I slipped away from the empty house without first going down the road to knock on Theo’s door. There were discoveries concerning the three bodies that I ought to have reported to him straight away, but I decided to wait until I had begun to resolve the mysteries that had just been stirred up. Or that was how I reasoned; it would have been more honest to admit that I was burning with impatience to get home and examine the spade-bearded man’s pack, in the privacy of my study with the door firmly closed.
Samuel came out to take care of Hal as I rode into the yard, with Tock his ever-present shadow. He greeted me with the news that Mistress Palfrey had but recently gone out and Sallie had left with a basket over her arm to hunt for late mushrooms in the woods above the river.
So I had my house to myself.
The pack was in the corner of my bedchamber, where I’d thrown it yesterday shortly before collapsing onto my bed for a much-needed sleep. I fetched it and took it along to my study, where I cleared my wide desk of everything else so that the pack stood in solitary state. Slowly I sat down, simply staring at it. It was almost as if it held me in a spell, and—
Angry with myself, just as I had been after standing in the cold crypt while time passed by outside my knowledge, I reached for the pack and, my hands rough and impatient, unfastened the buckled straps.
It was made of as fine a piece of leather as I’d ever seen, let alone handled. It was a rich, glowing shade of chestnut, buffed to a rich sheen, and so supple that it moved like cloth. Yet it was sturdy and strong, and although clearly well used, showed not a scratch or a stain. I folded back the flap and looked inside. There were two compartments separated by a partition of a darker shade of leather. The front compartment held papers and a book, the rear one held a pewter inkhorn, several quills, one or two objects wrapped in velvet and a small wooden box.
I drew out the papers first. Some had writing on them; the work of several different hands. Place names, one or two dates. I ran my eyes over the pages and, with a powerful sense of disappointment, realized I was wasting my time. The small amount of writing on them meant absolutely nothing to me.
Then I reached inside the pack again and drew out the book. It was small, very well used, bound in leather worn and grubby from handling. Its thin pages were covered in dense blocks of incomprehensible writing. On the flyleaf was that familiar symbol.
Either I was dreaming again, or this was Francis’s notebook.
I’d put it back in his bag, I was sure of it. I would go and check to make absolutely sure, but—
Half out of my chair, I stopped. I heard myself say aloud, ‘Where is it? What did I do with Francis’s bag?’
And, frightened now, I realized I couldn’t remember.
I couldn’t remember anything.
I sank back into my chair. For several long moments I sat perfectly still, my hands resting on my desk. I don’t think I have ever felt more terrified.
I’m sure we all fear madness. We see old men and women in their final years, trotting out a trite and familiar little fact and totally forgetting they’ve just told you the same thing, several times over. We see the loss of memory, the failure to recognize a familiar and much-loved face. We see the fading of all reasoning power, the gradual and horribly inevitable slide into non-thinking and the collapse of all reason, all mental facility and flexibility. And we dread it, of course we do, because while we are still in our right minds, we recognize that it is a one-way journey, and nobody ever comes back.
As I sat there in my study, surrounded by my books, my notes, the long shelf of journals that record my life as a healer, my medical impedimenta, my rows of potions and preparations in their little jars, pots, phials and bottles, I wanted to reach out and grasp the lot, hug it to me, shout out that I was still young, still able, still a rational man, and please do not take away all that makes me me, not yet!
It seemed that some part of my battling soul remained my own. For slowly, as if I was wading through soft, wet, sucking sand, I began to fight back. I threw myself against the fear, forcing it into submission. And as a small amount of daylight cleared amid the blackness, I recognized this for what it was.
I’d just been attacked.
And instantly reason returned. I had put the notebook back in Francis’s bag, but straight afterwards I’d gone wandering through the ancient passages of the Saracen’s Head and experienced my waking nightmare. While I was absent, someone had crept into Francis’s room and taken the notebook. I’d been pushed, violently, into that accursed mirror, hadn’t I? What was more likely than that someone had made sure I was out of the way for that very purpose?
As if that first breach swiftly brought about the fall of the whole edifice, now I realized I’d been fighting a phantom; and, moreover, one conjured by the same skilled power that had had me in thrall down in the crypt. Angry now, I shouted aloud, ‘I do not believe in conjurings!’
So, what had they done? Who were they? And how had they done it? Moving aside the spade-bearded man’s pack and its contents – in my fury, shoving it so hard that everything except Francis’s notebook fell on the floor – I reached for my own notebook, inkhorn and quill and began to write.
Why does anybody attack? Because someone else is threatening them. Somebody had undoubtedly just attacked me, which led to the conclusion that they feared whatever threat I posed.
As I wrote, other thoughts crowded into my head. Judyth, yesterday evening, saying that the Company were concealing a deep secret: there are layers of darkness beneath this surface, she’d said. The Saracen’s Head, its secret little rooms and its dark, twisting passages imbued with a sense of dread that, despite its reputation for being haunted, had not been present before. A man dying of poison, a youth feigning death even as a play of particularly repellent violence was enacted only yards away from him, later to be stabbed through the heart. A spade-bearded sophisticate from London, dead in a barn with his neck broken. A weighting – Judyth’s word again – of every play they had put on, as if a hidden message was being cried out to those who watched and heard. Some of whom felt, or sensed, whatever it was the Company was silently suffering.
And I was delving into the heart of the business. It had been I who tended Francis Heron, I who examined the bodies of Daniel and the spade-bearded man, I who only a few moments ago had been going through the contents of that man’s pack. Somebody knew what I was doing, and didn’t like it. And – my thoughts were racing now, my mind responding to my need with its habitual flexibility so that all dread fears of losing my reason had fled – this same somebody had tried to halt my probing, just as I’d been halted on the spot and held out of time, down in the crypt earlier this morning. As, the night after Francis Heron fell sick, I’d been assaulted by a horrific vision of beheading in a mirror that I was convinced had just crept up on me.
I put down my quill. I realized I was sweating, and I felt, I actually felt like a physical presence, the moment of fear that demanded, Is it the pestilence?
‘It is not,’ I said, my voice quite calm.
It was a very clever person playing with my mind. But this was where they would stop.
I sat still for several long moments. Then I stood up, walking over to the window to look out at the late autumn sunshine on the familiar landscape and the river winding its way to the sea. And as I stood there, quietly, with no effort whatsoever, I remembered exactly what I’d done with Francis Heron’s bag.
I raised a clenched fist and punched the air.
Celia had woken with the strong need to talk to Gabe. Hurrying through the morning rituals, selecting one of her less flamboyant gowns and dressing her hair in a modest style of braids wound at the nape of her neck, she flew down the stairs, early enough – or so she’d thought – to find him just beginning his breakfast. And so it was with some dismay that she learned from Sallie that he had already gone out.
The bodies, Celia thought, consuming with scant attention the bowl of porridge sweetened with honey that Sallie put before her. Of course. He was going to examine the three bodies in Theo’s mortuary first thing today. She was angry with herself for having forgotten; for having allowed her own preoccupations to blank from her mind all thought of anyone else’s.
It was a flaw of which she was well aware.
She had thought, when Jonathan Carew had made mention of the dangers of self-absorption in his sermon a few weeks ago, that he was addressing her. But, even as she’d listened, head bent and eyes cast down, she had realized that this too was a demonstration of self-absorption, for undoubtedly she was not the only person among the parishioners of Tavy St Luke who was overly focused on her own thoughts and actions, overly determined to make her own path through life smooth and pleasant …
She finished her porridge, got up and took the empty bowl into the kitchen, where Sallie greeted her presence with some surprise. ‘No need to have brought it through, Miss Celia!’ she exclaimed. ‘I was just about to come and ask you if you wanted more!’
‘I’ve finished, thank you, Sallie,’ Celia said. ‘It was delicious,’ she added, causing Sallie’s eyebrows to rise even higher.
‘Same as it always is,’ she muttered, eyeing Celia warily as if worried that she was sickening for something.
Is it that extraordinary for me to be courteous and considerate? Celia wondered. ‘I’m going out, Sallie,’ she said. Before Sallie could ask where she was off to, she added, ‘I’m riding into Tavy St Luke first, but I’ll be out all day.’
She collected her heavy cloak and her velvet cap, then hurried out into the yard and called to Samuel to saddle her mare.
‘I shouldn’t be bothering you,’ she said to Jonathan a short time later. ‘You have far more important matters calling for your attention, I ought to have waited until Gabe comes back from examining the bodies in Theo’s crypt and not—’
‘Celia, I’m glad you came,’ he interrupted gently.
‘But you’re here, in the church, so you must be praying. Or thinking. Or something.’ She made herself stop, embarrassed.
She had knocked on the door of the Priest’s House, opened it and peered inside when there was no answer, and he wasn’t there. She had hurried over to the church, where he had been on his knees before the altar. She closed the heavy old door as quietly as she could, but it was pretty pointless because she’d already made too much noise throwing it open.
‘Just now I’m in the church whenever I have nothing more pressing to attend to,’ he said. He paused. ‘We spoke briefly yesterday, you and Theo and I, agreeing that there was some grave disturbance in the air.’
‘Yes.’ It had been a worrying conversation, for she had felt the disquiet so powerfully; she knew it was real, and no invention of people avid for something alarming to gossip about.
‘The mood is darkening,’ he went on. ‘Nobody wants to put a name to it, but people are afraid. When they are afraid, they seek the old comfort.’
Even as he spoke, the heavy door creaked and opened to admit two women and a child, who nodded to their priest and slipped away beneath the low arch into St Luke’s Little Chapel.
‘There are two men and three old women in there already,’ Jonathan remarked. He smiled wryly. ‘They appear to think the main altar here is my preserve, and so out of consideration they go into the side chapel.’
‘Whereas in fact you’d far rather be in there,’ she said softly, knowing without having thought about it that she was right.
‘I would,’ he agreed. He glanced at her, his strange green eyes shining in the light of the altar candles, and she could not read his expression. If I hadn’t known it to be highly unlikely, she thought, I’d have said he was briefly filled with joy …
Abruptly aware that she should not waste any more of his time, especially with eight people in the side chapel, she gathered her courage and said, ‘Gabe went out early and I’ve no idea when he’ll be back, but I really do need to talk to someone I trust, so I hope you don’t mind.’
‘I don’t,’ he murmured. The strange look was fleetingly back, then his expression was sombre again.
‘As I believe you know, I was staying with my friend Sidony in Plymouth in order to save travelling to and fro each day to watch the performances,’ she began, aware that she was speaking too fast. ‘But then poor Francis Heron fell sick, and Gabe thought it could be – well, it wasn’t, so no need to say what it could have been. With Gabe being so preoccupied, and then that young man disappearing, it seemed wrong to be giggling with Sidony and going to the plays because one of the handsome young actors had asked me to alter a cloak for him and …’ And I’d been flattered by his attentions, bewitched by his good looks, found my heart beating fast when I was with him, she had been about to say. But she held back the words. ‘So I went home,’ she said instead. ‘Only now I regret it, because I abandoned Sidony without adequate explanation and, which is nearly as bad, I was running away. And I want to go back, call on Sidony and her father to apologize, and ask her if the two of us can attend the final production this afternoon. Which I am really keen to see,’ she added, ‘so perhaps the regret and the urge to apologize are just excuses so that I can have what I want?’
The rush of words stopped, and she found she was slightly breathless.
After some moments Jonathan said quietly, ‘It sounds quite reasonable to me not to want to miss the final play. It’s not as if a travelling company comes to town every week. And you don’t need my permission, Celia.’
‘I don’t need anyone’s permission,’ she replied. Far too curtly: ‘Sorry,’ she muttered. ‘I don’t really know what I’m asking you, Jonathan. Don’t know why I’m here,’ she added.
‘Perhaps simply to talk to a friend?’ he suggested. ‘We are all out of our usual humour, I think. Just now you said you felt you had run away from whatever so darkens the air at the Saracen’s Head, and I well understand how you might.’ He paused, frowning. ‘I was there, very early yesterday. Your brother had called on me late the previous night, and, knowing poor Master Heron was near death, I rode down soon after dawn.’ He stopped again. Then he said, his voice so soft that she strained to hear, ‘I sat with his cooling body, as I have sat with so many. I prayed for his soul, I spoke to the man he had been. I told myself God was with us both in that isolated little room, I tried again and again to convince myself that what I was sensing so powerfully was only in my imagination; the result of a lonely little room, a dark and twisting passage, an ancient, creaking inn, the echoes and shades of those days of thrills, violence, romance and drama as the Company put on their plays and made their audience believe that fiction was fact.’ He stopped suddenly. Then he said, ‘But it did not relent. As I sat there, I had the dreadful feeling I was being overcome. I thought I was losing myself.’
Celia gasped, quickly suppressing it. Unthinkingly she reached for his hand, and he took hers in a tight grasp.
Amid the turmoil in her head, the thought briefly struck her that she had come to him for comfort, and here he was seeking the same from her.
As if he had all at once realized what they were doing, he disengaged his hand and leaned away from her a little. Gave her an awkward smile. She thought that her impetuousness must have offended him, and she was heartily glad he could not have picked up what she was thinking.
But then, once again leaning close to her, he said quietly, ‘I believe my parishioners can do without me for a spell. May I ride into Plymouth with you?’
‘You’re certain this was in Francis Heron’s bag?’ Theo said.
I was in his office. I’d given my report on the three dead men, and now the spade-bearded man’s pack lay unfastened on his desk. He was holding up Francis’s battered old notebook.
Francis’s bag, as I’d remembered as soon as that frightening mental mist had cleared, had been fetched from the Saracen’s Head when they went for his body and left for safe keeping in the coroner’s office. And the notebook wasn’t in it.
‘Quite sure,’ I said. ‘The spade-bearded man, or someone acting on his behalf, took it from Francis’s bag. And if you compare what’s inscribed on the flyleaf with this’ – I flipped through the papers from the pack to the one with the series of drawings – ‘you’ll see someone’s been copying that symbol.’
Theo grunted an agreement.
‘I wondered if it’s astrological,’ I added. ‘I thought the cross might be a Christian symbol, but the equal-armed cross is older than Christ, I believe.’
Theo looked up, his expression suggesting that there were more important matters for our attention than a scholarly discussion of symbols and their meaning. Then he went back to the notebook.
‘Code,’ he muttered. ‘Pages of it, in the front.’ He flipped through the pages. ‘And here at the back, what look like lists of words, mostly the same length, five letters long … are they names?’
He held it out to me in his fingertips as if he feared it was about to burst into flames. I fought the strong reluctance to take it – it was a book, for the good Lord’s sake, a much-used, dog-eared, cheap and dirty one, so what harm could it do me? – and opened it.
But just then there came the sound of the outer door opening and one – no, two – people came along the passage to Theo’s inner office. Before whoever it was could knock on the door, he moved out from behind his desk and flung it open. Jonathan stood there, with Celia beside him.
I stared at her. ‘What are you doing here?’ I demanded.
My sister looked taken aback, not to say offended, at my tone, but before she could protest, Jonathan spoke. ‘Celia said she was coming into the town to ask her friend to accompany her to the Company’s final performance this afternoon, and—’
‘I am, Gabe,’ Celia put in, her jaw set. ‘I owe Sidony an apology for leaving so abruptly, Francis Heron didn’t have what we all feared he had, and there’s no reason whatsoever why I shouldn’t see today’s play!’
The echoes of her words rang in the room. Into the brief ensuing silence, Jonathan said quietly, ‘No danger, at least, from the plague.’
I spun round to look at him, noticing that Celia and Theo did the same. He nodded, and it seemed to me he paused for a moment, as if in preparation.
Then he said, ‘But all of us know there is danger.’ Glancing at Celia, he added, ‘It’s why I suggested Celia and I came here to join you, so that we could speak together, share what we know.’ He paused. ‘What we fear,’ he murmured.
Theo had returned to his own side of his desk, almost as if he was making it clear that this was his office, reminding us that he was the coroner and dead bodies were his responsibility. He waved a hand to a couple of chairs set against the wall and Jonathan drew them forward, offering one to Celia. He stood with his hands resting on the back of the second, I stayed where I was.
Theo had actually started to speak but, with a brief glance of apology, Jonathan forestalled him.
‘Three men are dead,’ he began, ‘one by unknown means and—’
‘Francis Heron was poisoned,’ I said. ‘Daniel was stabbed,’ I added, ‘and the other man in the barn had his neck broken.’
Jonathan was silent for a moment. Then he continued. ‘All three deaths have occurred within days of the arrival of a London theatre company, who have been attracting large audiences daily with their captivating, not to say enchanting or even bewitching, performances.’
‘There is the sense that this Company have their own very distinctive way of portraying the plays,’ I said. I thought of Judyth, and her conviction that the productions had been weighted so that a message could be transmitted, or a truth obscured. ‘Which may have a definite purpose behind it.’
‘Yes,’ Jonathan agreed. ‘In addition, those of us who have spent time at the Saracen’s Head other than during one of the plays’ – he glanced at me – ‘have noticed that there is an unwholesome air within the inn. This – this disturbance has spread, and for the last couple of days St Luke’s Church has received a steady flow of people who seem to want nothing more than to sit quietly in the peaceful silence.’ He paused, then added, ‘Most of these people have been to see at least one of the Company’s plays. It is as if they have brought something away with them, and that whatever it is has spread to others in the village.’
‘As if it were a sickness,’ Theo said very quietly.
‘It is not the plague,’ I said, not quietly at all. Somebody needed to make that fact absolutely plain, and I was the doctor.
‘Not the plague,’ Jonathan repeated. ‘And, I would suggest, not a physical ailment at all.’ He paused, once again looking round at each of us. ‘Instead, something of the mind.’
Celia drew a sharp breath. Theo looked as if he wanted to throw himself out of his office and start banging heads together.
Jonathan met my eyes. ‘Gabe?’ he said. ‘Could this really be happening? Is it possible?’
‘I would say no to both questions,’ I replied, ‘but I can’t because I’ve experienced it myself. I have spent the greater part of two nights in the Saracen’s Head, and what I saw and felt there – what I thought or was made to believe I saw and felt there, I should say – was horrible. And I was not the only person to be affected.’ I turned to Jonathan. ‘Something is profoundly amiss is what you said, and one of the players, a man called Barnaby Abell, said, There’s something so wrong here. Now, if we are not to let ourselves believe in a sudden outbreak of ghosts and gruesome hauntings in an old inn that has stood there for centuries with no such horrors, then it’s too much of a coincidence to suggest this wrongness just happens to have materialized precisely when a London theatre company came to stay.’
‘You’re accusing the Company of having brought it?’ Celia demanded. ‘But,’ she went on angrily, not giving me a chance to respond, ‘why in heaven’s name would they?’
‘I have no idea,’ I said. ‘Theo? Jonathan? Do you think I’m right?’
‘It seems a little unlikely for the whole Company to be involved,’ Jonathan said thoughtfully, ‘but yes, I think it’s entirely possible that someone among them may be perpetuating this, er, this illusion.’
‘There’s something else,’ I said. ‘They – he – whoever it is has a long reach.’ Suddenly I felt as if I couldn’t go on; as if a strong hand was on my throat, stopping the words. It’s an illusion, I told myself very firmly. That’s what Jonathan just said – whoever it is is perpetrating an illusion. There’s nobody here except my sister and my friends. ‘This morning I was in my study at Rosewyke’ – the words seemed to explode out of me, causing Celia to look at me in alarm – ‘and all at once I couldn’t think. I couldn’t remember anything. Oh, you may laugh’ – nobody was even smiling – ‘but at the time I truly believed my mind was going. And it wasn’t the first time, because earlier when I was examining the three bodies in the crypt I suddenly found I’d lost quite a lot of time, and—’
‘What do you mean, lost time?’ Theo demanded. He too was looking at me worriedly.
‘Exactly that,’ I said. ‘I’d been studying a rash on Francis Heron’s chest and concluding it had been caused by the deadly nightshade, which is the poison that I believe killed him. The Company use belladonna drops, or at least some of the players do. The young lad who plays female roles has abnormally wide pupils, and that’s what the drops do. Then it occurred to me that there have been many references to potions and poisons in the plays that have been performed over the last few days, and that this might suggest someone within the Company knew rather a lot about the subject. But all at once I realized that my feet were cold.’ I paused, for the alarming power of that moment was still uncomfortable, even in memory. ‘I looked at the candles in their lanterns, and the top third had burned away. Somebody, somehow, seemed to have put me into a trance.’
There was a stunned silence. Then Theo said a little too loudly, ‘You were concentrating on what you were thinking about! And you’re tired, Gabe! Exhausted! When did you last have a proper night’s sleep?’
I shrugged.
Theo glared at Celia, then at Jonathan, as if trying to force them to agree with him, but neither said anything. ‘Jonathan?’ he demanded angrily. ‘You’re a man of the church, surely you don’t believe in this rubbish? In this absurd suggestion that a person not even present – not visible, audible or tangible – can affect another’s mind?’
Jonathan smiled slightly. ‘I think, Theo, that you are looking to the wrong man for support,’ he said gently. And Theo, frowning briefly as he worked it out, looked away, abashed.
It did not take him long, however, to recover.
‘What, then, are we to do?’ he demanded. ‘If we agree that someone, or more than one person, in the Company is trying to confuse our investigation into these three deaths, what is our next step?’
‘As I told you all, I’m going to call on my friend Sidony and we will go to see the Company’s final performance,’ Celia said.
I turned to her. ‘Are you?’
‘Yes,’ she said, with a touch of defiance. ‘I know you’re going to say Is that wise? or something equally crushing, but I’ve made my mind up.’
‘I wasn’t.’ I smiled at her. ‘I was going to say, keep alert, but then I’m sure you will anyway.’
Theo, who had been frowning in thought, said, ‘Jarman Hodge reports that this Daniel was new to the Company, and—’
New to the Company.
Out of memory, I remembered something that Francis Heron had said, shortly before he entered into his final convulsions. He had been recalling his past, the life he had once lived, the person he had been … and he said, I am not the man you think I am. And you would not believe what I have seen.
Which did not sound, I now thought, as if he was talking about his life as an actor.
Theo was still speaking, but I could not wait.
‘I don’t believe Francis Heron had been with them very long either,’ I said.
Theo stared at me, drumming his fingers impatiently on his desk. Jonathan had a watchful air, Celia looked as if she wanted to be gone.
And after a short pause, Theo said, ‘Three men have died, as Jonathan said at the start of this extraordinary conversation. I am His Majesty’s coroner, and it is my job to ascertain how, and why, they died. We know how; Gabe just told us. You three can go haring off after ghosts and fanciful notions of dark horrors and disembodied spirits with the power to confuse men’s minds and stop them dead, and men who for their own reasons choose to obscure their own past, and I wish you all success. My task is clear and straightforward, and I’m going to get on with it.’ Abruptly standing up, reaching for his long black robe, he yelled, ‘Jarman!’ and strode out of the room.