Sacrilege: A Novel

by S. J. Parris

  “Find a bed where you will,” he slurred, pointing vaguely at the rest of us, then crashed into a chair and lurched towards the door, unlacing his breeches as he went. Two of the others heaved themselves unsteadily to their feet and stumbled after him. A crashing sound came from the corridor, as of someone falling into furniture. Only Bates was left, shuffling the cards and looking around the table at his fallen companions with disdain. He seemed worryingly alert. As his eyes came to rest on me, I quickly affected a cloudy gaze and swayed a little in my chair.

  “Looks like we are the last men standing, Filippo,” he said, a slight slur in his voice. “God, what I wouldn’t give for a woman now. If only Nick had dismissed that old crone and got himself a young housemaid, we might have had some sport with her, eh?”

  By way of answer, I let out a convincing belch.

  “There is a bawdy house outside the West Gate might still let us in at this hour,” he said, hopefully. “Shall we try it, you and I?”

  I waved a hand imprecisely, shaking my head. “I would be no use to a woman in this state,” I said, slumping forward across the table. “But you go.”

  Bates regarded me for a moment, then sighed.

  “No. It can wait.” He clicked his tongue impatiently and stretched out in his chair, his hands clasped behind his head. “God’s blood, I had just as well go drinking with my infant nieces for all the company these fellows have been tonight. We were supposed to keep on till dawn. You will take another cup, though, Filippo? Don’t leave me up drinking by myself here. I’ll wager you have some wild stories to tell from your travels.” He yawned and filled his tankard again and turned to me, the pitcher held out expectantly. The flush in his cheeks from the wine made him look even younger, and I saw that, for all his swagger, he was still just a boy, afraid of the silence, of being left alone. If I had not joined the Dominican order and given my twenties to philosophy and theology, might I have ended up in this kind of company? I was glad now that I never had the choice. Reluctantly I raised my cup for more.

  Bates continued to drink steadily while I concealed my desperation for him to join the others in sleep, and instead recounted the tale of a young man in Naples who makes mischief by advising his lascivious elderly neighbour on the best way to seduce a beautiful courtesan, ensuring that the old man is caught out by his wife, while the young hero becomes the girl’s lover himself. Into the story I wove other characters: a miser, a conniving alchemist, and a pedantic schoolmaster, all bested by the wit of the young man, who I modestly implied was my younger self. Bates roared with laughter, poured himself more wine, and I watched in hope of seeing his eyelids droop as the story progressed. He had no idea, of course, that I was telling him the plot of The Candlemaker, a comedy I had written for the stage some years earlier; a ribald tale with a philosophical slant, filled with characters just like those I had observed when I first arrived in the glorious noisy, filthy, sexy chaos of the city of Naples as a youth. Bringing those streets to life made me feel how much I missed it.

  It is rare that a storyteller feels delight at sending his audience to sleep, but I silently rejoiced when the wine and the late hour finally worked on Bates enough for him to stand up, sway a little on the spot, and then announce his intention of finding a place to bed down. I grunted, lay my head on my arms, and waited until the sound of his footsteps on the stairs and the boards overhead faded to silence.

  My own head was more than a little fuzzy from the wine. I blinked hard to clear my vision, and when I was certain that no one was stirring, I took the two longest candles from the table and moved as noiselessly as I could towards the door, leaving my fellow gamblers snoring, spit falling in threads from their open mouths to pool on the boards beneath their sleeping heads.

  I crossed the stone-flagged entrance hall and took the passageway past the stairs towards the back of the house, where I found a large, well-appointed kitchen, evidently cleaned and scrubbed scrupulously by the housekeeper before she retired for the night. I paused and looked around, the candles’ flames sending shadows skittering up the walls and across the black opaque panes of the casements. From somewhere in the distance came the drawn-out, wavering cry of an owl, a sound that never failed to make the hairs stand up on my neck, and I smiled in the dark thinking of the girl Rebecca and her belief that she had heard screaming coming from the burial ground. My fears that night were more prosaic; I did not want to be caught before I had a chance to uncover anything useful.

  A cellar, I concluded, if it was used for storage, would most likely have some access from the kitchen. I moved carefully, anxious not to stumble into anything—pots, pans, brushes—that I might knock to the floor, announcing my presence. At the far side of the room, opposite the vast hearth with its rows of roasting spits, was a door set in a recess that appeared to open onto a rear courtyard. Beside it, an empty lantern hung on an iron hook, and with some relief I blew out one of my candles in case I had need later, and fitted the other carefully inside the glass, saving myself the trouble of shielding its flame with my hand. Immediately its light bloomed and seemed brighter, and I held it up as I tried the latch of the back door. This was firmly locked, but to the left was an archway that led through from the kitchen into a large pantry, its shelves stacked with jars and bottles, full sacks lying against the wall on the floor.

  I lowered the lantern towards the floor and saw what I had hoped to find; a wooden hatch with an iron ring set into the flagstones. I set the lantern down on the floor and knelt beside it. Before I could reach out a hand to the ring, my breath was stopped in my throat by the sound of tapping from the room behind me. I swallowed silently, barely daring to turn, and it came again, sharp and insistent, a tap followed by a kind of scraping.

  Slowly, I pulled my dagger from its sheath; keeping it low by my side but with my arm tensed and ready to spring, I rose and moved back into the kitchen, one step at a time, holding the lantern aloft. The room was empty. I waited, straining to listen, until eventually the tap came again, from outside the window: tap-tap, tap-tap, scrape. I felt my legs buckle with relief as I realised it was the branch of a tree, nudged by the wind; I laughed softly, and heard the trembling in my own laughter.

  I worked quickly this time, determined not to be distracted again. To my surprise, the wooden hatch in the pantry opened smoothly, revealing a narrow flight of stone steps leading into a musty darkness below. Their treads were worn smooth with age and sagged in the middle from the passage of feet; I thought with pity of the elderly housekeeper being sent to fetch and carry up and down these precarious stairs. But perhaps she knew them so well by now she could find her way easily even in the dark. I was not so confident; keeping my feet within the yellow circle of the lantern’s glow, I descended carefully into a wide cellar, its ceiling supported in the centre by two thick stone pillars. Wooden barrels lined one wall, while another corner was filled with a jumble of what looked like broken furniture and a stack of crates, such as might be used to transport produce on a ship. I made a slow tour of the room with the light, examining objects, looking for traces of anything unusual on the floor or the walls, though already my heart was sinking with the weight of disappointment; I knew I was in the wrong place. The cellar had opened too easily to me; there was nothing hidden here but wine and refuse. The mysterious cellar Sophia had mentioned had to be elsewhere—yet where should I begin looking for it? It could not be more than a few hours until dawn, and I dare not be found wandering the house when the others awoke.

  I gave one last turn, willing myself to see anything I might have missed, straining so hard that it must have looked as if I was trying to see through the stone walls themselves. I stopped, struck by the thought. Perhaps that was it; this storage cellar was directly under the kitchen, but there could be more underground rooms beyond it, stretching out the length of the house. I shone the light again at the tangle of broken stools in the corner, splintered legs jutting into the air on top of an old wooden chest, casting spiky shadows on the ragged b
locks of stone that shored up the wall of the cellar among the foundations of the old manor. Beside them, the stack of wooden crates, about the height of a man, very neatly placed. Too neatly, perhaps; I crossed the room, set the lantern on the floor, and tried to lever the boxes away from the wall. They were heavy, but I managed to shift them enough to feel into the gap behind, where my fingers brushed over wood, not stone.

  Bracing myself, my palms growing slippery, I heaved the topmost of the wooden boxes from the pile and almost dropped it, staggering back under the weight so that my foot struck the lantern, which rocked for a few moments before mercifully deciding to stay upright. I steadied the box against my chest, the muscles in my arms standing out like cords as I set it on the floor with a heavy thud and paused to see if the sound had carried, sweat running down my collar at the exertion. What had Kingsley stored in these crates to make them so heavy? I lifted one edge of the wooden lid and found to my surprise that it had been left unfastened; inside was a pile of broken masonry. I lifted out a corner piece and realised letters were engraved on it, though faded almost smooth. This must be rubble cleared from the graveyard, the debris of old headstones. There could be no good reason for him to have squirreled it away in these crates, except as a useful deterrent against opening the door that clearly lay behind them.

  One by one, breathing hard and pausing only to wipe the sweat from my eyes on the shoulder of my shirt, I moved the crates away until the low door stood clear. It was made of wood with iron studs, rising to a pointed arch in the old style and not even reaching to the top of my head. Naturally, it was locked. With shaking hands, I took out the keys I had copied from Langworth and tried each of them. The third fitted, with a little tweaking, and I closed my eyes with silent gratitude as I heard the bolt slide back. Just as I was about to push the door open, I caught the sound of a footfall on the stairs behind me and whipped around, my hand reaching to my side for the dagger.

  If I had been a more superstitious man, I would have cried out at the sight, because the figure on the stairs seemed at first glance to have risen from one of the graves surrounding the house; dressed in a threadbare shift with a shawl around its shoulders, unbound tendrils of grey hair standing out from its head, the sunken features lit from beneath by the candle it carried in a terrible rictus. It took me a moment to compose myself, even though my rational mind realised it was only old Meg, the housekeeper, roused from sleep, and that her dreadful expression was merely a result of her own shock at finding me here. I ran a hand over my mouth, took a breath to steady myself, then pressed a finger to my lips with an imploring look.

  She appeared to consider this request for a moment, then stepped closer.

  “If it’s the wine you mean to steal,” she whispered, “you won’t find it in there. That door is locked, in any case.”

  I shook my head urgently and beckoned her nearer.

  “I am not here to steal anything. I am only looking for answers.”

  I saw her face draw immediately tighter, as if she knew what I alluded to.

  “Meg.” I bent my head and fixed her eyes with my own in the shifting light. “I am a friend of Soph—” I checked myself just in time. “Kate. Your mistress. I am here to help her. She always said you were kind to her.”

  The old woman hesitated; her desire to believe me seemed to be battling with her natural wariness towards a stranger and a foreigner. After a moment, her face crumpled and her thin fingers clasped my wrist.

  “She didn’t kill him,” she said, her voice barely escaping the dry lips.

  “I know.” I pressed my own hand over hers for reassurance. “But to save her I must find out who did. Sir Edward had secrets …” I gestured with my head towards the room behind us. Fear darted across Meg’s eyes again.

  “I have not been through that door, sir. Not once. Only he had the key and it has not been seen since he died.”

  “Someone took it from his corpse while it was still warm. But I have a copy.” I pushed the door an inch farther to show her it had opened. She inhaled sharply. “Well, then,” I said. “Let us see what your master wanted to hide.”

  Meg stepped back, shaking her head as if I had just suggested she walk through the gates of Hell itself. I turned, my hand on the latch.

  “Do you know what he kept in here, Meg?”

  She continued to shake her head as if her life depended on it, but the candle in her hand trembled and in its light I saw tears well up and spill over her lined cheeks. My heart swelled with pity and I squeezed her hand again. “It’s all right. You need not look.”

  “I never saw anything, sir, I swear it on the holy martyr. But sometimes I heard it. Dreadful sounds. There was nothing I could do, though, you understand? Not a thing.”

  “What did you hear?”

  She only pressed the back of her hand to her mouth to stifle a little sob and shook her head again. My gut tightened with a horrible apprehension.

  I pushed open the door and picked up my lantern, holding it up as I stepped forward into thick darkness.

  Before me there stretched out a passageway, lined with damp stone, tall enough for a man to walk along, if he stooped. It smelled as if no clean air had circulated there in recent memory, and I took shallow breaths through my mouth to avoid the lingering odour of decay. It was hard to get my bearings underground, but I had the sense that the passage was leading me away from the house, under the cemetery itself, and though I consider myself above superstitions and folktales, nonetheless I had to suppress a shudder at the thought of all those corpses pressing down overhead and to each side—an impression made stronger by the unmistakable smell of dead things that seemed to grow denser with every step.

  The floor beneath my feet was of compacted earth and I stepped forward carefully, keeping the lantern as steady as I could, to stop myself from stumbling, brushing thick cobwebs from my eyes and mouth with every step. After perhaps thirty yards, as I felt the faint stirrings of cold air as if from some vent nearby. I saw that three rough steps had been cut into the floor of the passage and that it ended abruptly in a wooden door. I pushed this gently with the flat of my hand and found that it opened a little way without too much difficulty; as I did so, something brushed swiftly past my foot in the dark and I leapt back, stifling a cry, heart pounding in my throat. Rats, no doubt; a faint scuffling came from whatever lay beyond that door.

  Gathering my courage, I pushed the door farther and squeezed through the gap, repeating to myself that I had nothing to fear except dropping the lantern. So I thought, until the full force of the stench hit me and I had to clutch the wall, fighting for breath as my head swam and my stomach rose, so that I was afraid I would faint and retch at the same moment. It is almost impossible to convey the horror of that smell, even now; a brutal mixture of rotting flesh as from a charnel house, with undercurrents of every other filthy human effluent: piss, vomit, ordure, and a faint note of something unfamiliar, almost sweet, herbal. It was as if I had opened the mouth of Hell and all its foul vapours had rushed out to poison the earth.

  Battling against the bile that threatened to choke me, I steadied myself and held up the lantern to examine this unspeakable place I had entered. I saw that I was inside an underground tomb, cut out of the earth and walled with stone, its floor covered with ancient flagstones carved with patterns I could not decipher in the candle’s thin light. On each of the four walls niches had been built with stone biers inset, two lengthways along the longer walls, the lower ones complete with reclining effigies, their features still remarkably sharp, protected down here from the ravages of wind and weather and by the cool air, which filtered in through unseen ventilation holes and raised gooseflesh on my skin. I looked up; above me, high enough to stand upright, was a vaulted ceiling, and opposite the passage where I had entered, a flight of stone steps led upwards, but the exit had been bricked up. I must be directly under the mausoleum I had seen in the churchyard earlier. I thought it curious that the tombs had not been desecrated when the prior
y was dissolved, as I knew many had been in other religious houses, but perhaps a few monks dead for three centuries were not enough to pique the interest of the commissioners who came to raze the buildings.

  Apart from the effigies on their stone biers, the tomb was empty. I moved forward with cautious steps, shining the light into the corners, keeping my sleeve pressed over my mouth, but could see no obvious reason why this place should have been so significant that Langworth needed to steal the key from Sir Edward Kingsley’s corpse. If anything had once been hidden here, Langworth must have returned to clear it out before anyone could find it. I cursed and was on the point of turning back when something drew my eye: a flash from the floor close against one of the end walls. I crossed quickly and knelt to see what object had caught the light, and almost cut my knee on a shard of glass. There were several lying in the same place, and when I picked up one of the largest I saw that it was curved on one side. I gathered some of the other fragments and realised that I was holding the broken pieces of a small glass alembic. Bringing one piece nearer to the light, I saw that there was a residue staining the interior, of what looked like a dark-greenish hue, though it was hard to tell as the candle flame flattened all colours. I put my hand down to my side to lever myself up and felt something rough beneath my fingertips; lifting the light again I saw that it was a short length of rope, frayed at one end where it looked to have been cut with a knife. A couple of feet away, tucked into the shadows, was a pile of sacking. Gingerly, I lifted one corner, pinching as little of the material as possible between my thumb and forefinger. As I did so, something stirred within and a large brown rat shot out of the filthy nest past my feet. I swore aloud in Italian and from behind me I heard a muffled cry. I whipped around to see Meg standing in the half-open doorway still holding a candle in one hand, her shawl clutched across her mouth. We stared at each other for a moment, our ragged breathing amplified unnaturally in the vault, until I burst out laughing. I could hear the hysterical note in it as Meg joined in, prompted by relief.