Dark Fire (19 page)

She sighed. ‘Very well.’

‘And now I would ask you more about yesterday’s events. Please, sit down.’

Reluctantly she took a chair. ‘Did your husband and brother seem as normal when you and Susan left the house to shop?’

She looked at me wearily. ‘Yes. We left before the markets opened and returned at noon. Michael hadn’t gone to Augmentations yesterday – he went up to help his brother with one
of his vile-smelling experiments. When we got back we saw the front door had been staved in and then those – those red footprints. Susan didn’t want to come in, but I made her.’
She hesitated. ‘Somehow I knew there wasn’t anybody here, not living.’ Her tightly held features seemed to sag a little. ‘We went upstairs and found them.’

I nodded. ‘Is Susan your only servant?’

‘She’s all we could afford, silly lump though she is.’

‘And none of the neighbours saw or heard anything?’

‘The goodwife next door told your man she heard a great banging and clattering, but that was nothing unusual when his brother was at his work.’

‘I would like to look at the workshop again. Do you feel able to come with me?’ I recalled her terror at the notion the day before, but now she only shrugged apathetically.

‘If you wish. They’ve taken them away. After you’ve seen it, can I get it cleared? If I’m to keep myself fed, I’ll have to let it out.’

‘Very well.’

She led me up the twisting staircase, still complaining about the need to let the room and how she had no money coming in now. Barak followed; behind her back he worked his mouth in a silent
gobble in imitation of her. I gave him a stern look.

At the top of the stairs she fell silent. The door still hung off its hinges. I looked at the other doors leading off the corridor. ‘What are these?’ I asked.

‘Our bedroom, my brother-in-law’s, and that third one is where Samuel kept his rubbish.’

‘Samuel?’

She grimaced. ‘Sepultus. Samuel was his real name, his Christian name.
Sepultus
,’ she said again, with mocking emphasis.

I went to the door she had indicated and threw it open. I had wondered if I might find the Greek Fire apparatus in there, but there was nothing but a jumble of broken chairs, bottles, cracked
flasks and, staring up from a corner, a large toad preserved in a vinegar bottle. Barak peered in over my shoulder. I picked up an enormous, curved horn that lay on a cloth. Little pieces had been
cut out of it.

‘What in heaven’s name is this?’

Goodwife Gristwood snorted again. ‘A unicorn’s horn, so Samuel said. He’d bring it out to impress people, powder up bits of it in his messes. I’ll be reduced to boiling
it for soup if I can’t let some rooms.’

I closed the door and looked around the hall with its bare boards, its dried-up old rushes in the corner and the big crack in the wall. Goodwife Gristwood followed my gaze. ‘Yes, the house
is falling down. This whole street’s built on Thames mud. It’s drying out in this hot weather. Creaks all the time, makes me jump. Maybe the whole place will fall on my head and
that’ll be an end to all my problems.’

Barak raised his eyebrows to the ceiling. I coughed. ‘Shall we go into the workshop?’

The bodies had gone but the floor was still covered with blood, its faint tang mixed with the sulphurous stink. Goodwife Gristwood looked at the spray of blood on the wall and went pale.

‘I want to sit down,’ she said.

I felt guilty at having brought her; lifting a chair from the wreckage, I helped her sit. After a minute some colour returned to her face and she looked at the smashed chest. ‘Michael and
Samuel bought that last autumn. Heaved it up here. They’d never let me know what was in it.’

I nodded at the empty shelves. ‘Do you know what was kept on those?’

‘Samuel’s powders and chemicals. Sulphur and lime and God knows what. The smells I had to put up with, the noises.’ She nodded at the fireplace. ‘When he was heating
potions there I was sometimes afraid he’d blow the house up as high as a monastery church. Whoever killed them took Samuel’s bottles as well, God knows why. This is where all the great
knowledge Samuel claimed to have brought him in the end,’ she said wearily. ‘And Michael with him.’ There was a sudden catch in her voice; she swallowed and made ther face severe
again. I studied her. She was holding in some powerful emotions. Grief? Anger? Fear?

‘Has anything else been taken that you can see?’

‘No. But I came up here as little as I could help.’

‘You did not think much of your brother-in-law’s trade?’

‘Michael and I were happy enough on our own till Samuel suggested we all buy a large house together when the lease ran out on his old workshop. Samuel was all right purifying lime for the
gunpowder makers, but when he tried anything more ambitious he’d come unstuck. He was greedy beyond his knowledge, like all alchemists.’ She sighed. ‘A couple of years ago he
fancied he’d found a way to strengthen pewter, some formula he’d teased out of one of his old books, but he never managed it and the Pewter-masters’ Guild sued him. And Michael
was always so easily led, was sure one day his brother would make their fortune. These last few weeks Michael and Samuel spent half their time up here. They told me they’d found out a
marvellous secret.’ She looked at the bloody doorway again. ‘Men’s greed.’

‘Did they ever mention the term Greek Fire?’ I watched her face. She hesitated before replying.

‘Not to me. I tell you, I wasn’t interested in what they did up here.’ She shifted uneasily in her chair.

‘You spoke of experiments, sometimes out in the yard. Did they have an apparatus, a large thing of tanks and pipes? Did you ever see anything like that?’

‘No, sir. I’d have noticed. All they took out to the yard were flasks of liquid and powder. That’s not what the earl’s men have turned my house upside down looking for,
is it? I thought it was some papers.’

‘Yes, it was,’ I said mildly. Her eyes had narrowed warily when I mentioned the apparatus. ‘But there was a big metal construction as well. You are sure you know nothing of
that?’

‘Nothing, sir, I swear.’ She was lying, I was sure. I nodded and stepped to the fireplace. The stoppered bottle lay where I had left it, but to my surprise the thick liquid on the
floorboards seemed to have evaporated; there was nothing left but the barest stain on the floor. I touched it; the floor was quite dry. I hesitated, then picked up the little bottle, still
half-full of the stuff.

‘Might you have any idea what this liquid is, madam?’

‘No, I haven’t.’ Her voice rose. ‘Greek Fire, formulae, books, I don’t know what any of it means! God’s wounds, I don’t care either!’ Her voice
rose to a shout and she covered her face with her hands. I picked up the bottle and wrapped it carefully in my handkerchief, then slipped it into my pocket, suppressing a momentary stab of fear
that it might be Greek Fire itself, that it might explode into flames.

Goodwife Gristwood wiped her face and sat looking at the floor. When she spoke again it was in a cold whisper. ‘If you want to find who might have told the killers about my husband, you
should go to
her
.’

‘Who?’

‘His whore.’ Barak and I looked at each other in surprise as she continued, her voice like a thin stream of icy water. ‘The woman that keeps the brewery told me in March
she’d seen Michael in Southwark, going into one of the whorehouses. She enjoyed telling me too.’ She looked at me bitterly. ‘I asked him and he admitted it. He said he
wouldn’t go again but I didn’t believe him. Some days he’d come home drunk, smelling like a stewhouse, goggle-eyed with sated lust.’

Barak laughed aloud at the words. Goodwife Gristwood rounded on him. ‘Shut up! You churl, laughing at a woman’s shame!’

‘Leave us,’ I told him curtly. For a moment I thought he would argue, but he shrugged and left. The goodwife looked up at me, her eyes fierce. ‘Michael was besotted with that
vile tart. I raged and shouted at him but still he went to her.’ She bit her lip hard. ‘I’d always been able to manage him before, stop him getting too involved with mad schemes,
but then Samuel came and between him and that whore I lost him.’ She looked again at the awful spray of blood then stared at me, her eyes fierce. ‘I asked him once if his lusts were all
he cared about and he said the tart was kind to him and he could talk to her. Well,
you
talk to her, sir. Bathsheba Green at the Bishop’s Hat brothel at Bank End.’

‘I see.’

‘They do what they like over in Southwark, outside the City’s jurisdiction. This side of the river she’d have her cheeks branded, and I’d do it for them.’

Despite her vicious words I felt sorry for Jane Gristwood, alone now with nothing but this big decaying house. I wondered what she had felt for her husband. Something more than the contempt and
bitterness she expressed, I was sure. Certainly she would make what trouble she could for the whore.

I looked into her eyes and again had the sense of something held back. I would return when I had found this Bathsheba Green.

‘Thank you, Goodwife Gristwood,’ I said. I bowed to her.

‘Is that all?’ She looked relieved.

‘For now.’

‘Talk to
her
,’ she repeated fiercely. Talk to
her
.’

A
S
I
WALKED DOWNSTAIRS
I heard voices from the back regions; a man’s murmur then a woman’s sudden giggle.
‘Barak!’ I called sharply. He appeared, sucking an orange. ‘Susan gave me this,’ he said, tucking the half-eaten fruit away in his codpiece. ‘Fresh off the
boat.’

‘We should go,’ I said curtly, leading the way outside. I blinked in the afternoon sun, bright after the gloomy house.

‘What did Madam Sour-face have to say?’ Barak asked as we untied the horses.

‘More without you there baiting her. She told me Michael was seeing a whore. Bathsheba Green, of the Bishop’s Hat in Southwark.’

‘I know the Bishop’s Hat. It’s a rough place. I would have thought an Augmentations man could have afforded a better class of nip.’ We mounted the horses; I adjusted my
cap so some shade might fall on my neck.

‘I was asking Susan about the family,’ Barak said as we rode away. ‘Goodwife Gristwood tried to rule the roost, but her husband and his brother paid little heed, apparently.
They were thick as thieves. Both after a quick fortune, she said.’

‘Did she know of Michael’s dalliance at Southwark?’

‘Yes. Said it turned the goodwife bitter. But you could see that, pinched old raven.’

‘She’s lost her husband, has nothing in the world now except that ruin of a house.’

Barak grunted. ‘Apparently Gristwood married her for her money when she was nearly thirty. There was some scandal in her family, Susan didn’t know what.’

I turned to look at him. ‘Why do you dislike her so?’

He laughed, in a tone as bitter as Jane Gristwood’s own. ‘She reminds me of my mother, if you must know. The way she was after you for information about the house the moment we were
in the door, and her husband lying in his gore upstairs. My ma was like that, married our lodger not a month after my father died. I quit the house then.’

‘A poor widow must look to her future.’

‘They do that all right.’ He pulled his horse a little ahead of me, ending the conversation, and we rode on in silence. I kept raising my hand to remove the sweat that was falling
into my eyes. I was not used to criss-crossing London like this. The heat was baking the rubbish in the streets, releasing all its vile humours. Beneath my doublet my armpits were damp with sweat
and my breeches felt as though they were stuck to Chancery’s saddle. This was a trial for him too: he was finding it hard to keep up with Barak’s mare. I resolved that in future we
would travel by water when we could. It was all very well for Barak and his horse – each was a decade younger than Chancery and me.

B
Y THE TIME
we arrived back at Chancery Lane the sun was low. I told Joan to fetch us some food. In my parlour I dropped gratefully into my armchair;
Barak collected some cushions together and sprawled inelegantly on the floor.

‘Well, where are we now?’ he asked. ‘This day’s nearly done. Then only ten more.’