Well, they have your cell phone number anyway, and so far they seem happy to have Bowerdale.
She left her number, reread Hargreaves’s message one more time, and returned to the entries for 1620 in the records book. Thinking of Bowerdale gave her another pang of guilt. It was too early to call Powel, so she e-mailed him, a long and impassioned plea for Cornerstone to stay on top of the State Department, and for the State Department to stay on top of the Mexican authorities.
She returned to the parish records.
Edward, it seemed, was not a common name in Pendle. Three were born in 1620. One died almost immediately, one went to work on a farm near Clitheroe. The other changed his last name. He was born Edward Davis, on August 4, 1620, to his mother Janet. There was no mention of a father. The scribe, however, had noted in the marginalia that he was “raised at the charge of the Cliffords at Skipton, whose name he took.”
“There you are,” she said.
So. A poor local woman has an illegitimate child. Lady Anne Clifford of Skipton, who had dealings with the villagers as servants and as half relatives, the result of her father’s seeking affection outside her mother’s bed, adopted the child, raised it as her own, and sent the boy to school and then to court. Why? And what happened in 1634 that destroyed the boy’s hopes for a courtly career? She went back to Hargreaves’s message and read the lines about Edward’s fall from grace:
“There’s a courtier’s diary from the summer of 1634,” Hargreaves had written. “The bloke sounds like a snake, but you might find something of interest in his venom for Edward Clifford. He wrote, ‘‘Tis one thing to have a beggar, a whore, and a famous fool for a mother, ‘tis something quite different for that mother’s evil to be made manifest in the shrunken child.’”
Deborah sat back, confused. How could anyone at court know anything about Edward’s real mother? But the charge of whoredom and beggary could not possibly be leveled at Lady Anne.
She was mulling all this when the phone rang. She snatched it up.
“Barry?” she said.
But it wasn’t Barry. It was Jesus at the INAH physical anthropology section at the Regional Yucatan Center, whom she had only spoken to once before.
“You called?” he said. “I heard your message. Rylands did not give you the information?”
“Rylands?” she said. “What information?”
“The bones from the hand you sent are no more than three hundred and fifty years old. Not Mayan. European. There’s a tiny fleck of steel in the bone. The steel is almost certainly Spanish—not Hispanic—Spanish, from Spain. A sword, probably.”
“I see,” she said.
“Probably the arm was cut off by a sword.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes,” he said. He had clearly saved the best till last. “We were able to extract DNA from the finger bone. It was not a child. It was a man, an adult.”
“But the bones were too small,” said Deborah, though even as she said it her eyes flicked back to the image of the tiny, bearded man standing below the portrait of Lady Anne.
The mother’s evil made manifest in the shrunken child...
“He had achondroplasia,” said Jesus.
Deborah stared at the figure in the painting and something in her mind slid into place.
“He was a dwarf,” she said.
“Exactamente.”
Chapter Fifty-Five
Deborah sat on a bench against the wall of the church with her laptop case beside her, waiting for the boy at Lancaster castle—Barry—to call. The vicar had put the books away, walked with her out to the churchyard, and advised her not to look for witches’ graves. “Don’t believe what tourists say,” he said. “No convicted witch would have been buried in this consecrated ground, even so-called gentry like Alice Nutter.”
“So what happened to their bodies if they’re not in buried here?”
“Dumped in a communal pit,” said the vicar, “their graves unmarked. People were scared of witches even after they were dead.”
And with this grim pronouncement he left her, and she sat looking down over the sloping graveyard with its varied headstones—some slick, upright, and new, others ancient, lurching, and weather-beaten like dead teeth.
She thought of Edward Clifford, who had been born with dwarfism into a poor rural community in the early seventeenth century. She couldn’t begin to imagine what life would have had in store for someone in those circumstances, had not the austere and defiant hand of Lady Anne Clifford not scooped him up. Could she have believed that her careful nurture would have compensated for what an ignorant and superstitious age might see as marks of evil on his body? What had the letter said?
The court was too decorous for such as I. I know the labours you undertook on my behalf and know that they came from the best of intentions, from love for that the world finds unlovable...
Too decorous indeed for a poor Lancashire boy marked by dwarfism. Yet, for a time, at least, he seemed to have been successful, and perhaps Lady Anne had thought he would continue to rise. Robert Cecil had risen to be Queen Elizabeth’s most powerful counselor, she recalled, despite being unusually small and hunchbacked. Perhaps Lady Anne saw Cecil—whom she would have known as a child at court herself—as a model for the boy she had rescued from poverty.
So what had happened? Edward Clifford had four good years at court, then nothing. Clearly he retained—along with his adoptive mother—his royalist sympathies or he would not have been defending Skipton Castle against Cromwell’s Parliamentarians during the Civil War, but it seemed unlikely that it was politics that lost him his position. The war, after all, didn’t begin till 1642, by which time Edward had already been gone from court for eight years. Why? Something must have pushed him from court in 1634, something that did not tarnish his respect for King Charles.
Deborah fished in her bag and drew out the water bottle from the cottage, unscrewed the top, and took a sip. She knew whom the arm in the tomb belonged to and where he had come from, but that seemed to make little difference to the larger question of what had been buried with him and where those things were now.
It was cold and damp in the churchyard. Deborah sipped from her water again and noticed that the light had shifted. What had been rustically picturesque before seemed darker now, lonely and isolated. The wind had picked up and cloud had covered the pale sun. She gazed down through the monuments and headstones—all much larger than those common in the States—and was aware of a shape at the far end of the cemetery that she hadn’t noticed before. Someone, she thought, was kneeling on the ground. Beside the figure was a black dog, which seemed to be turned toward Deborah as if watching her.
Deborah rose, picked up the laptop case by its strap, and, without a clear sense of what she was doing, began to walk slowly down the path through the graves. Getting up made her light-headed, and she clutched a great stone cross till the dizziness passed. Then she drank again from her bottle and continued to walk. She stumbled, the ground swimming up to meet her, and a wave of apprehension broke out like sweat over her body, so that she felt like she was in a dream in which she couldn’t stop moving toward something she did not want to see. And then the path turned and there was the huddled figure, a woman, her back to Deborah, but her old, clawed hands visible as they dug out the grave dirt in handfuls. She was wearing a silver ring with a rough turquoise stone. Beside her was the dog, looking at her, its body quite still. Arranged on the edge of the flat-topped stone were five human teeth and a clay figure with a tangle of hair attached.
Deborah turned to flee, but she was unsteady on her feet, and as the dog shot out in front of her she fell hard against a raised gravestone. She stood, clutching her shoulder, and began to weave up the path toward the church. She breathed in the cool air and thought it cleared her head a little, but when she looked up she saw a man standing by the church tower, a black man in a long trench coat. There was no sign of the dog.
She hesitated. The man was coming down to
ward her and his strides were long and purposeful. Without thinking further, she cut off the path to the right, moving in among the graves and dropping to a crouch. She paused behind one large headstone, then scuttled quickly past two more, then cut up toward the church.
Her head seemed to be clearing, but the sense of alarm would not leave her. She glanced back but could see no sign of the old woman who had been digging teeth from the earth, and suddenly Deborah was sure there had been no such woman. It had been some kind of waking dream like the one she had had at the cottage the previous evening. There was no demonic black dog running through the cemetery either, and she considered standing up and walking calmly back up to the church. She could find the vicar and ask him to call a doctor. Something was wrong, but she had recovered enough of her old rational self to think it had little to do with witches and demons.
But when she did start to move, she saw the man, his trench coat flapping in the wind. She crouched again to get out of sight. He was walking through the graves, searching. He was no devil, but he was also not the vicar. Below the coat, he wore a crisp white shirt with a tie. She thought she had seen him before, on a train perhaps.
Yes. On the train from London to Lancaster.
He was tall and young and athletic, dangerous looking in a precise, military kind of way. He was also—she felt sure—looking for her, and she was just as sure that she did not want him to find her.
Chapter Fifty-Six
Though the headstones were huge, there just wasn’t that much cover in the graveyard and no clear way out. Down one side was a high brick wall, overshadowed by yew and sycamore trees. Deborah risked a look around the great brownish headstone behind which she was hiding and saw the man turning and looking about. He had lost her for a moment. He was standing no more than thirty yards away, his back to her, and she watched as he shrugged out of his trench coat and tossed it over an adjacent grave. As he moved, she saw that he was wearing a pistol holster with a large automatic on his left side.
She ducked back behind the stone and tried not to panic. Calling the police was no good. They’d take too long to arrive and wouldn’t arrive ready for a firefight. She had to get to where the vegetation was densest, then work her way back up toward the church and beyond. The graves were random in their arrangement but were still in linear ranks, which meant that hiding among them was like being among oversized dominoes: if the man in the trench coat took a step or two, changed his line of sight by only a few degrees, he would see her. She looked back to where she had been: still no woman digging in the dirt, and now—her head clearing still further—even the idea that she had seen such a woman seemed preposterous. Beyond that spot the top of a brick wall ran up to the road in scalloped terracing that matched the steep drop of the churchyard. At its lowest point, the wall was only four feet high. If she could get there without being seen—crossing the open center of the cemetery and its path in the process—she could get over the wall and follow it up to the street.
Easier said than done.
She slipped her head through the strap of her laptop case so that it wouldn’t swing, gripped the edge of the headstone in front of her, and peered round. The man in the trench coat hadn’t moved, but as she looked she caught another blur of movement from up close to the church: the black dog was back. It was snuffling through the graves toward her.
It’s just a dog, she told herself. Not a devil or a familiar.
But if it came sniffing around her, it might be trouble enough. The man with the gun had seen it too, and now he turned toward it, watching where it went. Deborah chose quickly. She ducked back down the hill, keeping low but moving as fast and quiet as she could in the long, damp grass. One row of graves, two, then stop. She flung herself down, no idea if he had seen her or not. She was breathing hard and her heart was racing.
She had put some distance between herself and her pursuer, but she still needed to get across the path. Overhead a wood pigeon cooed, owlish. The sky was getting darker and she felt the first drops of rain.
Good, she thought. Might make me harder to see.
She got as low as she could, her face in the wet grass, and angled her head around the gravestone. Nothing but crosses and headstones. Had he moved? Slowly, her muscles aching with the effort, she got to her hands and knees. In front of her was one more grave marker with a great stone angel, greenish and blotched with lichen, then the path and no cover for thirty feet. She didn’t know where either the gunman or the dog were, and trying to find out would probably get her spotted. She crouched, her legs tightening like a sprinter in the blocks.
She bolted out from behind the grave clutching the laptop to her chest, didn’t pause behind the green angel, and sprinted hard toward the brick wall, dropping and rolling as softly as she could as soon as she was among the gravestones. Even as she ran she held her breath, waiting for the shot or the bark, but nothing came. She skittered a little in the dirt as she launched herself into the heavy ferns that had overgrown the corner of the cemetery, but didn’t know if she had been seen or heard. The wall—now more clearly stone, not brick—was only a few yards away. Old broken headstones had been propped up against it, and there were heavy trees and shrubs growing alongside it. The pattering of the rain was nearly loud enough to drown out the thumping of her heart. She took another breath and ran.
She almost made it.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Some of the graves, she had noted, had low ornamental iron railings, no more than a few inches high, their corner posts capped with little rusting fleurs-de-lis. Deborah was nearly at the wall when some matted ferns she stepped on turned out to be hiding one of them. Her foot snagged on the rail, and she fell heavily on her hands. She didn’t cry out, but the fall had been loud enough.
She heard the dog bark and knew it was coming. By the time she was up and running, vaulting the wall as well as her stinging hands would let her, she could hear the gunman coming too.
But she was committed now, and if there had been any doubt about the man’s interest in her, his pounding pursuit wiped that out. She had no choice but to run. She landed clumsily on the other side of the wall and found herself on steep, uneven turf. She barely broke stride, pounding up the hill toward the road as quickly as she could, knowing he couldn’t yet see her, knowing too that he was wearing street shoes to go with his suit, and that she—in walking boots—had an advantage on the slick turf. Her grazed palms shrilled with pain, but she put her head down and ran, hard as she could, thighs pumping steadily up the hill.
It took her a second to realize that she was in a kind of backyard and that there was what looked like a house between her and the street. There were no lights on, no sign of life, so she ran past it, bursting out onto the road and hooking right past the church, still at a full run. Then, on her left, before the houses began, she saw a narrow flight of steps, almost a passage, leading steeply up between stone walls and heavy shrubbery. She had no idea where it led, but it provided a cover that the empty street did not. She bolted up the stone stairs.
The steps turned, and Deborah found herself emerging in the open at a fence with a gated stile. She pushed through the little sprung gate, closing it silently behind her, and ran on. The steps were gone now, and she was on a dirt path across a swelling pasture. Behind her, the village of Newchurch fell away. Ahead, she could see nothing till she cleared the brow of the hill and found herself confronted with the brooding purple gray of Pendle itself. There were cows all around, and a hundred yards or so ahead an abandoned piece of farm machinery with a great iron roller—perhaps ten feet long—browning with rust. She ran to it, round it, then flung herself down in the long grass behind it, biting back her sobs of panic and exhaustion.
She might, she supposed, be lucky. If she had gotten up the stairs before he had seen her, he might never find her. But if he had seen, she was now alone and there would be no witnesses to whatever happened next.
Should have gone to a house, she thought.
But th
ere hadn’t been time. If he’d wanted her dead, she would have been before anyone answered the door, though why anyone wanted her dead, she had no idea.
She lay facedown, feeling the cool rain on the back of her neck, her hands flat against the metal of the roller, which was colder still and numbed the cuts on her palms. It stood about three feet high: more than enough to hide her from anyone coming up the path, but also obvious. She rolled carefully onto her back, listening, and for a moment she saw the rain-darkened sky and felt the looming presence of Pendle behind her head.
A hell of a place to die. And for what? Why does the man in the trench coat want me dead?
She was trying to banish that thought when the phone in her laptop bag trilled. She reached desperately to silence it, her fingers fumbling wildly inside, and heard the unmistakable sound of movement just on the other side of the iron roller.
She stopped breathing, lay there motionless on her back, gazing straight up into the gray sky, her eyes filling with raindrops like tears, but unblinking, so she would see him when he leaned over, pistol in hand. The phone rang on, piping its silly, electronic notes, and for a moment, nothing happened. Then she heard his weight shift, felt it almost through the ground, and heard something like a breath. He sounded big, imposing like the hill itself, so that an unreasoning part of her wanted to cry out at the unfairness of it all. Then he moved again, and the gray sky was filled with his massive head and blank, uncurious eyes.
For a second Deborah just stared, then her breath came and she laughed, a loud boisterous guffaw and rolled over. The huge bull, his muzzle black and wet, lowered his head to the turf where she had been lying, and began to chew the wet grass as if he hadn’t even seen her.
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