The Devlin Diary (30 page)

“To speak with the sexton who buried your father.”

H
ANNAH LEADS
S
TRATHERN
along a dirt path, only wide enough for one, that winds through the burial plots crowding St. Clement’s churchyard. She points to a small outbuilding ahead. Like the church, its stone walls are blackened with soot.

“Mr. Ogle lives there,” she says. “One can usually find him here of a Sunday—that’s when the parish pays him extra to tend to the graves.”

The weathered wood door to Ogle’s cottage is closed. Edward raps hard enough with his gloved fist to make it rattle. They stand expectantly for a minute, then Hannah adds her much softer knock to his. “Mr. Ogle?” she calls tentatively.

“Who’s askin’?”

They both start at the sound of the voice behind them. The tread of Tom Ogle’s boots was muffled by the muddy ground. He carries a rusty shovel, dirt still clinging to the blade. “Oh, it’s you, Mrs. Devlin,” he says. The sight of Hannah puts him slightly more at ease, but he stares at Strathern with a native suspiciousness. On his scarecrow’s frame hangs an ill-fitting suit of work clothes, grimy and threadbare. His skin is so often caked with dirt and coal dust that it’s permanently stained a dull, dark brown. Hannah knows that the sexton is not a bad sort, but
his presence in the churchyard is enough to make young children cling to their mothers.

Hannah introduces Edward. “We’d like to speak to you, if you have a moment.”

Ogle squints up at the sky. “You’d best come in, then. It’s startin’ to rain.”

His cottage is cozier and cleaner than one would imagine, with a neat straw bed in the corner, woven mats on the floor, hooks for his clothes on one wall, and hooks for his grave-digging tools on another. The rapidly fading daylight struggles in through two square windows cut into the thick stone. Ogle hangs up his shovel, lights a long wick by holding it over the burning coals in the tiny fireplace, then puts the flame to a candle set on a table just big enough for one. Next to the table is the only chair in the room, which he offers to Hannah. She thanks him and sits down.

“Mr. Ogle,” she begins, “last year you prepared my father’s body for burial. Do you remember?”

Ogle shifts his glance from Hannah to Edward and back again. “I remember. I was wonderin’ when someone was goin’ to ask me.”

“Ask you about what?” Edward says.

“About what I seen.”

A shiver of foreboding runs down Hannah’s back. It took some time for Dr. Strathern to convince her to come here. She agrees with him that the murderer should be brought to justice, but it does not make facing the truth any easier. Who would want to discover that their father was willfully, brutally murdered? She prefers to believe that her father’s killer was poor, starving, afraid, and had not meant to kill him. She prefers to believe that he is someone she can forgive in time.

“Did you find anything unusual about my father’s body?” She wants Ogle to say no, there was nothing, so that she can press a few coins in his palm for the care of her family’s gravesites and leave with an easy mind.

Ogle fixes her with his dogged stare. “Are you sure you want to know?”

Hannah hesitates. She isn’t sure at all.

“We can stop right now if you want,” Edward says.

Once Ogle tells his story, there’s no going back. Will she be tormented by thoughts of her father in his final moments? Perhaps knowing the terrible truth is the price of justice. “I want to know,” she says softly.

Ogle steps over to the grate. He stirs the burning coals thoughtfully, as if the action might spur his memory. “When the constable first brought him to me I could see he’d been stabbed. And not just once. He’d been cut up real bad—almost like it was done by some demon. I never seen nothin’ like it.”

“Can you describe what you saw?” Edward asks.

“His stomach was sliced right open, all the way across. His chest was all cut up. Deep wounds, about this wide.” He holds up his thumb and forefinger about an inch and a half apart. “And there were marks cut into his flesh.”

“Do you remember what they looked like?” Edward asks.

“Of course I remember. I tried to forget it, but I couldn’t. I never wanted to say, knowin’ your father was a good man, Mrs. Devlin. But they was like something’ made by the Devil hisself.”

“Could you draw them for us?” Edward surveys the room and realizes at once that it doesn’t hold any writing accoutrements. “I suppose I could fetch some paper and ink—no, wait.” He crouches down by the fireplace. With a pair of tongs he withdraws an ashen lump of coal, then brushes off the smooth hearthstone in front of the grate. “Draw them here.”

Ogle takes Strathern’s improvised writing instrument and kneels down next to him. The rain gently patters on the roof while Ogle slowly draws, the charcoal scraping softly on the stone. When he is finished, Edward stands back so Hannah can see.

The shapes the sexton has drawn are similar to the markings Strathern found on the other bodies, but not precisely the same: a circle with a dot inside, a slender crescent moon, a vertical line adjoining a small half circle at the top.

“I’m sorry, Hannah,” Edward says.

Ogle looks up at her, the whites of his eyes bright against his brown skin. “There’s something more,” he says. “His finger—the little finger on his right hand—it was cut off.”

In the carriage they sit facing each other, each of them nearly lost in the shadows.

“I neglected to tell the coachman to put in new candles,” Edward says apologetically. “I didn’t think we would be out so late.”

Night has fallen. Under a steady barrage of rain, the streets are slick and empty. “It is of no consequence,” Hannah replies. She doesn’t mind the dark. There is a certain comfort in being in Dr. Strathern’s carriage, in listening to the rain and to the slow clatter of the horses’ hooves along the cobblestones of Wych Street. She feels safe in a way she hasn’t felt in some time. It’s reassuring to gaze upon Edward’s countenance. At regular intervals, the sight of his face emerges from the darkness as the orange glow of a street lantern illuminates the coach, then disappears into shadow again. It occurs to her that they’ve spent nearly the entire day together. She hasn’t spent an entire day in a man’s company since Nathaniel was alive. What’s most odd about it is that it doesn’t seem odd at all.

Edward called her Hannah earlier, saying her name easily, naturally, as if they were already intimate. Something has happened between them, though she cannot say exactly when or where or how. When did it happen? While they were dancing, or before, at the anatomy theatre when she unburdened herself to him, or even before that, as they stood by poor Mr. Henley’s bedside? Perhaps it happened at the very start, when they first looked into each other’s eyes during the surgery. How could something so momentous result from such small events: a glance, a few conversations, the discovery of a shared passion? She did not imagine that it was so easy to fall in love, but she is forced to admit that it is.

Her whole world has suddenly shifted in a way she didn’t anticipate or even desire. It hardly seems fair. Only a few days ago she would have said that Mr. Montagu impressed her as the most attractive of men: worldly, charming, witty, gallant. But she suspects that she would never
have told Montagu about the darkest time in her life or allowed him to see her mother in her fragile state. She can’t explain even to herself why she trusts Dr. Strathern, a man she hardly knows, except to say that what she first mistook for vanity she now recognizes as a quick understanding coupled with intellectual curiosity. His face has become as dear to her as any she has ever known. She tries to discern what exactly has charmed her so: the cleft in his chin, the strong jaw, the slightly asymmetric but graceful nose, the eyes that betray so many of his emotions? It’s the sum of all of these and more. It’s in the remarkable feeling of familiarity, as if they met before. Each conversation between them seems as if it has its beginnings in the past and its end sometime far in the future.

Presently, Strathern’s gray eyes cloud with concern. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Devlin. About what we discovered about your father, I mean.”

So now it’s back to Mrs. Devlin; but that’s as it should be. Dr. Strathern is much too respectable to disregard the rules of propriety. Nor does she want him to. She has had an entire day to think about the possible consequences of an attachment between them, and heartbreak is the only outcome she can envision for herself. Even though he indicated that his engagement is based on affection, she is certain that money plays no small part, and its appeal shouldn’t be underestimated. Furthermore, he is an aristocrat and she is not. Men such as the Honorable Dr. Strathern marry not only for themselves but also for their families. Would he ignore all of that to be with her? Even if he were not engaged to another, would he actually marry her? She may trust his judgment, she may even trust him with her life, but she will not risk putting him to that test.

“Thank you for your kindness.”

“I can only imagine how you must feel.”

“Indeed, I’m not entirely sure myself. I have so many different emotions I feel they are at war inside me.” And that’s without including her complicated feelings about him. “I was more content when I thought my father’s death was indiscriminate, perhaps even unintentional. And now…” She shakes her head in despair. “It’s clear we must proceed, but how?”

“I have thought about this. I believe we could benefit by following
the principles of modern philosophy. First, we must carefully examine the physical evidence, then proceed to an hypothesis.” He leans forward eagerly. “For instance, we know that the manner of your father’s, Sir Henry’s, and Roger Osborne’s murders were nearly identical, by which we can deduce that these killings were probably carried out by the same man.”

It’s a brilliant idea and a unique approach. Crimes are usually solved by the testimony of witnesses or by confession; to her knowledge, no one has ever considered another method. “Which would narrow the list of potential killers down to someone who knew all three men, someone who had been involved with each of them in some way. But there is a matter that perplexes me. My father was killed more than a year ago, and Sir Henry and Mr. Osborne only recently.”

“I wish I knew what to make of that. I can only hope that we’ll learn something more that will help us understand why.”

“You told me that you saw my father with both those men in Paris. What were the circumstances?”

“They were all at the Palace of Saint-Cloud the night that Princess Henriette-Anne died.”

“My father was there because the king asked him to accompany the princess back to Paris after their reunion at Dover. But why were you there?”

“For a completely frivolous reason—a party, or so I’d been told. Sir Granville, who was at that time visiting Paris, insisted that I was too serious in my studies and would benefit from the diversions of the French court. I was by no means convinced of this—which is to say that he practically had to drag me there. We didn’t know the princess was ill until we arrived. Apparently, the sickness came upon her quite suddenly. And tragically, as it turned out.”

Hannah thinks back to what her father told her of that sad incident. “There were rumors of poison.”

“There always are when a member of the nobility dies in such a manner. But your father’s postmortem put an end to that.”

Hannah nods. “He spoke to me of it. He was certain that she died of an ulceration of the stomach.” She pauses thoughtfully. “About the
markings—there is one that I recognize. This is what I meant to tell you earlier. I remembered it the night of the dance. The
x
inside the square is a symbol used by apothecaries. It means
month.
”

His brows knit together. “Month?”

“As they might write on a recipe—as in, ‘use once a month.’”

“And the others, could they also be apothecaries’ marks?”

“I didn’t recognize them as such.”

He stares out the window, ruminating. “Did your father keep records of his patients or his cases?”

“Yes, quite a lot.”

“Have you ever looked through them? Perhaps you would discover a reason why someone would want to kill him.”

“No, but until today I did not know that his death was due to anything other than a robbery.”

Strathern looks chagrined. “Of course.”

The coach stops outside her house. Neither makes a move to leave the carriage. Perhaps he knows, as she does, that doing so will mean good-bye. All that must be left unsaid fills the space between them, awkward and painful. But she must know one thing. “Dr. Strathern, why is it so important to you to solve these murders?”

He seems surprised by her question. “A killer is on the loose. Is that not reason enough?”

“No other reason?” The words seem to come from deep inside her.

He takes a long time to answer. “If there were another reason, a more personal reason, would you allow me to speak to you of it?”

She has heard enough; any more would be tempting fate. “I think that would be unwise.” She puts her hand on the latch, but he covers her hand with his own before she can open the door. She looks at him steadily. “I must go,” she says softly, pulling her hand away. “I must find out if they’ve heard anything from Lucy.” Strathern’s disappointment is evident in his eyes. He opens the door for her, steps out, and helps her down from the coach. His hand holds hers for a moment longer than it should. She pulls away and starts toward the house.

“Mrs. Devlin,” he says suddenly. Hannah turns around. “Will you allow me to call on you again?”

His entreaty is almost impossible to resist, but she has had an entire day to come to her senses. “I do not think we should see each other, Dr. Strathern. But I promise to read through my father’s papers. If I find anything of interest, I will write to you.”

She turns and walks to the door, leaving him standing in the dark, in the rain.

Fifth week of Michaelmas term

D
URING HER FREE
hours Claire read Shelton’s
Tachygraphy
online and attempted to decipher her copy of the first fifty pages of the diary. She worked at the dining table in the main room of her set, a few printed pages with the symbols from Shelton’s book spread out before her. At first, the symbols used in the book and in the diary seemed to have little relation to each other, and for a while she worried that Hannah Devlin had devised her own code irrespective of Shelton’s. But gradually, reluctantly, it seemed, the diary divulged its secret language. First Claire searched for the most common words—
a, I, and, the,
then
he, she, they
—copying them down in the same location in which they appeared on the page, with great gaps between them for the still-undeciphered words. After a while she began to see the similarities between the diary’s code and Shelton’s, and the sentences formed between the pale blue lines of her notebook.

What she found was nothing less than amazing. The book she’d discovered in the Wren Library was as Robbie Macintosh had said: the journal of a female physician in Charles II’s court. Hannah Devlin’s private observations ranged far beyond medical notes to include her daily activities, her encounters with other people, her private hopes and
fears. While not as exhaustive as Pepys, it made for fascinating reading. By the time Andrew Kent stopped by to check on her progress, Claire was transcribing her notes at a slow but steady pace. “It’s amazing,” she told him. “It’s an incredible find.”

“A find that’s been lost, unfortunately,” he replied. “Hoddy and I have gone through most of Derek Goodman’s set without discovering it.”

“Other than not being where he said it would be, the diary is just as Robbie Macintosh said. Hannah Devlin was a doctor. She treated Louise de Keroualle.”

“For what?” He glanced at Claire’s notebook and saw the transcribed date at the top of the page. “Of course: 1672. The king gave her the clap, as it was then called.”

“You know about this?”

“It wasn’t a secret, even then.”

“They tried to keep it a secret, though.” Claire flipped through her transcription to the beginning. “One of the king’s ministers, Lord Arlington, practically kidnaps her and takes her to court. Her father had been a court physician and a friend of Arlington’s, but something happened—I don’t know what, she doesn’t say. She only mentions that her father is dead and that she doesn’t trust Arlington at all.”

“Smart girl. Who was her father? Dr. Devlin?”

“Her maiden name’s Briscoe.”

“Dr. Briscoe,” Andrew mused. “Never heard of him. Is there any mention of Osborne?”

“Not one.”

“Henriette-Anne? Saint-Cloud?”

“Nothing.” Andrew looked disappointed, so Claire tried to cheer him up. “But I’m only up to the eighteenth of November. There’s still a lot left to decipher.”

Andrew asked to read her transcription. She slid her notebook over to him and waited patiently. Near the end, he turned a bit pale and gulped. The amputation, no doubt.

After he finished reading, he stared out the windows at the gray sky beyond. “Robbie Macintosh said that Derek Goodman told him that
this diary was the key to Osborne’s murder,” he said, thinking aloud. “I assumed that meant that the author was privy to all of the details, and had written down precisely who murdered Osborne and why. But what if it isn’t that straightforward at all? What if it’s something inadvertent? Incidental, even?”

“You mean that Hannah Devlin herself didn’t know anything about Osborne’s murder?”

“Right.”

“Oh,” she said, dismayed. That would make solving this puzzle considerably more difficult.

Andrew’s expression suddenly brightened. “Have you transcribed the photocopy yet?”

“No. I was so caught up with the diary that I forgot about it.” She found it in the inside pocket of her notebook and set to work. It wasn’t long before she had reproduced the page in fairly legible English.

They looked at each other, perplexed. “Still nothing about Osborne,” Claire said. “Maybe you’re right, maybe the solution to the murder isn’t here in the diary. Maybe this is just…a guide.”

“A guide to what?”

“I’m not sure yet. But think of all the books and papers we found in Goodman’s study. The other day, they seemed to have little in common—at least, I couldn’t imagine exactly what it was.” Claire excitedly flipped through her transcription. “But look—there are direct correlations between what’s in this diary and the materials Derek Goodman had in his rooms.”

“So you think this is just a starting point, a nexus for the research.”

“It could be.”

Andrew sighed and studied the floor for a moment. “You want to go back to his set, don’t you?”

Claire nodded eagerly and grabbed her coat.

“So what happened to her?” Claire asked as they hurried along a courtyard path. Even though fellows were allowed to walk on the lawn, she had noticed that they seldom did.

“To who?”

“Louise de Keroualle.”

“You mean because of the, uh—”

“Yes.”

“She survived. For a very long time, in fact. She died in 1734 at the ripe old age of eighty-five, outliving Charles by almost fifty years.”

“That’s it? She was fine?”

“I don’t know if I would say she was fine. She was the king’s mistress for another thirteen years, but she never had another child, and there’s no evidence that she ever conceived again. That episode of illness left her barren. I’d say she paid dearly for being the king’s mistress—but he also paid dearly for his mistake.”

“The necklaces?”

“That was only the beginning. Although Charles’s first mistress, Barbara Villiers, was the most blatantly avaricious of them all, Louise de Keroualle did very well for herself, acquiring jewels, gold, revenues from estates and taxes, houses, land—although she never showed much interest in living anywhere other than at court. She thrived on being at the center of power and being the center of attention.”

Andrew unlocked the door to Derek’s set and they went inside. It was much as they’d left it, with books and papers spread out on the dining room table. If the police had been here again, they hadn’t been much interested in anything there. Although Claire was keen to get back to work, her thoughts were still occupied with Hannah’s story. What a strange and rarified world the court must have been.

“Did she love him?” she asked.

“The king? That’s a question that has long fascinated historians,
though no one has ever been able to answer it satisfactorily. Certainly she loved being the king’s mistress, even though she obviously suffered for it. Louise de Keroualle adored comfort and luxury above everything else. But passionate feelings for Charles? If she ever had any, they were never recorded.”

“Did he love her?”

“His true feelings for the mademoiselle, too, are an enigma. Some people believe that his alliance with Louise was political, that she was little more than a French pawn in a game between Charles and Louis. But most think he was blinded by love and quite the fool. Ralph Montagu—the man mentioned in the diary—once famously said that Charles was a fool, and his brother the Duke of York ‘a governable fool.’ It wasn’t an uncommon sentiment at the time. Pepys, Evelyn, the playwrights, the wits—all expressed their disappointment in Charles’s character once the first heady days of the Restoration had passed, and they frequently complained about a king who seemed serious about nothing other than the pursuit of pleasure.”

“Do you think he was a fool?”

“When it concerned women, he certainly was.” Their eyes met, but Andrew quickly looked away, turning his attention to the stacks of books and papers on the table. “Now then. You said there’s something here from the College of Physicians?”

They sorted through the materials on the tabletop until Claire found the document she’d remembered. “It’s the postmortem report on Roger Osborne,” she said. “Performed by Edward Strathern, MD, FRS. What’s FRS stand for?”

“Fellow of the Royal Society.”

Together they read through the report. Osborne died from multiple stab wounds and had been dead for at least two weeks when his body was discovered. Found in the Fleet Ditch by a Mr. T. Ravenscroft, FRS.

“Another fellow,” Andrew commented.

“Is that important?”

“I don’t know. But it makes me wonder where Derek found this document—in the archives of the College of Physicians or the Royal
Society? Or somewhere else altogether? It doesn’t have an archival stamp on it. I’m also wondering—”

“There’s more,” Claire interrupted. A couple of the puzzle pieces were beginning to make sense. “More than one.”

“More than one what?”

“More than one murder. The London maps. Perhaps Hoddy pointed them out to you. Derek Goodman wasn’t trying to solve one murder but a whole series of murders.”

The same idea occurred to both of them at the same time, and they rushed to the bedroom to study the maps and the six red dots scattered around London.

“Six murders?” Andrew said skeptically.

“He doesn’t seem sure about the fifth. There’s a question mark next to it.”

“My question is, what do they all have in common?”

“Three of them are near the Fleet,” Claire pointed out.

“You think that’s significant?”

“There’s a lot of material out there on the Fleet River.”

“More than we have time to read,” Andrew concurred. He paused thoughtfully. “I think I know just the person who can help us.”

“Absolutely not,” Fiona Flannigan said. “I wouldn’t lift a finger for that bastard even if you offered me the chance to tap-dance on his grave.”

“But Dr. Flu…Fa…Fla…
Fiona,
” Andrew sputtered, flustered by her vehemence. “Dr. Goodman is dead.”

“Don’t expect any tears from me,” she said, rather unnecessarily. From the moment Andrew had first mentioned him, Fiona Flannigan had made no effort to hide her virulent hatred of the deceased.

“What I mean, Dr. Flannigan,” Andrew went on, attempting to retrench, “is that you wouldn’t be helping the late Dr. Goodman so much as you would be helping us. We simply want to know if you know anything about a few murders. In London. In the 1670s. Near the Fleet.”

She folded her arms over her chest and raised her pointy chin, regarding them suspiciously through narrowed eyes. Fiona Flannigan was
a petite woman, but formidable. Her incredibly well-defined biceps and triceps bulged from the short sleeves of her black cycling shirt, which was made of some kind of high-tech fabric that reminded Claire of a diver’s wet suit. Her short red hair stuck out from her head in a puckish arrangement of moussed spikes, a style that seemed rather revealing of her personality, which Claire would have readily described as thorny.

The walls of Fiona’s Clare College office were plastered with copies of old diagrams, drawings, and plans of various pumps, pipelines, gutters, sewers, canals, and a number of mechanisms Claire couldn’t even begin to name, all clearly connected with the book she was writing. An important work, Andrew had told her on the walk over. Derek had been wrong to make fun of it. Clearly Fiona hadn’t forgiven him, and possibly never would. Just by saying his name they’d aligned themselves with the enemy, not a smart move. If they didn’t rectify it soon, it was unlikely Fiona was going to tell them anything helpful. She looked as though she was ready to kick them out of her office. Andrew might not have noticed the fury in her eyes, but Claire certainly did.

“Dr. Flannigan,” she said sweetly, “this drawing is very intriguing.” She pointed at a nearby diagram of what looked like a canal. “Part of your research?”

Andrew shot her a look, but she ignored him and continued to smile encouragingly at Fiona. She knew as well as anyone that historians liked nothing better than to discuss their work. How many people ever bothered to ask? And, truth be told, she was sincerely interested.

“That,” Dr. Flannigan replied, “is the first large-scale system of municipal waste disposal ever invented. It was conceived and designed by Theophilus Ravenscroft, one of the unsung geniuses of his time.” She spoke with pride and some lingering hesitation, as if she feared ridicule. No doubt she’d had plenty of that from Derek Goodman.

“How did it work exactly?”

“See here—” She moved closer to Claire and pointed at the relevant parts of the diagram. “These movable gates filter the waste from the river. It’s then put on barges and taken downstream.”

“Ingenious.”

“Yes, it was.” Fiona Flannigan looked at them with a gleam of triumph in her eyes. “All the more so for being the first. Until this, no one in London—not even Wren or Hooke—had thought of a method to rid the city of the sewage that accumulated every day.” She spoke more pointedly to Claire. “Do you have any idea of the sort of filth that people lived amongst then?”

“A bit,” Claire ventured.

“It was worse than you can possibly imagine. People were surrounded by rubbish and their own effluvia. And dying from it, of course, although they didn’t know it. It’s difficult to conceive of what it was really like, mainly because most of us have only been exposed to a sanitized, Hollywood version of the past. But back in the seventeenth century, town-house basements were used as cesspits, and night soil men carried the unpleasant cargo right through the house. People thought nothing of throwing the contents of a chamber pot out the front window and into the street.”

“Did Mr. Ravenscroft’s device work?”

Fiona stepped back, the sharp features of her face tightening with distrust. “That’s not really the point, is it?”

“Didn’t Ravenscroft end up in the Tower?” Andrew mused. “Didn’t something go terribly wrong—”