The Lies of Fair Ladies (41 page)

"That's where
she held her."

One chair, plain
wood, still with its auction number on it. Ordure, excrement, urine stained the
poor old thing. Quite good, just mid-seventeenth century, when chair-making became
a craft separate from village joinery. Basically a chair in medieval joinery
style, panel back with a carved crest, flat seat, plain front legs neatly
turned. Its arm supports were missing. I saw those, crudely sawn off and
chucked against the wall. Chain links trailed to new iron rings set in the
wall. Sampney taught its young ladies all manner of skills. Maybe she'd
practiced, I thought queasily. On what? On whom?

"Lovejoy?"
Cradhead asked, wondering.

"She kept Connie
here, chained. Forty-eight hours was her goal. I knocked some time since, no
answer."

"Search the
place, lads," Cradhead called. The uniforms plodded downstairs, meeting
another load coming up. He exclaimed in exasperation. "Well,
Lovejoy?"

Consecrated. This
place was not a church exactly, but a Meeting

House. I was looking
at it. A prerequisite. The Witch-Finder General used holiness like a net. Was
this the selfsame holy place where the witch trials were held? I didn't know
enough to be certain. But the door to this upstairs hall was original. And that
horrible chunk anciently cut out of it, like a cat flap, clumsily repaired with
wrong beechwood by some nerk. For the familiar, the gremlin spirit that
accompanies a witch. That's why Veil had gone, maybe knowing something evil was
about to happen. Maybe her message to me was a kind of warning.

"The Priory,
Craddie." The one place left. "She's there."

"Why?"

Because Connie would
be too ill, after over forty hours chained to a chair in her own filth, maybe
maimed or battered, to walk anywhere. Had her kidnapper helpers? Like, say.
Acker Kirwin, who'd killed Connie's business partner Rye at the mill? I wasn't
sure. I was already clattering downstairs, thrashing my way through the useless
Plod in Gunge's wake. I said nothing. Forty-four hours. Four left. It would be
dawn when Connie died.

"Jake!" I
yelled, tearing across the narrow street into the ruins. "Jake! It's me,
Lovejoy!"

Like an idiot I'd
forgotten my torch. I realized I was still barefoot when the churchyard path
started hacking my feet. I've a brain like lightning. Gunge crashed ahead.
Somebody running with me among the old overgrown gravestones shone a lamp.
Others took up the cue. Somebody with sense rushed along the street to the main
Priory gate, and now shone torches into the steep ruins from there. Cromwell's
men, Fairfax and his lot, had crunched this religious foundation in the Great
Civil War. It had stayed crunched.

"Go right.
Gunge," I called, still yelling for Jake.

But the fire was out,
cold some time. No Jake, presumably wanting a quiet night, or starting off
early to notch another trudge to Norwich.

"Lovejoy?"
Gunge, tears a-trickle, looking at me. "What've they done with her?"

"Wait."

A plodmobile, its
driver brighter than the rest, drove in from the street below. Its beam heads
shown through the elder and birch. Surreal. Browns, creams, russets of the
gaunt ruins stretched into the night sky. Scrubby little shrubs clung to the
mortar, hung over the toothy remains of arches. Pillars always stay last, don't
they? Eighteenth-century gravestones, several dozen. Connie could be in any
one. Or not. Could we search them all, underground vaults, in, what, three
hours? It had been an enormous priory, supporting scores of religious. They'd
had fish pools for Fridays, two wells . . .

Wells. I looked up,
astonished to discover rain teeming on my upturned face, oblique light catching
the drops as they came at me out of the night sky. Wells. I wish I’d asked
Therla's friend Josh more, fought the library harder for a book about the Witch-Finder.
I’d had time, once. No time now.

In the old days,
they'd caught the poor old crones, the so-say witches. Strapped them to a
chair. Tortured, as a matter of course. Kept them awake. Extracted confessions.
Then, forty-eight hours later, they'd ''swum" them. Float equaled guilt.
Drown, innocence. Water. You needed water.

"She's here.
Gunge. In a well. Or in the fish pools."

"Fish pools are
dry here, sir. The wells aren't."

I stared at the tall
constable. Cradhead asking him details.

"I come painting
here, sir," the constable said, embarrassed. "The fish pools dry four
or five times a year. Like now."

"Lovejoy. What
wells?"

"The abbots had
wells. The Colne's half a mile off, downhill."

Cradhead started
calling orders. Uniforms rushed off. More cars came, more lights. Somebody
rigged up spotlights—in the wrong places, of course. Gunge was like a mad
thing, tearing aside the great gravestones, anything that possibly might be a
well covering, blubbering in panic that infected us all. The tall constable
came with me.

We wasted an hour.
They'd put out a call for Elizabeth Cassandra Clark, but that only warns
miscreants to get the hell out. Some hopes. Wet through, worn out, I found
myself at Jake's cold fire.

And finally began to
think. Jake usually seemed to camp hereabouts. Never up slope. Never down
slope, below the last level of wall. Yet he'd be just as well hidden there as
here—and he could use the old crumbled Priory as a windbreak for his sack tent.
Yet he camped here. I borrowed the copper's flashlamp.

The ashes of a good
dozen fires, Jake style, were within twenty feet. Why?

Because he forever
brewed up. Find a tramp, find a brew. For which you need water. If fish pools
dried often, you'd need a well. Shopkeepers on the street wouldn't give a tramp
like Jake the time of day, let alone fill his billy can.

"Here,
Craddie," I yelled. Within yards of where I was.

You go in rings, make
circles to search. It was a patch cleared of vegetation that gave it away. A
gravestone about six feet long by three wide in the undergrowth, covered
loosely by brambles. I hauled them aside. They came easily, which is something
brambles never, ever do. They cling and rip your hands. I once rescued a
blackbird in my own bramble-riddled hedge from a cat. The blackbird flew off
without a word of thanks. I got cut to blazes.

A patch of earth, a
crescent, scoured clean of vegetation. Pure dark earth. I tried shoving it,
calling, "Connie? Connie?" Then pulling. I tried knocking on it.
Tramps must be tough, if they do this all the time. I was having another go
when I got lifted, literally lifted and lobbed aside. Gunge bent, grabbed the
stone and flipped it over, nearly driving the constable into the ground like a
tent peg.

"Lights!
Lights!" Cradhead was shouting.

Big size twelves
crushed the earth about my face. I peered over the edge of the well, down. Down
into the face of Connie, alive, looking up.

"Lovejoy?"

Inaudible. She was
trying to croak out my name, but only managed to move her lips. She was tied to
something in a sitting position, maybe on a stool, hands behind her back. Her
hair was matted about her face. She was breast-deep in water. A dead rat
floated by her shoulder.

There were ominous
marks on the well's walling. The stones were shiny to a point some two feet
above her head. Even as I gaped down into the fetid chasm, it seemed to me the
water rose a fraction.

"We're here,
love. Have you out in a trice, eh?"

Then people were
bawling for ropes, stand aside, get ladders, and fire engines were wahwahing
about the ruins. I only hoped they didn't think it was me this time, or I’d be
for it. Suddenly I felt so tired, got up and stepped away. It's times like this
I wished I still smoked.

"They found her,
then," a woman's voice said, casual. "Thanks to you, Lovejoy, I
hear."

A shrug. "I'm
thick. Should have been hell of a sight faster." Then I looked round,
keeping my footing as the Plod milled uselessly about.

"Elizabeth
Cassandra Clark, I presume." I thought a moment, managed dully,
"Descendant of Elizabeth Clark, witch?"

"That's right,
Lovejoy." She looked so pretty and assured. Women never lack confidence,
do they? It's us blokes lose heart at the ways of the wicked world. Women are
in the thick of things, enjoying it all, good and bad. "Of course, one
hopes Connie Hopkins may not survive even yet. I rather put her through
it."

"Aye. Along the
same time-honored lines."

"Why not?"
Cassandra looked almost winsome. "Her ancestor murdered mine. He was the
most repellent specimen of the human race. Connie deserved at least this."

She watched as some
stalwart fireman was lowered into the well on an impossible array of ropes,
pulleys screeching. She chuckled prettily. So very lovely.

"I had to send
poor Rye flying—took his little belaying pin out when he least expected it.
Very appropriate, don't you think? Death by flying, for Connie's friend?"

"No, love. You
can't go about killing folk."

"But one can,
darling, when necessary." I felt Cradhead come and stand listening.
"Joseph Godbolt's time had come. It was so easy, to become his prison
visitor. I was actually fond of him." She laughed. "You see how
deluded you can become? Fond! Of the spawn of a hanging judge?"

"Connie, though.
Your schoolfriend."

"Don't worry,
Lovejoy. I shall get her. You can't imagine the temptation! The times I almost
ended her life at the Academy! Only tradition held me back."

"You still have
no right, Cassie," I said doggedly.

Her eyes filled. She
leant and kissed me gently.

"Poor Lovejoy.
Always wrong. Knows all, knows nothing."

Then she drew a knife
out of her sleeve, and stabbed me. I looked about, puzzled, thought. Hey, hang
on, then started to die.

Thirty-Five

The fact that there
was a woman in the bed opposite amazed me. As soon as I was able I asked the
nurse, why was I in a women's ward.

“There's no such
thing nowadays,” she scathed. "How long since you were in hospital?"

“Two years."

“Things change."
She was gone.

You never see a nurse
coming towards you, do you? Only receding at a rate of knots. Where the hell
are they all going? Off duty, I suppose. Sister spent all her waking hours at
her desk doing the nurses' Off-Duty Rota, as they cheerfully call their on-duty
rotas. You never see the same nurse twice, either. But the noise in hospital's
the same. Clash, bang, wallop. All night long the din of nurses playing
cymbals. Sirens concentrate on the forecourt below your window. They have lifts
that sound like the Brigade of Guards. The trolleys and gurneys whine shrilly,
gnats in your earhole the livelong night. Wheels squeak, patients snore and
groan.

By the fifth day I
was on quite good terms with the woman opposite, in for something excruciating.
She was delighted to learn I was the one the papers were on about. She was less
excited when the police started taking statements. Several times she asked me
what I’d done. Then she went home, made well by some doctoral mismanagement.

Cradhead came to stare
about and make oblique references to criminal charges, forgery. Drinkwater
never came once, not even to gloat. Miserable sod wouldn't know sympathy if he
fell over it.

Early on I’d told a
hurtling nurse to clear a table for the flowers all my mates would be sending.
She said, "Clear one yourself!'' and sprinted on to rendezvous with her
next percussion section. I did, my side hurting from physiotherapy. And waited
for the stream of visitors who'd come and give thanks for my deliverance,
praise my astuteness, rejoice that I'd tottered from the brink of death.

And waited.

Wai . . . . . . . . ted.

It was only in the
second week, refused phone access by your friendly surgeons in collusion with
your friendly police, the penny dropped. I began to smile. I knew what my
friends were doing. They were ringing in to check on my progress, but warning
the nurses not to give It away. And I knew what It was.

Surprise party.
They'd all jump out of the woodwork the instant I got sprung. Then it would be
the inevitable tussle for my body, the women giving me the hard time that I
loved deep down. The deeper and downer the better.

"What are you
smiling at?" a nurse cried, charging past.

"Nothing,
Nurse," I called, beaming.

"Why've you no
flowers, Lovejoy?" I got next morning.

"Get on with
you," I rebuked fondly.

And the great moment
dawned, two weeks to the day. The surgeon came round with his entourage, peered
shortsightedly at my belly, said hmph, asked Sister did Lovejoy do his
physiotherapy.

"Yes, sir. On
the hour," she lied slickly.

"Rum name."
The surgeon strolled affably on. "He can go."

Sprung! I dressed,
got taken down to Reception. There I waited, smiling knowingly. They would come
for me in some daft decorated motor, balloons all over, streamers and banners.
I bet Big Frank'd arrange it. He's always keen on barmy jollification at his
weddings.