Dark Fire (22 page)

‘I’m sorry I let pock-face get so close,’ he said. ‘I dropped my guard.’

‘You can’t be watching all the time.’

‘He must have been somewhere among that rabble in the church. By Jesu, he’s good. Are you all right?’

I took a deep breath and dusted down my robe. ‘Yes.’

‘I’ll have to get word of this to the earl. Now. He’s at Whitehall. Come with me.’

I shook my head. ‘I can’t, Barak. I have my appointment with Joseph. I can’t miss that, I’m still responsible for Elizabeth. Then I want to see Guy.’

‘All right. I’ll meet you outside the apothecary’s in four hours and we can go on to Southwark. It was nine by the church clock as I came in – say, at one.’

‘Very well.’

He looked at me dubiously. ‘You sure you’ll be all right on your own?’

‘God’s death,’ I snapped irritably, ‘if we have to stay together every minute we’ll double the time this takes. Come,’ I said more gently, ‘we can ride
together as far as Cheapside.’

He looked worried. I wondered what Cromwell’s reaction would be when he learned a third killing had been attempted.

W
E WERE AT
Aldersgate before Barak spoke again. ‘I knew we should never have gone to Barty’s,’ he said
crossly. ‘What did we achieve except for that poor arsehole being shot and Rich put on the alert?’

‘We got confirmation that Greek Fire was discovered in the way the Gristwoods said it was. That there really was a barrel of – something – and a formula.’

‘So you believe it now. Well, we have made a step,’ he said sarcastically.

‘When I was learning law,’ I said, ‘one of my teachers said that there is a question that applies in every case. The question is: what circumstances are relevant?’

‘And the answer?’

‘
All
the circumstances are relevant. One must know all the facts, the whole history, before proceeding. And I have learned much, downriver and again today, for all it nearly cost
me. I have some leads that I would like to pick over with Guy.’

Barak shrugged, evidently still feeling the visit had been a dangerous waste of time. As we rode on it occurred to me that all who knew about Greek Fire might be in danger: Marchamount,
Bealknap, Lady Honor.

‘I’ll have to tell the earl we met Rich,’ Barak said. ‘He’ll not be pleased.’

‘I know.’ I bit my lip. ‘It worries me that all of our three suspects are linked to some of the highest and most dangerous people in the land. Marchamount to Norfolk and
Bealknap, apparently, to Rich. And Lady Honor, it seems, to almost everyone.’ I frowned. ‘What
is
the connection between Rich and Bealknap? I’m sure Bealknap was
lying.’

Barak grunted. ‘That’s for you to find out.’ We had reached Cheapside. ‘I’ll leave you here,’ he said. ‘Meet you at the old Moor’s shop at
one.’

He rode off south, and I turned down Cheapside. As I rode between the rows of busy stalls I kept a careful eye out. I told myself no one would dare assault me among such a crowd – anyone
would surely be seized before he could get away. But I was glad to see a number of constables with their staffs among the crowd. I turned up Walbrook Road, where many imposing merchants’
houses stood. A little way up the street I saw Joseph pacing up and down. I dismounted and shook his hand. He looked strained and tired.

‘I have been to see Elizabeth again this morning.’ He shook his head. ‘Still she says nothing, just lies there, paler and thinner each time.’ He studied me. ‘You
look out of sorts yourself, Master Shardlake.’

‘This new case I have is a troubling matter.’ I took a deep breath. ‘Well, shall we face your family?’

He set his jaw. ‘I am ready, sir.’

Then so must I be, I thought. Taking Chancery’s reins, I followed him to an imposing new house. He knocked at the front door. It was answered by a tall, dark-haired fellow of about thirty,
dressed in a new jerkin and a fine white shirt. He raised his eyebrows.

‘You! Sir Edwin said you would be calling.’

Joseph reddened at his insolent manner. ‘Is he in, Needler?’

‘Ay.’

I did not like the steward on his looks. He had a broad sly face under long black hair and a stocky frame starting to run to fat. An impertinent servant, I thought, allowed to get above himself.
‘Can someone stable my horse?’ I asked.

The steward called to a boy to take the animal, then led us through a wide hallway and up an imposing staircase, the banisters carved with heraldic beasts. We followed him into a richly
appointed parlour hung with tapestries. Through the window I could see a garden, large for a town house. Flower beds with trellised walkways between ran down to a stretch of lawn; the grass was
browning at the edges from lack of rain. There was a bench under an oak tree and, nearby, a circular brick well. I saw its top was sealed.

Four people sat on cushioned chairs. All were dressed in black, to my surprise for it was nearly a fortnight since Ralph had died and few wear mourning so long. Sir Edwin Wentworth was the only
man among them; seeing him close I saw the resemblance to Joseph not only in his plump red face but in something fussy about his manner. He fumbled with the hem of his robe as he stared at me, eyes
hard with anger.

His two daughters sat together: they were as pretty as Joseph had described, both with fair hair falling over the shoulders of their black dresses, milk-white complexions and with startlingly
large cornflower-blue eyes. They had been embroidering, but as I entered they laid their needles on their cushions and gave me quick, demure smiles before lowering their heads and sitting with a
well-brought-up stillness that was decorous but also a little unnerving, their hands unmoving in their laps.

The third female in the room could not have been more different. Joseph’s mother sat ramrod straight in her chair, snow-white hair gathered under a black cap, veiny hands folded over a
stick. She was thin, the planes of her skull visible beneath pale skin that was a patchwork of lines and smallpox scars. Wrinkled eyelids were closed for ever over her decayed eyes. She should have
been a pitiful figure, but somehow she dominated the room.

She was the first to speak, turning her head towards me and thrusting out a lantern jaw. ‘Is that the lawyer come with Joseph?’ she asked in a clear voice with a trace of a country
accent, showing pearl-white teeth I knew must be false. I shuddered involuntarily, for having dead people’s teeth fixed in your jaw by a wooden plate was a conceit I disliked.

‘Yes, Mother.’ Edwin cast me a look of distaste.

She smiled crookedly. ‘The seeker after truth. Come here, master lawyer, I would know your face.’ She raised a beringed claw and I realized she wanted to feel my features as blind
people sometimes will with their social inferiors. I approached slowly, for this was presumption from a woman who had once been a mere farmer’s wife, but bent down. I felt all the eyes in the
room upon me as her hands flickered lightly over my head and face with surprising gentleness.

‘A proud face,’ she said. ‘Angular, melancholic.’ She ran her hands lightly over my shoulders. ‘Ah, a satchel of books and the slip and slide of a lawyer’s
robe.’ She paused. ‘They say you are a hunchback.’

I took a deep breath, wondering if she intended to humiliate me or just spoke as she liked out of age.

‘Yes, madam,’ I replied.

She smiled, giving me a glimpse of wooden gums. ‘Well, you can take solace in having a distinguished face,’ she said. ‘Are you a Bible Christian? I hear you were once
associated with the Earl of Essex himself, God protect him from his enemies.’

‘When I was younger, I knew him.’

‘Edwin will have no papist in this house. He even gives the girls religious books, encourages them to study the Bible. Such ideas are a little advanced for me.’ She waved a hand at
her son. ‘Answer his questions, Edwin,’ she said brusquely. ‘Tell him everything. You too, girls.’

‘Sabine and Avice have had enough, Mother, surely?’ Edwin’s voice was pleading.

‘No. The girls, too.’ Sir Edwin’s daughters cast identical wide blue gazes at their grandmother, apparently as much under the old woman’s spell as their father.

‘We must have all this finished,’ she continued. ‘Perhaps you can imagine, Master Shardlake, the misery Ralph’s death at Elizabeth’s hands has brought our small
family. Three weeks ago we were happy, with fine expectations. Look at us now. And Joseph taking Elizabeth’s part makes matters worse. Perhaps you may imagine our feelings about him. We will
not have Joseph in our house again after today.’ She spoke calmly, evenly, without turning her head to her oldest son. Joseph lowered his head like a naughty child. I thought what inner
courage it must have taken to defy this beldame.

‘Am I right,’ Sir Edwin asked, in a deep voice very like his brother’s, ‘that if you think Elizabeth is guilty you will cease to represent her? That those are the rules
of your trade?’

‘Not quite, sir,’ I replied. ‘If I
know
she is guilty, then I must and shall cease my representation.’ I paused. ‘May I tell you how the matter seems to
me?’

‘Very well.’

I went over the circumstances as I knew them: the girls hearing the scream, looking from the window, then rushing into the garden; Needler coming out and finding Ralph’s body in the well.
I felt sorry for the two girls having to listen to the terrible story once more. They cast their heads down again, kept their faces expressionless.

‘But you see,’ I concluded, ‘no one actually
saw
Elizabeth push the boy into the well. It seems to me he might have slipped.’

‘Then why does she not say so?’ the old woman snapped.

‘Because she knows questioning would bring the truth from her,’ Edwin said with sudden fierceness. ‘Of course she killed Ralph! You didn’t have her in your house nine
months, sir; you didn’t see the viciousness she was capable of!’ His mother leaned across and put a hand on his arm and he sat back, sighing angrily.

‘Can you tell me more about that?’ I asked. ‘I only know what Joseph has told me.’

Sir Edwin shot an angry glance at his brother. ‘She was malapert, disobedient and violent. Yes, sir, violent, though she was but a girl.’

‘From the very start?’

‘She was surly from the day she came, after my brother’s funeral. We were prepared to make allowances as she’d lost everything. I was prepared to share all I had and I am not a
poor man, though when I came to London I’d no more than Joseph has.’ Sir Edwin’s chest swelled momentarily with pride, even in the midst of his grief and anger. ‘I told the
girls to make her welcome, teach her the lute and virginal, take her out visiting. Much thanks they got. Tell him, Sabine.’

The older girl lifted her head and turned her doll-like eyes on me. ‘She was horrible to us, sir,’ she said quietly. ‘She said she had more to do than tinkle on a music
box.’

‘We offered to take her to call on our friends,’ Avice added. ‘To banquets, to meet young gentlemen, but after one or two visits she said she didn’t want to come again,
called our friends mannered fools.’

‘We did
try
, sir,’ Sabine said earnestly.

‘I know you did, girls,’ their grandmother said. ‘You did all you could.’

I remembered what Joseph had told me about Elizabeth’s bookish interests, her love of the farm. She was clearly a girl of independent spirit, different from her cousins, who I guessed
would happily limit themselves to womanly interests, aiming only for good marriages. But lack of common interests could scarcely have led to murder.

‘After a while she’d barely speak to us,’ Avice added sadly.

Her sister nodded. ‘Yes, she took to staying in her room.’

‘She had her own room?’ That surprised me. In most households unmarried girls would sleep together in the maidens’ chamber.

‘This is a large house,’ Sir Edwin said haughtily. ‘I am able to provide separate rooms for all my family. In Elizabeth’s case that was just as well.’

‘She’d never have slept with us,’ Sabine said. ‘Why, soon it got so that if either of us went to ask her to join in things, she’d shout at us to go away.’ She
flushed. ‘As time went on she started using bad words to us.’

‘She lost all decorum,’ Sir Edwin said. ‘She was scarce like a girl at all.’

The old woman leaned forward, dominating the room again. ‘More and more she seemed to hate us. At meals you couldn’t get a civil word from her. In the end she said she’d take
her food in her room and we let her; her presence at table spoiled our meals. When you are blind, Master Shardlake, you are more sensitive to atmospheres, and the atmosphere around Elizabeth grew
dark with unreasoning hate for us. As dark as sin.’

‘She hit me once,’ Sabine said. ‘That was in the garden. She took to sitting out on the bench on her own when the weather grew warm. One day she was sitting reading one of her
books there and I went and asked her if she would like to come picking mayflowers outside the City walls. And she just picked up her book and started hitting me about the head with it, using
terrible words. I ran away to the house.’

‘I saw that myself,’ Sir Edwin said. ‘I was working in my study and I saw Elizabeth fly at my poor daughter from the window. I told Elizabeth to keep to her room for the rest
of the day. I should have known then what she might do. I blame myself.’ Suddenly he buried his head in his hands and his voice broke. ‘My Ralph, my boykin. I saw him lying there, dead
and stinking—’ He sobbed, a heartbreaking sound.

The girls lowered their heads again and the old woman’s jaw set hard. ‘You see the horrors you raise for us, Master Shardlake.’ She turned to Sir Edwin. ‘Come, my son,
fortitude. Tell him how Elizabeth treated Ralph.’

The mercer wiped his face with a handkerchief. He glared at Joseph, who seemed near to tears again himself, then at me. ‘I thought at first she might like Ralph better than my daughters.
He was another one who went his own way, bless the imp. And he did try to befriend her, he was pleased to have someone new in the house. To begin with they seemed to get on well: she went for a
couple of country walks with him, they played chess together. But then she turned against him too. One evening, about a month after she came, I remember we were in here before dinner and Ralph
asked Elizabeth to play a game of chess. She agreed, though in a surly way. He was soon winning, forward boy that he was. He leaned forward and took her rook, and said, “There. I have him,
that rook will peck out no more eyes from my men.” And Elizabeth threw the board up in the air with a great cry of anger, sending the pieces all over the room, and landed Ralph a great clout
on the head. She left him sobbing and ran to her room.’