“Supposedly,” he said. “The man who sold it is dead, and if anyone knows exactly where it went, no one’s talking.”
“Right, but when you first told me that, I didn’t actually know about the witch connection to Malkin Tower,” she said, feeling a little embarrassed by the admission. “I’m probably the first visitor to Lancaster Castle who didn’t know who its most famous inmates were.”
“Probably so,” he said with a chuckle.
“Anyway, that made me realize: the buyer you spoke of must have assumed the gem had power because of its association with the witches.”
“Right,” said Hargreaves. “It’s rubbish, of course, doubly so since there was no tradition of crystals or stones being used in witchcraft in seventeenth-century England. All that New Age stuff about crystals and Wicca is completely different. The Lancashire witches weren’t practitioners of some alternative religion. They were poor, uneducated people who clung to whatever power people assumed they had, and their charms—such as they were—were garbled old Catholic prayers tacked on to folk remedies and curses: old-fashioned sympathetic magic. They weren’t Goddess worshippers, they weren’t practitioners of some pre-Christian fertility religion, and they didn’t use magic stones. Whoever bought the Malkin Tower gem did so based on nothing more than coincidence or what we scholar types call cultural association.”
Another blind alley, then.
“OK,” she said, deflated. She scanned Clifford’s letter again and her eye fell on the phrase “Where I will alight, I cannot say, though I have a mind to explore something of the lands recounted by our infamous countryman, Thomas Gage.”
“Does the name Thomas Gage mean anything to you?” she asked, conscious that she was clutching at straws.
“Amazingly, yes,” he said. “He was an English Catholic who joined the Spanish Franciscans and went to Mexico as a missionary. He then converted to Anglicanism and wrote a rather unpleasant book about his former brothers and their work. It was published in...hold on...” There was a paused while he checked. “Sixteen forty-eight.”
Two years before Edward Clifford made a similar journey.
That was something, she supposed. Clifford had intended to go to Mexico, to escape Europe entirely and make a new life for himself. She had guessed as much, but it at least showed she was on the right track.
So why didn’t it feel like she was making progress?
“Well, I appreciate your help,” she said. “If you stumble upon Edward Clifford’s name elsewhere, would you mind giving me a call?”
He said he’d be glad to and took down both her number and her e-mail address, but she hung up with a sense of having run into a wall. Before she shut the laptop down she did a quick search for crystals, experimenting with the key words “ruby,” “chrome,” “iron,” and a host of others. She got nothing that was clearly useful except the oblique remark that a combination of chromium and iron was indeed very rare but might enhance a ruby’s optical properties, whatever that meant.
She showered to clear her head, laced up her walking shoes, slung her laptop case over her shoulder, and set out heading west. She needed fresh air, and a walk to see to the historic grounds of Newchurch seemed in order. Following her map, she soon reached the hamlet of Roughlee, once the home of Alice Nutter, the lady of property hanged as a witch in Lancaster.
Before long, she spotted the church with the swelling, gloomy mass of Pendle as a backdrop. There was a footpath that climbed up the hill, beginning with ancient stone steps, but Deborah had business in the old church first, and she entered the churchyard through a blue painted metal gate.
The church was like a dozen others she had glimpsed from train windows over the last few days: a rectangular nave with a sloping roof, and a square battlemented tower with a clock at the west end. She was looking it over casually, taking in the setting that had a kind of windswept beauty, when she saw something that made her breath catch. She stared at it, her eyes wide.
There was no doubt.
Halfway up the church tower, set into the stone, was a curious oval shape with a dark center: an elliptical eye exactly like the one that, alongside the Clifford coat of arms, adorned the ring they had found in Ek Balam.
Chapter Fifty-Two
Hargreaves hung up the phone and chewed his lower lip thoughtfully.
“Barry,” he said. “Fancy leading the tour?”
Barry, seventeen, an aspiring history student due to begin university in the autumn, had looked at him like he’d just divulged the whereabouts of the Holy Grail.
“Seriously?” said Barry, pushing his lank hair out of his eyes.
“Seriously,” said Hargreaves. “I want to nip down into the archives for a few minutes. You can handle this lot, right?”
He nodded at the assembled tourists who had clustered around the gift shop: a family with a petulant preteen boy, an elderly parson type, two enthusiastic American backpackers, and a dowdy middle-aged dear in a blue mac.
“Absolutely,” said Barry. “Brilliant. I won’t let you down, sir.”
Hargreaves smiled at the boy’s enthusiasm and on his way to the basement stopped into the kitchenette to make a cuppa. After the water boiled, he put an inch of milk and two sugars in a souvenir mug, poured the boiling water into a pot with two teabags, and left it to steep.
The library was two doors and a short flight of steps down from the kitchenette. It may once have been a storage room that had been pressed into service as a dungeon when the castle got overcrowded. It was stone flagged and windowless, and had been used to store prison records for fifty years or so. Some of the older files were still here—or at least the pompous and partisan jottings that had passed for files in those days—but the twentieth- and twenty-first-century stuff had all been removed. Hargreaves was glad. One of the reasons he liked history was because the grim injustices of the past were just that: past. It was one thing to show the cramped cells to the tourists, or the manacles used to chain the Australia-bound deportees, or even the wheeled hanging chair, which had been used to get the lame Jane Scott to the gallows in 1828, but it was another thing entirely to have to deal with the reality of a modern prison.
The wheeled hanging chair had always haunted him, though. Jane Scott had been a pathetic and guileless creature who had attempted to cajole a man into marrying her by claiming to be a wealthy woman. In order to get that wealth, she had bought arsenic from a druggist in Preston where she lived, claiming it was for the rats. She blended it into a porridge that she fed to her parents. Her father had vomited most of it up, but the doctor had not been able to save her mother. The man she had been interested in, a man who had probably seduced her and then reneged on whatever promises of marriage he had made, was quick to witness against her and she had fallen apart. When the guilty verdict had been read to her, she had broken down, confessing to the poisoning and to the killing of two illegitimate children, one hers, one her sister’s. By the time she came to be executed, her health declined so much that she could no longer stand.
Hargreaves had dreams about it. He wasn’t sure why. Nothing had stamped itself on his subconscious like that damned chair, squeaking on castors as the pitiful, stupid woman was wheeled out to her death. As he had told Deborah Miller, the tourists loved that chair, and it was only in that room that he was glad of the prison’s policy disallowing photographs.
Imagine them mugging for the camera beside that thing.
The castle was full of old horrors. It had, after all, been the site of brandings and beatings, incarcerations in darkness, filth and disease, and, of course, of countless executions—more than two hundred and fifty between the years of 1782 and 1865. But it was Jane Scott and her chair that had gotten under his skin and lodged there.
He shuddered and pushed the idea from his mind.
As Hargreaves turned on his computer—the one without the dodgy mouse—he remembered his tea. He was just stepping out when the phone began to ring. It was a prewar black thing that felt brittle
and it seemed to ring out of the past. Hargreaves cursed, then resolved to get his tea anyway. The only person who knew he was there was Barry, and Barry would just have to fend for himself for once. If it was important, he’d call back.
He sipped at the tea as he carried it down the hallway, but it was too hot. He set it down on the stained table where he was working and started thumbing through indexes.
The royal court records were full of Cliffords, most of them connected to Lady Anne, but there was no Edward among King Charles’s courtiers. Then he tried searching family records on court servants and pages, and there it was: Edward Clifford, a page attending on His Majesty for four years, starting in 1630. There were details of his conduct and training, so that the boy must have been considered something of a rising star. Hargreaves reached for his tea and sipped it, wondering why the boy seemed to be under the protection of prominent people, and why he needed it. After 1634, Edward was back in Skipton. In the 1640s, he did “honorable service” during the roundhead siege of the castle. He seemed to have had dealings with Cromwell himself in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War in London, but in 1649—the date the king was executed—he disappeared from the record entirely. He opened an e-mail message to Deborah Miller, typed in the pertinent details, and sent it.
He was about to quit when he spotted one last tantalizing reference, also from 1649. The Lord Protector—Cromwell—“on the advice of both George Withers and Sir Henry Mildmay,” earnestly sought out Edward Clifford “as a royalist traitor to the State.” Withers and Mildmay, thought Hargreaves, sipping his tea. Why are those names familiar?
He opened a search engine and typed them in, but at the same instant, the phone rang again.
It was Barry, and he sounded rattled.
“What is it boy? I’m working.”
“Mr. Hargreaves,” he sputtered. “I’ve lost one of the visitors on the tour. She’s vanished. We were moving out of the Shire hall and I realized she wasn’t with us anymore. She could be anywhere. It could be part of a prison breakout,” he said, sounding hysterical. “I’m going to lose my job, aren’t I?”
Hargreaves told him to calm down and call the security office, and said he would be right there. He was smiling as he hung up, but then he heard a sound in the stacks behind him, and his smile stalled. At almost the same instance, the colors on the computer monitor seemed to swirl so that he had to grip the table to keep from falling.
He blinked, listening, and then he heard a faint squeak like turning metal. A sense of foreboding filled him, but he felt rooted to the spot. Two seconds passed, three, then it came again. And again. He felt cold, stricken with dread, and then glimpsed something gliding beyond the stacks, visible only through the gaps above and below the books: a shape like a haggard woman, her head down. She was sitting but somehow kept moving, drifting along the floor like she was on wheels.
Jane Scott.
She had come for him at last.
Chapter Fifty-Three
James sat on the end of the bed under the mosquito nets and watched her read. He had known he would eventually show the letter to Alice despite all his protestations to the contrary, but he should have held out longer. They had made love properly at least, but she hadn’t bothered to conceal how much that had been an unspoken deal.
You show me yours...
Something like that. It left him feeling weak and dirty, but it had done two good things. It had given him someone he could confide in about his predicament, which made him feel less lonely, and it had taken some of the shine off Alice. He had known, of course, that she was hard and selfish and manipulative, but he hadn’t had the power to walk away from her. He was captivated. Now, oddly, in the moment where they were closest through sex and the shared knowledge of their secret, he felt more distant from her. This was, he thought as he watched her read the scrawled sheets of folded parchment, a good thing. He knew he could not trust her.
When he had opened the canvas bag she had whooped with delight and triumph, and her eyes had been full of a wild light that was more than just exhilaration. It was, what? Rapture? A joy beyond anything she had shown when they’d made love, certainly. But it wasn’t surprise, and that bothered him, because there was something hidden in her face that made him think she had already known what he would be bringing back from Coba.
But how?
He sat up and read the letter again over her shoulder, peering at the rough and uneven writing.
My honoured mother,
Much has happened since I last wrote and the consequences of my small doings have caught up with me at last. This will be, I fear, my last letter, nor do I think it will ever reach you. The Spanish priest who bore my former correspondence is no longer here, nor are any of his compatriots. The circumstances of their departure is the bulk of my story, but it is also its end, and though leaving this life grieves me little, it pains me that I will not see you again and that my words will lie with my poor remains forever. Or rather, a part of them.
I have, I think, learned impetuousness from thee, though I did not suck it from thy breast, and defiance wherein the cause is just. You schooled me in much but nothing of greater import did I learn at your kind tutelage than that the world can be a most wicked place and that it is right and proper to sometimes stand against it.
I have been here amongst the Indians of that region of New Spain called Mexico some dozen years, and in that time I have seen much not dreamt of in the land of my birth, things of great beauty, and skill, and things which are too terrible to report, even to one such as you who are made of sterner stuff than most. Some of those terrible things were done among the Indians themselves, but many more were visited upon them by our European cousins the Spanish, who have made it their purpose to conquer this land and strip it of its resources. The Yucatan has been spared some of the most appalling aspects of the conquest, because it lacks the precious metals and other minerals which the Spanish seek to send back to their homeland, but they have brought great hardship nonetheless, even in spite of their own priests who have—in my sight—urged patience from the soldiers. But the army, though it has some good, God-fearing men, has many in it which are no more than a disordered rabble of drunkards who are here for profit, and are quick to use the sword and the noose. I have heard of whole villages strung up by ropes from the trees, the very babes lashed by the throat to their desperate mothers’ heels. Perchance the forest breeds a wildness in the Indians, but barbarism lives not in what we know or believe, but in our actions, and in this I have seen the Europeans stoop to acts our country’s worst villains and hangmen would balk at. The Indians are but poorly armed and of a desperate poverty wherein they live and die by the meager crops they raise, so that a drought produces famine. It has been easier here for the invaders than in places dominated by the so-called Aztecs. Here there is little unity between villages, and the old civilizations which boasted mighty armies have long since passed. The worst years were a century agone, but the Indians still live under a great burden, and sometimes that burden becomes more than usually weighty.
The latest dispute arose when a captain from Valladolid moved his troops through the forest near the village. It was said he had once seen most bloody action, an uprising by Indians far south of here in which they had executed several Spanish and some Indians who worked with them in horrible and unnatural ways. The captain’s wife was among the murdered. He took to heart then a most vile hatred for the Indians, and revenged himself with his troops upon a neighboring village, killing many in battle and executing those he captured in ways which—save the removal of the hearts, which the Indians had done as a sacrifice to their gods—was the copy of the brutal acts he was avenging. When word reached Spain of his response he was—it is said—told to desist from future reprisals, but either the order never reached him, or he ignored it. He brought his troops north, raping and destroying all he found, till he came to Ek Balam.
We had word of their coming, and I was able to use what able-bodied men w
e had to arrange archers on the pyramids in the ancient town where the villagers still live as I once stood upon the walls in Skipton to fire down upon the roundheads. Our numbers were few, some twenty-six men and a few women and children strong enough to fight, but the enemy had expected little resistance, none organized. When they rode into town we met them with several volleys of arrows and though we killed none right away—they being well armored against bows—several were injured or lost their horses and caused great confusion and disorder among the troops. The Spanish fired their harquebuses but hit none of our men, and as they sought cover, were two of their soldiers killed with arrows. As the Spaniards split up, some seeking to regroup and some fleeing outright, we leapt down onto them and tore them from their horses. In the struggle which followed I did meet the enemy captain and cut off his arm with the sword I wore when holding Skipton for the King.
At this the remaining Spaniards fled, though the Captain still breathed, and—under my guidance—did one of the village women tend his wound. For two days I thought he would die, but he began to gain some strength. At first he would not speak, and showed great hatred for myself and the Indians, even those who nursed him back to health, but I visited him every day, and at last we did pray together with some of the Maya who had been called to Christ by Spanish missionaries, albeit to a version of the old faith marked still by their own superstitious practices. Yet should I not call them superstitions though I countenance them not, as I have grown wary of discounting the Catholic view, though I hold fast to my own. It seems to me now that we see the world from the slim angle of the place where we were born, altered only slightly by our slender experience of others.
The Captain stayed with us a month, but then his troops arrived with a new commander, one Gomez, and emissaries from Valladolid who came with plans to execute all who remained. As you can well believe, they were much surprised to find the Captain still alive, and marvelled more so when he did speak on our behalf. But yet Commander Gomez was implacable: his troops would visit upon the village, he said, the same number and manner of deaths and mutilations that the Captain and his men had suffered. It was to be an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. I spoke then for the village, urging patience, and the Captain too did remind Gomez that the attack upon us had been quite unwarranted. The man shed tears for those who would be killed, though he himself had been poised to kill them but two months earlier.
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