The 13th day of December 1752

St Lucy’s Day (New Calendar)

Luminary: Sun rises 9 minutes after 8 in the morning.

Observation: Mercury sets half an hour after 4 in the afternoon.

Prognostication: Light will be shed on unexpected places.

 

Tabitha woke before sunrise, bedevilled by forebodings about Nat. She felt fingers probing her closed eyelids, and then poke her nose and mouth. For a moment she was back in the featherbed at Eglantine Hall, waking sleepily to her lover’s caresses. Then a high-pitched chuckle told her she was back at the cottage with Bess. It was still dark, but some inner mechanism told Tabitha it was time to rise and go to the doctor’s house.

Bess giggled again, feeling the flutter of her sister’s eyelashes.

Tabitha pulled her into the bed and hugged her, stroking her hair. While apprehensions about Nat plagued her every waking minute, Bess was at least an occasional distraction. Tabitha untangled her fair hair with her fingers, soft as the strands of a dandelion clock. Bess was growing into a remarkably pretty maid, her cheeks as plump as peaches and her eyes a pair of lively dark-ringed sapphires. Not that she was an angel; she could be huffy and petulant when the mischief took her, though the next moment she would caper into Tabitha’s arms.

It was a pity she would have to leave Bess soon. Whatever happened at Nat’s trial, she could not stay here past the first day of the new year, for Mister Dilks had taken great pleasure in announcing Nell Dainty would then move into the cottage as the new searcher. And Joshua was right, for once; London was no place for a child. Recently, she had caught herself wondering if London was the best place even for herself. ‘A great city, a great solitude,’ she told herself. If only she could get a glimpse of what the future would bring.

She pulled on her warmest clothes. Jack Frost, as children say, had called in the night, and left the window a swathe of icy ferns. Bess had fallen asleep again, wound into a snail-like curl. She pulled the blanket gently up to her chin. It was time to leave – Jennet must make the child’s breakfast.

The almanack reminded her that it was Saint Lucy’s day, a favourite saint of her mother’s, famed to bring light to aged eyes. She pulled her mother’s threadbare red cloak tight around her arms as she hurried up the drive to the doctor’s house. Soon would come the darkest point of the year, for the sun was growing paler and weaker, each successive day. Around her, the doctor’s garden was as unkempt as she had ever known it. Starved of the sun’s rays, fruits and leaves had shrivelled and dropped, and now were turning into slime. Only the glossy green leaves of the holly tree, the laurel hedge, and the climbing ivy had survived. Most of nature had burrowed underground, bracing itself against a season of hoar frosts and northern blasts.

She felt a guilty pleasure at entering the doctor’s comfortable home, unhappily recalling Nat’s icy cell. There was a warm fire in the grate where she settled to her work, and a good supply of oil to light the lamps as soon as daylight failed. It grieved her that the doctor did not always rise from his bed. He was sick almost to death; it needed no physician to diagnose that.

To her surprise, Judith the cook knocked at the door with a slice of seed cake, and two more pieces wrapped in paper for Bess and Jennet.

‘Master don’t eat nearly nothing nowadays,’ she grumbled. ‘Best it goes to you young’uns.’ The doctor, she said, was out visiting in Chester with his manservant, Florian. At once, Tabitha’s heart leapt, for Judith would also be out marketing that morning. That would give her free rein to search the house.

Certain she would be uninterrupted, she began her study of those of the doctor’s books that were written in the English tongue. The Pharmacopeia Extemporanea contained vast lists of ailments and remedies in English. She read avidly – of lack of speech, weak limbs and falling fits, nervous diseases and palsies. But, blinking her strained eyes an hour later, she had to admit that none of it gave her a clearer understanding of the De Vallory brothers’ maladies.

She heard Judith close the door behind her and watched her stump off down the drive; then, at once, she began to explore the hall, parlour, dining room, library and servants’ chambers. Sir John had stripped Bold Hall of what he called its morbid ancient follies; but not so the doctor. Most doors were open, and she moved along the creaking oak boards on stockinged feet, admiring fragments of pillars, patterned tiles and stones with peculiar lettering. By the light of windows set with jewel-like glass she admired large paintings, rich fabrics and Turkish carpets. To the rear was Judith’s domain, an old-fashioned kitchen and scullery. Only two rooms were fastened tight: the wine cellar housing the prize casks of Florentine wine rumoured to be the doctor’s great indulgence, and the strongroom that held his money. She remembered glimpsing the inside of the strongroom once, when passing on her way to the kitchen; a windowless room, in which padlocked chests were lined up along shelves. She made a rapid search for the keys but could find none.

Upstairs, there were ranged a series of bedchambers and closets. The doctor’s small chamber she found a lonely room, furnished lavishly, but lacking the blessing of love or companionship. Now that she had observed him more closely, she understood he was not entirely a saint; wryly, she had noted a vaunting pride in his own great learning, and scorn for other country physicians. And why ever not? He had clearly won the brains in the battle with his brother. No one doubted that the doctor could have run the estate more profitably and astutely, either. If he had a fault, it was his stubbornness. He could be so clever, and yet so blind. She had urged him to look more carefully to his own safety but had met only with scorn.

By his bedside was a table of the sort that she, as searcher, often found beside a sickbed, stacked with tonics and elixirs, measuring spoons and an apothecary’s weighing scale. Most interesting of all was a distillation of gold, labelled aurum potabile, that he had said was a wondrous cure-all. Poor fellow; for all his knowledge, this physician could not cure himself. As her fingers idly lifted and inspected what was spread upon the table – a jar of ointment, two large needles, a razor-sharp scarifying instrument to pierce the skin – Tabitha comprehended that she would never find a poison to match both Sir John’s and the doctor’s symptoms, for their ailments were entirely different.

The doctor, she mused, had gradually become breathless, fatigued, and was losing the strength in his limbs. Doubtless some disease was attacking his animal spirits. Sir John, on the other hand, had been suddenly struck down; all reports said that he could neither speak nor rise from his bed.

The ticking of a distant clock goaded her to use her time well. With the neat, precise movements of a housebreaker, she searched the rest of the doctor’s chamber. Running her fingertips into the dusty bowl of a classical urn, she felt a familiar object; carefully, she shook it out on to the bed, and a ring of ancient keys rattled on to the blue velvet coverlet.

As she inspected them, a new sound reached her from the front of the house, distant, low and rhythmically steady. It was the passing bell at Netherlea church, tolling the news of a death. Dropping the keys back where she had found them, she satisfied herself that everything was just as it had been; then, silently returning downstairs, she pulled on her cloak and hurried away to the church. She must now collect her searcher’s bag and learn the name of whichever of Netherlea’s inhabitants had just passed away from this life.

According to her daughter Alice, Nanny Seagoes had left this world just an hour ago. Alice was a sensible woman, who kept a small herd of cows and sold butter at the market. Stocky and broad-faced, she greeted Tabitha with grave cordiality. ‘The pity is she had a nasty sort of fit at her end time. We was all hoping for an easy passing – but the Lord din’t choose to give it her.’

‘You were with her, then? Was anyone else here?’

‘No. Just meself. Though I’m right thankful Mister Dilks come this morning and spoke the proper words over her.’

Tabitha caught her breath. ‘She could drink the wine, then?’

‘Now, that I cannot say. I were out milking, and then I passed him on the lane; he said she were in God’s good hands and whatever was needful was done.’

Oh, was it, indeed? Tabitha halted abruptly at her first sight of the old lady, lying on her box bed; her eyes were still open, colourless and rheumy, in a face of livid pink.

‘She has a most high colour, Alice.’

‘Aye, she does. That were the fit brought all the blood to her face.’

Sir John’s face had also, by all reports, been scarlet from the apoplexy. Tabitha approached the dead woman and began unbinding the white plait of hair that hung over her shoulder. Pink patches also blotched Nanny’s throat and chest. Tabitha held her tongue; she had never seen such livid marks upon a corpse.

Alice brought her a bowl of fresh water, and Tabitha began gently to wash the old lady’s hands. Her fingers were as tight as knotted twigs of oak; she could not unbend them.

‘Could your mother speak at the end?’

‘No, she weren’t up to talking, poor thing. She were proper badly. I come here and she’s vomited all down her shift.’

‘So you cleaned her up?’

‘Aye, I used the best of her rosewater to make her nice and spruce again. I want people to see her as she always were, neat as a pin.’

Tabitha touched the woman’s arm. ‘I’ll get started, if you like. You put some tea on, and rest your feet.’

Once alone, she went straight to the communion tray. The wafers remained on a little dish of pewter, but the wine bottle was unstoppered and empty. She sniffed it – the heady scent she had smelled last time was barely a ghost in the newly cleaned glass. Damn the parson. She had been hoping for a sample to steal away, for the doctor to make trial of.

‘That’s an odd thing,’ she said in an even voice to Alice, when she joined her. ‘The church wine bottle is cleaned out. It looks as if it’s all been drunk. Or did you wash it out yourself?’

Alice had been staring into the fireplace and raised a pair of eyes that were tired and dull.

‘I wouldn’t know about that. It’s all just as it were when I first come here.’

‘I’ll drop the parson’s things off later,’ Tabitha said.

‘Save your feet; he’ll be back later, he told me. ’Tis too bad, eh? Both of us losing our mothers this year.’

‘It is a trial we never expect to face. Would you like me to tell anyone, Alice? Has anyone else come around to call yet?’

Alice took a long draught of hot tea. ‘Well, Mrs Hay next door come round for a gawp once the bell started up. But no one else. Only the constable come round earlier on.’

‘Whatever for? I thought Joshua had plenty on his plate, what with Sir John ailing and this trial coming up in January.’

‘He brought a letter, all the way from Chester Castle. Seems some lawyer were going to ask Ma to be a witness to the character of that murderer fellow. Starling, is it? Well, he shall have to go to the gallows without my mother’s word.’

A knock on the door interrupted them, and Tabitha rose to let in a gaggle of neighbours. Then she sidled back into the room where Nanny lay, her soul snuffed out before her time was due, and stroked the old woman’s carnation-pink cheek. Coldly and secretly, someone had administered poison to this defenceless woman, she was sure of it.

‘I am sorry I failed you,’ Tabitha murmured.