A Midwinter Murder (An Elizabethan Murder Mystery), page 15
As soon as they were out of the rain – out of the room beneath the open tower – Tom left Janet lying on the cold flags of the little nave and pulled himself to his feet against the wall. He discarded his sopping cloak and immediately felt almost that he was floating spirit-like, so heavy had the sodden wool become. The jack came next, and another great weight was gone. Would that he could just add some natural warmth, he thought grimly, to this fire-like, airy lightness he seemed suddenly to have about him. Would that he could stop this juddering in his near-frozen limbs. He would fain have removed his boots too, for they were so full of stones and water that they were almost impossible to walk in; but he wisely calculated that the simple effort of getting them off would use up the last of his strength, and that must still be put to better use.
Tom staggered back out into the room beneath the open tower. If there was the rubble of stones here, he calculated, then there would also be the rubble of wood. If the stones had been piled out of the path, why the wood might be neatly stacked as well. So it proved. Over in a corner, as much by feel as by sight in the near-pitch of the darkness, he found great balks standing – a well-chosen corner too, selected by a man with an eye to re-using such matter and conserving God’s gifts to men. If stone didn’t perish with the action of water, wood most certainly did. The balks were stored in the one dry area of the room, therefore; and, at the cost of a stab-wound or two, Tom discovered splinters and kindling beneath.
Tom marked where the makings of the fire of salvation were and left them there. He was wet himself and feared he would flood their natural elements with his current icy state. Furthermore, though he had the makings, he still lacked the vital spark. Festooned with powder and shot though he was, it was all, like himself, inundated. He had flint and stone about him too, but his tinder was as wet as the rest of him. He must dry his hands, therefore, and explore a little further still; and time was running out. His body was still feeling some relief at being out of the jaws of the storm, but the body of the church itself was still icy-cold and the last of the heat was coming out of his juddering frame at a terrible rate – so much so, that a distracting element of self-doubt, a disturbing fear of death began to lurk at the outer edges of his mind; and yet he fought on against the inner demons and the outer.
At the far end of the place there was a little altar. Father Little’s care had placed a little white altar cloth upon the plain wood of the simple table. Tom noted its pale glimmer in the thick darkness of the place leavened a little beneath the high plain glass of the northward-facing window. He touched it, felt its dryness and left it alone as yet. Once dry, his hands would remain so only for an instant or two with the rest of his clothing down to the fine lace of his shirt cuffs still sopping. He needed one more thing – had great hope of finding it. For there were two great candles there, the white columns of their pure wax bodies seeming to glimmer. If Father Little had left candles in the place, then he might well have left the means of lighting them.
And so he had. There, on the altar itself, a black square in the last of the light, lay a little tinder box. Tom picked up a candle and used the stand that held it to move the tinder box aside. Then he took the altar cloth in shaking fingers and brutally scrubbed life into the quaking flesh of his hands and forearms as he dried the water out. Last of all, in a moment of blessed clarity, he swept the thing over his face and forehead, pulling back the dripping mop of his hair.
The instant Tom felt dry, he put the cloth aside and arranged the candles and the little box of wooden spills that sat beside them convenient to his shaking hands. Then he opened the tinder box. He had been using devices such as this since childhood – and in the dark at that. Why were his fingers so clumsy now? Why could he not hold the flint at the right angle? Why not raise a spark against the striker? His breath hissed in and out between his tight-clenched teeth as he struck and struck again. Wetness of cold sweat as well as running water was oozing past his wrists now. He dared one more strike, and raised a spark.
With all the concentration of a drowning man as he fastens his fist around a straw, Tom bent forward and controlled the jumping muscles of his belly so that a slow, steady breath of air fanned the tiny spark in the heart of the tinder until it flamed. With shaking hand, he reached for a spill and slid the end of it into the little smouldering ball, blowing as steadily as he could until the flame spread from the one to the other.
Slowly Tom straightened, unconsciously hunching over the tiny spark of life, protecting it from wind and rain while it ran unsteadily up the shaft of wood, and carried it across the tiny distance to the candle wick.
Even when both candles were well alight, Tom could not relax. He stumbled down the echoing, weirdly dancing chamber of the nave, past Janet, who lay as still as a fallen monument in her spreading puddle of water and out into the room beneath the tower. Like a leper, he skinned his insensible knuckles against the wood as he shifted the bigger balks aside and carried the makings of a fire into the nave. There were no pews – not even a private area for the great and the good. Had the tower not been half-ruined, there would have been nothing in the sparsely furnished place to burn except for the altar, and the priest’s chair that also served as pulpit. Then, likely, they would both have died before the bitter night was out.
The tower had fallen, though, and Father Little had piled the smashed wood in a dry corner, and so Tom built his fire in the very heart of God’s little house and, with candle flames and a spill or two he set it all alight – set it so and kept it so, all through the long, cold night; but that was by no means all he did.
Once the fire was safely alight, Tom looked to Janet. He stripped her of her cloak before he moved her and placed her cloak with his over the priest’s chair, which he pulled as close to the flames as he dared. Then, thinking more clearly as he began to warm a little, and having desecrated the altar cloth in any case, he pulled the solid table over and set up a simple rack between that and the chair using wood from the room outside. That rack conveniently went between the door and the fire, cutting down further on the draughts, especially after he hung her jack beside his upon it. Belts were next – with such daggers and guns as the Black Lyne had left to them – and shirts, though this left them both naked to the waist. The desecration of the altar cloth was compounded as he tried to rub some life and warmth – and dryness – into the marble of her shoulders and back. He did not touch her front, for three reasons: two were soft and white, pink-tipped and tempting even in his icy condition. The third was exactly between them and it was an ugly black: the great round bruise. That mark showed her fortitude, for it must have been a source of potent agony from the moment his shot had struck her to the moment she had fainted of the cold in the rushing river.
The fire was blazing merrily now, the ancient timbers spitting and crackling as the tall flames consumed them. It gave off brightness as well as warmth, allowing Tom’s wandering eyes to see the walls and roof of the place. The roof was high and pointed. Just as it kept the rain out, so it kept the smoke in, and already the highest point was beginning to fill with fumes – but, Tom thought, even eventual damnation for this sacrilege was preferable to instant death now. Below the sharp slope of the roof, the walls were rough – roughened, in fact. In the days before King Henry and the split away from Rome there had apparently been beautiful paintings of saints and Bible scenes there. They were gone now, and simple Bible texts etched in black against the rough white were all that remained. Idly, Tom wondered what had happened to the golden candelabra and great gold cross that were said to have decorated the place in the legends of his youth, long forgotten until this moment — until the necessity had arisen, in this place of all places and at this particular time, of distracting his lower spirits from the fact that he was alone with a near-naked woman.
Even this close to the fire the flags of the floor still struck icily through their sopping clothes. When he was sure he could bring no more life into her upper body working as he was, therefore, he lifted her and sat her on the steaming cloaks in the priest’s chair. Then he fell to easing off her boots, allowing the warmth of the fire to bring further life into his lower back and buttocks as he worked. Her boots were not quite as long as his, but they were equally full of water and pebbles, both of which slopped out of them as soon as they came free. He emptied each with almost drunken care and stood them as close to the fire as he dared.
‘So, this is ravishment, is it? It’s a sight more gentle than my mother warned me. And a sight less hot to boot.’
Tom sat back on his heels and looked up at her. In the firelight she seemed a thing made all of gold – above the waist, at least, and below her raven hair. He opened his mouth to rebut the accusation. Then he recognized the tone of her voice. He glanced up further. Her eyes were resting on him like the eyes of a night-hunting cat, as huge as though she had been drizzling belladonna into them. He looked up further still. On the wall above her head it said: THOU SHALT NOT COMMIT ADULTERY; and for some reason that struck him as exquisitely funny.
‘Janet Kerr,’ he said, his voice atremble with strange hilarity, ‘you are safe from me this night. What with the river reminding me of the closeness of death and the place reminding me of the nearness of heaven and, most especially, these boots reminding me of the torments of hell, I fear I would never dare to transgress.’
She sat for a moment, looking down at him. Then she smiled and said, ‘Let us remove your boots at least, and see what might follow then, in the matter of heaven at least.’
The morning sun came late and dull. It found them enmeshed in a tangle of cloaks and clothing – and of each other’s limbs. Nothing was dry, but everything was warm and, such had been the length of their attempts to visit heaven and their repeated little brushes with exquisite death, the fire was still ablaze. Tom woke first, stirred as ever by his stomach. He opened his eyes groggily, for he had not been asleep for all that long; and the first thing he saw was a pile of pebbles from his boot. In the absence of pillows such as soft southerners were growing used to, they had used blocks of wood, but even so his face was close down to the floor. The pebbles seemed quite a little mountain to him, therefore; and, in the brightness of the fire as it struck across his shoulder, they seemed to be gleaming a little. Still held by the rags of last night’s sensual dream, he reached out and felt the gleaming pebbles with an idle finger. They were warm. He stirred them. They were smooth – almost as smooth as Janet wrapped against him. He picked one up. It was heavy. It was very heavy indeed.
Slowly, carefully, gently as though in a dream, Tom sat up. The cold whipped at his shoulders at once but he paid it no mind at all. Even shadowed from the fire, with nothing but the dull cobweb-grey of the morning, the pebble seemed to glitter; and it slid down into his palm with almost sensuous slowness, like quicksilver. But it wasn’t silver at all. What in God’s creation was it?
Janet stirred against him, coming awake. Gently, even in his dazzled state of mind, he extricated himself from her and began to sort through the gleaming pile. Still almost asleep, as though sleepwalking indeed, Janet pulled herself away from him and stood. She caught up some covering and padded away towards the door. Cold struck again and bore upon him most urgently that they had best get dressed and moving at once; but the gleaming pile distracted him – so that Janet had to scream twice, and at the top of her lungs, before he ran out to see what had frightened her.
Even when he reached her side she had to gesture twice again before he looked up and saw: halfway up the tower was a little balcony, floored with wood and edged with a rough banister. Here stood Father Little staring down at them – staring down and screaming, eyes and mouth spread wide, tongue rigid and protruding; screaming with stark terror.
But screaming silently, for he was clearly dead.
Nineteen: Post Mortes
They had not buried John Musgrave in a coffin but in a winding sheet. So it was that Tom could begin to make observations about the true state of his brother even as he oversaw the manner in which his body was eased out of the shallow grave. A coffin would have been unusual, for John was not an important man, but in any case, thought Tom, given the state of the ground it would have been impractical, and given the state of the corpse it would have been impossible.
It was after noon on the third day, the dawn of which had brought Janet’s discovery of Father Little’s corpse. In the interim, Tom had discovered the father’s little pony tethered securely in the churchyard behind the kirk and had used that to make contact with one of the groups of men the battered Lord of the Waste had sent out to search for his still-missing guests in the dawn. He had accepted Lady Ellen’s assurance that the kitchen at Bewcastle fort had been cleaned and scoured in case the sickness visiting them now had arisen from some failure there. He had fed, dressed – in a clean, neatly mended shirt for a wonder – and left Janet mutinously in Lady Ellen’s charge.
Then he had returned to oversee the removal of the old priest’s body from the rough wooden balcony where it stood. Doing this had allowed the Master of Logic in Tom to make certain observations and deductions that he was keen to prove now. For, although Eve and Geordie were beginning to show some recovery, and he himself, although touched by the sickness, had hardly been hurt by it, he had three corpses to compare, and every reason to believe that they had been killed in the same way.
Although he had spent yesterday, the feast of St Stephen patron saint to horses, proving to his own satisfaction that something very like the Barguest must exist, nevertheless he was also certain in his own mind that it had not after all killed these men. For he could say with some certainty that Father Little had not died of fear, and with great certainty that Archie Elliot had not, for everyone said the man had just fallen off his horse of a sudden, calling and convulsing.
Yet if the Barguest had not killed Archie, Father Little and, therefore, John, then something else had – or, more likely, someone else. Some person, or some secret confederation of people, was a more likely proposition as the origin of these deaths than, say, a repetition of simple accidents; or they seemed so in Tom’s mind. This was because of the attempts on his own life, because of the generality of the sickness within Bewcastle fort, and because he could conceive of nothing that his brother John and Father Little could have shared, other than the company of the same, limitedly local people.
Certainly, thought Tom, checking his logic by assessing it from another angle, the Bar-guest had left no sign of being in the kirk at Blackpool Gate, though Satan himself might have stood close once or twice in the night, in the persons of the demons of lust. Nothing had clawed the stones or the rubble or the balks of timber beneath Father Little’s balcony. Yet something had clawed the great oak – and again, if not the Barguest, then something else, or someone else. Finally, therefore, that person or confederacy had struck time and again, covering their tracks for reasons of their own; but now they must be found and stopped and made to pay. For with the Father’s death, all ten of the commandments had been broken now.
Yesterday’s torrential rain had ceased. This morning had been brighter but ice-bound once more. Now the freezing afternoon threatened snow. The water of yesterday’s flood seemed hardly to have penetrated the earthen clods of John’s grave. Perhaps just enough to mould the rough cloth of the winding sheet more tightly about the body and give it a crisp patina of ice. Even to make it almost transparent in places – over the face, particularly. And here the outline of the cloth showed John’s face still frozen in his dying scream, but there was no great staining of mud; nor, to Tom’s relief, was there any great icy puddle out of which the body might have to be chipped like a precious stone in an open mine.
That had been a particular worry to Tom, who was still castigating himself over the length of time it had taken him to come to this necessary point in his investigation. The God of the Borders was not a forgiving God, and Tom was quite sure that laggardness was almost as much of a sin as the manner in which he had passed last night.
Then again, no: there could be few things worse than the list of desecrations he had committed, finishing with carnal knowledge of a Kerr in the chancel of a kirk.
Tom gave himself a mental shake and called his straying wits, blessed with enough self-knowledge to understand that his thoughts were wandering because of the horror of the work at hand. This, though, was the horror he had been sent into the North to face. Therefore Tom jumped into the icily dry and solid bottom of the grave as soon as he was able. Even as he did so, he was struck by how wide the hole was – something that had not been obvious with all the rough clumps of earth piled neatly on top of it; and he saw at once why this was so. John’s body, lying reverently on its back, eyes fixed on heaven, was still spread wide at hand and knee. It was still frozen in the attitude in which they must have found it, kneeling with one knee on one of the two spread branches and the other on the other one. He had remained frozen in that attitude for more than a week now – frozen literally since his burial, perhaps, for all the world nearby had been in the grip of frost and ice for at least a month now; but frozen in other terms than being gripped by ice.
For, thought Tom, taking hold of the marble-solid arm within the winding sheet, Father Little’s arm had felt no softer; and, although Tom might allow the kirk at Blackpool Gate to have been icy-cold in all areas except one, it was obvious that the good father had died on his feet, and remained frozen on his feet most unnaturally. Every dead man that Tom had seen had fallen at the point of death, if not before; but not Father Little. He had locked into some kind of seizure, had set like a rock as he died, as though he had seen not the Barguest but the Gorgon itself.
As Hobbie had said while they fought to free the good old man from the balcony, they could have carried him to one of the empty chapels in his church and stood him up as the statue of a saint.
