The 6th to the 30th day of October 1752

Luminary: The day shortened to 10 hours long, decreased 6 hours 26 minutes.

Observation: Opposition of Saturn and Mars from Virgo and Pisces.

Prognostication: It is not safe to be too secure.

 

When Nat first heard the sound of knocking, he thought it must be a shutter banging in the infernal wind. He pulled his coat more tightly around his shoulders and hunched over the fire, too exhausted to investigate. The Cambridge coach had rolled into Chester well after midnight, and all his fellow passengers had trailed into the golden-lit entrance of the Cross Keys Tavern. He alone had held back; his business in Cambridgeshire had already delayed him damnably, and he was rattled, as if the uneasy wind had infected him with its fretfulness. So he ordered a glass of negus to be sent to the stables, and after a delighted reunion with Jupiter, was soon up in the saddle. There had been no letter from Tabitha for three days, and anticipation of her surprise the next morning glowed like a hot coal inside him, through all the dark and drenching ride back home.

The banging continued to penetrate his reverie until he noticed that the knocks were being struck in weak beats of three. He stood and yawned, leaving his night robe warming before the fire. Taking only a candle, he went downstairs in a flurry of chasing shadows. In the hallway, he could hear nothing at all. Curious, he opened the front door and found daylight seeping into the sky, and a heap of wet clothing discarded on his steps. Investigating with the toe of his boot, he was horrified to find that a person lay within it; and, even worse, that it was Tabitha who lay there, senseless on the ground.

For sweet pity’s sake, he cursed. Why had he not investigated sooner? Swiftly he carried her upstairs, her limbs hanging stone cold in their dripping garments. Then he laid her in a high-backed chair beside the fire, fetching a blanket and bottle of spirits. She was insensible and her face had a bluish cast; across her cheek, a swollen ridge was sliced, a wound the length of his finger. God spare him – but at least she breathed, faintly but regularly. In a panic, he pulled at her wet clothes, peeling off her sodden grey cloak, heavy skirts and petticoat. What price modesty when his sweet love might die?

Her garments were gritty and stained muddy brown and smelled of the river. He had got as far as her stays when he found the knots seized – he sliced through them with his knife. Trying not to look too hard at the curves and crannies of her nakedness, he dragged her clinging shift up over her head and began to dry her with the blanket. She shivered, her eyelids flickering, but remaining closed. Once his own green Chinese robe was wrapped around her, he reached for the cauldron of water warming by the fire. Gently, he washed her face, and then the skeins of her long hair, lathering it with almond soap and cradling her head as mud and broken leaves were rinsed away. Tenderly he dried the snake-like tangles that dripped down to her waist. He was thankful to see her colour improve, and a pulse beat at her neck. He carried her over to his bed and laid her down. Then he set a warm cup of brandy to her lips.

The spirits made her gasp, and her eyelids fluttered. Finally, she blinked, and looked at him for the first time.

‘Dammit, Tabitha. Are you trying to scare me to death with such a greeting?’

She stared up at him, seeming not to see him. Fetching a hot stone from the fire and wrapping it in flannel, he pushed it inside the bed.

‘I need warmth,’ she whispered hoarsely. He obliged, and she clung to him, knotting trembling fingers into his shirt.

‘What happened to you, my poor love?’

‘Darius. Came to the cottage.’ In fits and starts she recalled her ordeal. ‘I think he’s dead,’ she ended. ‘Save me, Nat. I thought I would die.’

Damn the rogue to hell! He had almost lost her. He kissed the wound on her face, tasting the iron-saltiness of her blood. As he did so, her mouth slid to his throat, exciting a pang of pleasure. He was holding her gently in his arms, but she pulled him tighter against her, bone to bone, locking them together. He tried to free himself. This could not be honourable, he told himself; to take advantage of a half-drowned woman.

‘I am so cold,’ she begged.

‘Tabitha, stop.’

His blood was heating and hardening, nevertheless. He kissed the top of her head, as though she were a child. Still she clung to him, trying to absorb every ounce of his heat. Her eyes were open and glassy, her lips parted, her hair a Medusa’s nest. She looked like a wild woodland creature, a tangled dryad of the forest.

‘Warm me, Nat.’

Her breath tickled his neck, and a pang shot directly to his groin. She was a pitiable creature plucked from the hands of Death himself, but she was also an extraordinary being: Agape, the muse he had searched for all his life. She moved beneath him, and his bones grew incandescent. I am on the edge of the precipice, he marvelled; if I leap, everything will change. Then all argument ended – he could no longer think of anything but her.

Kissing her, he felt a deep tremor in her jaw; her mouth was warm and yielding, yet still her skin was cold as a shroud. He chafed her arms and found himself pulled closer still. Involuntarily, he groaned. Damn his blood, she was trembling in his arms, shuddering, her eyes half-closed. Her icy hand snaked down and lifted her robe, uncovering the length of her naked leg. Now she was tugging at his shirt.

‘I thought I would die,’ she whispered. ‘Bring me to life again.’

Her wide eyes were no longer unfocussed but piercing him, shining with tears. For an instant he puzzled over the meaning of her words; then he lost himself, plunging into the crimson darkness.

He only returned to himself after the exquisite spasm of his own little death, when, as the ancients wrote, a man’s soul leaps for an instant outside the bounds of Time itself. In their mutual pleasure, they had whispered together. Words, he understood for the first time, were rungs in a golden ladder that carried him to a place entirely new and glorious. She loved him, she had known it from her very first sight of him, and he had whispered in reply of his adoration, calling her his treasure, his true love, his wanton queen. Now she lay still and dreamy, her heart still thrumming fast. A frond of fern-like weed lay exquisitely pressed against her pink-tipped breasts. He rose to his elbow and surveyed her, every inch of her, like a bounty.

Her eyes opened. She did not smile but gazed at him with her unearthly eyes.

‘I am a little warmer now,’ she said.

She found his hand and pulled it to her secret cleft, drawing him closer in a greedy trance. He licked the cut on her cheek like a lascivious cat. He told her he would never ever leave her, that they were one now, and were bound together for all time.

Tabitha was content to stay on at Eglantine Hall. Nat had no wish ever to see another soul again; but when she asked, he dutifully sent for the constable to inform him of Darius’s fate. Saxton barged in ill-temperedly, looking for a quarrel.

‘Where were you when the prisoner was trying to abduct my daughter?’

‘On the road from Chester,’ Nat replied courteously.

‘So you merely happened to arrive back upon the same night as that blackguard, Darius?’

If he had not been floating on a paradisiacal cloud, Nat might have shot the buffoon down with a well-aimed insult. Instead, he laughed.

‘Yes, you have it, Saxton. I have been hiding the rogue in my portmanteau, all this time.’

Just then the constable caught sight of Tabitha lying in Nat’s bed, and coloured like a virgin boy. Poor fellow, Nat thought; for now, he pitied any man who did not possess her. She sat up against a bolster, still wearing his own green robe, looking flushed and dishevelled and wonderfully provoking, as the constable questioned her. Impatiently, he listened as Saxton prepared a statement about her encounter with Darius. When she recounted Darius’s confession that he was her mother’s murderer, her voice shook. Nat was not certain, but it looked to him as if Saxton was holding her hand across his counterpane. At that moment, he could have knocked the constable’s head clean from his hulking shoulders.

A few hours later, Saxton returned to announce that Darius’s body had been found, bloodied and battered, trapped in the mill’s weir.

‘Sir John is jubilant at the news; and is overjoyed that your mother’s murderer is found, Tabitha. As for me,’ mumbled Joshua, ‘I should never have believed you would risk your own life like that. I will never forget that you saved Jennet’s life. There’s no need to fret about Bess; Jennet will keep her with us till you are up and about.’

Nat paced like a panther, waiting for the constable to leave. If there was any rescuing to be done, he thought, Joshua had wished to do it himself. It must rankle him to be obliged to a woman, especially a woman he so violently wanted, and whom he had lost to Nat himself.

Nat had never before noticed that October was the most abundant month of the year. The summer was not dying; rather the earth was ripening in a short but vigorous explosion of life. Through autumn’s copper-tinted days, he and Tabitha wandered slowly in the grounds of Eglantine Hall; within the crumbling walls grew brambles and yellow crab apples, soon succeeded by purple-bloomed sloes, rose hips and black elders. They unburdened themselves of their childhoods and younger lives, of their secret whims and most profound beliefs. On warm afternoons they reclined in a leafy arbour, and Nat felt himself to be some bold knight from a long-lost tale, courting a beautiful sorceress. Tabitha was surprising, funny, spirited; and also, he marvelled, a most lascivious lover. Each night, in the universe of his bed, they were transformed into twin pulses chasing each other in the darkness. Time, if it existed, was a mere word – their lives were measured in spasms of pleasure before they tumbled into sleep as dawn approached, echoing each other’s deepening breaths.

One such night, Nat told her his speculations on travel through time itself.

‘I once read a collection of letters titled Memoirs of the Twenty-first Century. In it, a fellow possessed a guardian angel that carried letters back and forth into some future date, the year 2019, if I recollect.’

‘I cannot even comprehend such a vast time into the future.’

‘Why, it is only two hundred and sixty-seven years hence. Think of how it might be. I have heard engineers describe machines with near magical capacities quite unknown to us. We might have animated statues to be our servants.’

‘I hope they can dress hair in the latest style and tie those difficult back laces.’

‘Certainly, and pray let the female type be comely and pliant. I can think of many uses—’

She dug him with her elbow but he was in full flow now.

‘And I have also heard of mighty cities run by clockwork. Picture it, coaches driving across the land without horses, their motion arising from the turning of a key. Mechanical looms, ovens and even ships. And flying carriages with powerful springs that send us careering up into the sky like fireworks. I would take my telescope on such a voyage.’

‘I hope you would invite me.’

He pulled his arm even tighter around her and his tortoiseshell eyes shone.

‘I may even give you your own telescope. And if these machines perform all our dreariest labours, there would be more time for love and poetry and bed.’

‘Ah, your ideal world.’

‘A better world. And I would be well paid for my scribblings. Or, listen to this. I would employ an angel of time to fly to a century distant in the future, where he finds my greatest poem. My time-leaping angel would return here with a fair copy. So I would possess my poem before I have written it!’

Tabitha laughed, saying only Nat would contrive such a world, in which poets had all the praise and none of the labour.

He began to laugh, his shoulders heaving with mirth so he could barely speak.

‘So then I copy this poem and sell it to great esteem. The printers keep selling it, I grow rich, and my name becomes immortal. You agree? Yes! But who wrote it? Not me. I merely copied it!’

Their idyll was disturbed only when the doctor called on Tabitha. The man who hobbled in was a sadly diminished figure, bent over a walking stick and looking about himself with disapproval, as if he detected an air of lovers’ deshabille about the place. Before Nat could stop him, he shambled to the wall displaying their speculations upon the murders.

‘What is this?’ he said, pointing belittlingly with his cane.

Nat blushed. On the wall, as clear as crystal, was a paper with the title The Doctor, and a list of reasons why he might have wished to kill his own nephew. He tried to remember if Saxton had also stopped to read their conjectures. Dammit, he was too short of sleep to remember.

‘I am a writer,’ he mumbled. ‘Such matters intrigue me.’

‘A scribbler, eh? We all, sir, believed you to be a gentleman. I pray you do not think to publish any scribblings about these persons to whom you are so greatly obliged.’

Nat felt a stab of shame that might have been his conscience at work. Why, this was the merest sampling of his sins. To his knowledge, his pamphlet on the Bloody Almanack had not yet been seen in Netherlea; each day such ignorance continued, he was filled with gratitude, and prayed it might remain so. Yes, he had enjoyed writing it, and had welcomed the money it earned – but now that it was finished, to be identified as its author struck him as a nightmare beyond endurance. Nat made a stiff little bow to the doctor, who dismissed him with a wave of his fingers.

When the doctor had departed, Tabitha relayed his diagnosis.

‘The knocks to my head and back are pretty severe, and he has given me a salve for the cut to my cheek. He did not remark on the bruises to my thighs …’ she teased. ‘I must stay abed a whole month, though that will be no suffering if you will join me.’

‘He does not like me,’ said Nat.

Tabitha pulled an amused face. ‘He is jealous. For an ailing man, he is rather a gallant; he has always cast a greybeard’s twinkle in my direction.’

‘He saw our speculations on the wall. If only I had covered them with a cloth. I don’t care to think of him telling his brother about it.’

‘I thought you were Sir John’s friend?’

Nat felt trapped again. ‘“Friend” is not quite the correct term.’ Even as he spoke, he hated his pedantic tone.

‘Well, what is the correct term, then? They are all suffering heavy misfortune, Nat. The doctor is dying. Sir John is unwell, too. There is talk that neither may survive the winter.’

‘Good God.’ Nat turned aside to mask his consternation.

‘I know. There is something sinister at the heart of this.’

He shook his head, unable to find any words.

‘I am sorry you don’t like the doctor,’ Tabitha went on. ‘I have told him I’ll help him with his papers again as soon as I’m up and about.’

‘Why?’ He was irritated by the news, recalling the hostility in the man’s jaundiced eye. ‘We have money. There is no need for you to work.’

‘It is a pleasure for me. Truly. He is sick; I enjoy helping him.’

‘But do you trust him?’

‘Yes, I do. He has helped me at every step, has he not? He has given me a cottage, respectable work, kindly regard; and even,’ she hesitated, ‘kept me out of the way of his brother when he calls.’

Nat nodded, placated. Then he glanced at the tattered pages on the wall and raked his fingers through his hair.

‘Back to our inquiry, then. I have news of Mr Dilks.’

He saw he had her immediate attention. ‘Firstly, I am afraid, I made inquiries and found that he was indeed at the Bishop’s Palace the night your mother died. On the other hand, I made enquiries of a man I still know at Trinity and discovered that Dilks was dismissed from his position as chaplain there. The matter was kept quiet, for it involved a young pupil of his. The boy was punished much too brutally.’

‘No! Poor boy.’

‘It seems he was beaten – viciously beaten. His parents threatened to go to the law. And there was a question of – I would say this only to you, Tabitha – of unnatural practices.’

‘Did you know that Dilks was also Francis’s tutor? There was a falling out there, too; Dilks thrashed him so severely that he complained to his father. Perhaps Francis was killed to keep the parson’s unnatural behaviour quiet? What else did your friend say?’

‘That Dilks has powerful allies. Lady Daphne takes his side and will barely speak a word without his instruction. She and the De Vallory family made certain he took refuge in Netherlea after his dismissal.’

‘Do you think he hopes, through her ladyship, to gain control of the estate?’

‘Quite possibly. I heard, too, that her ladyship is prone to nervous attacks, and mystical – some might say lunatic – visions. God forbid Sir John were not fit and well. Dilks need only appoint himself her guardian to take the reins of all.’

‘I am sure it is he,’ Tabitha said. ‘While you were away, I saw Lady Daphne waiting for Dilks outside the church. They both regarded me with the utmost malice, as if I had witnessed them conspiring in secret. As for her ladyship, I know she is disturbed in her mind; but remember how she threw that threat from De Angelo into the fire? I fear them both, Nat. I am only tolerated here because the doctor insists I stay on as searcher.’

Nat stroked her hair. ‘I don’t care to think of you in danger like this. Promise me that you will not pursue De Angelo alone.’

‘I promise. But neither must you endanger yourself, Nat. Promise me that in return.’

‘Very well.’ He rapidly kissed her fingers. ‘To other matters: I made enquiries in London about the almanack’s printer. The address on the frontispiece is a sham. Number thirteen St Paul’s Courtyard does not exist. Apparently, it is something of a joke; an ancient thoroughfare that did once exist but was destroyed in the Great Fire. It is commonly used as an address by printers hoping to evade their creditors.’

‘So what do you construe from that?’

‘That De Angelo is both clever and ruthless.’

‘And do you believe he is Dilks?’

Nat pressed his lips together tightly and shook his head. ‘He is a likely suspect. Without evidence, though, that is all I can say.’