‘I’ve been asking myself the same question. I don’t think they’re there to protect Arcampora. I think they’re for Samuel.’
‘And why in the name of Christ’s nails would he need protecting? The greatest danger he faces around here – apart from the village boys who throw stones at him – is accidentally treading in sheep shit.’
‘I don’t know, Ned. I truly do not know.’
Ned takes one hand from the reins and scratches his fiery red beard. ‘When I was working in the mortuary at St Tom’s, there was people who would come across the bridge from the city and pay me money, just so they could look at the stiffs. Not my idea of entertainment, I grant you – but a man ’as to make a living, and as we both know, ’ospitals pay fuck-all. If I ’ad a particularly messy arrival, I could double what I charged. Now if this fellow could cure the falling sickness, well, he’d be able to charge whatever he wanted, wouldn’t he?’
‘Yes. He would, Ned.’
‘So maybe that’s what he’s about.’
Nicholas shakes his head. ‘Arcampora has a high regard for his reputation, I’ll grant. But that’s not it. It’s as if he’s trying to prepare Samuel for something.’
‘Perhaps his father wants him by his side in the Low Countries. Perhaps he’s trying to toughen Samuel up.’
Nicholas pictures the line of portraits at Cleevely House, every single one a stern Christian warrior. ‘Samuel will never be the son Joshua Wylde wanted, whatever Arcampora tries to make him. No, it has to be for a different purpose.’
They round a hummock carpeted with dogrose and corn-cockle. Ahead of them the ground slopes towards the little bridge across the stream and the drovers’ track leading to the Oxford road. Beyond it, the beech wood on the other side of Cleevely village.
Then, at the very edge of his vision, Nicholas spots a sudden movement in the grass. A hare breaks away down the slope. Buffle gives one high yelp of delight and tears off in pursuit.
‘Come back here, you little rascal!’ shouts Ned. He tries to spur his pony forward, but the creature seems to know it has three days of bearing Ned’s weight ahead of it and stubbornly refuses to break into anything more vigorous than a reluctant trot.
And so it is left to Nicholas to save Rose’s present before it disappears from sight. He puts his spurs to his horse’s flanks and sets off in pursuit.
But Buffle’s head is full of canine desires quite unknown to man. She pays Nicholas not the slightest attention. She crosses the bridge, nose down, at a determined gallop. Cursing, Nicholas follows.
Now they are in the beech wood. The trees crowd over the track. The wind moans in the branches. Buffle, damn her, has left the track and is heading into the undergrowth, nose still barely an inch from the ground. Her tail thrashes in ecstasy. And then she swerves and plunges into a particularly dense patch of undergrowth.
Shit! I’ll never get her back now, Nicholas curses under his breath. Ned will have to find another present to melt Rose’s heart.
He dismounts, calling to the dog with increasing frustration. For long minutes he can hear a disturbance amid the ferns and bracken, but catches not one glimpse of Buffle.
He’s about to give up when she suddenly emerges from the thicket a short way off and trots proudly towards him.
At first glance, Nicholas thinks she’s found part of a deer’s carcass. But when she gets closer, her tail a blur of self-satisfaction, he sees it’s the remains of an old coat, covered in mud and leaves. An old brown worsted coat, with broad pleats around the hem.
And from the torn material hangs the fan of a human ribcage. Not yet fully whitened, but well feasted upon by worms, rats, beetles, crows and foxes – all the unwelcome dinner guests that dine on a corpse dumped in a beech wood.
5
‘Not much of a way to take your leave of the world – picked over by foxes, scattered about like leftovers. Probably not even shriven, poor sod,’ says Ned darkly, sitting on a broken bough while he regards the pitiful collection of filthy bones, flesh and cloth they have managed to collect from the thicket.
It’s been a grim task, but they’ve completed it as best they can. Using broken branches and the sharp poniard Nicholas bought before he left Bankside, they’ve assembled enough of the remains to establish the corpse is that of a young male. With Buffle’s assistance, they even have a gnawed skull with half the grey flesh attached, recovered together with a soiled jerkin from a clump of ferns. The lingering stench almost makes Nicholas gag, but the find tells him all he needs to know.
‘I’d wager a golden half-angel against a button that it’s Tanner Bell.’
Ned stares at him. ‘I knew physicians was clever sods, but that takes the prize, that does. ’Ow d’you know?’
‘Because this is his brother’s coat.’
A scowl of doubt on his face, Ned says, ‘A tattered old thing like that, and you can name its owner at one glance? I want you on my side next time I play primero. With second sight like that, we’d win a fortune.’
‘First of all, by what’s left of this body, I’d say it belongs to a lad around Tanner Bell’s age. Then we have Isabel Wylde’s claim that Tanner Bell and his friend Finney just upped and left for London – which Mercy Havington refuses to believe. But the damning proof is this.’ Nicholas holds up the ruined garment, to reveal a patch stitched low down at the back. ‘That’s where the ball that killed Dorney struck. I was there when it happened. He died in my arms. Sir Joshua Wylde insisted that we send his belongings back to his father, but we couldn’t let him receive his son’s coat with bloodstains all over the back and a hole shot through it, could we? So we had one of the washerwomen clean and patch it. I checked it myself, to see if she’d managed a half-decent job.’
‘So why was Tanner Bell wearing it?’
‘From what Dorney used to say, I got the impression Tanner idolized him. He probably wore it as a memento.’
‘According to Mercy Havington, this Tanner lad was on his way to London. What’s he doing in pieces in a wood barely a mile outside Cleevely?’
‘That’s where my second sight fails. You’ll have to trust your own, next time you play at cards.’
‘What do we do with him?’
‘We put him back where Buffle found him.’
‘What?’
‘Think on it, Ned. If we inform the local magistrate, he’ll send word to the coroner at Gloucester. That will take at least a day. Then the coroner will empanel a jury. Before the week is out, it will be common knowledge in every hamlet, village and town for miles. Arcampora will be long gone before the ink is dry on the arraignment. And anyway, Lady Wylde will tell the jury exactly what she told Mercy Havington and me: the boy left of his own volition – last seen heading for London.’
‘Except that you can prove someone with medical knowledge killed him. An’ the only one round here with that is your Swissy.’
‘I could,’ Nicholas admits. ‘But I’m not going to. Not yet.’
‘Why not?’
‘I want Arcampora to think I’m on my way back to report to Sir Joshua Wylde, without a suspicion in the world.’
‘But if Arcampora did this, isn’t Samuel Wylde in great danger?’
‘You didn’t see how Lady Isabel behaved with her stepson, Ned. Whatever it is that she and Arcampora are doing to Samuel, killing him is the very last thing they intend.’
‘What I can’t understand,’ says Ned, jabbing a finger in the direction of the skull, ‘is why anyone would carve a hole in his head like that. What did they use – a fucking carpenter’s auger? God’s blood, I could stick two fingers in there and pick his nose from the inside!’