The 14th day of August 1752

Harvest

Luminary: The Harvest Moon at Full.

Observation: Mars, Mercury, Saturn and Venus all direct in motion and very active.

Prognostication: Changes at hand either by death of displeasure.

 

Tabitha ran towards Riddings’ field, her thoughts turning somersaults. Who had been killed? It could not be Joshua, if he had sent for her – in spite of their last caustic meeting, she felt giddy with relief. Could it be Sir John? The grumbles against high rents, the muted accusations of his overreaching his position – all suggested the villagers’ violent opposition. And the Devil take her for a sinner, but she would feel a moment’s relief if Sir John conveniently disappeared.

As she pelted along the lane, a cart rattled up in her wake. After gasping out her mission, she was hauled up on to the board and jogged along in a hail of golden chaff. In the distance, the twisted chimneys of Eglantine Hall poked up behind the trees. A little snag of anxiety caught at her mind: she did not want the victim to be Nat Starling, either.

The Riddings’ cornfield came into view, and she leapt down, only to slow again as she spotted a tableau of men huddled at the field’s edge. After long hours working indoors, she could not help but notice the sky, shining cornflower blue above a row of hayricks as neatly thatched as miniature cottages, while poppies fluttered their venous petals underfoot. Yet there it was, something partly obscured, an object slumped and scarlet against the biscuit-golden corn. She marked the members of the assembled group off as she began to hurry towards them. Joshua was there; even from a distance he looked unsteady, as if drunk on punch-gut beer. The doctor was leaning over what she now saw was a bloody corpse with its face obscured. There was a labourer too, clutching his hat, gaping from a respectful distance, whom she guessed must have discovered the body. And there, kneeling on the stubbled ground, was Sir John himself. Gone was the puffed-up pigeon of a man – he was doubled over, his head bowed, like a broken version of his former self.

The shape was at first unknowable: a punctured sack of torn clothes twisted into an unnatural form. The victim had been kneeling, it seemed, when he died, but had toppled sideways so his face was deep in the standing corn. At least a dozen black-red gashes sliced through the remnants of his shirt, and a terrible wound lay open on his marble-white shoulder. Flies circled above him; Joshua nervously tried to bat them away with his hat. Coming closer, she saw a pair of lifeless eyes like two beads of pale jade. It was Francis De Vallory, heir of Netherlea.

Sir John was crooning over his son. ‘You did not deserve this, Francis. How in God’s name will I tell your mother?’

Then, turning round and seeing Joshua at his back, he cried harshly, ‘Find who did this! I’ll see the dog hang high.’

The doctor patted his brother’s shoulder, but Sir John lashed out in reply, pushing him so hard he almost stumbled.

‘Who the devil could have done this?’ he cried, his face pink and his breath wheezing. Looking about herself, Tabitha comprehended a great truth; that the murderer had not only severed the life of one man but diverted the whole community from its ancient course. Quiet, dull, predictable Netherlea had been destroyed forever.

A farmhand now entered through the gate, and Joshua went to meet him. The constable returned a few moments later, and a horrified murmur rose as they identified what he carried. ‘The weapon,’ Joshua said huskily. He lifted aloft a straight-handled scythe with a cruel, crescent-moon-shaped blade. It was brown-stained, marred with what might have been cotton threads or whitish hair, all congealed along the length of it.

Sir John blanched. ‘Who do you suspect, Saxton? Who?’

‘I’ve a warrant out for that tinker they call Darius. I’ll pull him in.’

‘The tinker?’ Sir John’s voice trailed away. ‘Go and get him. Go on, man.’

Joshua left with the scythe swinging in a sack, as the doctor concluded his gentle examination.

‘When did it happen?’ Sir John asked his brother.

The doctor pulled out his pocket watch and glanced up at the sun. Tabitha was just close enough to see the light sparkling on the tiny hand that moved inexorably around the elaborate dial.

‘This morning. No more than two or three hours ago. Men must be fetched now, to take Francis home.’ Then he turned to Tabitha and announced quietly to all present that she was the searcher now, as her mother had been. ‘She must go with Francis and do what is right.’

He patted her arm. ‘Well done for bearing up. Get back to the hall now and see to the body.’

Rather than wait to accompany the men, Tabitha slipped away through a gap in the hedge, to a path she knew led directly to the hall. As she walked, she listed the items she needed to lay out Francis: rosemary and other sweet herbs, warm water, clean linen. The sounds of men and horses gradually subsided until the sensation of being entirely alone overcame her, bit by bit. The folly of her wandering solitary along this path, perhaps the one the murderer had taken, made her pause mid-step. She looked around at the familiar meadows: all was quiet, save for a couple of magpies watching her from a post. She glanced down to see footprints in the mud, heading in the opposite direction, back to Riddings’ field. Three sets of footprints, she noticed. Fearful of meeting three strangers, she walked on even faster.

At the hall she was led up to Francis’s rooms by Master Francis’s valet, a sweating, trembling foreigner who mumbled Popish oaths as he clucked about the room in search of his master’s best suit of clothes. Francis De Vallory lay twisted on a snowy bedsheet, laid over a bed decorated with embroidered peacocks. It was Tabitha’s job now to transform those hacked remains into a semblance of the youth he once had been. The valet backed away when she asked for help in pulling off Francis’s boots, so she had to heave at the stiff limbs alone, all the while struggling to preserve a measure of the youth’s dignity. His boots of fine leather were splattered with mud, from their tan tops to the fashionable low heels. The vague recollection of the footprints she had seen on the path chimed in her mind; one of the footprints had, she was sure, been made by a heeled boot like this.

She closed her eyes and forced herself to remember. There had been a set of distinctive hobnail prints, she was convinced of that. And had there also been a third pair of footprints? Though fear pricked her like a thousand pins, she decided she must go back to the path when she had finished laying Francis out. In London there had been much talk that summer of a thief caught by taking the measure of shoe prints left behind in soil.

She began to wash Francis with warm water from a china ewer. Pictures flashed in her inner eye, of the one and only time she had openly conversed with him while he was alive; alone together in the bedchamber of a grand Chester inn, laughing and drinking on his birthday. At just twenty, he had been little younger than herself, and she had liked his cutting humour and sardonic gift of mimicry. At the time she had thought it the most pleasant guinea she had ever earned.

Now she removed his dew-damp clothes with difficulty, for his limbs would not relax from their contorted shape. The sun had baked his wounds, and the fabric of his shirt stuck like fish glue to his flesh. Newly slashed fibres needed careful coaxing to pull them out of hardened scabs. She counted thirteen wounds cut into his snowy flesh, from his shoulders to his buttocks; some so deep that they passed through skin to yellow fat and into white bone. Unwillingly, she thought of his last minutes kneeling in the corn, beseeching his murderer. She could think of no one on this earth who would want to do this. As the water turned rosy red, the sheet became stained too; the bed soon resembled a butcher’s block. Behind her, the valet complained of faintness, and finally fled through the door with a whimper.

As she lifted his coat to lay it on his clothes press, a bloodstained corner of paper peeped out of his pocket. With great care, she eased it free and read it. At once she recognized the same hand, and the cruelty, of the missive sent to her mother:

To Francis

A harvest fails when seeds are rotten,

A weak seed fails in fields of tares,

A Noble House needs strength begotten,

In clever, strong and worthy heirs;

The Age of Gold will be reborn

When your blood spills upon the corn.

De Angelo

De Angelo? So ‘D’ and the almanack writer were one and the same! Had he killed both her mother and Francis? So who the devil was De Angelo? Everyone knew him as the author of Chester’s Vox Stellarum but no one knew the man. It had to be a pen-name concealing D’s true identity. And according to her mother’s diary entries, D was a local man, a man of high regard. As though handling a pus-soaked rag, she laid the paper out on a nearby table, and hurriedly washed her hands again. Joshua needed to see this at once, and also Sir John. Time was running short – a hue and cry must be sent out to catch this lunatic. Yet first, she had to finish Francis’s laying out with the dignity he deserved.

Tenderly, she washed the youth’s long face, noting the bloodless echo of his father’s features, the cheeks hairless. His skin was poreless, his mouth as silky and pliable as a maiden’s. He was only a youth, she thought, robbed by this monster of an even greater portion of his life than her own mother had been. When she twisted his head sidewards to wash the deepest wound on his shoulder, a dribble of bile-like liquid poured from his mouth, staining the lace pillow with a pool of yellow. It smelled of spirits, and she wondered at his having drunk intoxicating liquor so early in the morning.

With quick movements, she washed his private parts, then, hoisting him on his side, prepared the herbs she must push inside his body to keep him fresh. She had once seen a molly boy slumped in a Covent Garden alley after being violated by a soldier, and had never forgotten the blood-streaked signs of force. Thank the saints, nothing of the kind had been inflicted on Francis.

By the time she had tugged a suit of embroidered silk on to his limbs, the pallid youth bore the look of an effigy. He no longer felt limber; his flesh was stone cold, and the right arm that had been raised, doubtless to protect his head, was impossible to straighten. Filling a second china bowl, she scrubbed ineffectually at the brown lines rimming each of her fingernails. Catching sight of herself in a looking glass, she saw that her apron bore livid pink blotches.

Before she could remove it, a second apparition stood in the mirror beside her: a few feet behind her stood Lady Daphne De Vallory. For a moment their eyes met in mutual astonishment. The passing years had blanched whatever remained of her ladyship’s beauty, leaving behind a strange translucence; her hair stood wiry grey beneath her muslin cap, and her complexion was crumpled under white powder.

Lady Daphne’s ice-water eyes froze hard. ‘What are you doing here, with my son?’ She pointed towards the blood-soaked bed.

Aristocratic disdain fought with volcanic fury in her voice. Close at hand, the mistress of Bold Hall’s face was corrugated by age, and her hollow eyes showed the skull beneath.

Be bold, Tabitha commanded herself. These people can do you no harm. She spoke gently, as if to a child.

‘I was instructed to come here. I am the searcher now. This is my task.’

‘What is this?’ Francis’s mother snatched at the bloodstained paper and stared blindly at the writing upon it. ‘He thinks I don’t see his continual scribbling?’

Her ladyship’s lips tightened, as if restraining a great deal more she would like to say, or in preference spit, at Tabitha. Then, turning, with a creak of her vastly hooped sacque gown, Lady Daphne threw the paper into the fire before Tabitha could stop her. In a moment it had been reduced to ash, and a jagged pain exploded at Tabitha’s temple as a porcelain shaving dish clattered to the floor.

‘You abomination!’ the older woman screamed. ‘You filth!’

She picked up a brass candlestick, and made ready to throw that, too. Tabitha ran in desperation for the door. By the time she reached the head of the great wooden staircase, she found that her scalp was smeared with bright blood and her eyes felt hot, though she blinked them very fast. Death and damnation! She should never, in a thousand poxy years, have come home.