and a woman who owns a tavern.’ He looks directly at Nicholas. ‘Not to mention a physician who’s also a paid informer. I understand from my contacts at the College that he has a recent history that can best be described as questionable.’
‘It’s the truth,’ says Nicholas. ‘And don’t think I haven’t had it refuted by any number of clerks and parish officers already.’
‘It’s late,’ says Lumley. ‘Gabriel, as usual you’ve been uncomplainingly dutiful. I shall decide what to do in the morning. As for you, Dr Shelby, I think you’ve provided us with more than enough shocks for one day. God grant us both an untroubled rest.’
In his chamber, Nicholas dips the hem of his shirt into a water bowl and cleans the dried blood from hip and buttock, washes the neat puncture made by the tip of Quigley’s dagger. It’s a small wound; he’s suffered worse bringing in the harvest at Barnthorpe. It seems a small price to pay for the gift Elise Cullen has given him. He climbs into bed, lies on his front for comfort and falls into an exhausted sleep.
Eleanor is waiting for him. She’s standing on the far bank of a river, her gown harried by the wind, her hair loose and billowing. The sky at her back is a boiling cauldron of dark cloud. She is calling to him, one arm outstretched like the doomed heroine of a Greek tragedy. Nicholas knows she is in terrible danger. He must cross the river to reach her. To save her. But there are things lurking just below the surface, things even worse than his own dread of failing her. A magnificent barge is moored nearby. In the prow, Robert Cecil is hunched over Francis Deniker’s writhing body. He’s hauling out the Jesuit’s bloody entrails while Fulke Vaesy stands at his shoulder, quoting the Bible and pointing to each organ with his ivory pointer.
Nicholas awakes with an anguished groan. His shirt is soaked in sweat, ice-cold against his back. The wound from Quigley’s knife throbs like a wasp’s sting in his hip. He sits up in bed and waits for his breathing to settle, for the hammering of his heart to soften. What has caused him to wake? Was it the dream, or a noise from the corridor outside his chamber? He has no idea of the time, though by the amount the candle on his table has burned down he can’t have been asleep more than an hour. The last wakeful moment he can remember was spent staring at the wall, wondering how he was going to protect Bianca once he’d told Robert Cecil that life hadn’t equipped him for the role of informer.
There it is again – a noise just loud enough to wake a habitually light sleeper. Less than a full tapping on the door, more than just a draught pushing it against its hinges. He calls out. ‘Who’s there?’
Silence. Or not quite silence. Then the distinct sound of feet hurrying away down the passage.
Nicholas throws back the covers and goes to the door, his way lit only by the candle and the muted glow from the embers in the hearth. He lifts the latch and looks out into the corridor. It’s empty. Cursing his overactive imagination, he turns back towards the bed.
As he does so, he sees in the candlelight a small sheet of parchment on the floor. He bends to retrieve it, cursing at the sudden sharp pain in his hip. Carrying it back to the bed, he reads the words scrawled in spidery black ink:
I know who killed the maid’s brother and the others. Come to me in the storeroom at the end of the mews. I shall wait no longer than cockcrow. Despite your promise before Lord Lumley not to denounce me, I must go out of England before the day’s end or perish.
40
Tonight is the first night the dreams do not come. Tonight Ralph’s weight does not fatigue her shoulders. Jacob Monkton does not disturb her ears with his gibberish. The eyeless woman who rocks to and fro incessantly has departed. The old, one-handed man who cannot remember where to find his mattress or the piss-pot has vanished. Tonight the sturdy walls of Nonsuch do not transform themselves into briary thickets and hedges. Elise is warm in her bed. Her stomach is full. She is not chilled to the bone, cramming discarded scraps of bad meat into her mouth, drinking from muddy puddles. All these trials have begun to fade from her consciousness like pain from a wound as it heals. In their stead comes a strange noise, which at first sounds like someone calling to her in a foreign language, calling from a long way off. It is the sound of her own voice.
When she’d returned to the servants’ dormitory, on the ground floor of the Nonsuch inner gatehouse, no one had thought to ask her why she’d been summoned to Lord Lumley’s privy apartments. They’d known she wouldn’t answer. Since when had the girl they called Betony ever answered a question?
Sprint had been wise enough to let her go in and find her own way of making landfall. She’d busied herself in preparation for sleep, washed under her linen kirtle with a rag wetted from the water tub in the corner, cleaned her teeth with leaves of eglantine. Then the familiar rituaclass="underline" Joanna leading the women in their evening prayers: Our Lord which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name… let thy kingdom come…