“The Diamonds of Golkonda” first appeared in Cross Plains Universe: Texans Celebrate Robert E. Howard, edited by Scott A. Cupp and Joe R. Lansdale, a limited edition anthology published for the 2006 World Fantasy Convention by Monkey Brain Press and the Fandom Association of Central Texas.
As a Texas writer, I was asked to submit a story to Cross Plains Universe, and am very pleased I made the cut.
Despite living most of his tragically short life in a small Texas town, Robert E. Howard’s imagination soared. He’s best known today for creating Conan the Barbarian and other fantasy heroes, but he also wrote stories set during the “Great Game”, the British campaigns in Central Asia and India. Howard wrote mostly during the 1920 and 30s, and I’m afraid that his stories haven’t aged well, either in style or in content. But they can still be great fun if you squint a bit while you read them.
One of my daughters-in-law is of Indian descent. Her Hyderabadi relatives took us to see the fort of Golconda, as it’s spelled nowadays, which is still impressive. The Nizam did have female harem guards, a British contingent was stationed in the independent (until 1947) Hyderabad, and until the opening of the South African mines, all the world’s diamonds did come from Golconda. The Hope Diamond, now in a museum in Washington DC, is one.
So is the Koh-i-noor, now among the British crown jewels. There are present-day Indians who are campaigning to have it returned, much as modern-day Greeks campaign for the return of the marbles from the Acropolis that are now in the British Museum.
By the time Jake turned into the driveway the bombs were already falling. He stood beside the car and watched the flashes play along the bottom of the clouds like lightning. It was going to rain again—the wind was gusty, damp, scented with earth, weighing down the collar of his uniform. But lightning? No. The Luftwaffe was hammering the shipyards at Bristol, again.
Not that he could do anything about it, not now. He stabbed his cane into the mud. The movement jolted the patchwork that was his gut and he winced. He should be glad he was out of it, safe, tucked away at this old house in the Somerset countryside. He should be glad to be alive.
The conical shape of Glastonbury Tor stood in black outline against the distant fiery glow. Jake had crawled like a worm along the dark, narrow roads to get from there to here. He could’ve flown those few miles in seconds.
He felt again the throb of his Spitfire, full throttle, nose up, the patterns of fields and roads falling away behind him and clouds streaming over the wings—he’d break free of earth and cloud alike and see the stars strewn across the night sky, constellations marching from horizon to horizon—the sound of his engines, of his thoughts, would be lost in the mighty vastness. . . . He crash-landed in his own present.
He’d drunk too much scrumpy cider in Glastonbury, Jake told himself. The Brits hadn’t been joking, it was powerful stuff.
The surrounding trees creaked and thrashed in the wind. Cold rain sifted down on his face. Awkwardly he felt his way up the unlit steps and opened the front door of the house. Once a butler had answered this door. Now Jake was greeted by the acrid hospital smell of disinfectant and overcooked cabbage.
A musical feminine voice asked, “Did you enjoy your leave?”
He looked around. There was the one bright spot in this dark, cold, wet, besieged country. Nurse O’Neill. Bridget. Tonight the starched wings of her cap contained her tightly-bound red hair. Last night, during her birthday party, her hair had tumbled down over her shoulders and he’d caught a flowery whiff more intoxicating than any alcohol.
“I’d have enjoyed my leave a lot more if you’d come along,” he told her with a smile. “Country boys like me, we need native guides.”
“You manage well enough, I’m thinking.”
Jake could see her breath leaving her parted pink lips. He leaned forward. “All those narrow lanes, night coming on fast—I was expecting a Roman soldier or a medieval knight to step out in front of me.”
“I shouldn’t be surprised to see one myself, not here.”
“The car heater was acting up. Feel my hands.” He grasped her warm hands with his icy ones.
She pulled hers away, but not very quickly. “You’re thinking it’s cold? Just you wait, it’s autumn now, winter’s round the bend. . . .”
“Well, well, well.” Harry Davenport’s nasal bray echoed from the high ceiling.
Bridget’s face went rigid and she stepped back abruptly. She hasn’t done anything wrong, Jake told himself. I’ll be damned if I’ll let anyone make her feel like she’s done something wrong.
Harry’s nose and teeth thrust forward like a predator’s. A red scar creased one cheek. “So you fancy foreigners like yourself, is that it, Bridget? Can’t resist our Yank’s Hollywood handsome face? No accounting for tastes, is there? But then, I hear beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
“And handsome is as handsome does.” With a tart glance at Jake, Bridget walked off down the hall toward the kitchen.
Harry’s dark beads of eyes followed her. Jake stepped in front of him. “She told you last night she wasn’t interested.”
“Why should I be interested in her, she’s nothing but a bog-trotter’s daughter.” Harry pivoted on his crutch and started heaving himself up the staircase, one thudding step at a time.
Jake wanted to shout after him, Pick on someone your own size. But the other airmen were already Harry’s favorite targets, like Taffy with his Welsh accent and tin ear, and serious, literal-minded Dicky.
Jake took off his coat. Outside a rush of wind threw raindrops like shrapnel against the mahogany panels of the door. The fanlight was blocked by cardboard. The marble flooring of the entrance hall would have gleamed if it hadn’t been smudged by muddy footprints—and if more than two bulbs of the chandelier had been lit.
This was a hell of a place, Jake thought, and amended, had been a hell of a place. Now the carved wood and marble trim was roughly boxed in. Now pale rectangles on the wallpaper were the ghosts of paintings taken away for safekeeping. Anthony Jenkins-Ashe was trying to preserve his ancestral home. He’d told Jake his family had lived at Lydford Hall for centuries.
Jake had grown up in a bungalow in Kansas City and was hard-pressed to name his grandparents. While the other airmen might call the elderly estate owner “Dotty Andy”, Jake found him both educational and entertaining—not least because he refused to let anyone call him “My lord” or “his lordship” or however a baronet was supposed to be addressed.
Jake pulled a paper and twine wrapped package out of his coat pocket and headed for the back parlor that was now Andy’s sole domain. He knocked. After a long moment Andy’s reedy voice answered, “Come.”
The room was cold and dark. A small fire provided the only light. The old man would rather strain his eyes than close the blackout curtains, even though tonight his view was of blank darkness. His chair sat on the hearth, so close to the fire that the flames illuminated the hills and furrows of his face as harshly as the folds in his old tweed suit. He was scraping the mud off a boot.
“Have you studied Herodotus?” Andy asked. “‘In peace, children inter their parents; war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children.’”
He was thinking of his son, dead at Dunkirk. “I was scheduled for a classics seminar,” Jake answered. “Then the war started, and suddenly history and literature seemed mighty useless.”
“Useless? No, history and literature are never useless. Glastonbury, now, is proof of that.”
“It’s an interesting little town with a heck of a history—I looked at some of the books while I was waiting for the clerk to fill your order. Here you go.” Jake handed over the package.
Andy put the boot down next to his rack of pipes and used his knife to cut the twine. “Thank you, Pilot Officer Houston. Very kind of you.”
“Seems only fair, I was using your car.”
“The car belongs to the hospital now. There’s a war on.” Paper rustled and Andy held two books to the firelight.
Jake squinted at their spines—The Company of Avalon by Frederick Bligh Bond and The High History of the Holy Grail. Those names were vaguely familiar, which was more than he could say of most of Andy’s books. He’d barely heard of heraldry and astrology and DeBrett’s Peerage before he’d come here.
With a weary sigh Andy stacked the books by his chair, next to his omnipresent notebook and pen, and picked up the boot again. “Please, sit down.”
Jake glanced over his shoulder, but Bridget was probably back under Matron’s watchful eye. He pulled up a footstool and lowered himself onto it. The wind whistled a low note in the chimney and rain streamed down the windows. “Did you get out for your walk this afternoon? Find any more Roman ruins?”
“Perhaps a trace or two by the Brue, between the bridge and the apple orchard. If this rain ever lets up I’ll give you a tour. Although we’re unlikely to see any improvement so late in the year. It’s the equinox, you know. Virgo giving way to Libra . . . What is that commotion? Are they playing cricket in the gallery again?”
Voices spoke urgently in the distance. Footsteps drummed overhead. A door slammed. “I don’t think so,” Jake answered. “I’ll take a look.”
He got up, opened the door, and peered out. Now several voices were talking at once. Foggy Dewar was stumping along the hall as though he was working his way through deep mud. “What’s happened?” Jake called.
“Another poor sod’s bought it. Randy last week and now . . .” Foggy disappeared around the corner.
Hell, Jake told himself. Losing a colleague on the mend was worse than losing him in the midst of battle.
Behind him Andy said quietly, “Fate can be cruel, can’t it? Damnable war, too many young men lost.”
Jake agreed, but he didn’t see any way of stopping the war other than sacrificing even more men. With a half-salute to Andy, he followed Foggy toward the library.
Its double door was clotted with his fellow patients. Using his cane, Jake levered himself high enough to see Doc Skelton, the flight surgeon, kneeling on the floor. “Yes, he’s dead. Has been for over an hour.”
A murmur ran through the group. Jake pushed his way through the gathered men until he could see Bridget. She was standing alone next to the massive Victorian desk. Her normally rosy cheeks were pasty white and her arms were laced across her chest.
Skelton stood up and brushed off his trousers. He turned toward the door, shoulders coiled and head down like a bull searching for a china shop. “As you’ve no doubt noticed, gentlemen, his head’s been bashed right in, by that bit of sculpture, I should think. He was murdered.”
Murdered. Jake’s mind tripped over the word and went sprawling. In the sudden silence he could hear the wind howling outside, rain sluicing down the tall windows behind the heavy black curtains, and the ragged breaths of the men around him. Then someone swore, softly. Each airman inched a bit farther away from the man he was standing next to and Jake found himself popped like a cork into the library.
Stretched out on the bare planks of the floor lay Dicky Richardson. A rust-red puddle pillowed his head and his blond hair was mottled with crimson. His face was as white and still as the plaster cast on his left arm. His blue eyes looked purple. Maybe, Jake thought, they’d stared yearningly into the sky so long they’d bruised.
A fist-sized lump of gray stone lay between Dicky and the desk. Even in the dim light Jake could see the half-dozen drops of blood spattering its weathered surface.
He braced himself on his cane. Dicky. He’d liked Dicky, even though the man had no sense of humor. Which was hardly reason to murder him.
So what, then, would be enough reason to murder him? Or anyone, for that matter? Hadn’t there been enough death already? Jake looked up at Bridget. She bit her lip, and for just a moment fear dulled her eyes.
“Has anyone been seen going into or coming out of the library in the last hour?” asked Skelton. “Save Nurse O’Neill, who fetched me.”
Some of the men looked off into space, some at the floor, some at each other. No one answered.
“Has anyone had a row with Richardson, lent him money, anything of that nature?”
Silence.
“Right. Houston?” Skelton pronounced it “Hooston”, like everyone except Andy, who knew better, and Bridget, who’d asked.
Reluctantly Jake turned away from her. “Sir?”
“You were on leave.”
“Yes, sir.”
“When did you get in?”
“Fifteen minutes ago. Maybe twenty.”
“Anyone see you?”
“Yes, why?”
“Because it appears you’re the only person in the house who couldn’t have done Richardson here in. He died whilst you were away.”
“Twig and I’ve been playing cards all evening,” said Epsom, his moustache bristling.
Foggy added quickly, “I’ve been reading, Taffy looked in on me.”
Harry’s voice overrode the others. “A bit hard to sneak up on a chap and bash him when you’re lumbered with a bloody great crutch, isn’t it?”
“No one here is incapacitated,” Skelton told him.
Jake nodded. “And the wind is noisy enough to hide footsteps.”
“Very observant,” said Harry acidly.
Matron thrust her way through the door, parting the men with her cantilevered bosom like a ship’s bow parting the waves. A clean white sheet hung from her arm. “I phoned for the police, but the line’s dead. A tree’s gone down in the storm, I expect. Good job the electricity’s from our own generator. I’ve sent the orderly with the car round by West Pennard, in case the road’s blocked or the bridge over the Brue is awash.”
“Slow going, but needs must,” said Skelton.
Taffy asked, “What if the orderly’s the murderer?”
“Then he’ll be in the hands of the police, won’t he?” Matron beckoned to Bridget. “Come along, Nurse.”
“Aren’t you going to pick him up and lay him out properly?” asked Foggy.
Skelton shook his head. “The police will want to see him like this.”
The women unfolded the sheet, stretched it out over Dicky’s body like a canopy, then lowered it. His outstretched arm and hand lay at an angle to his torso and Bridget bent down to pull the fabric over them. She looked like a ministering angel in a Renaissance manuscript, Jake thought. . . . “Wait a minute. What’s he holding?”
Skelton brushed Bridget aside, knelt, and inspected the tightly curled fingers of Dicky’s right hand. “A pen. His fingers have ink on them. Was he writing something?”
Jake walked the dozen paces to the desk. A bottle of ink stood in the center of the blotter, its lid beside it. Next to that lay a partly crumpled piece of paper. When he smoothed it out Jake saw several smudges looking like badly-drawn heiroglyphs straggling across its top. The only words he could read were “Lydford” and “suspected t . . ,” the rest of the word trailing away and ending in a blotch. The letter “B” nestled beside another blotch.
“Dicky was left-handed,” said Bridget at his shoulder. “He was learning to use his right, but still I was writing the letters home to his mum.”
“This one he wanted to write himself,” Jake said, handing the paper to Skelton.
“Lydford,” Skelton read aloud. “Suspected, followed by a word beginning with T. Another word beginning with B. Anyone have any idea what he was on about?”
Jake looked back at the men crowding the door. Funny how clear his mind was now, the last vapors of the cider burned away. He saw each face as clearly as a dial on his control panel. Everyone’s expression ranged from puzzled to blank except for Twig’s and Harry’s.
It was, of course, Harry who spoke up. “The word is traitor. A suspected traitor.”
“Traitor?” Matron repeated.
“Out with it, man,” ordered Skelton.
Harry drew himself up, the center of attention. “Last night, after the party for Nurse O’Neill, Dicky said he suspected someone here of handing information to the Nazis.”
“Too much to hope he gave you a name?” Jake asked, wondering whether Harry’s sneer had made his face look like a gargoyle’s even before it was scarred.
“He started to do, then was interrupted when Matron called lights-out.”
“Harry’s having us on, isn’t he?” Taffy’s freckled face peered over his neck brace like a fox from his hole. “He was always having Dicky on, Dicky being such an easy target and all—positively gullible at times.”
“No,” said Twig, shuffling forward. “I heard what Dicky said, too. He had evidence of a traitor at Lydford Hall.”
Jake exchanged a look with Skelton. The doctor knew as well as he did that Twig was a former divinity student who made George Washington look like a liar and a cheat.
“B,” Skelton repeated reflectively. “That might be the initial of a name. The person Richardson suspected.”
“It’s bleeding obvious, isn’t it?” demanded Harry. “B as in Bridget. Bridget O’Neill. She’s the traitor.”
Jake stepped forward, his fist already raised. “Why you . . .”
“Steady on,” murmured Skelton.
Bridget’s slender body swayed. Jake thought she was going to fall back against the desk and changed course. But she caught herself. The look she shot toward Harry would’ve disintegrated anyone made of flesh and blood.
“Think,” Harry went on. “She found Randy dead last week, didn’t she? Lying in the bathroom, not a mark on him. She’s the one goes about with tablets and injections—what if she slipped him a few grams of poison?”
“Pilot Officer Randolph had two broken femurs,” said Matron, stepping closer to Bridget. “The cause of death was a pulmonary fat embolism.”
“Are you questioning my competence?” demanded Skelton.
Harry plunged on. “And today Bridget finds Dicky.”
“I’m a nurse,” said Bridget. “My job is watching the patients.”
“So she watches well enough she catches Dicky writing a letter that’ll expose her for what she is. You said yourself, Tex, normally she’d be writing his letters for him, but this one he was writing on his own.”
“My name isn’t Tex,” Jake said. “And it’s bleeding obvious to anyone with half a brain that just because Dicky wanted to keep his suspicions to himself doesn’t mean he suspected Brid—Nurse O’Neill. Unless you planted the whole idea in his mind to begin with, as another of your stupid jokes. Maybe you wanted to get back at her because she refused your advances.”
“And accepted yours?” asked Harry.
Matron shot a swift look at Bridget, who suddenly grew very interested in her shoes.
“No,” Jake snapped. “There’s nothing between us.”
Harry’s voice was taking on the same shrill note as the sound of the wind in the chimney. “She’s a foreigner, just like you are. Worse. She’s Irish. Ireland’s sitting out the war. It’s not only letting the side down, it’s filthy with Nazi sympathizers who’d do anything, commit any crime, to defeat us.”
Jake wanted to reach out and pry Bridget’s fingernails loose from where they were sunk into her palms, but he didn’t dare touch her. Was that what frightened her, that Harry’s constant slanders about her homeland would eventually stick? “America’s not in the war, either,” he said. “Are you accusing us of being a fifth column, too?”
Harry made a dismissive gesture that was almost an obscene one. Jake doubled his fist again. He’d knock the chip off the man’s shoulder whether he was wounded or not.
Skelton stepped between them. “Stop it. We’re getting nowhere with this. The police have been notified, they’ll sort it.”
“She needs locking up,” said Harry, pointing his crutch at Bridget. “In the linen closet or pantry, so she’ll keep. The police’ll take her away, and good riddance.”
Frowning, Matron took Bridget’s arm. “We’ll sit in my room and have ourselves a cuppa, won’t we? Come along.”
With a look over her shoulder at Jake—whether pleading for help or warning him to keep out of it, he couldn’t tell—Bridget let herself be led away. The police, he thought. The police might well take Harry’s accusations seriously. Everyone in the country was damned touchy right now. And with Hitler’s armies poised right across the Channel, who could blame them? But if Bridget was arrested, no matter how quickly she was cleared, she’d have a blot on her record dark enough to cost her not only this job but any other one. That wasn’t right.
Not that Dicky’s death was right, Jake told himself, not by a long shot.
“The rest of you lot, clear off!” directed Skelton.
The other men shuffled away silently, burdened by deep and discomforting thought. With one last glare over his shoulder, Harry brought up the rear.
Bridget hasn’t done anything wrong, Jake told himself. I’ll be damned if I’ll let anyone make her feel like she’s done something wrong. . . . Skelton was looking at him, waiting for him to leave, too. He wanted to lock up the room.
“Sir,” Jake said, “sir, you said yourself I couldn’t be the murderer. Let me stay here, look the place over, see if I can come up with something that’ll exonerate Nurse O’Neill. The evidence against her is no more than prejudice and coincidence.”
“You rather fancy Nurse O’Neill, do you, Houston?” Skelton allowed himself a thin smile. “But yes, you could well be quite correct about coincidence. And the prejudice as well, sadly, although you have to recognize that we have our backs to the wall just now, which does rather alter one’s viewpoint.”
“Yes sir. I understand. Just give me until the police come.”
“Very good then. I’d hate to lose Nurse O’Neill.”
“Just one thing, sir. Do you have a copy of the roster—a list of . . .” Jake almost said “inmates”, “. . . patients and staff both?”
“The initial B, is that it?” Skelton reached into his breast pocket, pulled out a small notebook, and tore off a page. “There you are. You have one thing on your side, Houston—we discharged a group of patients last week and several staff are on leave, so there aren’t many people here tonight.”
“And I have one thing working against me. Time. Thank you, sir. I’ll do my best.”
“Lock up when you’ve finished.” With a firm nod, Skelton walked across to the doorway and pulled the double doors shut behind him.
Jake turned in a slow circle, trying to see the familiar room with new eyes. The library had been his sanctuary against the outside darkness both literal and figurative. He’d spent many hours here, reading and writing letters and listening to Andy’s half-baked but always interesting musings—the fault, my lad, is not in ourselves but in our stars. Now the comforting smell of books, paper and ink with an afterglow of mildew, was overwhelmed by the reek of mortality.
Between the books the shelves were cluttered with Andy’s collection of art and artifacts—a bust of Athena, a set of apothecary’s scales with a stuffed dove nestling in one bowl, a model ship, a Roman amphora. Several of his rolled-up maps lay on the mantel. . . . Andy. After he looked over the library he’d talk to Andy. If the old man had just come in from his daily walk maybe he’d seen or heard something.
Jake leaned up against the desk and unfolded Skelton’s list. Of course Skelton himself might be the murderer. While it was stretching it a bit to think a doctor would kill one of his own patients, if Skelton was the traitor then he’d have a motive to kill. Assuming Dicky actually had reason to suspect a traitor. As much as Jake wanted to think the entire scenario was another of Harry’s malicious jokes, he couldn’t see how a joke would lead to murder. Neither could he see Harry himself killing Dicky, more’s the pity.
And what information would a traitor find at Lydford Hall, anyway? Killing off a few recuperating airmen wouldn’t damage the war effort.
He read down the list, looking for names beginning with B. No, Skelton’s first name was Trevor, for what that was worth. Matron was Geraldine White. The orderly was William Graves. . . . Someone named William was often nicknamed Bill, but Jake couldn’t remember hearing anyone ever call him that.
The Brits with their mania for multiple names. Harry wasn’t the only one who called Jake “Tex”, even though the closest he’d ever been to Texas was Tulsa. His surname was Houston, that was enough. At least Tex was better than some of the others’ nicknames, which made them sound like characters in a Wodehouse comedy—Epsom Downs, Foggy Dewar, Twig Smallwood, Taffy Evans. Harry Davenport should’ve been “Sofa”, Jake supposed. But then, no one liked Harry well enough to give him a nickname.
Jake glanced down at Dicky’s shrouded shape. He was—had been—a big man. Jake had often wondered how he managed to pleat himself into a cockpit. Now he was no more than a pile of meat to be disposed of. If he owed Bridget the truth, Jake told himself, then he owed Dicky, too.
He looked at the list. Dicky’s name was Donald Richardson—not that he’d have been writing about himself. The only “B” on the list besides Bridget was Twig, whose name was Bernard. Even if he could believe Twig was a spy and traitor, which he didn’t, Jake knew the man had only to keep his mouth shut about Dicky’s suspicions and everyone else would’ve discounted Harry’s wild story as just that.
Jake folded the paper into his pocket. The storm seemed to have eased a bit—at least the wind was moaning rather than howling and the rain was more a patter than a roar. A draft played along the floor, stirring the edge of the sheet and exposing Dicky’s clenched hand. Jake shivered. From the cold, he assured himself. The fire inside the massive fireplace with its marble mantelpiece had died down, not that it had been very big to begin with. Looking into that fire Jake could see burning cities, exploding flak, Spitfires spiraling down into the cool but unforgiving water of the Channel. He’d sat in the pub in Glastonbury staring into its fire and seeing the same visions. The pictures weren’t in the fire at all, were they, but in his own mind.
The small stone—the murder weapon—lay on the floor. Jake knew what it was, a lion’s head from Glastonbury Abbey that usually sat on the desk. Andy had rescued it from a spoils heap when he was helping with the excavations before the war. The first war.
And that, realized Jake, was where he’d heard the name on one of Andy’s books. Frederick Bligh Bond had been the archaeologist in charge of the excavations. He’d been discredited in later years for saying the spirits of dead monks had told him where to dig.
Painfully Jake lowered himself down beside the sculpture. Except for the flecks of blood the stone looked all right, not damaged at all. Andy wouldn’t be happy one of his prized possessions had been used to kill someone. He’d had a wooden pedestal made especially for that lion’s head. . . . Jake glanced back at the desk. The pedestal and the sculpture had stood on the edge of the desk. Now the pedestal was lying on its side.
Cursing both the feeble light and his own injuries, Jake sat down on the floor and leaned as close as he could to the sculpture. Yes, it was spattered with a few drops of blood. But several drops lay on the floor as well. And as far as he could tell not one strand of hair clung to that rock, not one blood smear. What if it wasn’t the murder weapon at all?
He clambered clumsily to his feet and peered down at the bottom edge of the desk. Yes, beside it lay a long triangle of clean wooden plank. The desk had been moved, very recently. And there—yes. The upper corner, closest to where the sculpture had stood, was sticky. The color of drying blood blended with the cherry wood so well it was almost invisible. But the two strands of blond hair that were matted in the sticky patch were apparent enough, if anyone looked.
Jake let himself down into the desk chair. That was it. Dicky hadn’t been hit with the sculpture at all. He’d pitched forward for some reason, hitting his head on the corner of the desk. A sudden jolt could’ve both moved the desk and toppled the sculpture.Then, dazed, Dicky could’ve crawled a few paces and then collapsed. Head wounds bled profusely. When Dicky’s head hit the floor blood spattered all around.
Jake supposed an autopsy would show that the indentation in Dicky’s head was sharply angled, not rounded, to fit the corner of the desk but not the sculpture. Which was all well and good, except for one very important point. Unlike Harry, Foggy, or Jake himself, Dicky had been perfectly steady on his feet. Why had he fallen? Had he been knocked over in a struggle?
The door behind him burst open and Jake jumped, jamming his belly into the arm of the chair. The pain shot stars and comets across the room. When they cleared he saw Harry standing in front of him, wearing a triumphant smirk and holding out a piece of paper. On the whole, Jake thought, he’d rather have the stars and the stitch in his side. “What do you want?”
“I found this in the sideboard in the dining room. Dicky and I both saw Bridget put it there last night. I daresay he had himself a look after the party. Perfectly damning evidence against your little Irish . . .”
Jake lashed out with his cane, striking Harry across his good shin. He cried out, dropped the paper, and staggered backward to crash heavily against one of the bookcases. Several books fell to the floor.
Apologizing silently to the books, Jake leaned over and picked up the paper. On it was drawn a circle with lines radiating out from the center. Other lines angled across them. Letters and symbols were grouped in different sections. Oh, for the love of . . .
“What’s all this?” demanded Skelton from the doorway.
Harry’s words came in staccato bursts, like a machine gun. “Bloody Yank tripped me up. Found proof that O’Neill is the traitor. Some sort of navigation chart. Guiding the Jerry bombers to Bristol. Maybe more. An invasion plan.”
“This is perfectly innocent,” Jake told them both. “It’s not even Bridget’s handwriting.”
Skelton levered Harry away from the bookcase and draped him over his crutch. Then he took the paper from Jake’s hand. “Whose handwriting is it, then?”
“It’s Andy’s. He cast her horoscope for her—her birthday was yesterday, remember?” Jake reached down and picked up one of the books that had slid to his feet. He opened it. Across the top of the flyleaf, in calligraphy worthy of a diploma, was written, Anthony Jenkins-Ashe, Lord Brue. He handed the book to Skelton. “You don’t see penmanship like that any more.”
“A horo-what?” asked Skelton, looking from the book to the drawing and back again.
“A horoscope’s a way of predicting the future by charting where certain constellations were in the zodiac on the day someone was born. Like in the Bible, when the three wise men follow a special star to Bethlehem. Astrology’s just a mathematical game, if you ask me, but Andy believes in it. He told me he knew he’d never see his son again because he read it in his horoscope, and that made his death easier to accept.”
Skelton shook his head doubtfully. “Spiritualism?”
“No, he’s not claiming he can communicate with the dead. He’s claiming he can predict, maybe even control . . . Oh, hell.” Jake suddenly remembered the purchase order he’d given the bookshop owner in Glastonbury, signed with just the one word, Brue. That was another of Andy’s topics, how titles were based on landscape features. Anthony Jenkins-Ashe, Lord Brue.
He could see it all now, and he didn’t like what he was seeing. “I remember reading an English history book when I was a kid, the author kept referring to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, as both ‘Dudley’ and ‘Leicester’. I thought he was talking about two different people. What I didn’t think was that Dicky’s ‘B’ could be Andy. But he always tried to call Andy by his title, didn’t he? If he was referring to him in a letter he’d call him ‘Brue’.”
Skelton leaned over and pulled the letter closer. “Yes, the word could be ‘Brue’, right enough. Richardson may well have thought this, this horoscope business was something underhanded. He borrowed Andy’s books, he’d recognize the handwriting.”
Jake looked at the sheet laid so carefully over Dicky’s body. Blood from the puddle on the floor was seeping through, staining the white linen with a brownish-red blotch. Dicky had been prepared to die for his country in battle. Even here he’d thought he was helping his country by turning in a traitor.
Harry kicked petulantly at the books lying at his feet. “Who’s saying this horoscope rubbish isn’t underhanded? Maybe the traitor isn’t O’Neill—I’ll reserve judgment on that—but what about Dotty Andy, eh? He’s out and about the countryside every day, isn’t he, always writing in that notebook of his, always at his maps. I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if he is helping the enemy, him and his supernatural bunkum. The Nazis believe in the occult, don’t they? Everyone knows that!”
“It doesn’t follow that because Andy’s interested in astrology he’s a traitor!” Jake spat.
“I’ve said before and I’ll say again,” insisted Harry, “that there’s something seriously wrong with that man. Wrong enough to sell us all out. Wrong enough to murder Dicky here.”
Jake heaved himself to his feet and with his cane started pushing the fallen books into a pile. “Look. I don’t think Dicky was murdered at all. He fell against the desk—see, how it’s been moved? And there’s blood and a couple of hairs on the corner. The sculpture fell over when the desk was pushed. Andy wasn’t even here.”
Skelton inspected the desk. “I see. Very good.”
“So how did he fall, eh?” Harry asked.
“I don’t . . .” Beside the book that lay next to the door were several little brown lumps. Jake slowly knelt next to them, but he already knew what they were. He picked up first one lump and then another, rubbing them between his fingers. His heart dived like a rudderless airplane.
“What do you have there?” asked Skelton.
“Bits of mud and leaf mold.”
“Someone tracked it in from the outside, I expect.”
Jake looked out the door. Footprints smudged the entrance hall, but he didn’t see any between there and here. Only the suggestive little clots of mud. as though someone had put a pair of muddy boots down just inside the door. Put them down because they had to do something in the library.
Gritting his teeth, Jake pulled himself up. “I have to talk to Andy.”
“Right,” said Skelton. “I’ll come along, shall I? No, Davenport, I’ll see to it.”
Jake could feel Harry’s glower on the back of his neck as he and Skelton knocked on Andy’s door. Again the old man’s voice said, “Come.”
He was still sitting by the fire, holding a rolled paper across his knees. The scent of tobacco smoke hung in the air and a ghostly wisp of it wafted across the silvery pale rectangles of the windows. The storm had passed, and the moon and the stars were starting to peek through the clouds. A full moon was a bomber’s moon, Jake thought. Under the full moon no blackout could hide a target. Only camouflage could do that, making factories look like fields and gun emplacements like barns.
“I hope we’re not intruding,” Skelton said.
“Not at all,” returned Andy. “Please, sit down.”
Jake sat on his stool. With a sharp glance at Jake, Skelton moved Andy’s clean boots aside and pulled up a light chair.
“Have to valet myself, don’t you know,” Andy explained. “There’s a war on. Mustn’t complain.”
“Too many young men lost,” Jake said quietly, repeating the words Andy had dismissed him with earlier. “Were you thinking of your son? Or were you thinking of someone else?”
Andy’s face sagged as though pulled down by a heavy weight.
“You put your dirty boots down inside the library door,” Jake went on. “What happened? Why is Dicky—Pilot Officer Richardson—why is he lying there dead?”
The dying fire crackled. Skelton’s chair squeaked. Andy said slowly and precisely, “Upon returning from my walk, I wished to consult a reference book. When I pushed open the door of the library I saw Richardson sitting at the desk. He was muttering and splashing ink about, having a spot of bother, I expect, writing with his right hand and holding the paper steady with his left. I asked him if I could be of assistance. He crushed the paper, leapt from the chair, and spun round as though I’d shot him.”
“Ah,” said Skelton softly.
“Then he went positively ashen and toppled over, striking his head on the desk. I dropped my boots and hurried forward to help, but he propelled himself himself across the floor away from me. And then he collapsed, quite dead. Quite. Horribly. Dead.” Andy closed his eyes. One bright teardrop traced a zigzag path down the creases in his cheek.
Skelton nodded. “Richardson was still convalescing. Leaping up in alarm like that caused his blood pressure to plummet. He blacked out briefly. Rotten luck he fell against the desk.”
“Rotten luck he hadn’t been taking Harry’s spitefulness with a grain of salt, the way the rest of us have,” Jake said. “You never looked at the letter he was writing, Andy?”
“Read another man’s private correspondence? I should hope not!”
“Why didn’t you fetch Matron or me as soon as it happened?” Skelton asked.
“Ah. Well then. . . .” Turning away from the fire, Andy drew his fragile body to attention. “I’ve been sitting here having a smoke and thinking it all over. I’ve decided I should put you in the picture. The full picture. You see, Richardson had one of my maps unrolled on the desk beside him, held open with one of my notebooks. He’d found both there in the library. I’m a bit disappointed that he’d take it upon himself to read them, but I imagine the other gentlemen’s talk of ‘Dotty Andy’ and the like had piqued his curiosity.”
“Not to say his suspicions,” muttered Jake.
“Yes, his suspicions. What was he thinking, do you suppose? That I was making maps to guide the German bombers? An appalling misconception, if so, for I’ve been doing the exact opposite.”
“I beg your pardon?” Skelton asked.
Andy’s face struggled with several expressions, doubt, distress, determination. “I didn’t tell you Richardson had been injured—had been killed—because I knew there’d be a lengthy investigation that would in all likelihood draw me away from Lydford tomorrow. Tomorrow being the equinox. Virgo is moving into Libra, you see. That segment of the zodiac must be walked.”
“The zodiac,” repeated Jake.
“I’ve hesitated to speak of it openly. Look what happened to Bligh Bond when he spoke of his spirit guides—he was removed from his position, completely discredited, left to die in shocking obscurity.” Andy shook his head. “But personal considerations aside—and they must be put aside in wartime, mustn’t they?—I had an even better reason for keeping my own counsel. While Richardson and Davenport had the wrong end of the stick in regard to my loyalty, in one area they were quite correct. Loose talk must be avoided. The more people who know about the Zodiac and the importance of the equinoctial walk, the more opportunity the enemy will have to hear of it, to realize its importance, and to try to destroy it!”
Jake groped for solid facts. “You didn’t tell anyone Dicky was dead because you were afraid you’d have to explain why he was startled, even frightened of you. And then you might be prevented from—walking?”
“Richardson was suspicious of the horoscope you made for Nurse O’Neill,” said Skelton. “But what’s all this about a zodiac?”
“Have a look.” Andy handed over the rolled paper. Jake opened it up and turned it to the firelight. Skelton leaned closer.
Jake had no trouble recognizing a map of Somerset. Or of this part of Somerset, at least. There was Glastonbury, West Pennard, Street, the River Brue, Lydford itself. But on top of the usual lines of roads and field boundaries were drawn black borders, in some places interconnecting, in others enclosing angular shapes. One at the bottom of the paper, beyond Charlton, looked like a rough approximation of a dog—or a lion.
“The symbols are quite distinct, really, once you know where to look,” Andy assured them. “The Glastonbury Zodiac has been marked out by hills, trackways, watercourses, and the like. It was rediscovered very recently, by Katherine Maltwood whilst she was researching the quest for the Holy Grail as enacted here in Somerset. The chance of such patterns being found on the ground randomly, patterns that harmonize so closely with those in the sky, is on the order of 149,000,000 to 1 against.”
Skelton looked at Jake. Jake looked at the map. Only by a stretch of his imagination could he see any likeness to real objects in the indicated shapes.
But Andy’s eyes were shining with his vision. “This house was built betwixt Virgo and Libra. At the equinox. But the Glastonbury Zodiac uses the dove of peace instead of the traditional symbol for Libra, the scales. See, there it is in the center of the circle, just above Barton St. David. St. David’s symbol, you’ll remember, is the dove. And Glastonbury itself is in Aquarius, the beginning of the year, which here is not a water-bearer but a phoenix rising from the ashes. How better could the ancients have signaled to us the importance of this site in wartime than by using such symbols?”
He’d put together a string of coincidences the same way Harry had done with his evidence, Jake told himself. Give either of them a map of Missouri and they’d find Mickey Mouse between Kansas City and St. Joseph. “I’ve flown over this area. You can’t miss the Tor and the square of the ruined abbey, but I’ve never seen any of these outlines.”
“One always sees patterns in the earth,” Skelton cautioned.
“But the Temple of the Stars is a pattern in time as well as space,” said Andy. “It’s the world’s greatest feat of engineering, repeating in the natural forms of the earth’s surface the patterns of the stars themselves. For the earth and heavens are linked, and the forces of one affect the other. As above, so below.”
“You mean streams, roads, and so forth were engineered to form the shapes of the zodiac?” asked Jake. “But streams and roads change course. People build by-passes, that sort of thing.”
“Who’s to say whether the minds of the surveyors are being directed by planetary forces? The Roman road to the east, for example, the Fosse Way, has a kink in an otherwise dead-straight stretch just at Virgo’s clasped hands. Hands clasped in prayer, no doubt.”
“Planetary forces.” Skelton was looking dazed, but then, he wasn’t used to talking to Andy.
Not that Jake wasn’t starting to wonder if he were experiencing some bizarre after-effect of the cider. “So this zodiac was built by the Romans?”
“Oh no, it’s much older than that. Older than the ancient temples of Stonehenge and Avebury. Once we believed in such spiritual matters, and were sustained by them. Now we place our trust in rationality and science, and look where we are—bombs are raining down upon our cities!”
Muted lights flashed across Andy’s windows. A car. More than one car. The police. Jake looked over at Skelton.
With a grimace almost of embarrassment, Skelton stood up. “Your Lordship, would you be so kind as to join me in the entrance hall? I’m afraid the local authorities must be told about Pilot Officer Richardson’s—tragic accident.”
“Yes, yes, of course.” But Andy made no move to get up. The light in his eyes winked out and his face went cold and bleak as moorland beneath a sleet storm.
Jake got to his feet, watched Skelton walk out of the room, then turned back to Andy. His symbols were only shapes in the fire, in blotches of ink—or in blood. But he saw those symbols because he had to. “Why do you need to walk over part of the zodiac pattern tomorrow, Andy? What are you trying to do?”
“I’m hoping to raise the powers of England’s ancient soil, the soil from which we sprung, to repel a German invasion. Some prayer is a laying on of hands. This is a laying on of feet.”
“A prayer? Or a magical rite?”
“Both,” Andy replied. “Even such an enlightened Renaissance prince as Elizabeth the Great kept an astrologer, John Dee. He lived here at Glastonbury. Here he raised the power that repulsed the Spanish invasion of the Armada.”
The ships of the Armada were dispersed by a sudden storm, Jake knew, but he’d always thought Dee was a charlatan.
“And here, in the Vale of Avalon, is where Britain’s greatest warrior, Arthur, was laid to rest. Because in life he, too, walked the zodiac, and so defeated the invading barbarian hordes at Mount Badon.”
Jake didn’t mention that the invading Angles were the ancestors of the English, and that they won their war in the next generation.
“During the eighteenth century Glastonbury became, briefly, a spa. People came to drink the healing waters of Chalice Well. How many of them were then inspired to walk through the countryside and, however unaware, trace the zodiac? Soon afterwards Napoleon threatened to invade England, but never did so.”
Jake could only shake his head in something between astonishment and admiration.
“This evening, this accident—fate can be cruel and capricious—perhaps it’s written in the stars that England should fall.” Andy looked up, his face twisted in pain. “And yet fate is balanced by free will, isn’t it? Jake, my lad, you’ve told me your date of birth, you’re an Aries, active and courageous. Why else would you volunteer to fight here when your own country isn’t at war?”
“A lot of people volunteered,” said Jake.
“But you are here now. If you could possibly see your way clear to volunteering one more time, to making one more effort for your old and beset mother country. . . .”
Jake looked down at the map he was still holding.
“The notebook beside my bed, the pages devoted to Virgo and Libra,” Andy went on, his voice winding tighter and tighter. “They list the exact paths to take, the places where you must stop and make small offerings—a bit of food, a drop of wine or beer, a flower. The going isn’t difficult, you’d manage quite well even with your cane. Jake, I know you’re thinking I’m daft, but. . . .”
He’d come this far, thought Jake, from the Great Plains of America to the antique landscape of Somerset. He’d offered to lay down his life. Why shouldn’t he lay down his feet, too? What difference would a few more steps make?
According to Andy, a big difference. If he didn’t walk the zodiac tomorrow, Jake asked himself, would the Germans invade? If he did, would they stay back? And he answered, no one would ever know what was cause and what effect. If you see the future and then do something to alter it, then it wasn’t the future that you saw. The future, like much of the past, was a matter of perception.
If Andy wanted to perceive meaningful symbols in the spilled blood, the death in war, of so many young men, let him. The tragedy wasn’t that a troubled old man saw symbols where there were none but that the unimaginative minds of people like Dicky couldn’t see symbols at all.
Jake said, “I’d be honored to walk the zodiac in your place.”
“Thank you.” For a moment Andy went limp with relief. Then he pulled himself together, stood up, seized Jake’s free hand, and wrung it between his own. “Most kind. Very good of you.”
“Seems the least I can do,” Jake said with a wry smile.
Brisk male voices echoed from the entrance hall. Bridget hurried down the corridor and stopped in the door. Her voice was music compared to the crow-like clamor of the others. “Doc Skelton just told us what happened. Andy, I’m so sorry.”
Andy’s skin crinkled in Jake’s hand like the paper of the map. Inside his tweeds he seemed very old, very small, sucked dry. But still he summoned up a hint of a twinkle. “Thank you, Nurse O’Neill. You and Pilot Officer Houston make quite a handsome couple, don’t you now? Did I tell you, Nurse, that your horoscope predicts a long happy marriage to an Aries? Houston here is an Aries.”
Jake opened his mouth to protest. But the words were spoken—the die was cast. He stole a glance at Bridget.
A log collapsed in a shower of sparks and a sudden flame shot upwards. But the rosy glow in Bridget’s face, he decided, wasn’t from the fire. Releasing Andy’s hand, he slipped his arm around her waist and told himself that some prophecies just might be self-fulfilling.
She leaned against him. Together they watched Andy walk, slowly but as erect as a soldier, out the door and down the hall.
“Thank you, Jake,” Bridget murmured. “I was seeing myself sacked and deported. But that poor old man, now, will they be sending him to a home?”
“This is his home,” Jake told her. “And sometimes I think he’s more sane—and more sober—than anyone else in this crazy world.”
“Do you now? With him reading the future in the stars and all? Or is he reading the past this time round?”
“A bit of each. Here, let me show you.” Jake unrolled the map and angled it so she could see. “The storm’s lifted. I think we should take a walk tomorrow morning, follow some of these paths and have us a picnic in honor of your birthday. The exercise will do me good, shake out the knots in my side.”
She eyed the distorted shapes of the zodiac, her head tilted, then turned her face up to Jake’s. “I’d like that. Especially if you’re after explaining it all to me.”
“I’ll try,” Jake assured her. “I’ll try.”
The flare of light from the fireplace died down. Shadows oozed in from the corners of the room, but still the windows gleamed faintly. An airplane droned overhead, making the panes of glass reverberate. Jake looked toward them. Even though he couldn’t see the Tor he imagined it reaching toward the stars, steady, solid, reassuringly permanent, a bridge between earth and heaven.
Bridget took his cool hand in her warm and capable one and tugged him toward the door. “Let’s get on with it, then. There’s a war on.”
“Yes,” he said. “All we can do is get on with it.”\
“The Eye of the Beholder” first appeared in Death by Horoscope, edited by Anne Perry, Carroll & Graf, date, and was reprinted in The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories III, edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg, Tor Forge, 2002.
In my personal library I have several books on “landscape mysteries”, ley lines and such. A quite sober take on the Glastonbury Zodiac is in Richard Muir’s Riddles in the British Landscape. He shows how you could find the head of a bear on a map and then make a connection with “Arthur” meaning “bear”, and so forth. My favorite book about Glastonbury is Geoffrey Ashe’s Avalonian Quest. I read my paperback so many times the pages started to fall out—so I bought a hardcover as well. I’ve visited Glastonbury a couple of times, and much of Lucifer’s Crown is set there.
As for why I set this story in World War II, I don’t now remember, other than that I enjoy reading about that era—one in which horoscopes were not common knowledge. I may also have recently read P.D. James’s mystery, Shroud for a Nightingale, which takes place at a nursing school and whose plot reaches back to the war.
I chose an American protagonist because I needed an outsider who would notice the things locals take for granted. The story Jake tells about getting the names and titles confused while reading British history is exactly what happened to me in my youth. Even as an adult, I’m still a bit confused. Death by Horoscope’s editor Anne Perry, who is British, had to correct the way Skelton addresses Lord Brue.
From the veranda of the plantation house, Alexander Fraser could hear only faintly the crack of the lash and the cries of the wretch it was laid upon.
The prospect before him was admirable—the lawns dotted with grand old trees, the river a sheet of silver reflecting the last pink glow of the sun, and on the far shore, two miles away, the groves and fields of the neighboring estates. A cool breeze not only diluted the heat of the day, but also carried the fragrances of wood smoke, tobacco, and roasted meats to his nostrils. He should have been content. Instead, he stirred uneasily.
Fraser was not unfamiliar with the screams of soldiers in battle. Here, though, he was not on the field of battle, riding with the Scots Greys in their bravura charge against Bonaparte’s Guard. Here he was a guest. If Edwin Harrington was bound by the conventions of hospitality, then so was he, compelled to make no comment about that peculiar institution upon which his host’s prosperity was founded. And yet the subject was the most disagreeable and the most difficult that could engage the attention of a visitor to these southern American states.
A movement at his elbow drew him abruptly from his grim reverie. The household’s footman stood beside him, proffering a silver goblet so brightly polished it put the shine of the river to shame. With a polite if distant nod to the young bondsman in his tidy white and blue livery, Fraser took the goblet and drank deeply of his host’s whiskey. Its acidic tang caught his throat.
The youth’s whiskey-colored face turned toward the sounds of violence and misery and his dark eyes sparked, then quickly hooded themselves. For a long moment he stood as still and cold as a statue upon the Acropolis or, more aptly, as one of the great statues along the Nile. Then he turned and slipped back into the house.
The discomforting noise ceased at last. Along the row of small houses almost hidden behind a cedar hedge, set aside from the general prospect, the Ethiopians in bondage shook off their own petrifaction and continued about their work. They gave wide berth to the man striding amongst them, his white face reddened by his ire and his exertions both.
Pollard, the plantation overseer, was neither fish nor fowl. By lack of possessions he was excluded from the ruling class, by virtue of his color he was set above the bondsmen. Save for his Saxon name, he could perhaps be descended from one of Fraser’s fellow countrymen, those Scots transported to the American colonies as indentured servants after Prince Charles’s rebellion of 1745. Some of them had prospered. Some of them had been reduced lives as unwholesome as those of the African captives.
Pollard stamped toward the veranda and threw himself down upon the top step so heavily it creaked beneath his bulk. “Mason!” he called.
The stripling footman reappeared in the doorway.
“Whiskey!”
Mason vanished. Pollard glowered out into the twilight, still holding the length of cowhide that was his badge of office. Its end was dappled in crimson, and crimson flecks lay upon the white skin of his right hand. Only when Mason returned with another serving of the water of life, American-style, did Pollard drape the lash across his lap. His besmirched fingertips took the goblet from the tray without looking at the dark hands that held it, and he gulped down its contents. “Well then, Captain, you see what we are up against here.”
“I beg your pardon?” Fraser replied.
“I have no choice but to use the lash, on both men and women. Some I must whip four or five times a week, some only twice or thrice a month. But all attempts to make these people work by advice or kindness is unavailing, for their general character is stubborn idleness. And yet Mr. Harrington is obliged to feed and house and clothe them, even when they are sick and cannot work at all.”
Mason walked back into the house, his back straight, his shoulders set, his eyes lowered submissively. And yet behind his long lashes that same spark Fraser had earlier detected flashed like a dark lantern unshuttered, and then blinked out.
Fraser thought of the great disparities in quality of food, housing, and clothing not only for black but for white he had observed in his visit to the chief families of Virginia. At last he said, “Could it be that slave labor is less cheap and profitable to the proprietor than popular wisdom assumes it to be? Perhaps the estate would produce more revenue if the property were divided into freeholdings under lease to farmers of every hue. Why, the tenants on my father’s lands in North Britain are as proud a race of men as ever . . .”
“Hunh,” scoffed Pollard, but before he could add words to his derisive sound the door opened and Edwin Harrington stepped out onto the veranda.
“You must understand, Captain Fraser,” he said, “that we are doing God’s work here, improving and civilizing the Africans’ barbarian state.”
Fraser half rose from his chair, bowing slightly and withholding what might have been his tart response. The English had said they were civilizing the Scots, not so long since, and the tenants still whispered around their peat fires of the barbarities such an excuse allowed. Admittedly, though, the denizens of Africa could hardly be compared to Fraser’s own highland cousins, however rough.
Harrington turned to his overseer, who scrambled hastily to his feet. “Mr Pollard, if you would be so kind as to step into my study. Please excuse us, Captain Fraser.”
“Certainly, Mr. Harrington.”
The plantation owner reminded Fraser of nothing so much as a wading bird, an ibis perhaps. His nose was beaky, his eyes were beady, and his shoulders sloped as though perpetually weighted by responsibility and its close relative, worry. When Pollard, lash in hand, and lumbered after his employer, Fraser imagined him wringing Harrington’s neck like the cook a chicken’s. But his stance was almost as submissive as Mason’s, even when Harrington’s cultured voice began, “Once again I must remonstrate with you, Sam. Your beatings are rendering the field hands unfit to work and engendering a most unbecoming sullenness in their behavior.”
Fraser sat back in his chair, musing on how economic necessity over-balanced moral queasiness. The dusk thickened into full night, the river sank beneath a burden of shadow, and stars shone above the ancient forest trees that gave Oak Grove its name.
Then, with a ripple of laughter and a rustle of silk, Harrington’s two daughters ran onto the veranda. This time Fraser stood up, even though inwardly he quailed. The previous evening he had endeavored to amuse the young ladies with conversation, but had found it hard going. They were lovely, yes, pale of complexion and bright of eye, but so everlastingly shy and modest, greeting his every sally with giggles, that he wondered how Miss Letitia had managed to affiance herself.
Tonight, however, Miss Letitia and Miss Betsy bobbed only perfunctory curtseys toward Fraser. Their attentions were directed to the carriage that jounced up the drive and stopped before the veranda. Its lanterns swayed, its fine pair of horses jangled their harnesses, and its ebony-skinned minions produced first a set of steps and then a young man, who, judging by Letitia’s blushes, was the fiancé himself, come to spend the weekend.
Harrington, Pollard looming behind him, returned to the veranda in time to accept the young man’s courtesies. “Captain Fraser,” said his host, “may I present Mr. Dabney of Bella Vista, who is to marry Letitia next month. His father has a thousand acres and over a hundred slaves. His property adjoins ours on the west.”
Fraser concealed his smile of comprehension with a polite murmur. To his eyes, three years into their fourth decade, Dabney seemed hardly older than the stripling footman, if of a considerably lighter hue and softer frame. His cravat was tucked close around his plump chin, his collar rose beneath his ears as though supporting his round head, and his tail-coat and trousers were cut in the latest style.
“Charmed,” said Dabney, affecting a deeper voice than God had given him.
Pollard looked the young man up and down and muttered something about a swell-head, quietly, beneath his breath, but not quietly enough. He was the sort of man who would tiptoe with louder steps than a marching army.
Letitia took Dabney’s arm and tried to lead him away, but the young man resisted her, instead bristling up into Pollard’s face. “I should take that comment back if I were you, Mr. Pollard.”
“I meant no harm, Mr. Dabney,” said Pollard, with a bow just taut enough to be mocking.
“Good. Remember that the likes of you never mean any harm. Come along, Letitia. Cato, bring the baggage.” Dabney turned toward the house.
Attempting a flounce with her fashionably narrow skirts, Letitia followed. Her sister on her other side repeated her flounce in an enthusiastic if less practiced manner.
Dabney’s valet mounted the steps, burdened with a several bandboxes. Brushing him aside, Pollard stamped down the steps with another sotto voce murmur, this time about popinjays hiding behind petticoats. He strode off toward his own small house by the hedge.
Dabney’s back stiffened, but Harrington’s hand on the rear buttons of his coat urged him toward the door. Mason held it open. “Dinner is served,” he said, and stepped aside.
“See that Dabney’s men are housed and fed, and help Cato carry his things to the second-best guest room,” ordered Harrington. In the lamplight emanating from the doorway his face seemed slightly gray, and his shoulders sloped even further than usual, and yet the narrow line of his lips softened a bit as he spoke, as though he were about to smile upon the young bondsman, but then thought better of it. “Captain Fraser?”
Fraser stepped past master and slave, out of the darkness into the warm light of the house.
* * * * *
Fraser pushed back from the breakfast table, somewhat dyspeptic. While delicious, the hot muffins and corn batter cakes, rice waffles, hot loaf, flannel cakes, and French rolls, washed down with both coffee and tea, made him yearn for oatmeal and bannocks eaten looking out upon the austere mountains of his own homeland.
Last night’s Lucullan banquet had been over-salted by Dabney’s monologue on Pollard’s iniquities, faults that were aggravated by his low social status. By the time the ladies had left the table Fraser was so weary of both Pollard and Dabney, he acceded with relief to Harrington’s request to hold forth with tales of his battles with the French and travels amongst the Mahometans.
Harrington had interjected many remarks and questions, while Mason skillfully poured various wines of no mean quality—the richest Madeira, the best Port, the softest Malmsey wine. The footman also, so far as Fraser could tell from his attentive mien, had listened with interest but was constrained to make no comment. Dabney, sulking to be so far out of his element, had at last left the table to make sure his horses were properly stabled.
This morning Fraser’s companions were only the demure daughters of the house, whispering to each other about frocks and parties, and the portrait of their late mother, taken untimely by Miss Betsy’s birth. None of these ladies demanded his attention, and indeed barely noticed when he left the table.
Fraser walked out onto the veranda and looked about him, at the mist rising off the river and wavering tentatively upward into a fresh blue sky, at the damp sparkle of grass and leaf, at the community hidden behind the cedar hedge, already hard at work.
A bondswoman appeared, clad in a simple muslin dress and a kerchief and apron of dazzling whiteness, all the brighter for contrasting with the mahogany of her skin. Upon her head she bore a basket brimming with vegetables from the kitchen garden. Ah, this must be Venus, the cook, of whom Harrington had spoken such entirely deserved praise. She trod past the veranda, stately as a queen, directing her steps toward the kitchen in its small separate building behind the house.
At that instant two men came running across the lawn from the stable, stumbling in their haste, their eyes wide with alarm and with, Fraser suspected, fear. Venus turned toward them, so gracefully the basket upon her head did not tilt, let alone fall. Fraser stepped down off the veranda onto the gravel of the drive. “Here, here, what’s this?”
“Master,” said one of the men breathlessly. “Master Pollard’s horse done come back to the stables all alone, dragging his reins.”
Fraser was turning toward the house to call Harrington when the man himself came through the doorway. “Alone? You mean the beast’s thrown him somewhere in the fields?”
“Yes, Master.”
“We must look for him,” said Harrington. “He might be injured. Fraser, you’re an expert horseman, if you would be so kind . . .”
“Certainly.”
“Mason!” Harrington shouted.
The footman appeared from around the corner of the house and stopped at Venus’s side. He must have been in the kitchen himself, breaking his own fast, as his brow was bedewed with perspiration and his waistcoat unbuttoned. “Yes, master?” he asked, and polished the toe of his left shoe against his stocking-clad right calf.
“Write and send a message to Mr. Dabney’s father at Bella Vista, asking him to join the search.”
“Yes, master.” Youth and woman exchanged a significant look, and together they disappeared in that subtle fashion of all the bondsmen, appearing more like dark ghosts hovering at the rim of consciousness than human beings.
Fraser hurried back into the house and up the sweeping staircase lined with the powdered heads and laced coats of ancestral portraits. At its top he was confronted with the spectacle of Dabney in his dressing gown, a half-eaten muffin held to his be-crumbed lips, Cato behind him holding a cup and saucer.
“What’s all this infernal shouting?” the young man demanded, his voice thick with the food in his mouth. Upon Fraser acquainting him with the situation, Dabney shrugged and permitted one corner of his upper lip to turn upwards in a smile. “Well, if the man can’t keep his seat, ‘tis no affair of mine.”
Making no comment on Dabney’s pleasure in Pollard’s predicament, which was no affair of his, Fraser equipped himself with boots and a wide-brimmed hat and within moments joined Harrington in the stables. Every lineament of the plantation owner’s body displayed his nervous tension as the stableboy—one of the two men who had reported Pollard’s disappearance—saddled the second of a brace of horses.
Fraser stopped beside the tall, sturdy bay that stood, saddled and bridled, to one side. “This is Pollard’s usual mount?” he asked.
“Yes, it is,” said Harrington.
Fraser was not surprised to see that the beast was of good, although not excellent, quality. He breathed in heavy snorts, his foam-flecked mouth working around the bit, his eye rolling. Murmuring soothing words, Fraser stepped closer.
Now the reins were looped loosely around a hitching post. But they had been dragging, as the men reported—their ends were muddy and creased. How fortunate that the horse had not tripped himself up and broken a leg in what had obviously been a mad dash for home. The question was, what had provoked him into such exertions?
Fraser ran a hand over the animal’s steaming flanks and then inspected his fingertips. Tiny seeds, glued together by the horse’s sweat, clung to them. “Boy,” he called, and the stableboy looked around. “Where can be found plants with this sort of seed?”
“In the slough where the branch meets the river, master”
“In the marsh where the stream runs into the river?” Harrington translated. “Is that where the man is to be found, do you think?”
“I think that is where we should begin our search.” Fraser was just returning the reins to the post when the angle of the saddle caught his eye. He tilted his head assessingly, then clasped the edge of the saddle and joggled it. It slipped loosely to the side, and would have fallen beneath the horse’s belly had he not caught it.
“What is it?” asked Harrington, stepping closer to inspect the evidence.
“The saddle is loose. Surely Pollard would not have set off without making sure ‘twas tight. Aha!” Fraser unbuckled the straps and pulled the saddle free. “Look. One of the perforations in the girth-strap has broken through to the next one. He could have tightened it properly, not noticing the perforations were almost conjoined, and the movements of the horse completed the break.”
“I see.”
“Do you?” Fraser’s index finger indicated how the enlargement of the perforation had been caused by a knife-cut, not the jagged edge of wear.
“Ah,” said Harrington.
Fraser carried the saddle through the open doorway of the tack room and set it on a the first empty stand. Something caught his eye, a gleam where the cobblestone floor met the planks of the walls. He reached down to the shadowed intersection where the daily sweepings had accumulated, and picked up a brass button.
He carried this suggestive item to Harrington. “This has lain here only a few hours.” Fraser’s thumb stroked the smooth metal surface, demonstrating how the merest few grains of dust dulled its luster.
Silently Harrington took the button from Fraser’s hand and placed it in his pocket. The lines in his face deepened from creases into crevasses as he took the reins of his own horse from the attending stable boy. “See to Pollard’s horse, Gideon. Mind you wipe him down well.”
“Yes, master.” Gideon, his own dusky features set in every indication of deep thought, proffered the reins of the second horse to Fraser. He mounted and turned with Harrington toward the river.
A glance toward the main house showed Mason handing a white square to a small boy, who trotted off westwards, and not a sign of Dabney. Fraser pressed his heels to the flanks of the fine specimen of horseflesh Harrington had entrusted to him—his reputation as a cavalry man had preceded him—and the beast stepped out, attempting in his high spirits to prance sideways until Fraser brought him securely under control.
But this he did instinctively. His mind was turning over the thought that not only had the slave Mason been taught to write, he had been taught to write well enough to be entrusted with the proper conveyance of a message. This made him a more valuable servant, certainly, and yet at the same time was a risk. Fraser glanced at his companion, but Harrington’s keen white face shadowed by the hat-brim indicated nothing save his concern for Pollard’s predicament, now seen to have been no accident.
The plantation owner led the way past the small log houses behind the cedar hedge. Chickens scattered, squawking. Little children, wearing no more than a shirt, picked insects from the leaves of tobacco. Others squatted in the dirt, using their fingers to eat a pottage of beans and grain from wooden trenchers. A man in the field hand’s uniform of loose shirt and trousers sat upon a pile of bricks, the same russet as the main house, polishing a hoe into cleanliness while his bare feet remained coated with dust and chaff.
Once in the open fields, Harrington urged his horse into a canter, hurrying toward a line of trees rising on the horizon. Beneath the eaves of those trees, the brown dusty track became a brown muddy one. Fraser reined in and leaned precariously to one side, squinting in the sudden shadow. “Those hoof prints are very fresh.”
“Pollard?” Harrington asked, leaning not quite so precariously.
“Quite likely so, yes. There are two sets—see how the tracks are curved in the direction the animal was walking? At least, he was walking when he faced toward the river, but running when he returned. Those tracks are much further apart, and overlie the earlier set, obliterating many of them. Obliterating many prints of bare human feet as well. Do the slaves come here?”
“Yes they do, to hunt and fish and gather reeds for bedding and baskets. Pollard is obliged to patrol the area, making sure the slaves carry out such activities on their own time, not mine.”
“They hunt?”
“With snares and the like. Of course they are not allowed to carry firearms.”
“Of course not.”
Ducking an overhanging limb, Harrington urged his horse onwards. The moist warmth of the river rose around them. The hooves made louder and louder plops as the ground grew boggier. Then they broke through the belt of forest and into the sunlight. Before them lay an expanse of marsh, rushes and reeds trembling in the still air and pools of water glinting. White birds broke cover and flew upwards, calling raucously. A flying insect made a determined sortie into Fraser’s ear and he batted it away.
To the left the pools grew larger, joining together, and drowned the trees and water grasses in the expanse of the river. To the right the trail ran away into the marsh. The hoof prints turned to the right, heading toward a grove of willows. Fraser guided his horse in that direction and found himself in the lead. The odors of rotting vegetation and stagnant water enveloped them.
Suddenly Fraser’s horse started violently, corkscrewing fit to tie himself into a knot. Only Fraser’s hard-earned skills kept him in the saddle. Behind him Harrington’s horse lurched backward, the skittishness contagious.
“Whoa, whoa,” Fraser murmured, stroking the animal’s shivering neck. Once the animal had quieted, he handed the reins to Harrington and climbed down from the saddle, his boots meeting the mud with a soft squelching noise. He took two, then three steps forward, just into the dappled shade of the willows.
There beside the trail lay a huge brownish-black serpent, sinuous and sleek. Fraser’s steps backward were performed with much greater alacrity. The creature did not move at all. Stopping his retreat, he peered closely at it.
Before his eyes it was transformed from a serpent to a branch. He exhaled. Was it this illusion, almost perfect in the flickering light and shadow, that had frightened Pollard’s horse? Add the beast’s unexpected gyration to an abruptly loosened girth-strap, and no one could have kept his seat.
Again Fraser approached the branch, and this time stooped down to inspect it. “Interesting,” he said to Harrington, who inched closer. “This fell from an oak tree, wouldn’t you say? How came it here, then, amidst the willows?”
“Washed by the spring floods, perhaps.”
“I think not, Mr. Harrington. The rushes beneath this branch are fresh and green, newly-cut, and there is hardly any mud upon it. And look here!” Fraser indicated one end of the branch, where it curved upward and expanded into the very image of a serpent’s head. “Here is a bit of twine. This branch has been but recently placed here, perhaps to secure a snare or fish-net. As for Mr. Pollard . . .”
The path was a jumble of footprints and hoof marks, some of them now filled with water. Save for one patch, smoothed and hollowed, with the clear print of a human hand beside it, each finger a furrow in the mud.
“He fell there.” Harrington’s words dropped heavily into the damp hush, stirred only by the irritable thrum of insects.
On the opposite side of the muddy path, a trail of matted rushes and reeds led toward the water. A trail, Fraser estimated, made by a heavy weight that had broken the slender stems. Some of them struggled back upright, still green, as Fraser brushed by them. Others displayed smears of a substance too rosy to be mud.
Pollard lay at the edge of a pool of water dark as a Nubian’s eye, face down, arms outstretched. His cowhide lash lay at his side. But this day the blood upon it was his own, leaking from a grievous wound that had knocked one arc of his skull inward. Here the flies gathered.
Fraser took off his hat, partially from respect, partially to wipe his brow. Still his sweat trickled into his eyes and down his collar. “I have found him,” he called. “He is dead.”
“So I feared,” Harrington replied. “His fall has broken his neck, I expect.”
After a quick cast about the area, where he found nothing more than a frog to remark upon, Fraser pushed back through the rushes to the path. “He was injured, yes, but if his neck were broken he would not have been able to drag himself away from where he fell. In fact, I wonder why he would crawl away at all, if not to escape an assailant. For there are no stones lying about here, for him to fall upon and bash in his head.”
“His head is bashed in?”
“As the sharp rap of a spoon cracks the shell of a soft-boiled egg.” Fraser mounted his horse.
Harrington’s features went from merely white to ashen. He might not be as quick as some, but even he could see what this intelligence implied. Perhaps the serpentine log had been brought here for inoffensive reasons. But no innocent purpose explained the cutting of the saddle-strap. As for the weapon that had finished off the injured man and then conveniently disappeared . . .
A shout rang out. The horses shifted uneasily. Harrington produced a handkerchief from an inner pocket and rose in his stirrups. He waved his small white flag toward a similarly-hued man on horseback far across the marsh, where the land rose again onto terra firma. Or Bella Vista, as the case might be. “My respects to Mr. Dabney,” he called, “but we have found the man, and no longer require assistance.”
“Very well,” returned the other man, and turned his horse away.
“No,” muttered Harrington, sinking back down into his saddle, “No, we no longer require the assistance of the Dabneys. Let us return to Oak Grove, Captain Fraser. We must give Pollard the usual obsequies, and I must turn my efforts to finding someone to take his place.”
“And we must discover whose hand is behind this dreadful occurrence,” added Fraser.
The plantation owner regarded his guest with bleak eyes, and did not reply.
* * * * *
Fraser stood in the sultry shade of one of the great oaks, fanning himself with his hat and observing the scene before him, but, as befit his status as guest, not participating.
Outside Pollard’s small house, where his body now lay in more semblance of dignity than it had been discovered, Harrington and Dabney spoke in soft but intense voices. Harrington extended his hand, revealing something small that glinted all the more urgently in the sunlight for the slight trembling of his limbs. It was the button from the stable.
Dabney bridled and his tone rose from baritone to tenor. “What impertinence!”
Harrington murmured something soothing.
“I shall have my man bring my coat to you, to prove that all its buttons are sewn tightly!”
Harrington hid the button once again in his pocket and gazed down at his boots.
“I am a gentleman. I do not sneak about stableyards damaging saddles. If he had been my social equal, I would have called him out upon the field of honor. But he was not. He was beneath my notice.” Here Dabney bowed briefly toward the small house, acknowledging but hardly respecting the dead.
Harrington raised his hands, palm outwards, placatingly. “My dear Mr. Dabney, John, I do beg your pardon. You must recognize the difficult position I find myself in.”
Dabney nodded, grudgingly conceding the point, and stalked off toward the house.
Fraser replaced his hat. Yes, Harrington occupied a very difficult position. Which might explain his grasping so desperately at straws that he risked alienating the eligible Mr. Dabney. Although, Fraser supposed, Miss Letitia’s own eligibility provided insurance.
And Harrington’s suggestion was no more than a straw. Dabney would know of the marsh, since it bordered his own lands. He would not have known which saddle was Pollard’s. And Fraser could not imagine the fop with his smooth white hands carrying an oak branch down from the lawn, let alone lying in wait beside it, some heavy object to hand, in the chance Pollard’s fall was not sufficient to kill him. Dabney was correct that bashing in a man’s brains fell far below the dignity his position demanded.
Pollard might have been of a harsh and unfeeling character, hardened further by his disagreeable vocation, but he had been a white man. He had not died by Dabney’s white hand, he had died by a black one. And a slave murdering his master’s man required immediate apprehension and punishment, ere his example spread, to the detriment of the peace, the order, the purity, and the prosperity of Southern society.
Last Sunday morning Fraser had sat beside the Harringtons at the nearby church, politely bowing his Presbyterian head to the papist Anglican services. The sermon had been directed as much toward the ebony faces lining the balcony as toward the planters filling the pews. For the salvation of their souls, the minister said, those in bondage must realize that submission was pleasing to the Lord. They must learn respect and obedience to all those whom God in his providence had placed in authority over them. And if they were not obedient, then . . .
Fraser wondered whether that same minister had ever read to the slaves the book of Moses, called Exodus, or whether a lettered slave such as Mason was familiar with its story: “And the Lord said, I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows.”
Harrington paced back and forth before the steps of Pollard’s house with every appearance of a sapper measuring out a length of fuse. Frowning, equally restless, Fraser strolled away into the heat of the late afternoon. The saddle-strap. The branch lying in the rushes. A hand bringing—something—down upon Pollard’s head. It could well be that this deadly object had been cast far into the marsh, and would never be recovered. Still, though, if he could get some sense of it, he might could put a name to the person who had held it.
The Hebrew slaves of the Bible had labored to make bricks without straw. Fraser turned toward the pile of bricks he had observed only this morning, in a more peaceful time. It was not now occupied by any laborers polishing their hoes. He picked up one of the bricks and weighed it in his hand. It was heavy, hot, and gritty. It would have done to smash a man’s head in. So would a hoe have done. But Pollard’s wound was concave, not vee-shaped. Whatever had hit him, it had not had a sharp edge.
Ignoring the dark eyes observing him, Fraser replaced the brick and walked toward the neat clapboard dependencies ranged behind the main house, summoned by the aromas of baking breads and roasting meats. Cooking implements, he thought, and the cook Venus exchanging such a plangent gaze with Mason.
Fraser stopped in the shadow of a wisteria-covered garden arch to survey the scene. A girl sat on a bench outside the kitchen using a small, sharp knife to shuck oysters into an earthenware bowl. Another employed a wooden pestle and stone mortar to macerate some sort of sharp-smelling spice—cinnamon, perhaps. Mason, the man himself, sat upon a stump of wood reading a book.
Through the window of the kitchen, Fraser watched as Venus bent over a small spherical iron pot suspended from a bracket above the hearth. Flames licked up its sides like the purifying fire of some ancient Roman rite. She stirred the ingredients, then turned to a small basin set nearby. From it she lifted two long strips of gray fabric. She wrung out the—white stockings, Fraser realized—and folded them away into a bundle of blue cloth from which depended a needle and thread. That she tucked away in a basket woven of rushes, very like to the basket she had been carrying this morning. Atop the telltale cloth she arranged the leafy tops of carrots or turnips, and then she set the basket aside.
It was not Venus’s place to wash or mend clothing. The hierarchy of the household was clearly defined, the house servants each with his or her own task, and all of them set above the field hands. However, if the situation demanded washing or mending . . .
Fraser’s frown intensified to a scowl. He turned and walked back to the house as quickly as he could stride, his cheeks burning as with a fever. For he could think of nothing so much as the beann-nighe of the Gael’s mythology, the supernatural washerwoman seen laundering the clothes of next person in the community to die.
* * * * *
The dinner table was once again furnished with finest Virginia ham, a saddle of mutton, turkey, canvas duck, beef, oysters, plum pudding, tarts, peaches preserved in brandy, pickles, condiments, preserves, and quince marmalade. And yet Fraser’s appetite was not whetted as keenly tonight as it had been the night before. Despite the open windows, the air was close, and to his nostrils the perfumes of the meats seemed tainted with the stagnant odor of the marsh.
Politely he sampled the foodstuffs laid before him, and considered the gold and silver encrusted candelabrum rising like a temple to Mammon from their midst. He supposed its small sphinxes were intended to reflect Egyptian style, but to him they appeared to be no more than Frenchified fancies, golden calves commenting upon the morality play in which he found himself acting a role.
Save for Dabney, who made such small talk as occurred to his small mind, the company was silent. Misses Letitia and Betsy drooped picturesquely over their plates, although their solemn demeanors were positively blithesome compared to their father’s. It appeared that to Harrington, the feast was no more than funeral meats, dry as ashes upon his tongue, holding no nourishment. He signaled Mason to remove his plate, and the footman did so.
The lad was wearing his usual livery, white shirt and breeches beneath a long waistcoat cut of blue broadcloth and closed with brass buttons that winked in the candlelight like conspiring eyes. His stockings were white, and his buckled shoes were polished to a gleam darker than that of his extraordinary golden skin.
Or was his color extraordinary? Fraser saw in the shadows beyond the doorway the cook, Venus, making some last preparation to a platter of figs, raisins, and almonds. She handed it to Mason with a smile filled with such affection that Fraser could count every white tooth. And yet there was something else in her smile, an edge of concern that reflected as though in a mirror Harrington’s somber face.
Mason returned to the dining room and set the platter down before his master. Harrington chose one morsel and looked up, meeting the lad’s eye with a twist of his lips that he perhaps intended to be a smile. Their faces shared the same features, Fraser saw—a slightly receding chin, a high forehead, and especially an aquiline nose, not a lineament often seen in the African race.
What he saw was the truth of the matter. Rumor had it that even so noble a figure as former President Jefferson was served at table by a youth who was his very image, his own son sired upon a slave woman. Such relationships, Fraser had heard, were not uncommon. Why, there were occasions upon which a plantation owner would sell his own offspring, fearful wickedness as that might be.
Harrington’s position was similar to Jefferson’s—his wife was dead, leaving only daughters, and the beauteous Ethiopian Venus was in his power. He would have had no need to commit violence upon her person. Acceding to his wishes could well bring her every advantage—and in Venus’s instance, had, for she bore him a son whom he prized enough to not only christen with the name of one of Virginia’s great families, but also to educate.
Perhaps the woman was less pagan Venus than Christian Eve, tempted not by a suggestively-shaped branch but by the genuine infernal serpent to eat of the apple of knowledge of good and evil. For what if an intelligent young slave like Mason were allowed a few glimpses of education or liberty and given the first crude notions of natural right? Might he not rise to an indignation unfelt by his compatriots, who were kept ignorant and submissive in the interests of self-preservation more so even than profit?
And yet if the temptation to murder was infernal, surely the temptation to dignity was not. Fraser had friends here in these American states who, in recalling their recent struggle against what they saw as British tyranny, said they felt called upon to manifest the sincerity of their expressions of freedom by extending that same freedom to others, who though of a different color were the work of the same almighty hand.
The young ladies rose from the table and, ringlets bobbing, betook themselves to the drawing room. Mason served the wines and then slipped discreetly away. Harrington, considering the red port in his goblet as though it were blood, muttered of calling in the county sheriff and neighboring planters—they would wring the name of the evildoer from the slave population, yes they would. Dabney made noises of agreement, his face becoming rosier and rosier as he drank. Fraser sipped his Madeira and reflected upon the business of the last twenty-four hours.
Even if Mason had not found any number of small knives ready to hand in the kitchen, one of Harrington’s pen-knives would have served to turn Pollard’s saddle into a deadly trap. Perhaps the serpentine log had been produced especially for the murderous occasion, perhaps it had indeed come to the marsh to secure a snare or net, and was made useful in a very different way.
It had been the work of only a few moments for Mason to take off his shoes and stockings, so his footprints would blend with the others, and to follow Pollard into the marsh, there to finish him off with . . . Fraser, although not a betting man, would wager his pension on the murder weapon being Venus’s small iron pot. How better to destroy traces of blood and hair than by fire?
This morning she and her son had stood side by side, he with his waistcoat hanging open, wiping his shoe upon his stocking. Had he just then, in the light of day, noticed the missing button and concealed it as best he could? Had he had no time to wash his feet before replacing his footwear, so that his stockings were stained with mud? Probably so, otherwise Venus would not have taken her surreptitious turn as washerwoman and seamstress.
A movement in the doorway was Cato, beckoning urgently to Dabney, who despite showing every evidence of indignation answered the call. Their voices, hissing whispers, rose and fell in the corridor. Then Dabney reappeared, a smirk pleating his doughy face. “Mr. Harrington? Might I have a word, please? Your indulgence, Captain Fraser.”
Fraser rose and bowed. Taking his goblet with him, Harrington led Dabney down the hall to his study. The door shut with a thud. In the drawing room, one of the young ladies began to play the pianoforte and the other to sing: Sur le pont d’Avignon, l’on y danse, l’on y danse . . . These Americans, with their mania for the French. Fraser supposed he could lay the blame for that at the door of the otherwise estimable Mr. Jefferson.
Desirous of a cooling breeze, or at least of fresher air, Fraser walked out onto the veranda. But the night air seemed hardly less oppressive, hanging in a moist pall over plantation and river. Lamplight shone from the windows of Pollard’s house as two old bondswomen kept vigil over his mortal remains. Behind the cedar hedge, the Saturday night bonfire’s yellow sparks snapped upwards, clearer than the smudged stars above. The faces of those gathered around the fire were deeply shadowed, almost demonic in appearance, but that impression was mitigated by the snatches of song or even trills of laughter emanating from them. Were the all-too-human slaves celebrating the brief instant between Pollard’s demise and the wrath that would follow?
Fraser sensed himself to be between the rock of Sinai and the hard place of the desert. While he felt no sympathy for Pollard, neither did he approve of Mason’s deed. Nevertheless, Mason’s plight could hardly fail to move him. Yes, it was his duty as an officer and a gentleman, not to mention as Harrington’s guest, to reveal his deductions in the matter. Especially if his deductions could prevent the brutal hand of justice from falling upon a guiltless person. For even if Mason did not suffer the consequences of his deed, some other soul in bondage would.
Voices leached through the open window at Fraser’s back, the window of the study where prospective father and son-in-law were closeted.
“The devil you say!” exclaimed Harrington, his voice sharp with dismay. “You are gulling me, Mr. Dabney, in retaliation for my unfortunate question about the button.”
“Not so, not so,” Dabney replied smoothly. “My man Cato told me just now. I sent him to the stables before dinner to ascertain the condition of my horses. He felt your boy Gideon had not cleaned their hooves properly.”
“Gideon has been with me for many years, he knows horses.”
“That is not my point, Mr. Harrington. Cato had a word or two with Gideon, which Gideon repaid with insults, saying that Cato, as my valet, was putting on airs—well, he should, should he not?—and then having the audacity to raise his fists! Of course my man was constrained to defend himself.”
Harrington said nothing, no doubt thinking that the matter of who began the scuffle was immaterial.
“Then your footman, Mason, appeared on the scene—with one of your books tucked beneath his arm, Cato tells me! The impudence!”
Still Harrington said nothing.
“He told them to stop their fighting. Before Cato could point out that he had no power over either man, Gideon replied, plain as the nose on your face and the tongue in your mouth, ‘Are you my judge? What will you do? Wait beside the path in the slough while I exercise the horses?’”
“That doesn’t have to mean, that’s not necessarily . . .” A thump and creak indicated that Harrington had sat heavily down in his desk chair.
“Gideon sleeps in the stable loft, does he not? He told Cato he saw Mason in the tack room, late last night, a candle in his hand.”
“But if he never saw Mason cut the strap . . .”
Dabney’s voice became heavier, like a muddy river in spate. “Mason underestimates Cato’s loyalty to me and Gideon’s to you. Why don’t you inspect his waistcoat to see if all the buttons are sewn in the same fashion? Why don’t you ask the other house servants where Mason was at dawn this morning? He was most certainly not in the pantry serving the breakfast. The woman Venus, now, she said he was in the kitchen, but Cato never saw him there, even when he was preparing my tea. I trust no one else with my tea, mind, it’s a very good grade of . . .”
A slapping sound made Fraser step back, but apparently it was Harrington bringing his palm down upon his desk. “Infamous! Infamous! I raised that lad as—as though he were my own son, and yet he repays my attentions to him by murdering my overseer? I will have his head for this!”
Fraser turned away from the rim of lamplight, into the darkness, feeling not relief but a greater sense of duty than before.
He was no longer obliged to reveal the results of his deductions. Their preliminary steps had been sufficient to lead Gideon and Cato, and through them Dabney, to the truth. And now Harrington, caught in the tightest of cleft sticks, chose anger over compassion. It would take a braver man than he, one much less mindful of his social relations, to defy the terrible truth that the population in bondage equaled or even surpassed that population that was not.
Everyone, Fraser thought, slaves and masters alike, were caught in the same snare. As was he. If he could only escape by gnawing off his own foot, then so be it. He would betray the respect due his host, not to mention the laws of the country. There were higher laws to follow.
He slipped as quietly as he could off the veranda and around the corner of the house.
* * * * *
The light from the bonfire flickered on the walls of the kitchen, and the embers in the hearth emitted an orange glow like a desert sunset. The lights highlighted the planes of Mason’s face and reflected in his adamantine eyes. Behind him, Venus hastily piled food into a bundle, placing on top a copy of the Bible.
“You realize your flight is as good as a confession,” Fraser said.
“If by flying I can save the hand of justice from falling upon my relations, then I am content. Thank you for your warning, sir. As for Cato and Gideon—well, I must forgive them for making their own beds as soft as they can.” Mason’s generous lips curved in a wry smile.
Venus’s indignant harrumph was less charitable. “They had no call to speak up. They’ll know what they done, you got my word on that.”
“You meant for Pollard’s death to be thought an accident?” Fraser asked Mason.
“So I did. I have you to thank, I believe, for revealing the truth of the matter?”
“I shall not apologize.”
“Nor should you. The Lord brought you, and Cato as well, here at just this time, to teach me the wages of playing judge and executioner, and to show me my future path.”
“Could you not have waited to carry out your plan until we were gone?”
Mason shook his head. “No. It was yesterday that Pollard’s brutality reached its last straw. He beat my younger brother, my half-brother, my mother’s other child, almost to death for no reason other than to make an example of him. I shall not apologize, either.”
Younger brother, Fraser repeated silently. A dusky sibling who was not Harrington’s son, and was deemed a lesser being because of it. He drew several coins from his pocket and pressed them into Mason’s hand. “Make your way to Philadelphia, and there seek out the Society of Friends. They will help you in your escape.”
Mason bowed with the grace and dignity of the native Egyptians, be they Fraser’s wealthy hosts or fellahin tilling their fields below the broken statues of long-fallen pharaohs. “Again, sir, I am in your debt. I shall suffer my exile now, but in time, I promise you, I shall return to this land, and bring my brethren out of bondage.”
Venus, her luminous eyes shining with tears, handed Mason the bundle. “Go, my son. Godspeed.”
Fraser turned away from their parting, slipped silently from the kitchen, and walked slowly back to the great house whose walls were built of bricks and blood. As yet no sounds of pursuit came from there, but then, why would Harrington call out pursuers, when he thought that Mason would come when summoned, all unsuspecting.
What Fraser heard were the voices of the people gathered around the fire. The swaying rhythm of their song was punctuated by soft claps, and its chorus seemed to his ear like a zephyr stirring the oppressive darkness: “Let my people go,” they sang. “Let my people go.”
“Way Down in Egypt’s Land” first appeared in Thou Shalt Not Kill, edited by Anne Perry, Carroll & Graf, 2005.
My assignment was to write a mystery based on a Bible story. I dithered a long time over this, but finally settled on the story of Moses, which does, after all, include his murder of the Egyptian overseer. I did some research into Pharoah Akhnaten’s reign, planning to just write a straightforward story set in Egypt. And then I saw how I could transpose the story to another setting.
I set the story in old Virginia, an area I was already familiar with after my visits to Colonial Williamsburg. I chose the period right after the turn of the nineteenth century, because it was during that time that many of the rules and customs of slavery became entrenched. Again, I needed an outsider to tell the tale, one who could cast a cold eye on the justifications of the plantation owners. This time around the outsider is not just British, but Scottish, whose experiences in his own country give him some extra perspective.
I actually found in my own library a book titled The Plantation South, an anthology of original letters and diary entries from the time period. This book once belonged to my father, and had probably been lurking on my shelves for thirty years without being opened. But it was just what I needed—along with a copy of the Bible itself.
From James Boswell’s Journal of a Tour of the Kingdom of Scotland with Samuel Johnson: Kingsburgh, Isle of Skye, September 12, 1773.
We arrived late in the afternoon at the house of Allan MacDonald of Kingsburgh. He himself received us most courteously, and after shaking hands supported Mr. Johnson into the house.
Kingsburgh was quite the figure of a gallant Highlander. He wore his tartan plaid thrown about him, a vest with gold buttons and gold buttonholes, and tartan hose. He had jet-black hair tied behind, covered by a large blue bonnet with a knot of black ribbon like a cockade.
He conducted us into a comfortable parlor with a good fire, and a dram of admirable Holland’s gin went round.
By and by supper came, and there appeared his spouse, the celebrated Miss Flora. She was a little woman, of a mild and genteel appearance. To see Mr. Samuel Johnson salute Miss Flora MacDonald was a wonderful romantic scene to me. Indeed, as indicated by Kingsburgh’s garb, which was quite a la mode, time has healed the enmities between the kingdoms of Britain. In time I imagine the infant Prince of Wales will assume both thrones, as did his ancestor James VI of Scotland when he became also James I of England.
Mr. Johnson spoke to Mrs. MacDonald of the Duke of Cumberland’s visit to Skye in 1746. “Who was with the Duke? We were told in England there was one Miss Flora MacDonald with him.”
Said she with a secret smile, “They were very right.”
* * * * *
Armadale, Isle of Skye, April 18, 1746.
Hearing the slow approach of hoofbeats to her stepfather’s house, Flora threw her shawl around her shoulders and went out. Donald, the ghillie, was already waiting outside the stable door.
Sea birds called raucously above the Sound of Sleat. To the east the mountainous mainland faded into a pale spring twilight. The horse and man who appeared from the gloaming seemed so worn and weary they might have served as figments of nightmare. It was Allan, Flora saw. She stepped forward and held the bridle as he slid from the saddle with a groan.
There had been talk between their families, distant relations, that they should marry. As yet Flora evaded this notion, thinking Allan a man of great charm but little judgment. Now, though, she took note of the grave sobriety lining his features and raised her hand to his shoulder. “What of the rebellion, Allan? Is it over?”
“Aye,” he said, “tis over. Six days ago we made the crossing of the River Spey just beyond Ruthven, intending to catch Prince Charles before he gained the sanctuary of Inverness. But he turned, and the Highlanders came down upon us from the heights beyond the river before we’d had the opportunity to form up, let alone bring our artillery to bear.”
Flora could see the scene: The flood of screaming men, unbreeked, unwashed, undeterred, armed with swords as tall as themselves. No surprise they overwhelmed soldiers bought by pay, not principle. Soldiers who had only the one shot before their muskets were rendered nothing more than props for bayonets. That tactic had defeated Generals Cope at Prestonpans and Hawley at Falkirk. Now it defeated William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, King George II’s third son and a general who had proved himself in the Continental wars.
“If only the Prince had delayed his attack until we reached smoother ground near Inverness. If only he had refused in his pride to take the advice of Lord George Murray, who is by far the superior strategist. If only two French ships had not slipped through the blockade and landed money and supplies . . .” Allan shook his head. “Well, such exercises in supposition are best left to historians.”
With that Flora could only agree. “Cumberland and his army are retreating toward England, I suppose.”
Allan’s laugh was edged with bitterness. “The MacPherson levies denied His Grace the river crossing and the road south. He has fled west into the mountains, running like a rabbit rather than honorably surrender his sword to the victor.”
“Perhaps he feared for his life.”
“His life is hardly in so much danger as the Prince’s life would have been, had the situation been reversed. Charles has put a price on Cumberland’s head, in a fit of mordant humor, I wager, but still he ordered his men to spare the wounded and release the captives. And so you see me here, at your mercy, Cousin.”
How have the mighty fallen, Flora told herself, thinking more of her crestfallen cousin than the English duke. Handing the reins of the horse to Donald, she guided Allan inside and sat him down before the aromatic warmth of the peat fire in the parlor. To the maid waiting in the hall she said, “Betty, bring bread, cheese, and porter.”
Then Flora took the coat, its brave scarlet stained and torn, from Allan’s shoulders. He folded his long, lean limbs into a chair and rested his head against its back. “The Pretender—the Prince Regent, I should say—has entered Edinburgh, to even greater applause than last year’s acclamation. Strange, is it not, how many who kept back a welcome then are now flocking forward with one?”
“Is it so strange that few would commit themselves to Charles’s rash enterprise until that enterprise became victory?” And rash it was, Flora told herself. Even if during the forty years since the Union England had dealt with Scotland as though it were a backward colony, to go to war seemed far from sensible. “Even supposing Prince Charles to have the right, it might have been very generous for one to support him at every risk, but it was not wise. Not until now.”
“And now he has received the surrender of the Castle, had his father proclaimed King at the Mercat Cross, and called a Parliament. That will not last, he and his kind, they have little use for Parliaments. Soon the old days will be back again, tyranny at home and a hostile neighbor assuring our poverty.”
Betty brought food and drink. For several minutes Allan refreshed himself, whilst Flora admired the play of the firelight on his unshaven cheeks and the lock of black hair that hung forlorn over his brow. At last he set aside the empty cup, wiped his mouth, and asked, “Where are your mother and her husband?”
“He is commanding the government militia on Uist. She has gone to visit Lady MacDonald at Monkstadt and your mother at Kingsburgh and intends to return tomorrow.”
“Ah.” Allan summoned a smile, less radiant than his usual one, tense and uncertain.
She let him hold her small, clean hand in his large, rough, dirty one. It seemed the least she could do for a warrior so grievously disappointed.
* * * * *
Armadale, Isle of Skye, April 19, 1746
Marion MacDonald sat quietly, her hands folded in her lap, her countenance knitted in thought. “Well then. Did the Prince proclaim his father James VIII of Scotland only, or James III of Britain as well?”
“Does it matter?” Allan asked. Cleaned, rested, and in a new suit of clothes—Flora’s stepfather’s shirt and breeks fit him tolerably well—he had reclaimed some of his usual ease of manner. Still, Flora sensed that her spirited cousin writhed beneath the unaccustomed mantle of defeat.
“Aye, it does matter,” her mother said. “James might well overreach himself if he claims the throne of Britain entire.”
“The Stuarts have never hesitated to overreach themselves. But perhaps the Prince learned by his swiftly aborted incursion into England that he has little support outwith our own Highlands.”
“Indeed, the present ruling family, of Hanoverian origins or no, has the possession of the united Crown and with it, perhaps, as much right as the deposed Stuarts. But this issue has been decided. It no longer concerns us.” Marion’s maternal eye moved from one to the other of the young people before her. “Now. Allan, I spoke with your parents at Kingsburgh . . .”
Flora’s ear caught the sound of hoofbeats and voices from outside. Quickly she put down her sewing and went to the door.
Unlike yesterday’s tender spring evening, this evening was coming on dark and swift. A cold chill wind churned the sea. White gulls looked like flecks of paper swirling up against the clouds massed in the northwest, clouds colored the deep purplish-black of a bruise.
One last fragile ray of sun illuminated the approaching party, a lad from the village walking before three men on horseback. All three wore red coats like Allan’s, save these were decorated with bits of gilt braid. And the heavy-set man in the middle was bedecked with medals. “. . . the edge of the world,” he was muttering, his face set in a supercilious scowl. “Beastly country, savage mountain passes, not a decent inn to be found . . .”
Allan’s hand grasped Flora’s shoulder and his voice whispered in her ear, “I’ll be damned—I beg your pardon, Cousin, but it’s the Duke himself.”
“Come here? To us? He must find himself in dire straits, then, and in need of succor.”
Behind them both Marion gasped. “The beds need airing and the best china washing. . . .” Her footsteps receded into the house.
His errand completed, the lad sidled toward the gate in the wall surrounding the house. Then he took to his heels and disappeared toward the village. Flora rendered her best curtsey and Allan his best bow. “Allow me to make introduction. I am Allan MacDonald and this lady is Flora, my cousin of the same name. Your Grace is welcome in my uncle’s house.”
“Fort Augustus fallen to the rebels,” grumbled the Duke, “and Fort William as well, garrisons incompetent, should have hanged the lot of them . . .” He clumped loudly to the ground. Again Donald came forward and led the horses away, their hanging heads and rough foam-flecked coats making of them a pitiable sight.
The men appeared in little better health, their hats and the wigs beneath battered and worn, their chins unshaven, their clothing soiled—surely those were bits of heather clinging to the scarlet cloth. The taller of the two aides introduced himself as Felix Scott, the smaller as Neil Campbell. He added, “Are my kinsman Argyll’s troop of men in the area, Mr. MacDonald? We must send a message to them as soon as possible.”
Flora supposed Campbell of Argyll’s militia was in the vicinity. It had been patrolling Skye for the government for some time now. So had His Majesty’s ships been patrolling the Minch and the Inner Sound. She did not expect them to withdraw now, not when Prince Charles’s victory would spur the French to even greater threats against the island of Britain.
Before she could answer Allan said, “I’ll send the ghillie to make enquiries.”
Flora contented herself by saying, “Your Grace, Captain Campbell and Lieutenant Scott, please come inside and warm yourselves by the fire.”
The young officers bowed politely and walked into the house. The Duke eyed Flora in what she could only describe as an insolent manner. And yet the greenish tint of his jowls indicated that the crossing from the mainland had been rough. How indeed, had the mighty fallen, a king’s son sleeping rough in the heather, his enemies pressing close behind. With a pang of pity she curtsied again.
The Duke of Cumberland thumped into the parlor, threw himself into Marion’s best chair, and called loudly for brandy.
Flora and her mother hurried back and forth, bringing biscuits, brandy, and whiskey, and by and by serving a supper of roasted turkey, collops of venison, vegetables, bread, cheese, rum, and porter.
Allan played the host, and Scott and Campbell were as deferential to the ladies as to the Duke himself. But as night fell, the candles were lit, and the claret and punch went round the table, Cumberland’s face grew redder and more truculent. Even after Flora and Marion retired to the parlor and sat down with their sewing, they could hear his every blustering word.
“We faced genuine soldiers at Fontenoy and Dettingen. The Pretender’s vaunted clansmen are but savages. I am told they live an idle sauntering life among their acquaintances and relations, and are supported by their bounty. Others get a livelihood by blackmail, receiving moneys from people of substance to abstain from stealing their cattle. The last class of them gain their expenses by robbing and committing depredations. And they have the uncommon gall to rise up against the hand that seeks to civilize them!”
“Better you should ask why our relations must live in such an unhappy state.” Allan said. Her cousin was well into his cups, Flora realized with a sinking heart.
Cumberland asked nothing. “And the Young Pretender himself, what unmitigated cheek to place a price upon my head! Why your barbarian countrymen staged ambuscades from every hilltop!”
“King George placed a high price on Prince Charles’s head,” said Allan. “The very poverty that you deride, Your Grace, makes such a reward desirable, and therefore places your life in danger.”
Flora frowned at her mending. Cumberland was also in peril from those who resented the heavy hand of allies such as Argyll, not to mention from those who would curry the favor of the new regime. By now half the island would know he was lodged at her stepfather’s house.
Allan chuckled, but there was little humor in his voice. “You would have done better to have surrendered yourself to Prince Charles, who would have treated with you honorably and sent you home alive and whole.”
“Surrender my sword to the Old Pretender’s whelp, a puking boy barely out of the nursery?” Cumberland bellowed, overlooking the fact that he and the Prince were the same age. “The Young Pretender is under petticoat patronage, I hear, his supporters stirred up by their women, wanton Jacobitesses. Like the lovely Miss Flora, perhaps? A pretty little chit, ripe for the taking, eh, MacDonald? Have you had the use of her?”
The needle stabbed deep. Flora thrust her wounded forefinger into her mouth and looked in horror at her mother. Marion was already on her feet. But before she could take a step toward the dining room came the sound of a chair crashing back and a glass breaking.
Allan’s voice trembled with rage. “My family and I offer Your Grace hospitality, and this is how he repays it?”
Campbell’s voice murmured of misunderstandings, Scott’s of unwitting slurs and apologies on offer.
Another chair scraped. Cumberland snarled, “You call this hovel, this swill, hospitality? Why, I have banqueted with kings, you boor.”
“You pile insult upon injury,” said Allan coldly. “I have no choice but to demand satisfaction according to the Code Duello. Name your second, Your Grace.”
Flora tasted blood. Her stomach went hollow. Marion sank back into her chair, her complexion milk-white. “Oh Allan, no.”
“So the bumpkin plays at being a gentleman?” sneered Cumberland.
“My father is factor to Lord MacDonald, Your Grace. I have but lately served in His Majesty’s militia. I am a gentleman.”
“Then Captain Campbell will second me. And I offer you the services of Lieutenant Scott. They will provide us with their pistols.”
More soothing murmurs came from Scott and Campbell, along with the clink of glass on glass. Flora suspected that additional punch and claret would not assist a peaceful resolution of the situation, but she had no idea what might do so. Should she try to persuade Allan out of his rash enterprise? Hardly. He’d look at her as though she’d lapsed into a tongue that he did not recognize. He could rightly claim that whilst he played the host here, this was not his house and he was not bound by hospitality to overlook such an infamous slur.
He was not bound by common sense, either, Flora told herself.
“As to duelling,” Marion said weakly, “there is no case where one or other must die. If you have overcome your adversary by disarming him, your honor or the honor of your family is restored.”
“Will either of these men stop at disarming the other?” returned Flora. “There is no rationality in dueling. Nor legality, come to that.”
“No.” Marion looked into her sewing basket, as though the answer were concealed there.
“For all his recklessness,” Flora went on, “I do not wish Allan dead. But either the Duke will kill him or he will kill the Duke. And if he kills the King’s son here, within reach of Argyll and the Royal Navy, then he is as good as dead. If the matter were tried in a Scottish court, with feelings running as they are now, he might be acquitted of the charge of murder. But not in an English court. They would inflict upon Allan the penalities they have been thwarted of inflicting upon the Prince himself.”
In the dining room Cumberland and Allan were still exchanging insults, somewhat slurred now but no less bellicose. Campbell’s voice said something about dawn. Scott expanded upon the issue. “The wind may be in the man’s face . . . he may fall . . . many such things may decide the superiority. In the daylight, though, such a matter of honor . . .”
Flora had little hope that in the morning the men would have forgotten the words exchanged in their alcoholic fever. “We must spirit His Grace away before he brings disaster upon us, unwittingly or no.”
“He might be recognized upon the road by someone who has taken up the Prince’s cause,” protested Marion. “Unless he is returned safely to his countrymen, we can expect reprisal. Better to have him wait here, and send his aides to Argyll asking for a troop of men.”
“But then he would insist on settling his matter of honor with Allan, as Allan would with him . . .” Faintly but distinctly Flora heard shouts and the sharp discharges of firearms. She rose to her feet, but before she could peer cautiously out between the window shutters the rotund figure of Betty appeared in the doorway.
“What is happening?” asked Marion.
“A wedding party in the village.”
“No one has married this week.”
“Aye,” said Betty, her voice dropping into a husky whisper and her eyes glancing toward the dining room. “I’m knowing that, and you’re knowing that, but he’s not knowing that, is he now?”
Flora had to smile, if half-heartedly. The villagers wished to celebrate the Pretender’s—the Prince’s—victory without attracting the attention of Cumberland or any other Hanoverian supporters. How clever, to themselves pretend . . . Suddenly she knew the answer. Looking from Marion’s sewing basket to Betty’s furrowed countenance, she asked, “Has Donald returned from making his enquiries?”
“Oh aye. Argyll and his men are not to be found in these airts, but an English ship is sheltering in Loch Eishort.”
“There you are, then!” Flora knotted her hands into fists. “Mother, I will convey the Duke to that ship.”
“How?” Marion demanded.
“To begin with, there are many ways of interpreting shouts and the discharge of weapons in the night. I imagine the villagers have a bonfire as well?”
“Aye, that they do,” said Betty.
“Then this must be our strategy.”
Mistress and maid shared a long speculative glance as Flora spoke, and offered more than a few words of dissent, but in the end they had to agree that of all their choices, Flora’s plan was the only possible one.
The voices in the dining room rose. Chairs scraped. “I shall linger in this company no longer,” said Allan. “Good night, Your Grace. Until the dawn.” Uneven footsteps crossed the hall and mounted the stairs.
“Good,” Flora said. “Allan has gone to his bed. May he sleep the deepest sleep of his life.”
“Leave him to me.” Marion slipped catfooted up the stairs, her passage marked only by the swish of her skirts.
Betty sat down, opened Marion’s sewing basket, and threaded a needle. Squaring her shoulders, Flora marched into the dining room.
The three men stood together at the end of the table, inspecting a brace of pistols. The air was thick with the scents of food and sweat. Spilled claret stained the table linens, red as blood. That would be a difficult stain to eradicate, Flora told herself with a weary sigh. But first things first. “Listen,” she said.
The three faces turned abruptly toward her. Scott’s and Campbell’s were tight and pale, Cumberland’s swollen with self-righteousness. “Listen,” Flora said again, and walked across to the window.
Another ragged volley of gunfire drew a similarly ragged response from the nesting seabirds. Now that they were silent the men also heard the sounds. They exchanged looks of apprehension.
Flora opened one of the shutters. A distant fire tinted the night orange. Praying silently that God would forgive her her lies—they were for the greater good, after all—she said, “Cameron’s clansmen have braved the Sound, Your Grace, and are hot upon your heels. As yet they are contenting themselves with sacking the village, but soon . . .”
“Barbarian rabble,” stated Cumberland.
Allan would know that Cameron of Lochiel would never allow his men to plunder—at least not until their mission had been completed. But Allan was not here to say so. Flora said, “Before long someone will tell them that you are within these walls, Your Grace. A ship of the Royal Navy is only a few hour’s walk away. I will take you there. But we must leave now.”
“I shall only leave after I teach your impudent puppy of a cousin his lesson.”
Flora made a demure curtsey. “The truth of the matter, Your Grace, is that Allan is no cousin of mine. He is one of our servants. I beg your pardon on behalf of my family, but surely you will understand our predicament, three women alone in the house and brigands abroad.”
Cumberland gobbled indignantly. “He is no gentleman? And I shared my repast with him!”
“Under such circumstances, Your Grace need have no scruple about abandoning this affair of honor.”
Outside a single shot was followed by the concerted shout of several voices. Flora clung to her bashful mien even as her mind raced ahead. What if men from the village, encouraged by liquor, decided to raid the house and drag Cumberland away? She hoped they did not know about the reward.
“Your Grace,” Campbell said, “I beg of you, heed this young lady, your loyal subject, and leave this place forthwith. In disguise, if at all possible, as we were seen arriving here. Miss MacDonald . . .”
Flora never thought she’d find cause to bless a Campbell, but she did so now. “An excellent idea, Captain.” She heard Marion walking back down the stairs and edged toward the door.
“Disguise?” demanded Cumberland. “Infamy!”
“Greater infamy,” Scott said, “to be taken by such a rabble. They are not even regular soldiers! Why, they might return us to Edinburgh, there to kneel before the Pretender.”
Flora spared a blessing for Scott as well. “I should think these—irregular soldiers—would care less for your sword, Your Grace, than your person. Imagine the smile upon the Young Pretender’s face when he sees your head spiked above the gates of Edinburgh Castle. He would not then regret losing the opportunity to accept your sword in surrender, for you would have made an even more profound surrender to him and his house.”
From the village came the brave skirl of bagpipes. The scarlet hue drained from Cumberland’s porcine face.
“I know you find your own safety of little moment, Your Grace,” Flora went on in her meekest voice, “but as a prince of the blood surely you will grant this house protection from reprisals by wearing a disguise.”
“Very well then,” said His Grace, with little grace indeed. “What is this disguise you have settled upon?
“Come with me,” Flora said. And to the two aides, “You must hide your weapons away. Just now we cannot afford to call attention to ourselves.”
She shooed the Duke toward the parlor as though he were a particularly difficult sheep.
* * * * *
Ord, Isle of Skye, April 20, 1746.
The chill morning seemed as uncertain as the night, the light of the rising sun masked by cloud and mirk. Flora leaned forward, half-dozing in her saddle, then jerked awake at the sudden call of a flock of oyster catchers flying up from a field beside the road.
Several people dressed in their best walked by, no doubt on their way to Sunday services. “Good morning,” said the patriarch with a tip of his hat.
Flora returned the greeting. Her maid, walking beside her as was the custom, did not.
Several steps further on the man murmured, “Upon my word, that’s the ugliest lass I have ever seen.” His wife shushed him.
Flora tried not to smile. William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, was not particularly handsome as a man. As a woman, his face would sink a thousand ships. It had not abandoned its scowl since they left Armadale. Now it creased even deeper, his constant complaints of a sore head from the previous night’s intake of liquor and lack of sleep overwhelmed by mutterings of dignity denied and position perverted. Flora pretended not to hear.
She, Betty, and Marion had sewed an extra length of cloth onto the lower hem of Betty’s old calico gown and added a quilted petticoat on top, to camouflage the change from one sprigged flowery pattern to another. A large cloak and hood after the Irish fashion helped to conceal the Duke’s petulant features. Nothing could disguise his stride. His legs and feet, clothed in stockings, garters, and suitable shoes, moved in long ponderous steps, as though he wanted to proclaim to the world that he was not actually a woman.
If they were stopped and searched the pistols beneath his dress would give the game away. But he had refused to leave the house without them, coming so close to an inconvenient fit of rage that Flora at last acceded to his demand. She could only suppose that if he were searched thoroughly enough to reveal the pistols the fraud would be revealed in any event. She glanced around, her saddle creaking.
Campbell and Scott walked several paces behind, wearing Donald’s and her stepfather’s cast-off clothes covered by loose plaids. She had told them more than once to walk proudly, as members of the clan, not humbly, prepared at any moment to knuckle their foreheads. Still the young men slouched along in the manner that they no doubt expected of their own tenants.
Flora looked ahead. There, the Cuillins were appearing through the mirk. Their dark stone seemed more storm cloud than rock, save for the line of razor-edged peaks which etched the sullen sky.
Below the mountains lay Loch Eishort. And yes, thank the Good Lord, an English ship rose and fell to slow leaden surge of the waves. From a mast fluttered the Union Jack, the emblem created by combining England’s flag with those of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland—the latter as much a thorn in the English side as Scotland itself. Now, Flora wondered, would the Scottish saltire be removed from the brave red, white, and blue banner?
The party made its way down a steep, muddy slope to a rocky beach. The horse slipped and scrambled. So did Cumberland. At one sloppy patch he went sprawling, his skirts riding up to his plump, breeks-clad thighs. Cursing, he gained the beach, splashed through a tidal pool, and clambered upon a rock. His emphatic gestures earned no response from the ship’s crew, although Flora caught the dull gleam of a telescope trained upon them from the quarterdeck.
Campbell and Scott waved their plaids up and down. Cumberland hitched up cloak and dress, produced a pistol, and fired it into the air.
Flora’s horse started at the sudden report. She reined him in and peered toward the ship, hoping that the men’s actions would not be interpreted as provincial insolence and thereby attract a cannonade.
Many men were now gazing over the ship’s gunwales. Officers gestured. Sailors lowered a boat. Others pointed weapons toward the shore.
“You have returned to your own,” Flora told the Duke. “I shall take my leave.”
Captain Campbell stepped forward with a bow. “Please make our compliments to all those to whom we have given trouble.”
“Indeed,” added Lieutenant Scott, with a bow of his own.
Cumberland laid his meaty hand on Flora’s knee. His wig had been left behind, and his hair hung lank around his face. His eyes, half concealed in folds of flesh, gleamed up at her. “If you should happen to find yourself in London, Miss MacDonald, I should provide you with a small establishment of your own and as fine an assortment of gowns as any female could wish.”
She opened her mouth to offer a polite response, realized just what he was offering, and shut it again. A tug on the reins and she was free of his presumptuous hand, with the bonus that her horse’s hoof pressed Cumberland’s foot into the sand—not, alas, against a rock. He jerked back with a vicious oath.
“You are very welcome,” she said to the other officers, and to the Duke of Cumberland she said, “I hope, Your Grace, that you will never find cause to appear in this part of the world again.”
“God forbid, woman, God forbid.”
Amen, Flora added to herself.
He turned toward the approaching boat, favoring his foot, but shook away Campbell’s supportive hand. Ripping off his outer clothing, the Duke stamped them in disgust into the sand and seaweed. No hope of returning the dress to Betty, then.
Flora urged her horse toward the path. Behind her she heard the boat’s keel scrape against the sand, and the voices of Campbell and Scott identifying themselves and their superior. In return came the greetings of the ship’s officer, and then something she had not expected to hear at all, laughter, quickly shouted down.
She gained the top of the hill, prodded her horse into a trot, and did not look back.
* * * * *
Armadale, Isle of Skye, April 20, 1746.
Her mother greeted Flora at the door, the candle in her hand guttering in the wind. “Come sit yourself down by the fire. I’ll tell Betty to bring bread, cheese, and porter.”
In the parlor Flora found Allan waiting. Politely he stood up and offered her his chair. She folded her aching limbs into it and extended her icy hands toward the fire burning hot and fragrant above the stack of peats.
“I’m pleased to see you returned safely,” he said.
“I fell in with a troop of MacLeods, and they escorted me home.”
“Our—guest is now safely aboard ship?”
“Aye. He is that.”
“And not grateful for our help, I daresay.”
“Not especially.” She did not tell Allan about the Duke’s last offer, or else her cousin would have hunted him down and shot him where he stood. “And you? I trust you slept well?”
“Much too well. When I awoke the dawn was past. But when I hurried to make my appointment on the field of honor I found the door locked. Your mother would only open it when I gave her my word not to follow you.” Allan shook his head. “There was no need to lock me in, Flora. If Cumberland chose to flee this battle, just as he fled the battle at the Spey, it is no reflection upon me.”
“Very true.”
“However, it would be better if we never told anyone that part of the story.”
Flora considered the leaping flames reflected in Allan’s eyes. Please God he would never realize that her entire plan had been intended to protect him from himself, even to denying his rank to the Duke and his men. If she could hardly bear to see her dashing cousin humiliated, neither could she tolerate his anger. And he would be irrational enough to be angry, not grateful. “I shall never speak a word of it. Although I daresay no one will have enough interest in the story for me to speak at all.”
“Like as not,” Allan conceded. “Cumberland, I suppose, will return to the war on the Continent. A pity he proved unsuccessful in performing the task for which he was recalled to Britain. An enemy on its northern border will distract England from its task in Europe, to quell the power of France. But that need not concern us.” Allan laid his fingertips gently on side of her face. “Now, Flora, I have been speaking with your mother . . . “
She leaned into his touch with a sigh as much resigned as relaxed. In time she would marry him. He was quite the handsome fellow, with ample charm of manner and speech. But, more importantly, he needed her.
* * * * *
From James Boswell’s Journal of a Tour of the Kingdom of Scotland with Samuel Johnson: Isle of Skye; September 13, 1773.
Last night’s jovial bout disturbed me somewhat, but not long. The room where we lay was a room indeed. Each bed had tartan curtains, and Mr. Johnson’s was the very bed in which the Duke was to have lain in Armadale, but which he abandoned in his flight.
At breakfast we spoke to Miss Flora of her acclamation in Edinburgh, where the Prince jested with her, chiding her for helping his enemy. She told him, she said, that she would have done the same thing for him had she found him in distress.
It was not the escape that had destroyed Cumberland’s reputation, Mr. Johnson opined, but his abandonment of the field, both at the Spey and at Armadale, where the field was but a village wedding. And his appearance before his sailors attired in women’s clothing had only added insult to eclipse. “‘Billy the Lily’ Cumberland,” said he with a chuckle. “I hear that during his retirement in Bath, where he confined his strategizing to the game of whist, wags were given to presenting him with lilies. He would then rant and rain curses down upon all present, until he was at last carried away by a burst blood vessel.”
“If not for his royal connections he’d have faced court-martial, as did Cope,” Kingsburgh suggested, whilst his wife sat demurely refreshing our teacups.
“The war upon the Continent might have been won had Cumberland returned there,” I said, “instead of leaving France even stronger for the next conflict. It was in that struggle that young General Wolfe did well enough to save Hanover itself from France’s grasp, even though he himself died in the hour of his victory. Just as well he never knew how his victory contributed to our present stalemate.”
Mr. Johnson shook his head gravely, having always been of the opinion that had the English army been able to return from Germany then Charles would never had retained his separate throne. But, conversely, if England had been able to abandon the Scottish frontier, and its garrisons in Hanover, and those in Ireland as well—which, encouraged by Prince Charles’ Catholic Emancipation act, took the opportunity to rise—then perhaps the Continental wars of the last decades could have been won.
Still, Mr. Johnson went on to speak of the present political situation, which meets with his approval: How the French ship bringing Prince Charles’ father and brother to Scotland most conveniently—by English measures, at the least—sank in a storm, leaving the Prince to take up the crown of Scotland as Charles III. How, finding himself with no heirs acceptable to any British person save for his rivals the Hanoverians, he wed the minor Austrian princess who became mother to his daughter, Charlotte, the Princess of Albany, who has recently wed in turn young George III of England.
I have heard that Charles himself, disappointed in his hopes of the British throne, now contents himself with drunken rages. Perhaps all his victory at the Spey wrought for Scotland was to spare it the reprisals of a victorious Cumberland—who can say? For now the same economic forces which worked to unite our two countries almost seventy years since are now working to unite them once again. Why, I myself was drawn to London to seek my fortune, as Mr Johnson never fails to remind me, saying that the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that leads him to another country.
My heart was sore to recollect that Kingsburgh had fallen sorely back in his affairs, was under a load of debt, and intended to go to America. I pleased myself in thinking that so fine a fellow and his strapping sons would be well everywhere.
The MacDonalds could easily find occupation in the British Highland regiment lately raised by Lord North upon Queen Charlotte’s entreaty, eager as she is to find employment for her countrymen. And eager as he is to remove her countrymen, doughty fighters as they are, from the borderlands. Such a regiment, Mr. Johnson has often said, could be most advantageously utilized in the service of the American colonies, which are now sorely pressed by the extension of French Quebec beyond the Ohio River. How eloquently colonial loyalists such as Adams, Henry, Franklin, and Jefferson plead for the intervention of their motherland in local affairs!
Mr. Johnson saluted our hostess with his teacup. “Yours is a name that will be mentioned in history, and if courage and fidelity be virtues, mentioned with honor. For your loyalty to the house of Hanover, despite the dishonor of its son, does you and yours nothing but credit.”
Kingsburgh and his wife shared an enigmatic glance. “Ah,” said he with a shrug, “how these tales do grow in the telling.”
Miss Flora ducked her head modestly, and I detected yet another secret smile upon her countenance. I wondered at its origins, but she said nothing more.
Later Kingsburgh conducted us in his boat across one of the lochs, to where our horses had been sent round. Taking our leave of him, we rode on, speaking as we journeyed of the man who would never be king, carried over the sea from Skye.
* * * * *
Postscript: Charles Edward Stuart did not listen to Lord George Murray. He chose the worst possible stretch of ground for his battle with Cumberland, Culloden Moor near Inverness. His exhausted troops were massacred. The Bonnie Prince fled, becoming “the prince in the heather” of many a romantic tale, among them the story of Flora MacDonald disguising him in the clothes of her (nonexistent) maid Betty and conducting him over the sea from Uist to Skye.
William, Duke of Cumberland, earned his sobriquet of “Butcher” by enthusiastically pursuing an ethnic cleansing policy against the Scots. He returned to the Continental wars, but in 1757 was dismissed for making a deal with France which compromised Hanover. France was ultimately defeated, both in Europe and in North America, where after Wolfe’s victory at Quebec it ceded Canada to Britain. Without the pressure of French colonies to the north and west, and with increased taxation to help pay for the war, the English colonies began to grow restive.
In the ensuing Revolution, Allan MacDonald and his sons fought for the Crown, just as Allan had done during 1745-6.
“Over the Sea from Skye” first appeared in Alternate Generals III, edited by Harry Turtledove and Roland J. Green, Baen Books, 2005.
This story was written for the third in a series of anthologies dealing with alternate history. (I also have a story in Alternate Generals I, “The Test of Gold”, which is collected in Along the Rim of Time.) The object of the exercise is to pick a point of departure—change something that happened—and extrapolate from there.
Since I was researching the history of Charles Edward Stuart or Stewart, Bonnie Prince Charlie, for a novel, The Secret Portrait, it wasn’t difficult to choose my point of departure as his winning rather than losing his rebellion. Neither was it hard to make the inimitable Flora McDonald my main character. She actually did tell Cumberland, while she was being held prisoner in London, that she would have done him the same favor she did Charlie.
One of my favorite Scottish musicians, Brian McNeill, sings a song about Flora titled, “Strong Women Rule Us All”, commenting on the fact that despite a very difficult life, Flora supposedly never cried.
Many years ago I picked up an old copy of Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson at a garage sale. I wrote mock passages from it to use as the frame for this story, clarifying just what events Charlie’s victory might have caused. Or not caused, in the case of the never-fought American Revolution.
Charlie himself really isn’t mentioned in the story. My take on him is in The Secret Portrait, and it’s not an entirely flattering one. But then, I’m a Stewart myself.
Agitated voices echoed off the walls of the forecourt. Anselm shook his head in disapproval. More than the usual number of pilgrims had passed through the priory today, the feast of St. Anne, and he was only too aware that not all of them came with pious motives.
He turned his face to the late afternoon sunshine. Even though the days were dwindling, still July was the best of the summer. Anselm supposed he could find a lesson in that, something about the waning days of one’s life being the richest. But he was tired after the day’s sacred labors and was content merely to bask in the warmth and light and the subtle scent of incense. Inside these walls was an enclave of peace, not quite of this world, on the threshold of the next. What better symbol could there be of that than the Holy House of Nazareth in the Lady Chapel behind the church, the replica of Our Lord’s childhood home?
The sound of running steps shattered his reverie. He opened his eyes to see young Brother Wilfrid bobbing before him. “Father Prior, one of the pilgrims has been found dead in the chapel of Mary and Martha.”
“May he rest in peace,” Anselm returned, wondering why Wilfrid was so disturbed. Every few days an ill pilgrim gave up the ghost here in Walsingham, if unable to find healing in this world, then more importantly easing his passage into the next.
“Father, he was murdered.”
Oh, thought Anselm. Yes, that was a problem. “Tell Brother Porter to shut all the gates and allow no one in or out,” he ordered Wilfrid, and he ordered his own aching body across the forecourt to the church.
Several people stood outside the door. All voices bar one, a woman’s in full lamentation, fell silent as Anselm approached. Glancing at the group, he assessed them as a motley collection of pilgrims no different from any other—save for my lady the king’s mother, who was bending solicitously over the howling woman. Sorry to see the dowager queen involved with such an unseemly matter, Anselm offered her a brief nod of sympathy.
The interior of the church was dark and cool. A double row of pillars led to the high altar and its crystal reliquary containing a few precious drops of Our Lady’s milk, bright as a star in a constellation of candlelight. Anselm bowed before it, then turned toward one of the chapels.
The room was small as a hermit’s cell—or a tomb. A man lay prone before the altar, but not in an attitude of prayer. A runnel of blood crept out from his body to puddle amongst the scattered rushes. Anselm knelt down and with an effort—the man was fleshy, Anselm was not—turned him over.
He knew this face, pale and distorted though it was. Hubert of Gillingsoke, a merchant who came to Walsingham more to peddle his wares to the pilgrims than to pay his respects at the shrine.
Hubert’s tunic was soaked with blood from the gaping wound in his throat. Anselm saw no blood trail, no smudges, no scattered drops—like a slaughtered cow, Hubert had dropped where he stood. The small knife he carried was still in its sheath. He had neither defended himself nor attacked another. The murder had been the work of only a moment. Had Hubert even seen his murderer’s face? Probably not, if the killing stroke had come from over his shoulder. His vacant eyes were already glazing over, drained of life and its passions, good or ill.
The odors of profane blood and profane body thickened uneasily in Anselm’s throat, almost masking the faint aroma of—smoke? One of the tall beeswax candles on the altar had been knocked over and extinguished. The cloth below it was singed. Worse, one end of the cloth was blemished with a crimson smear swiftly darkening into brown. The murderer had wiped his blade on it.
And the reliquaries? Anselm rose to his feet, frowning. The gold-rimmed crystal displaying one of St. Martha’s hairs was lying on its side. The jeweled casket containing St. Mary Magdalene’s finger bone was gone. . . . No, thank God and all His saints, there it was, on the floor behind the trailing end of the cloth. Reverently Anselm picked it up.
“Father Prior,” said Wilfrid’s voice behind him.
Anselm looked around and up. “It was your place to conduct the group of pilgrims about the grounds and keep watch over the relics.”
“And so I did, Father. Although this group was the last of the day, I didn’t hurry them at all—we stopped by the chapel of St Lawrence, and the holy wells, and the wicket gate. At the Lady Chapel each pilgrim passed through the Holy House and then each placed a coin in the collection box. . . . Well no, Hubert groped in his purse but offered nothing—instead he hissed angrily at his wife and she opened her purse. Until we came here to this chapel, nothing was different from any other day.”
“So how then, did this evil deed happen?”
The young monk retracted his stricken face into his black-cowled shoulders like a turtle retreating into its shell. “Ah—well—you see, Father, the old sister swooned and the young one asked me to bring cool water to bathe her brow. So I ran to the well.”
“Sisters?” Anselm did remember seeing two Benedictine nuns amongst the pilgrims outside. “Did everyone remain here in the chapel whilst you fetched the water?”
“No, Father. When I returned they were walking into the porch, the old nun supported between the young one and Hubert’s wife, and everyone else gathered close. We got her outside and set her down. Once the color came back into her face—it looked like bleached linen, it did—Hubert’s wife asked where her husband had gotten himself off to. I went with her to search him out and here he was. Like this. Murdered.”
“Was anyone else in the church when you left to fetch the water?”
“No one save our lady the king’s mother. After she paid her respects to Mary and Martha she returned to kneel before the high altar, as always . . .”
“Yes, yes.” Queen Isabella had established her own patterns of devotion over the years. The relic of St. Mary Magdalene, the beautiful sinner, was her favorite, but she paid most of her attentions to the Blessed Virgin Mother. If anyone needed to pry open heaven’s gates, it was Isabella. But then, if prayer could pry open the gates of heaven then hers would do so.
When Isabella took up her usual lodgings at the prior’s house last night, she’d told Anselm she wanted to ask his advice on the disposition of a relic. Several times during the day he’d wondered just what she meant. Could she, with her connections in France, have come by another relic of the Magdalene to add to the Holy Mother’s treasury?
He put his speculations aside. The matter of Hubert’s death, while hardly more important, was more pressing. “And our lady Queen Isabella followed the pilgrim group outside?”
“She was with the others when I came back with the water, Father, and right helpful she was, too, first with the sister, then with the wife.”
“So the church was empty when you came in search of Hubert here.”
“Yes, Father.”
“You should have made sure it was empty before you left. You should have summoned help for the sister instead of . . .” He stopped. No need to rub the boy’s nose in his folly. The deed was done. “Fetch a hurdle and several strong backs to carry him to the infirmary. And gather the entire group of pilgrims—including my lady the king’s mother—in my parlor.”
“Yes, Father.” Wilfrid hurried away.
Anselm listened to the slap-slap of the young brother’s sandals receding across the chancel of the church. The sacristy door creaked open and shut with a thud. He turned back to the inert flesh that had once been a man.
The flesh was weak, Anselm told himself. Pilgrims were often overcome by exhaustion and emotion, especially if they’d been fasting and walking barefoot—as well they should, if they wanted their prayers to be answered.
And then there was Hubert, his feet shod, his protruding stomach rarely if ever purified by hunger. Along with linen, wool, and silk he dealt in bits of rag and bone which he claimed were relics of the blessed saints but which, for all Anselm knew, he’d “discovered” in the midden behind his house.
If Hubert had tried to steal the reliquaries, all one of the other pilgrims needed to do was raise the alarm. And since, manifestly, neither reliquary had been stolen, the matter could hardly be a falling out of thieves. . . . Thieves. Anselm felt along Hubert’s belted waist and found two trailing ends of leather. That was it, then. His purse had been cut clean away. It was justice, perhaps, that a less-than-honest man should fall victim to one even worse.
Reminding himself that it was not his place to pass verdict on the dead, Anselm closed the staring eyes. For a long moment he knelt, listening, as though the man’s ashen lips would open and speak a name. But no. His silence was absolute. With a groan Anselm stood up, removed the altar cloth, and set the candle upright on bare stone.
Which was worse, the defilement of this sacred space or that Hubert had died unshriven? If he’d said his prayers properly in front of Our Lady’s shrine, though, surely she’d hear his confession even now and intercede on his behalf. “May God have mercy on his soul,” Anselm murmured, and turned toward the door.
* * * * *
The western front of the church shone brightly in the light of the setting sun. But Anselm was no longer aware of the light. Neither did he smell incense. He twisted his nose at the ripe reek of summer and mortality, smoke, cooking food, offal. He’d never felt so much under siege from the town, its high street crowded with inns and shops breeding sin and disease.
He turned to Brother Nicholas, the infirmarian, whose stooped figure in its black robe looked like a raven. “Yes, Father, I’ll clean the man’s body and bind up his throat, make him decent so his wife can take him home. Gillingsoke is on the road to Castle Rising, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” replied Anselm, “but Hubert’s house and manufactory are in town, in Norwich. He held his property free of any lord. Such times we live in, Nicholas, such times!”
Clucking his tongue, Nicholas went on, “Here is Hubert’s purse—see the sprinkling of blood? It was lying behind a pillar in the church. The thief must have emptied it out into his own purse.”
So as not to be discovered holding it, Anselm told himself. The small leather pouch in Nicholas’s hand was flaccid as Hubert’s body.
The porter, Brother Simon, stood waiting his turn. His nose and the shaved crown of his head were both sunburned—he didn’t hide inside the gatehouse, he was faithful to his task. “Yes, Father, I saw the pilgrims fussing about on the porch of the church. Soon after I heard the woman scream inside. No one had left for some time. I sent Brother Peter to close the meadow gate and then he and I searched the enclave. No pilgrims are inside the pale now, bar the ones waiting in your parlor.”
“Thank you,” Anselm told them both, and told himself that their observations were probably useful but he was at a loss to say how.
He supposed he should send to the earl for a sergeant-at-arms—which would be yet another trespass by the outside world. Unless, Anselm thought suddenly, he solved this crime himself. Then all he’d have to do was turn the culprit over to the sergeant, shut the gate upon them both, and set about cleansing the sacred precinct.
He walked across the forecourt, bent beneath the weight of his task. But as crosses went, this one in no way approximated the poundage of Our Lord’s. Summoning the iron into his soul, Anselm opened the door to his house and stepped into his parlor.
The room, already small, seemed claustrophobic, warm and still. Pilgrims were ranged along the walls, some standing, some sitting on benches and chests, both his own and Isabella’s. Wilfrid stood guard over the one high-backed chair, trying to redeem himself after his earlier dereliction of duty. Anselm lowered himself down, only too aware of the dust dabbling his feet and the hem of his black robe and of the sweat trickling down his back. But he couldn’t ask Wilfrid to bring him a cool drink, not when all these people had none.
Every face turned toward him, every eye focussed on him. One of these people, Anselm thought, was a thief and a murderer. He could ask to inspect their purses, but each coin looked like another—how to tell which ones had begun the day in Hubert’s pouch?
The room was so quiet he could hear the concerted breaths of the pilgrims and the whimper of a baby. And a combination of the two, the quick gulped breath of a woman who’d been sobbing. Yes, there she was, Hubert’s young wife Alianor, small, sleek, her eyes like smoldering coals. She wore a headdress and a cote-hardie of an elegance beyond her station, not to mention her surroundings. The trailing end of one sleeve was stained a brownish crimson. It must have touched her husband’s wound when she and Wilfrid discovered his body.
“I’m sorry for your loss, Madame,” Anselm said.
She parted her compressed lips. “I’ve lost my husband, my livelihood. I don’t know where to turn.”
In truth, Anselm told himself, she hadn’t lost her livelihood—since Hubert’s property and business were free held they would come to her. But now, in the throes of her grief, was no time to mention such legalities.
The king’s mother stood close beside Alianor, one supporting hand on her shoulder. “You may come to me at Castle Rising, you know the way.”
“My thanks, my lady,” said Alianor, “I shall indeed throw myself on your mercy. But—oh, Father Prior, you must find the evil man who deprived me of my lord and husband!”
“If God so wills it.” Anselm turned to Isabella. “My lady, you and your retainers were the last to leave the church before the discovery of the murder. Did you see or hear anything?”
“Not at all, Father Prior.” Isabella’s voice was still inflected by the language of her youth, even though her youth—and her infamies—had occurred many years ago. Supposedly she’d once had a remarkable worldly beauty. Now her face was like fine marble eroded by time and repentance. “The murderer must have passed close behind us,” she said, “but lost as I was in veneration I saw and heard nothing. Sir Raynald?”
Isabella’s steward was a thickset man, freckled of face, red of hair. He smiled shamefacedly. “I confess, my lady and Father Prior, to woolgathering as I knelt, estimating expenditures and the like. I’ll be sure to beg Our Lady’s pardon for my inattention. Walter?”
“I was praying very passionately that my trespasses be forgiven.” The rawboned man-at-arms smiled tightly and a flush brightened his sallow cheeks, making Anselm wonder how many of his trespasses were hedonistic ones.
Raynald asked, “James?”
Isabella’s squire stepped forward, his jaw square, his blue eyes steady, his broad shoulders set beneath his flowing sleeves. “I heard my lady’s voice, Father, and the footsteps of the other pilgrims. Perhaps one set came late, behind the others—it’s hard to say, the space is filled with echoes and drafts and my mind was centered on my prayers.”
Isabella turned to her ladies-in-waiting. “Maud, Blanche, did you see or hear anything?”
While dressed less soberly than the queen herself, who wore the habit of a Franciscan nun, still the women’s clothing lacked the frills and furbelows of Alianor’s. They were both of a middling age and ordinary countenance. “I knelt beside you, my lady,” said the one, “and repeated the Psalter of Our Lady as you spoke it. Blanche?”
The other said, “The church is dark. After several moments staring into the altar candles strange shapes and shadows moved in the corners of my eyes, as though the pillars themselves came forward to kneel.”
“Yes, said one of the nuns suddenly, “I saw them too, the shapes of angels and ministers of grace, of the Holy Blessed Virgin and her mother, blessed St. Anne.”
“I beg your pardon?” asked Anselm.
The older nun’s thin face was almost as colorless as the wimple surrounding it, and yet a subtle glow in her flesh made Anselm think of a fine painted window shining with the light of heaven. It was the younger sister, wider than she was tall, round and rosy of cheek, who answered. “Father Prior, I am Sister Margaret and this is Sister Juliana, from the priory at Little Aldersthorpe. Mother Prioress gave Juliana permission to come to Our Lady’s shrine on this, the feast day of St. Anne, our patron saint.”
“And you came as Sister Juliana’s companion.”
“Yes, Father. I am infirmaress, and she has been—infirm.”
And hadn’t long to live, Anselm concluded. Yet Juliana came here in celebration, not to plead for healing.
“I’m afraid I saw and heard nothing this afternoon,” Margaret went on. “My attention was to Sister Juliana. Mother Prioress has excused her from fasting, but still. . . .”
“The incense,” said Juliana with a beatific smile. “The relics, the spirit of a blessed soul lingering in their physical remains, working miracles. Shape and shadow and Our Lord made flesh, out of Mary by the spirit of God.”
This one was a bit wander-witted, Anselm told himself, and turned to the gangly young man who hovered over a drawn and pinched young woman. She crouched on one of Isabella’s small chests, holding a child of perhaps two years of age. The simplicity of their garments reminded Anselm of the Holy Family, and yet their expressions, worry shading into despair, had nothing holy in them. “Who are you?” he asked.
“I am Thurstan, a plowman of Fakenham,” said the man, politely enough but with little deference. “This is my wife, Hawise, and our son, who we named Edward after your son, my lady.”
The corner of Isabella’s mouth tucked itself into a rueful half-smile, perhaps remembering that her late husband and his imperious father had also been named Edward. She peered at the child’s face. His lips were blue, his skin tinted with lavender. “He is ill?”
“He was taken ill in the spring,” answered Thurstan, “choking and wheezing, and now wastes away before our eyes.”
“And we thought ourselves fortunate to be spared the plague this last year.” Hawise rocked the child in her lap and it whimpered again.
“May the Holy Mother have mercy,” Anselm said. Of all the pilgrims who flocked to Walsingham, he liked the children best. It was sad when one died, yes, and yet it was also a blessing for their souls to be taken up into heaven before they were contaminated. . . . The desolation in Hawise’s face made Anselm realize she was seeing matters from a very different perspective. Somehow he’d never asked himself how the Blessed Virgin felt upon seeing her son’s bloodied corpse lowered from the cross. Strange, to think that everything was not as it seemed. Stranger still, to find that thought less discomforting than stimulating.
“We saw nothing in the church,” Thurstan said.
Anselm forced himself back to the issue at hand. “You went outside with all of the others?”
“Our lady the king’s mother knelt before the high altar,” Hawise said, then glanced at the man standing to one side, half obscured by the ray of sun just creeping into the narrow window. “But this man, here, he came behind us.”
“Well then,” said Anselm.
The man was tall, dressed in a simple wool tunic and mantle. Rough dark hair streaked with gray framed a patrician face, high-browed, hawk-nosed. “I am Geoffrey de Charny, knight,” he said in the accents of France.
The others glanced at him in surprise and even resentment. Several inched away. Isabella did not. Her eyes lit up. “Ah, un chevalier francais.”
“Je vous en prie, Madame.” Geoffrey bowed, his shadow on the opposite wall bending and straightening as well.
Well, well, thought Anselm. A Frenchman. An enemy. “You were the last to go outside?”
“No,” replied Geoffrey. “The merchant, Hubert, he stayed behind.”
“Of course he did, we know that. But you were the last of the group that did go outside?”
“Save my lady the king’s mother, yes.”
“You, then, were the last person to see Hubert alive.”
“So it seems.”
Anselm leaned forward like a hound on the scent. “Why are you here? Were you a captive?”
“I was captured at Calais. My king has paid ransom. I stop here on my way to take ship at King’s Lynn.”
Raynald’s sandy brows rose. “If King Jehan has paid your ransom then you must be a great knight indeed. An honorable man,” he added to Anselm.
“The truly wise man gives thanks to God and to the Virgin Mary for any successes he may achieve,” Geoffrey said.
Amen to that. Anselm deflated a bit, suddenly uncertain. France and England might be at war, but a warrior turned pilgrim, a man of honor trusted by his captor, always had safe conduct. And was hardly likely to go about murdering merchants.
“A Frenchman who can’t afford to pay his own ransom,” Alianor said scornfully, “might think a bit of thievery wouldn’t come amiss. He has killed many Englishmen, no great mischief to kill one more who stood between him and a holy reliquary.”
“Is the relic missing, Father?” asked Geoffrey.
“No,” Anselm replied.
“Perhaps,” suggested James, Isabella’s squire, “he dropped it on the floor as he fled.”
“Why do I steal a finger bone of the blessed Madeleine when her body already lies in my country?” Geoffrey returned.
“More than one body,” muttered Walter. “Those French monks either create relics or steal each other blind.”
Geoffrey quirked a brow but said nothing.
“If the holy thief succeeds in his purpose, then the blessed saint herself wants to move,” Juliana pointed out. “And some relics have the power of self-replication, like the holy Eucharist itself.”
Anselm had heard Hubert expressing similar rationalizations, although from a very different viewpoint. Not that it mattered—Walsingham’s reliquary of St. Mary Magdalene was safe in its chapel. “Only Hubert’s money was stolen,” he said. “And his life.”
“Hubert had no money,” said the lady-in-waiting named Blanche. “I overheard at the door of the Lady Chapel, he reached into his purse, found it empty, then muttered a curse at his wife for keeping their coins herself.”
Alianor shrugged. “He’d forgotten he gave me the coins to carry. He was always short-tempered.”
Behind Anselm’s back Wilfrid nodded agreement. He’d already mentioned the quick exchange between man and wife before the collection box.
“Even though the thief didn’t know Hubert’s purse was empty,” said Anselm, grasping at a quickly-receding straw, “the motive remains the same.”
“And perhaps this man here,” Alianor went on, “the plowman with the ailing child, needs money badly enough to kill for it.”
Hawise frowned, but Thurstan drew himself up and shook the mop of flaxen curls from his brow. “I’m not a wealthy man, far from it. But I’ve no need to steal. After the black plague killed so many in our village I have more work for my hands than ever before, and higher wages and a bit of respect as well.”
What is the world coming to? Anselm asked himself. Although he saw where he himself was going. He wouldn’t be giving thanks for achieving any successful criminal investigations, not at this rate. He sank back even further in his chair, sent a prayer for assistance heavenwards, and tried to concentrate his mind.
Had this crime gained nothing for the murderer, then, and accomplished no end whatsoever? No money stolen, no relics stolen—had Hubert died for a mistaken perception, because everything wasn’t what it seemed?
Anselm envisioned Hubert in the chapel, between the group with Alianor, Juliana, and the others on the one hand and Isabella and her retainers on the other. He must have died after the former left the church but before . . .
Impatiently Alianor looked right and left and then stepped forward, shaking her becrimsoned sleeve at Anselm. “My husband’s blood cries out for justice, Father Prior! If you can’t find his killer here, then send these people about their business and look amongst your own brethren. Who’s to say which of them entered the church, privily, through the sacristy door?”
“That door creaks,” Anselm explained, trying to keep the indignation from his voice. “My lady Queen Isabella would certainly have heard it, even if the guilty party had waited to cross the chancel until she’d turned away . . . What is it, Sister?”
Margaret was looking closely at Alianor’s forearm, exposed as the sleeve of her cote-hardie slid back. “You’ve been injured, Madame. Five bruises, four on one side, one on the other, like the violent grasp of a man’s hand.”
“It’s no matter, please don’t concern yourself.” Alianor quickly dropped her arm and the folds of cloth covered it.
Anselm sat up, suddenly seeing the murder from a different viewpoint, and answered his own question. What had been accomplished by Hubert’s murder was Hubert’s death.
Alianor might have tired of her husband knocking her about—that much Anselm could understand. But she hadn’t broken her vow of obedience, not to mention the sixth commandment, and murdered him. When she’d left the church with Juliana and the others, her husband was still alive.
Juliana, Anselm saw, was staring at the shadow play on the wall, Alianor’s sleeves billowing like smoke in the brilliant sunlight, Geoffrey’s figure like an upright effigy. Was it Sister Juliana who’d said something about shadows? No, it was Isabella’s lady-in-waiting, Maud, who said she’d seen moving shapes while she knelt at the altar. And someone else, one of the men, had also said something very interesting. . . .
The room was so silent Anselm could hear the child’s labored breath and the shuffle of feet as several people shifted impatiently. Shoes, he thought. He and his brethren wore sandals, but everyone else here wore soft leather shoes. Isabella and her retainers heard no footsteps because there had been none to hear. They themselves had been the only people in the church save Hubert himself.
Everyone spoke of the king’s mother as though she and her retainers moved together like soldiers in formation. But if Maud saw a shadow moving before her, what she was seeing was a shadow cast by the light of the candles in the chapel behind her, the shadow of one of her own colleagues as he stepped cat-footed through the door, did the evil deed, and returned. All he had had to do was station himself in the rear of the group and wait until Isabella, in a voice that had once commanded armies, began speaking the Psalter.
Abruptly Anselm stood up. The man had done two evil deeds—he’d murdered Hubert and he’d wiped his blade on the altar cloth, knocking the reliquary to the floor. Yes, he saw the way now, as clearly illuminated in his mind as the mottled plaster wall of his parlor was illuminated by God’s holy and revealing light. “Wilfrid, gather every knife in this room and bring them to me.”
Wilfrid stepped out from behind the chair, puzzled but knowing better than to ask questions. He collected blades from Geoffrey, Thurstan, Raynald, James, and Walter. When Margaret proffered a tiny knife Anselm shook his head. “Thank you, Sister, but so small a blade as that could not have cut a man’s throat in one stroke—nor could you, I think, have reached over his shoulder to make that stroke.”
Turning away from them all and yet aware of every eye upon him, Anselm walked into the hot glow of the sunbeam which shone through the window bright as the Holy Mother’s crystal reliquary. He beckoned Wilfrid, his arms bristling with knives, to his side. Picking up the first knife, he drew it from its sheath and held it to the blazing ray of sun.
Geoffrey’s dagger was long and plain, but the hilt was cunningly wrought. The blade was pristine, polished to a silvery gleam. Thurstan’s knife was well-worn and stank of onions, but it, too, was clean. Not that Anselm suspected either man, not any more. It was simply appropriate for him to inspect all the knives.
He picked up the third one, a fine blade with a jeweled hilt. Raynald’s, he guessed. He drew it from its sheath and turned it back and forth in the dazzling light. Clean. That left two, both simple, very similar, knives.
Feet shuffled behind him but he didn’t glance around. He plucked the next knife from its sheath and held it close, squinting in the glare. Yes, there, a streak of rust-red forming a thin crust between shining blade and dull guard. Wetting his fingertip, Anselm touched it to the crust. It came away red. If not for the sun he’d never have seen it.
“This knife has blood on it.” He turned back toward the watching people, blinked away several bright shapes floating in his vision, and asked, even though he knew the answer, “Who does it belong to, Walter or James?”
For a long moment none of the eyes watching him blinked. Then James exclaimed, “Walter! Have your debts grown so great you coveted Hubert’s money? One sin begets another and yet another, it seems.”
Walter’s jaw worked—he’d have spat on the floor, Anselm assumed, if he’d been anywhere but in a prior’s parlor. “I have gambling debts, yes. But I didn’t kill the man. Look to your own knife and your own sins, Sir Squire.”
Raynald caught James’s arm and pulled him into the light. The squire, his lower jaw outthrust, shook him away. “I tell you, that’s Walter’s knife, not mine.”
One lingering shape in Anselm’s eye resolved itself into a vision of a flaccid leather pouch, spotted with blood. Blood will tell, yes. Blood will confirm. Between thumb and forefinger he picked up the loose fabric of James’s sleeve and spread it before the all-seeing light of God.
Bending close, he smelled the young man’s acrid sweat. He saw a delicate spray of brown droplets fanning across the cloth. The drops drew an ugly picture—James’s left hand grasping Hubert’s shoulder or hair, his right arm reaching around and drawing the knife across his throat in a smooth, quick stroke. Hubert’s last breath, expelled through the wound, sprinkling his lifeblood over James’s stylishly long sleeve.
And it was James himself who’d uttered the words that damned him. “You knew that the reliquary had fallen to the ground,” Anselm said. “Only the murderer could have known that.”
“You killed my husband!” Alianor shrieked.
James turned on her with a snarl. “It’s what you wanted, you daughter of Eve! Isn’t that why you seduced me there at Castle Rising, when you and your husband came to peddle your wares? He’s old, you said. He’s vile-tempered, you said. Hold me, you said. And then when you’d had your way with me you told me that our passion was sinful, that it would be better to marry than to burn, and that I had no choice but to kill him and take you as my wife.”
“No.” Alianor took a step back and collided with Isabella, who laid a firm hand on her arm. “No, you’re lying.”
“You and Hubert did visit Castle Rising,” Isabella said quietly. “I bought a length of baudekyn from you, but none of your collection of relics, false or otherwise.”
Maud stared from Alianor to James and back. “I heard you talking, the both of you, about a relic. I thought that to be evidence of your piety.”
“Is he lying, daughter?” Anselm asked Alianor. “Or is he confessing his guilt? What of you? Confess your disobedience and purify your soul.”
“No,” Alianor said again, her voice stretching thinner and thinner.
“We made our plans,” James said between clenched teeth. His glare at Alianor was filled with passion, yes, but with hatred, not lust. “She told me her plans, rather, that I, fool that I am, agreed to put into effect. Her old husband, who was no great loss, by the by, wanted to steal the relic of St. Mary Magdalene. A holy theft, he named it. He’d told Alianor to feign a swoon there in the chapel, but in the event she didn’t need to.”
“It was I who swooned,” Sister Juliana said, not at all shamefaced. “And among those female voices I heard in my dream was one whispering, ‘now, do it now’. I thought the saint was speaking to me, and although I didn’t understand, I didn’t question, as God’s mysteries are beyond human comprehension.”
The color drained from Alianor’s face. “God and the Holy Virgin help me,” she murmured, and swayed like a broken reed. Maud and Blanche stepped forward to ease Alianor’s sagging body to the floor. She wasn’t feigning a swoon, not now.
Anselm regarded her sadly. The flesh was weak, and no flesh was as weak as a woman’s. . . . Well, neither Hubert nor James were male exemplars, were they?
All Hubert had had to do was attach himself and Alianor to the dowager queen’s party. Then, when—someone—provided a distraction and drew the others away, he would steal the reliquary. But Alianor and James had their own plot, parallel to his. All Alianor had had to do was guide her husband to Walsingham on St. Anne’s Day, when Isabella would also be there. Perhaps Alianor and James intended all along to throw suspicion onto Walter. Or perhaps they took advantage of his presence—and his failings—as they took advantage of having a peasant and a Frenchman in the party.
James took Hubert’s empty purse to make it appear as though robbery was the motive. And he knew that whilst Hubert could have slipped out of the priory with the reliquary beneath his tunic, the hue and cry over a murder would never permit James himself to do the same. So he’d left the reliquary lying on the floor of the chapel, where it’d fallen, most likely, after he wiped his blade on the altar cloth.
Why then, Anselm wondered, should James and Alianor have been discussing a relic at all? Because they could hardly avoid discussing Hubert’s business?
Margaret patted Alianor’s cheeks, bringing her round. James watched stone-faced. Wilfrid handed back the knives, giving James’s to Raynald. Thurstan inspected his and then used it to clean a bit of food from his teeth. Geoffrey tucked his into his belt abstractedly, as though feeling he had little to do with the events taking place before him.
Isabella met Anselm’s eyes with a remote, rueful expression. For just a moment he could read her mind. Her own husband had been no exemplar, either. Her rebellion against him, while wrong, was not inexplicable. Like Alianor she had discovered one very effective tactic: There was no need to wield a weapon yourself if you could beguile a man into doing it for you.
Isabella had had years to pay penance, humbling herself and showing compassion even for those like Alianor. Especially for those like Alianor. . . .
And suddenly Anselm saw the plot entire. What else had Hubert’s murder accomplished? It had left Alianor in possession of his property and his business, dealing not only in cloth but in relics. She had no need to plead poverty in front of Isabella and ask for her succor at Castle Rising.
But Isabella possessed a relic, one she wanted to discuss with Anselm. While Hubert might have lusted after a relic from Walsingham, Alianor lusted after the one from Castle Rising. Perhaps she’d learned of it from James. Perhaps she’d merely used James as a means to her end—not only to dispose of her husband but to claim Isabella’s compassion in her bereavement and thereby gain access to her relic.
The sunbeam faded, filling the room with twilight. With a quickly muffled groan, Anselm sat back down in his chair. James’s life would end on the gallows, no doubt about it. As for Alianor—well, unlike Isabella, the earl was not known for his compassion. “Wilfrid, have Brother Simon send for the earl’s sergeant-at-arms. Sir Raynald, if you’d be so kind—ladies. . . .”
“My pleasure, Father.” Raynald and Walter marched James across the room and out the door. He stepped out proudly, as though on parade.
Maud and Blanche came behind with a stumbling Alianor. “Is there any justice for me, Father? A young woman married against her will to a violent old man—why shouldn’t I look to my own provision?”
“We shall all stand before the judgment of Christ,” Anselm told her, “and each one of us shall render account of himself to God. All the church can offer you is forgiveness, if you ask for it.”
Perhaps she would ask, as Isabella had. Perhaps she’d never find humility. Anselm watched the two young people disappear out the door and felt old and weak and empty.
The child, Edward, was fretting, making little cries of discomfort. Hawise bent over him and Margaret knelt beside them. Suddenly he sat up in his mother’s lap, coughing violently, his entire body spasming. “Blessed Virgin,” exclaimed Thurstan, “as you loved your own son, help mine!”
In one great paroxysm the child spat something into Margaret’s hand and lay back, breathing deeply. Isabella set her hand on his face, watching in amazement and, Anselm thought, gratification, as Edward’s skin flushed a rosy and healthy pink.
“It’s a miracle,” said Juliana, crossing herself.
Margaret inspected the damp object in her hand. “It’s a bit of nutshell. It must have been lodged in his chest.”
Tears of joy were running down Hawise’s fragile cheeks. “The day he took ill I was cracking walnuts and he was playing at my feet. Children will put anything and everything into their mouths.”
“God be praised,” said Anselm, and he surprised himself with a smile.
“Yes, indeed,” Isabella said. “And God be thanked for giving me such a clear and unequivocal sign.”
“My lady?” Anselm asked.
“We were all brought here together for a purpose—the child, Sir Geoffrey, all of us. I see it plain as you saw the blood on that knife, Father Prior, illuminated by God himself.”
Geoffrey tilted his head quizzically. “Madame?”
“I wished to ask your advice about a relic, Father.”
“Yes,” Anselm replied. “I was just thinking of it. If you’d rather wait until some better time . . .”
“This is the time.” Isabella raised Hawise from the chest she’d been sitting on. Thurstan wrapped wife and child in one long arm and stepped aside. Margaret went to stand beside Juliana.
Isabella reached into her belt, withdrew a key, and unlocked the chest. Leaning forward, Anselm saw a length of baudekyn, its silk and gold threads shining in the last gleam of light from the window.
Reverently Isabella rolled back the end of the precious cloth. Inside it lay folded linen. She grasped one end of the linen and pulled it from its wrapping, higher and higher, until she held it unfurled to the height of her own body. Still part of the cloth lay concealed in the chest.
At first Anselm thought it was ordinary linen cloth such as Hubert sold. Then, very faintly, he began to make out the impression of a man’s body, a bearded face bedaubed with blood, crossed arms wounded in the wrists. The linen seemed to emit a pale light of its own as well as a subtle fragrance. He rose to his feet, slowly but painlessly, drawn by the soft but radiant glow of the cloth and that elusive scent of—myrrh, he realized. The unguent which anointed Our Lord’s corporeal body. . . .
“It is the burial shroud of Our Lord himself,” Isabella said.
“What?” Chills ran down Anselm’s back.
Juliana gasped and fell to her knees, Margaret at her side. “Look, it is the image of Our Lord, wounds and all. Thurstan called upon the Virgin in the name of her son, and through His spirit dwelling in the relic the child was healed.”
“I doubted whether this cloth was the genuine relic,” said Isabella, “having seen many false bits of bone and rag and such over the years. But here, in this moment, God has shown me—shown us all—the truth.”
No, Anselm told himself, the miracle was not a matter of perception or a difference in viewpoint. The cloth was exactly as it appeared.
One by one everyone sank slowly to his knees, save the little boy, who burbled happily in his mother’s arms. The child, made in the image of God, the image now displayed before them. The image of a mortal man, his body like Anselm’s own. What would have been the point of Our Lord’s sacrifice, had he had no body to suffer?
Anselm felt dizzy, as though a wind was blowing through his skull and sweeping his old perceptions away. Automatically he made the sign of the cross over them all, and then traced the sign again, more slowly, for the first time fully aware—and taking joy in—its physicality.
Isabella’s voice was a note of music. “I was sent from France to marry Edward the year after my father, King Philippe, charged the Order of the Temple with heresy. He purged them with blood and fire and took their treasure for his own. One of my bride-pieces was a jeweled chest from the Paris commandery. It was years later, long after my son exiled me to Castle Rising for my sins, that I found the false bottom in the chest and this cloth, folded so that only the face of the image could be seen.”
“The Templars were charged with worshiping a face,” said Geoffrey. “A face with a beard.”
Isabella folded the linen back into the chest. Its glow vanished into the shadows like the sunbeam disappearing from the wall. Its fragrance lingered, now smelling less like myrrh than like baking bread. After all, Anselm told himself, while man might not live by bread alone, bread was necessary to life. He bounded to his feet like a spring lamb, refreshed, and reached out to assist Juliana and Margaret. But they too, stood effortlessly. Every face was turned to the chest, and every face glowed rosily as though turned to the sun, even in the now-dark room.
“This is the so-called idol of the Templars,” said Isabella. “They didn’t worship it, they venerated it. I believe they saved it when Constantinople was looted by their own brethren, the Crusaders, and kept it so secret that even my father’s treasurers didn’t know where—or what—it was. The irony of the most sacred of relics falling into the hands of she who was once named ‘the she-wolf of France’, her father’s daughter, has not been lost on me.”
“God so willed it,” stated Juliana.
Isabella nodded. “I could, I suppose, present this relic to Our Lady’s shrine here at Walsingham, buying my way into heaven with it.”
For a long moment Anselm’s mind filled with the image of Walsingham as the greatest shrine not just in England but in the world, drawing pilgrims and their offerings. . . . The thought came to his mind as though a voice whispered it in his ear: I can’t have it both ways. I can either disdain the world or welcome it to my doorstep.
“And yet,” Isabella went on, “I see that today’s events are a sign from God himself, that my own penance is only a small part of a much greater one. France and England have seen war, plague, famine, death these last few years. This most holy of relics must be returned to the place whence it was stolen, to redeem both my and my father’s pride and to heal both my homelands. Sir Geoffrey, you must take it with you back to France.”
“My respect to your nephew, my liege lord Jehan,” said Geoffrey with a frown, “but he would destroy the suaire, the shroud, as evidence of the Templars. I could give it to the holy father, the pope.”
“Who is captive in Avignon, in my nephew’s domain, without hope of ransom. He wouldn’t dare accept such a gift. No, Sir Geoffrey, find some small church which will hold the holy shroud in trust until such time as its presence can be revealed and appreciated for what it is.”
“I shall give it, then, to my own church at Lirey and conceal its origins.”
“Thank you,” said Isabella, and, turning to Anselm, “I beg your pardon, Father Prior. I know what this relic would have meant to you here within these walls.”
“But we can see only part of God’s plan from within these walls,” Anselm told her. “Our Lord himself opened the door of his mother’s house and went out to meet the world.”
“If there were no outside world,” said Margaret softly, “why should there be need for places like Walsingham?”
Yes, thought Anselm, without pilgrims there would be no priory. Without the world there would be no pilgrims. Without the body and blood of Christ—the actual, physical body and blood—there would be no faith. That’s why relics existed. How long, he wondered, had he himself been no more than a rag and bone man, never seeing the true significance of his charge?
Geoffrey brushed the chest with his fingertips, then with a low bow accepted the key from Isabella’s hand. “Thank you for your trust, Madame.”
“I have learned,” said Isabella, “to trust in God.”
“Amen,” Anselm said with feeling. “Who would have thought that a rag and bone man like Hubert would be an instrument of God’s will?”
“God works in mysterious ways,” said Hawise. Edward was squirming. She set him down and he toddled toward the chest, where he started beating its top with crows of delight. Grinning, Thurstan pulled him away.
A bell rang outside. “It is the hour of compline,” said Anselm, “the completion of the daily cycle of prayer. Please, come to the church with me, so that we can pray for James and Alianor, and give thanks, and prepare ourselves to begin again tomorrow.”
“Yes, Father.” Thurstan gathered Hawise close. Margaret supported Juliana. Geoffrey bowed Isabella out the door.
Anselm waited a long moment, eyeing the room now empty of people but never empty of faith. Then he turned and went out into the twilight, grateful to be part not only of his canonical community, but of the greater community of mankind, saint to sinner and everyone between.
* * * * *
Postscript: The artifact now known as the Shroud of Turin can be traced back to 1355, when it was owned by the de Charny family and displayed at the tiny church of Lirey in France. How it got there is anyone’s guess. Since Isabella the Fair (or the She-Wolf, take your pick) had good reason to make her pilgrimages to Walsingham, and Geoffrey de Charny, who was in England in 1351, was known to be an exceptionally pious knight, this particular guess is only slightly less probable than some.
“The Rag and Bone Man” first appeared in Murder Most Catholic, edited by Ralph McInerny, Cumberland House, 2002.
Some of the research I did on holy relics, mostly for Lucifer’s Crown, went into this story. The post-Reformation verse about the devastation of Walsingham is mentioned in the same novel, but this story takes place at Walsingham’s height as a pilgrim center. I have a wonderful book titled The Pilgrim’s Way, which gives the history of Walsingham, of Canterbury, and of many other medieval pilgrim’s sites. My regret is that, many years ago, I was five miles from Holywell in Wales, the only medieval British Catholic shrine still operating as such, but at the time I didn’t know what it was, so passed up the chance to visit.
Isabella, the king’s mother, is the same French princess who appears in the movie Braveheart, where almost nothing except her nationality is portrayed accurately. To begin with, she was six years old at the time of William Wallace’s judicial murder. . . .
The bit of business with the child and the nutshell came from an article I read in a women’s magazine, probably while in a doctor’s waiting room, many years ago. You just never know what will come in handy.