As the Spaniard stops mid-sentence, Nicholas hears more footsteps on the flagstones. Father Vermeiren calls out, reverting to Dutch, ‘Who are you? What do you want? Can you not see I am busy here?’
The next moment comes a sound like someone crying out from a sudden attack of stomach cramp: a deep, groaning gurgling, followed immediately by the dull impact of a human body against hard stone. Then the sudden clatter of a steel blade on flagstones, followed by a single high-pitched scream – masculine – filled with agony.
Behind the pillar, Nicholas reacts without thinking. His physician’s instincts overcome his desire to remain unseen. His legs move without the will’s command. As he steps out from the shadows of the stonework he is almost knocked off-balance by a man fleeing the chamber, disappearing into the dark body of the church.
Now he can see that, besides himself, three people remain in the chamber. One of them is Father Vermeiren. He is lying on his back, one arm thrown out behind him, the other across his belly, his legs twisted sideways. His eyes stare sightlessly at the vaulted ceiling. By the amount of crimson spreading over the black cloth of his cassock, he appears to be in the process of transmuting into a cardinal before Nicholas’s eyes.
The other man – portly, with a sunburnt face and neatly trimmed beard – lies close by, his head almost touching the priest’s. Nicholas can see by the yellow corselet and breeches, expensively slashed to show the silk lining, that he is no priest, but a Spanish officer. Like Vermeiren, his eyes are wide open. But there is still a measure of stunned life left in them, a guttering candle flame that looks moments away from extinction. His throat appears to have been slashed. The blood pumps thickly from a severed artery, anointing the flagstones. Close by lies a dagger, the blade the length of a man’s forearm. It is slick with blood.
The third of this sanguinary trio is the only one very much alive.
Nicholas is looking at a dark-haired young woman with a high, domed brow and eyes that seem almost too large for the face, though he puts this down to terror. Her plain cloth gown is liberally spattered with the gore the killer has so generously spread about the chamber. For a moment he can almost believe she is one of the tormented sinners, escaped from within the picture into the world of the as-yet-unjudged. She only makes her reality indisputable when she begins to scream.
11
For Nicholas, the next few minutes pass in a maelstrom that pushes the torments portrayed in the triptych out of his mind entirely. He has real horrors to attend to. Despite his best efforts to stem the blood pumping from the Spaniard’s throat, the man’s eyes slowly dull. Eventually they reflect nothing: no pain, no fear… no life.
By then the chamber is full of people shouting in Dutch or Spanish. Save for Father Albani and Bianca, they achieve nothing other than stirring the chaos like witches around a cauldron. The captain of the Spanish garrison arrives, his sword drawn even in this house of God. Judging by his wild gesticulating and the whey-faced and trembling response it brings from the assembled priests and nuns, he appears to want to hang everyone from the trees around the Markt square. Nicholas, who has tended wounded Spaniards taken from the field of battle, shouts ‘Médico!’ at him, which at least delays their immediate lynching.
Bianca and Father Albani are doing their utmost to soothe the terrified young woman in the blood-soaked kirtle. She has stopped screaming, but her crimson hands shake as though she’s contracted a severe case of the palsy.
When it is clear that the Spaniard has passed beyond earthly help, Nicholas steps away from the two bodies. He turns to the captain and opens his bloody hands, shaking his head sadly to show he has done all he can. ‘Imposible… lo siento,’ he says regretfully. The man glares at him, his anger only slightly mollified.
Freed from the need to fight for his patient, Nicholas sees a picture of the slaughter emerging in his mind. Father Vermeiren has been killed instantly, by a sudden knife thrust between the ribs and into the heart. The blow must have been unexpected, Nicholas thinks, because the priest’s hands are unbloodied, and there are no telltale rips on the sleeves of his gown, indicating that he tried to defend himself.
The dead Spaniard seems to have been slashed across the throat, a sweeping arc of a blow that has torn through the larynx and the carotid arteries, also before he’d had a chance to act.
The captain of the garrison begins yelling again. The rapidly changing expressions on his dark face are easy to read, even if his words – delivered in a strangely high-pitched tirade – are incomprehensible. He wants to know what Nicholas is doing here, what he has seen, what account he can give of the murders. But Nicholas has little more to give, even if he had the language.
The man’s shouting subsides only when two deputies from the town assembly arrive, prosperous men with a civic solemnity about them that not even two bloodied corpses in their cathedral can shake. They escort Nicholas, Bianca and the bloodied, terrified apparition in the peasant’s gown down an echoing stone passage to a windowless storeroom. It is not exactly a dungeon, but with the iron grille that serves as a door closed behind them, it might as well be. The maid has started trembling again. Bianca calms her as best she can.
One of the councillors holds aloft a tallow light, to study Nicholas’s face by. ‘Who are you?’ he asks in Dutch. ‘The captain said you are a physician, but I have never seen you before.’
It seems to Nicholas that there is no profit to be had in lying. At least, not about his identity. ‘I am an Englishman. And this is my wife.’ He nods towards Bianca, who is clasping the maid to her breast, stroking her tangled hair like a mother with a child who’s woken from a nightmare. ‘We are refugees.’
‘Ah, you are the couple Meneer van der Molen brought us. We have heard of you,’ the other councillor says, as though observing some rare phenomenon of nature. He speaks good English – a wool merchant used to dealing with the heretics across the Narrow Sea, Nicholas guesses.
‘He told you?’ Nicholas asks, wondering if his trust in the owner of the fishing boat has been misplaced.
‘He did not have to. It is our job to know what occurs in our town. Why did you come?’
‘We fled out of England because I was denounced as a Catholic,’ Nicholas says, sticking to the story he and Bianca have contrived. ‘They accused an innocent old physician I knew of seeking to poison the queen. They tortured and executed him. I could have been next.’
The burgher nods in sympathy. He says, ‘God will punish them, when He is ready. But it would appear you have inadvertently brought some of the heretics’ malevolence with you.’
‘What do you mean?’ Nicholas asks.
‘The Protestant rebels in the northern states – I would hazard they are responsible for this.’ He regards the two corpses sadly. ‘It would not be the first time they have sent an assassin to murder a prominent Spaniard. But to commit sacrilege in God’s house, and slay an innocent priest while they do it: for that they will be damned to the eternal fires.’
‘Can you tell us what happened here?’ the councillor asks.
‘Not really. I didn’t see the actual attack,’ Nicholas says. It occurs to him that hiding in the shadows inside the little chapel might not look like the behaviour of an entirely innocent man. ‘I was merely taking a look at your fine cathedral while my wife was at confession.’
The man nods. ‘So you cannot describe the assassin?’
‘Not really. A man pushed past me, but I didn’t get much of a look at him. Then I heard this poor girl screaming. As for the rest of it, well, the priest was clearly dead. I did all I could to save the other gentleman–’