Wednesday’s edition of Pue’s Occurrences had the headline ‘Staff Editor Encounters the Dolocher’. Solomon had penned a hurried account of his experience near New Row, outlining all the instances and places where the Dolocher had been seen and the two murders committed by the fiend. He made broad recommendations to the public, advising people to travel in groups by night and imploring the city authorities to redouble their efforts to intensify the watch. He left Corker with strict instructions to go to the pawnshop and buy a pair of breeches, a jacket and a pair of shoes and to leave his new clothes at work, changing every morning and evening.
‘What for?’ Corker was delighted and confused at the same time, looking in the palm of his hand at the money Solomon had given him.
‘So your mother won’t sell them.’
‘The bitch. She’d sell me teeth if she could prise them from me head.’
‘When the paper comes out I want you to give yourself a good wash.’
‘Where?’ Corker squeaked. He wondered where he was going to find clean water, never mind soap.
‘I’ll give you a note to bring to Merriment’s. You wash, scrub up clean and go to all the coffee houses and clubs and sell as many copies of Pue’s as you can.’
‘Right-oh,’ Corker sniffed. ‘Ye make Pue’s sound like something that should be used to wipe yer arse.’
‘Very funny. Don’t let anyone boss you. You work for me. Ignore Philmont and Chesterfield. Use this satchel to put the takings in and bring it back here every day.’
‘Right-oh.’
Corker began cross-hatching his sketch of the Dolocher. He had drawn the beast crouched over and peering down from a towering height, its swinish face in chiaroscuro.
The office fire blazed in the hearth. Outside the wind was rising, the sniping rain hammered against the window.
‘Beats standing in the market havin’ Jody Maguire spitting black juice down at ye, doesn’t it, Sol?’
Solomon nodded, writing hurriedly.
‘When are ye leaving?’ Corker asked.
‘Soon as I can dash off this article. Now stop interrupting.’
Corker grinned, all his crooked teeth shining a faint yellow.
*
Solomon bought a second-hand cloak, heavy and dark and warm. He also purchased a tricorn hat and toyed with the idea of a periwig, deciding he hadn’t the time to fuss. At four o’clock he jumped onto the back of the cart carrying Maggie Fines’ corpse in a wicker coffin, and despite the rain fell asleep as the driver crossed the foothills of the Dublin Mountains to the small village of Saggart.
The rain fell in slants over the cluster of cottages gathered at the crossroads. A young girl he didn’t know bowed over the village well, her hair stuck to her face as she peered across at him. The sudden recollection of Eliza May’s drowned face flashed before his eyes. He looked down the street past the donkey huddled beneath a bush and remembered running to visit Eliza May that first summer. He had been seventeen and full of passion. His heart ached with the recollection of who he used to be. Young and vital and full of belief, and Eliza May was his queen. That halcyon summer she laughed and kissed him and the endless days were filled with sunshine and buttercups and rolling in the fragrant meadow. That was before Eliza May’s moods came, before he discovered that she cried as much as she laughed, before he realised that the girl he loved could not be reached when she was in the doldrums. One evening at twilight he found her sitting on the church stile sobbing like she was grief-stricken.
‘You will leave me,’ she wept. And though he held her close, rocked her and whispered, ‘Never,’ Eliza May shuddered, unconvinced.
Now as he stood in the pouring rain looking along the muddy street Solomon squeezed his eyes closed. The rain clung to his lashes as he desperately tried to shake off the weight of Eliza May’s memory. But her beautiful young ghost hung about his bones.
‘Need a hand?’ a familiar voice asked, and Solomon nodded reaching down to lift one corner of the wicker coffin.
Old Jed Ryan and Tom the carpenter came out to give Solomon and the driver a hand bringing Maggie’s coffin into the house. Maggie’s house consisted of a single living room and a small bedroom. A neighbour had cooped her chickens for the night and left the garden gate open on the superstition that she would come home alive and close it herself.
That night Maggie was waked on her kitchen table. The neighbours came in quietly, filing past her luminous corpse, touching her fingers and kissing her forehead and saying goodbye, praying and muttering at the godawful shock of such a nice woman meeting such a dreadful end. Old Mitchel brought a fiddle and Solomon paid Johnny Patrick one pound to roll five barrels of ale and bring ten bottles of whiskey to the wake. Friends and neighbours for twenty miles walked or rode into Saggart that night and by four o’clock in the morning the festivities were developing a second wind with women dancing and laughing in one corner, men playing cards and telling yarns in another corner while three keeners kept up a gentle wail, careful not to intrude on the high jinks and shenanigans. Solomon was quizzed on London and the Dolocher, about Eliza May and Sally Loftus. Others asked him if it was true that he owed a criminal money and Solomon bristled, remembering clearly why it was he had wanted to leave Saggart in the first place. He dodged the awkward questions with bland rebuffs, keeping everything general and impersonal. It was only when Michael Loftus took a swipe at him that Solomon decided he might go and sleep somewhere.
‘Ye took her,’ Michael Loftus cried, his plump face red and miserable. ‘Ye destroyed me little girl and we haven’t seen sight nor sound of her.’
His wife dragged him out the door begging him to ‘whist’.
‘But he took her. Couldn’t keep his pizzle in his breeches, the whoring blackguard.’
‘Ah now, Mick.’ A neighbour with broad shoulders waved his clay pipe. ‘Not over the corpse, Mick. No profanities at lovely Maggie’s wake. Go on now. Off ye go.’
Solomon sat in a corner, wishing he could undo all the harm he had precipitated. Johnny Patrick brought him a drink.
‘She were keen on ye, little Sally,’ he said, sitting down. ‘Heard ye got her pregnant.’
Solomon shook his head. For her sake, he didn’t want the truth to be known.
Sally had set about comforting him after Eliza May’s death. And he had taken the comfort of her arms, losing himself in her peachy soft skin and long blonde hair. Sally was very different to Eliza May. She was a practical girl with sharp edges and she quickly grew tired of his grief. He remembered the day she’d snapped. They’d been fooling around in Paddy Jordon’s hay loft and Solomon was lying on his back staring up into the beams where the swallows had built a nest. Sally clacked her tongue impatiently, sick of his faraway staring. She crouched forward and tugged on her stockings.
‘She were touched,’ Sally said, a hard light glinting in her eyes. ‘Everyone could see but you, Sol.’
Solomon hoisted himself onto his elbows and frowned.
‘What do you mean?’ he asked.
‘Eliza May, she was for the birds.’
‘She was fragile.’ His voice cracked.
‘She was unhinged and difficult, but ye’d got yer head stuck in that many poetry books and stories ye couldn’t see the wood from the trees. Everyone knew it would end bad and why wouldn’t it? This bloody place would get anybody down.’
Sally stared bleakly at the barn floor below, her expression alternating between smouldering rage and wily calculation. Solomon could see she was prickling, desperate to change her stars.
‘Take me with ye to London.’
‘Who says I’m goin’ to London?’
‘Maggie told me mam y’er thinkin’ of it.’
Her face filled with bright glee at the thought of moving to such a large metropolis.
‘No one would know yer business.’ She grinned. ‘Ye could do yer own thing without tongues wagging or a father to bar yer way.’
‘Sally . . .’
‘Oh, look at ye,’ Sally chirruped, ‘y’er white as a sheet.’ She bounced to her feet and brushed the straw off her skirts. ‘I don’t want to marry ye, Sol. Y’er all right for a roll in the hay, but ye know. Me and you don’t have that much in common. And I’d love to see London.’
The weeks following that revelation Sally alternated her tactics, trying to convince Solomon to take her with him. Some days she was nonchalant and offhand, showing him that she’d be no trouble and that she had no vested interest in him. Other days she pleaded, desperate to leave Saggart and her humdrum life behind.
Solomon turned to Johnny Patrick.
‘She wanted to come to England with me,’ he said. ‘I told her to stay. She kept crying that she’d be no trouble.’ Solomon bowed his head, staring at the honey-coloured whiskey in one of Maggie’s good china cups.
‘She followed ye so,’ Johnny Patrick said.
Solomon didn’t answer.
‘I heard it from the brother-in-law, he saw her over in London underneath one of the bridges.’
‘Did he?’ Solomon winced, knowing the inevitable outcome for a young girl making such a rash decision.
‘She were begging. One of her teeth missing. The brother-in-law said he did his best to convince her to come home. Said he’d stand the fare for her passage an’ all. Sure little Sally wept bitterly, said she couldn’t look her mother in the face and that she’d made her bed and must lie in it. The brother-in-law said she was drunk as a newt, sobbin’ for gin and sobbin’ for to come home and sobbin’ ’cause she couldn’t come home and sobbin’ for money.’
Solomon shook his head, biting on the inside of his cheek, wishing he had just said yes and let Sally come with him. His rejection drove her to desperate measures when a kind word from him would have protected her.
Johnny Patrick nudged him. ‘She were always headstrong, Solomon. As headstrong as her father there.’ He waved his drink at the open door. ‘Sure if the poor lass rounded the door her father’d beat her from here to Kerry for the shame she brought on his house. Sally is not welcome home and the poor divil knows it. Nothing ye can do there, my friend. Nothin’ ye can do there.’
The wake carried on until morning, with all the mourners heading home at dawn to freshen up and prepare for the Mass. Late that afternoon, in a tumbledown churchyard, Maggie was laid to rest by her husband’s side and Solomon Fish stood quietly by her graveside thinking of her past kindnesses and of his mother. He wanted to go home directly after the funeral but he knew that he had a responsibility to carry out the details of Maggie’s will, distributing the little that she had owned among her neighbours. He had to sign off on her tenancy agreement and pay any outstanding bills. He would have to spend a second night there and finish off the last of his duties the following morning. He looked through the bleak rain at the dank trees surrounding the churchyard, wishing with all his heart that when he died he would have someone to be buried beside.
*
As the rain patted against the shop window and Solomon hoped to be interred next to a loved one, Merriment showed Janey Mack how to prepare Paris quadrifolia.
‘It grows on a single stem. The flowers smell rank but it has a purple fruit which splits open and produces lots of seeds. It’s also called True Love.’
That got Janey Mack’s interest. ‘Is it, miss?’
‘Too much of it makes you sick and gives you diarrhoea, makes you giddy.’
‘Bit like true love, miss.’
Janey Mack grinned cheekily and Merriment laughed.
‘Did ye never love anyone after Johnny Barden, miss?’
‘I did.’ Merriment crushed the seeds with the mortar. ‘It was a long and tragic love affair.’
She remembered the first time she realised she had feelings for Ashenhurst Beresford. He had come below decks to visit the sick, something he did almost every night. They had both got into the habit of drinking a glass of port in the back office. That particular night he looked pale and Merriment remarked on it.
‘Are you worried about your wife?’ she asked, knowing that his wife was unwell.
Beresford’s head jolted back; he fixed her steadily with his bright eye, his eyepatch glinting darkly when he moved.
‘No,’ he said firmly, but his jaw locked and a nerve danced a moment at the edge of his mouth, like he was biting back a confession. For a while he said nothing, just stared, and Merriment felt pinned to the spot by his oppressive scrutiny.
‘You’re beautiful, you know,’ he said sharply before pushing his glass across the table and walking away, leaving Merriment staring at the door frame listening to his footsteps as they paced across sickbay and up the stairs to the galley above. The remark left her heart sundered. That was the moment that changed everything.
For a full year after that night, they continued to meet and discuss business, both of them pretending that nothing had altered. But they gazed more deeply at each other while they spoke. The conversations lingered long into the small hours and their goodbyes became awkward. A kind of pressure built up between them until one night Beresford came into the back room and, without speaking, slipped his arms around her and pressed his lips to hers. She gave in, forgetting everything, forgetting he was a captain, forgetting he was married, forgetting she was lonely. She remembered Beresford whispering, ‘I can make no promises.’ Sequestered in a tiny cabin on stormy waters with the wind howling and the lantern flickering, his whispers and embrace were enough for her then.
The passion was brief and laden with guilt. There was a shift in Beresford’s manner once his appetite had been satiated. In fact, there were times when he could be offhand. Six months after the affair began, Beresford returned from one furlough a new man. His wife had been well and something in their marriage had been reinvigorated. He cooled his ardour and Merriment retreated, hurt, nursing a fresh, disappointed pain. For a time things were strained. But the days at sea stretched into months and the months into years and their affection for one another slipped back into its own rhythm. They did occasionally lie with each other by way of comfort, but Merriment knew not to indulge in the fantasy of a committed relationship. Beresford’s passion waned into a respectful friendship that had intermittent sensual benefits for the times when he felt most in need.
Years passed, full of unresolved intimacy, so that by the time Merriment suggested giving up the sea, Beresford was faintly relieved by the idea. Merriment laughed at his keenness and was amazed to find that she was not cut by his manner but encouraged, particularly when he revealed that he was settling on land too, reinforcing her notion that he wanted to be near her. Confused by his actions, she had remained watchful. Their attachment proved to be more elastic than she had imagined. Somehow, the nights she had cried alone in her bunk faded into the distance. What was exposed was that they both had an affection for each other, a bond of friendship fastened by rough seas and skirmishes abroad. Their connection ran deeper than convention and his insistence on helping her to set up her shop curiously opened a deeper vein in her thinking: perhaps they were bound to always be linked in some way. What should have driven a wedge between them inexplicably consolidated their relationship. Beresford wanted to lend her money; she had taken a little and the small percentage he invested in her enterprise kept them attached in a way that quickened her feelings for him and confused her understanding of what they were to each other. Was that why she felt knocked back when she met him with Peg Leeson? There was a little something in each of them that could not resist the other.
Annoyed that she was pining for Ashenhurst on the one hand, and intrigued by Solomon on the other, Merriment thought of how she had been sculpted by rejection: what Johnny Barden had carved from her all those years ago, Beresford had finished off. Perhaps they had done her a favour. Giving up on love had drawn her away from romantic attachment and channelled her passion, directing it to the secure, flawless realm of logic and scientific rationalism. She thought of Solomon, arched over the table writing, and she frowned. Stop, she told herself. Don’t do this. She looked at Janey Mack and her heart was tugged in another direction. Merriment shrugged off her interest in Solomon and smiled at Janey Mack’s expectant face.
‘Were ye thinkin’ of him there, miss? The lad from the tragic love affair.’
‘I was.’
‘Don’t be wasting yer time, miss. He’ll not be thinkin’ of you, will he?’
And Merriment smiled, to mask the pang in her heart.
‘I don’t suppose so,’ she said.
*
When Anne called in later that afternoon she was carrying a copy of Pue’s Occurrences.
‘It’s seven pence a copy,’ she complained. ‘I thought that lad with the crooked teeth was having me on. The widow Byrne will not be impressed. Where’s Sol?’
‘Off burying Maggie,’ Janey Mack said.
‘Did she die?’ Anne gasped. ‘God rest her poor soul, the Dolocher has claimed another victim.’ She opened out the broadsheet and pointed to the headline. ‘And Solomon saw him.’ Anne read from the article. ‘“He emerged, a solid block of thick bristling flesh, his fearsome head glowing ominously in the pitch black. The barbed hairs growing along his extended snout appearing eerily russet along the depressed cheeks that accentuated his pronounced jaw. His polished eyes glimmered with a terrible light and, hunching above me, the demon made to lurch. Immobile and paralysed with fear, I was fixed to the spot, unable to breathe. Then just as suddenly as he had appeared, his terrible form vanished into the impenetrable darkness and I took off, afraid of where the Dolocher might materialise next.”’
Anne clutched at her throat. Janey Mack’s mouth hung open, her face drained white. They both looked at Merriment, waiting for her to speak.
‘I . . .’ Merriment started, but she was confounded. ‘He saw something,’ she said quietly and Janey Mack groaned, tears springing to her eyes.
‘The Dolocher’s after Solomon now. He could follow him home. Solomon must have done something.’ Janey Mack stared out into the streets. ‘We’re not safe, none of us are.’
Anne scowled, pressing her pale fingers to her bloodless cheek.
‘My God, the widow Byrne will not believe this. I don’t think I can breathe.’ Her eyes widened as she sipped in threads of air, clutching her breastbone and shaking her head. ‘Poor Sol.’ She blinked back two huge glittering tears.
‘Anne.’ Merriment licked her lips trying to think of a way to comfort both girls. ‘We are safe inside . . .’ she began.
‘You’ve to say yer prayers, Janey.’ Anne tried to pull herself together, her voice high-pitched and false. ‘Y’er a grand little girl. Sure, the devil wouldn’t be after us. We all stay in. He only comes out at night, roaming around the streets.’
Janey Mack ignored Anne and gazed intently up at Merriment. ‘Ye shouldn’t let Solomon back in,’ she suggested.
Merriment patted the little girl’s head. ‘We can’t bar the door to him.’
‘Ye have te, miss: if ye don’t, he’ll draw the Dolocher here and the two of us will be found dead in our beds or taken like that turnkey from the Black Dog.’
‘Oh.’ Merriment suddenly remembered Charlie and her promise to Sol. ‘Anne, can you bring Janey with you on your errands?’
‘Why?’ Janey Mack panicked.
‘I’ve something to do. I’ll only be an hour at the most.’
‘What about the shop?’
‘I’ll shut it up, leave a sign.’
‘Where are ye going?’ Janey Mack tugged at Merriment’s sleeve.
‘To the Black Dog.’
*
Anne took Janey Mack’s hand and said, ‘Now you don’t let go of me. We’ll swing by Saint Werburgh’s church. I’ve to meet the widow Byrne there. There’s some preacher lad coming and we thought we’d give him a listen to. Anyway, we said we’d get some holy water and say our prayers, it’s the only way to repel the devil.’
Janey Mack nodded sombrely. It was a grey, misty afternoon. The bells of Christ Church Cathedral rang out cheerlessly, the steeple vanishing in a bluish shroud of fog. No one liked the poor visibility. Horses and riders emerged out of the gloom like phantoms. People scurried, cloaks and shawls and skirts flapping, heels clicking, dissolving into the mist like they were insubstantial wraiths blending into an anonymous cloud.
‘It’s bitter,’ Anne complained, clutching her shawl and hurrying across Castle Street with Janey Mack in tow. ‘Don’t this mist creep into yer bones? Gets under the skin, so it does. Come on.’
A huge crowd filed into the church. Some of the throng paused on the steps and clustered into frightened groups, clutching at their Bibles or wringing their hands anxiously, trading Dolocher stories. Janey Mack scanned the crowd. There were young and old, fine ladies with pale, wretched faces, old men with sour, angry expressions, charwomen and weavers, even tradesmen who’d normally take a sup of ale at lunchtime were giving up their luxury to hear the famous Reverend Malachy Jones extol his learned advice on how to approach the current crisis.
The widow Byrne was a plump woman of about fifty with bright blue eyes and a high wig intended for a much younger woman. She wore a dark purple dress and a wool cape embroidered with blue roses. She took one look at Janey Mack and tapped the little girl on the edge of her shoulder.
‘The trumpet has sounded,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Gabriel has blown the last call and the devil himself is rounding us up one by one.’
Janey Mack nodded bleakly.
‘You better have no sins, little girl, or you are done for.’
‘Misses Byrne, she’s half out of her wits with fright as it is.’
‘I’m only saying. Unless you’ve led an exemplary life, there’s no hope.’
Janey Mack peered through the mist, watching as people emerged from the shrouded air, ghostly quiet. They moved silently up the steps and past the broad grey columns at the church entrance.
‘We’ll go in.’
The widow Byrne led the way, stepping into the dark wainscoted reception and moving with a curious kind of lightness that belied her weight. She glided to the top of the pews arranged to look out from a side aisle, insisting that everyone squash up and make room for her and her servant. Janey Mack sat on Anne’s knee, absorbing the cold, grey atmosphere. The church was huge and cavernous and bare: there were no paintings on the ceiling, no icons adorning the wall, no tabernacle or side niches holding dying saints or beatific angels. The church was a sparse, restrained Grecian monolith, with a high balcony supported by fluted Ionic columns. To the right of the altar, carved from dark polished wood, there was an imposing pulpit. Janey Mack snuggled into Anne, feeling the creeping anxiety as it moved in waves through the congregation. A low murmur rumbled through the church as people whispered, uncertain of how to deal with the tricks of the devil, how to avoid the terrible wrath of the Dolocher. When the church was crammed to capacity, with people spilling out onto the steps, the sexton hammered his mace three times on the slab floor, sending three resounding booms through the edifice, which echoed up into the rafters. A profound, thick silence descended, while a small man dressed in black, wearing a neat white periwig and thick spectacles, slowly made his way up the pulpit, carrying a sheaf of notes and a small Bible.
For a long time he stared at the congregation, and the longer he waited the more people held their breaths. When he finally spoke, he shrieked, a loud high-pitched elongation of the name Mark. The congregation pitched back. There was a universal groan of communal shock.
‘Mark five.’ The preacher waved his left hand. ‘And so they arrived in the region of Gerasenes.’
Janey Mack squeezed Anne tight.
‘When Jesus stepped out of the boat a man possessed by an evil spirit came running out of the cemetery, for this man lived among the tombs and the burial caves and he was insane. He could not be restrained; even chains and shackles could not hold him back. No one was strong enough to subdue him. Day and night he wandered among the burial caves and the hills, howling and cutting himself with sharp stones. And when the man saw Jesus he rushed forward, shrieking and screaming, and Jesus demanded, “What is your name?” and the man replied, “Legion. For we are many.”’
The preacher paused, his breath coming sharp and strong, his magnified eyes searching the crowd. The congregation sat pale and quiet and trembling.
‘Dublin,’ Malachy Jones assured them in a loud sonorous tone, ‘is this graveyard, is this very cemetery mentioned in Mark’s gospel. Dublin is the haunting ground of Legion.’
Women muffled their mouths with hankies. Men coughed uncomfortably. Malachy Jones held up the Bible.
‘And the man cut himself with stones.’ He thumped the pulpit. ‘Did not Olocher slice his own throat? Was he not possessed by a vile spirit? One of the legion? Did not one of the legion animate Olocher’s dead bones? And what happened to the possessed man in Mark’s gospel?’ The preacher raised both arms. ‘Jesus healed him by banishing the evil spirits into a herd of swine. Swine,’ he shrieked, the word piercing the air high and shrill. ‘Is not Olocher’s body a hybrid? A distortion of all that is natural and good? Has his wickedness not fused the head of a black pig to the decaying bones of an autopsied corpse? This is Mark’s gospel. This is Dublin. Today we are in the graveyard of one who calls himself Legion.’
The congregation shifted, terrified by the biblical comparison. Some women whimpered and sniffed.
‘We have, out in those very streets there’ – the reverend pointed to the doorway – ‘Olocher’s wicked spirit, his malformed, grotesque soul prowling the alleyways and the backstreets. And he is recognised by his visage, for he has been banished from salvation and left to roam this earth in the shape of a pig. This deviant human has risen from his dank grave and we have been warned: we will be snatched away, we will be destroyed by the savage appetite of this fiend from hell, this fiend that roams hell. The devil,’ the preacher roared, ‘is among us. You will be measured by your deeds and you will be found wanting. Repent your sins. Repent and be devout, repent and be vigilant.’
Janey Mack nuzzled into Anne’s neck.
‘Me skin is crawlin’ up and down me arms,’ she whispered, fighting back tears. The Reverend Malachy Jones whipped the crowd into a frenzy of renunciation and suspicion. His sermon warned them that Olocher had appeared ordinary before his heinous crimes were discovered.
‘Who are you sitting beside? Is your neighbour evil?’ he asked. ‘Is the one sitting beside you rotten through and through with wicked sin? Be vigilant and abhor those who blaspheme, those who indulge base pleasures, those who pray with one hand and smite with the other. Be vigilant and mark those who have taken the lower road, those who have turned away from God and court the devil, for if you keep the company of sinners you are tarnished with the stench of corruptible doom. You will be smelled out, your wrongdoing will exude an odoriferous stench, for the Dolocher will recognise you, he will sniff you out and you will be devoured and eradicated from the book of eternal life and left floundering in an agony of pit fire and sulphur.’
The Reverend Malachy Jones battered his wretched audience with a terrifying litany of possibilities, until finally, an hour later, the church emptied and the petrified congregation hurried into the misty streets rushing to get home, lock their doors and fall on their knees in a feverish act of contrition.
The widow Byrne was luminous with morbid excitement. She chatted to her friends while Anne squeezed Janey Mack’s hand. Janey Mack heard a group of workmen grumbling on the steps. One man with thick black hair and small narrow eyes sucked furiously on his pipe, only pulling it from his teeth to repeat over and over, ‘Shifting his shape, hiding in a herd of swine.’
‘That’s right,’ his workmates nodded, ‘hiding in the herd.’
The men huddled tight, their rough faces blotchy with red patches, their eyes shifting, their heads turning, suspiciously scanning the last of the congregation before they continued whispering out the sides of their mouths. When they shuffled off in the direction of Lord Edward’s Tavern, Janey Mack watched them while the widow Byrne chuckled and wrung her hands, her face lit with a gleeful kind of horror that made her blue eyes sparkle.
‘Well, in my whole life, of all that I’ve seen and done, I never heard the like of such a sermon. My spine is that affrighted I don’t know how it doesn’t jump from my back and run off without me. What an appalling predicament we are all in, girls, appalling.’
*
When Merriment returned from the Black Dog she found Janey Mack and Anne at the door of the shop, both of them white-faced and shaking. She was about to ask what they were doing standing about outside when she saw what they were trembling at.
‘Oh.’ Merriment staggered to a halt.
Daubed in bright red paint over the door and facade of her business was the word WITCH.
The crimson letters glistened, the power of the word punching through the thin veneer of rational thinking, reverberating with a menacing authority. The word glimmered in the grey air, in the twilight region between understanding and fear. A witch, a strong woman distorted by a maligned will, in contact with devils and familiars, using evil mystical rituals to conjure up demons and hex neighbours and do harm. Merriment tried to stop her hands shaking, recalling the deformed sailor lynched by the crew swinging from the yardarm off Port Royal. She’d escaped then because someone else had been targeted as the source of the misfortune. But if the crew had applied the superstition that it was bad luck to have a woman onboard ship, she could have been strung up. She swept her fringe to one side wondering, had her luck run out? Was this the law of the land? Would she be purged to counteract the hideous appearance of the Dolocher? Would the belief that she mixed potions and poisons be whispered throughout the city? Would she be expelled from the guild? Taken to trial? Formally accused?
Her breath came short and fast. She swallowed, staring at the word, her eyes widening as she ruminated over the macabre world she now lived in, feeling suddenly cast back in time to an era cluttered with religious zealotry and punctuated by profound spiritual fear. And knowing what fear could do to a crowd, she gazed at the letters scrawled over her doorway, afraid that if not stopped the word could command such primordial power that it could very easily become her epitaph. The thought of a baying crowd gathering outside the shop, armed with stones and torches and legal writs, chilled her to the bone.
She swallowed down her terror. If she had to, she could pack quickly and take Janey Mack with her to sea. For now, she would contact Beresford.
‘I know who did this,’ she whispered hoarsely.
‘Fling them in jail.’ Janey Mack squeezed Merriment’s hand, her whole body trembling. ‘Shoot them.’
Merriment swept her fringe out of her eyes and, smiling to mask her concern, she pressed Janey Mack’s fingers. ‘Come on. Let’s scrub this off.’
Anne said her goodbyes and scurried into the mist, her heart racing as she pattered through the cobbled streets, squinting at every grey shade in the hope that she would catch up with her employer.
‘Misses Byrne,’ she called meekly whenever she saw someone stout, ‘is that you?’
Close to Hanbury Lane, the widow Byrne heard Anne’s plaintive whisper and called back through the drear air.
‘Mother?’
‘No, Misses Byrne, it’s me.’ Anne ran, her face glistening, her complexion flushed, her eyes bright and shining.
‘Oh my God, you look like you’ve consumption,’ the widow Byrne gasped. ‘Like a beautiful spectre, bursting back from the dead.’
‘Don’t be saying that,’ Anne quivered, linking her employer’s elbow.
The widow Byrne tugged her shawl tighter. ‘I’ll tell you this much, if you don’t die young, you’ll be a beautiful bride.’
‘Stop frightening me.’ Anne poked the old lady in the ribs. Then, squeezing in close to her, Anne whispered, ‘The apothecary on Fishamble Street is in trouble.’