Quintessence

by David Walton

  Parris eased himself into a chair and pulled off his muddy shoes. He set them by the fireplace to dry. "Where's Catherine?"

  "Up in bed. She's hurt." The words were delivered like daggers. "She fell off a horse, trying to follow you."

  "Is she all right now?"

  "Better. The physic gave her a draught."

  "What physic was here?"

  "Dr. Weeks."

  "Weeks? He's a barber- surgeon, and the worst of the lot. You let Weeks put his hands on my daughter?"

  "I thought she might have broken her ankle, but it was just a sprain. You weren't here."

  "He's a charlatan. He wouldn't know a hangnail from a kidney stone. What kind of a draught did he give her?"

  "Stephen, you weren't here!"

  Her voice rang in the sudden silence. The firelight cast half of her face in flickering red, the other half in shadow. Her chair and hands were still.

  "The king knows," Parris said. "Sinclair told him everything."

  She shook her head. "You fool."

  "I don't know how he found out. Vaughan must have talked."

  "Of course he did. It was inevitable. That's how you always are, Stephen. I warn you, and you don't listen. You follow your obsessions like a horse with a feed bag, oblivious to everyone around you."

  "The world doesn't understand my work. Someday it will."

  "Your important work, yes, I know. More important than your wife and daughter. You told me."

  Parris bit back his reply. He wanted to explain that it was Joan and Catherine whom his work was meant to protect, but explanations wouldn't make any difference now. He stared into the fire.

  "You haven't heard my sentence."

  That got her attention. "Sentence? The king pardoned you . . . or you wouldn't be here. Do you mean a fine?"

  "I am to finance Sinclair's expedition."

  She coughed. "At what cost? Are we to sell everything we own and pay as much as this Sinclair wants to take?"

  "Worse. The king has already taken all our lands and given them to Sinclair."

  For once, Joan was speechless. Her lips worked, but no sound came out. Finally, she whispered, "Everything?"

  "Everything."

  "What will we do?"

  "We'll join the expedition, as we planned. This changes nothing."

  Joan dropped her knitting on the floor and stood. "Are you mad? It changes everything. He robbed you. It was suicide to begin with, but now . . ."

  "It doesn't matter. We must go." Parris crossed his arms in front of his chest. "It's the other half of my sentence. I am commanded to go along."

  He thought she might fly into a rage, but instead she gave him the disgusted look she usually reserved for incompetent servants. "So you've ruined everything."

  "If I could leave you and Catherine behind, I would. But it is not safe for you here without me, and it's impossible for me to stay."

  She gave him a frank look. "Not if the king dies."

  Parris glanced quickly around their empty room. "Hush!"

  "Don't hush me. The king will die before Sinclair leaves, won't he? Once he dies, you're free."

  "If Mary takes the throne, my life is forfeit anyway. If Northumberland stays in power, the king's decision remains in effect."

  "Northumberland can't stay in power."

  "That remains to be seen." He lowered his voice. "The king wants the Lady Jane Grey to succeed him. He's signed it into law."

  "He can't do that. Mary is next, and Elizabeth after her. He can't just change the bloodline."

  "He'll rule both of his sisters to be illegitimate children— he can't really do one without the other— removing them from consideration. Jane is the granddaughter of Henry VIII's sister. she's the next closest."

  Joan gasped. "Jane's wedding last month. To Northumberland's son."

  "Part of the plan."

  "A sweet- faced teenager with royal blood, loyally Protestant, more interested in books than in politics. Northumberland will string her as a puppet. And he'll lock the unsuspecting princesses in the Tower before the king's body is cold."

  Parris nodded. "Either way, my sentence holds."

  Joan walked away from him and faced the window. "It's not right. Mary should be queen."

  CATHERINE dreamed of tamarins. Thick trees in a dim forest, and tamarins invisible, but all around her.

  When she woke, it took her several moments to recognize her own bedroom. Weak sunlight filtered through the window above her head, casting vague shadows. Then, in a rush, she remembered turning her back on the tamarin, seeing its horrible spiked tail swinging toward her spine . . .

  She sat up and pressed her back against the wall, scanning the room frantically. What if it was still here? Looking around her perfectly normal room, it seemed absurd that there could be an invisible creature lurking there, but how could she tell? The platter of food was still on the floor where she'd left it, along with some scattered crumbs.

  The door opened, and Catherine yelped, but it was only Blanca, carrying a basin of warm water and a cloth. She sidestepped the platter with a puzzled look and set the basin on the dresser.

  "Are you all right, my lady?"

  "I . . . I'm fine. You gave me a start, is all."

  She considered telling Blanca about the tamarin attack, but couldn't quite bring herself to do it. It would just worry her, and to no purpose. It was Father she needed to tell. He should be home now, back from attending the king.

  She hobbled down the stairs, favoring her injured ankle. It was stiff , but it wasn't broken, and it would heal soon. The barber- surgeon had at first refused to touch her on the grounds that it was indecent for a man to put his hands on a woman's leg, but Mother had bullied him into it, saying she was only sixteen years old and a child. That was amusing, since Mother had spent the last year telling all and sundry she was sixteen years old and a woman grown. Ripe for the picking, as Matthew Marcheford had waggishly put it. Catherine doubted his father, the bishop, would have approved.

  Father was in the library. He sat at his writing desk, quill in hand, scratching at a parchment, and he didn't see her come in. She hesitated. Would he take her seriously? She wanted him to think of her as intelligent and sensible, someone he could share his work with, like he had with Peter. If she ran to him with wild tales of invisible monsters in her room, he might dismiss her as a flighty girl jumping at shadows. She had to speak to him in the language he understood.

  She carried the volume of Naturalis Historia to his desk and set it next to him, propped open to the passage about the tamarin. He set his quill down and looked at her, one eyebrow cocked.

  "Have you ever seen a creature like this?" she asked. "Or did Master Sinclair speak of one?"

  He peered at the text, reading quickly, then regarded her again, worry clearly etched in his face. "No," he said. "What's this about, Catherine?"

  Feeling jumpy, she sat on a nearby chair. "May I have a parchment and quill, please?"

  He paused a second, and she thought he might press her, but he handed them over. He lifted the inkwell out of the desk and set it on a tea table next to her. On the top half of the parchment, she sketched the tamarin's face. She added unkempt hair, a hunched body, hooked feet, pincer hands, and a multitude of tails, until she had drawn him completely. Not bad, she thought. She was no Hans Holbein, but it was unquestionably the tamarin.

  He watched her while she sketched. When she was done, she turned it around to face him. "I saw this creature in the parlor," she said. "That's why I screamed when Master Sinclair first came. I saw it again yesterday in my room."

  He tensed. "In your room?"

  "Yes. It can turn invisible." She swallowed, knowing how unbelievable that sounded, but hoping that the beetle and the snake had provided enough precedent. "And it can pass through solid objects— but it's real. It can pick up solid objects, too." She explained about the experiment she had performed with the platter of food. She kept her voice calm and tried to sound rational.
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  "So it could pass through things when it was invisible?" he said.

  "No. Here, look."

  On the bottom half of the parchment, she drew a square and divided it into four quadrants. In the top left, she wrote the word visible; in the top right, invisible. She struggled for the right word for a moment, and then in the bottom quadrants wrote substantial and insubstantial.

  "Those are the four states I've seen the tamarin take. Invisible most of the time, but occasionally visible. Insubstantial when the pillow I threw passed through him, but substantial when he picked up the meat."

  Dipping her quill again, she drew a line connecting the word invisible to the word substantial. He had taken a piece of meat while invisible, so she knew he could be both at once. This was where things got hard to understand. The invisible things in her experience— beams of light, smells, water vapor, wind— were also insubstantial. It was hard to think of them as separate concepts. She supposed a strong enough wind could be substantial enough to knock things down, but that wasn't the same as picking up a piece of meat.

  She drew another line connecting visible to substantial and visible to insubstantial. It stood to reason that the remaining connection, invisible to insubstantial, was also true, but there was no way to be sure.

  She was still scared, but it was easier to bear when she could think through the problem clearly. The exercise helped relax her mind, but she still hadn't told her father everything.

  "Yesterday . . . it tried to stab me"— she pointed at the spiked tail in her sketch—"with that. It jumped on my back and shoved its tail at me, and I only just got away." Though she didn't understand why. If it had wanted to kill her, it could have done it easily while she was sleeping. "I tried to ride after you, to tell you, but the horse spooked— I think it might have seen the tamarin— and threw me off ."

  Father stared at the parchment silently for a long time. He tapped where she had written insubstantial. "You saw Sinclair's beetle?"

  "I saw it. This tamarin is just as real."

  He seemed to come to a decision and stood abruptly. "We'll search the house. Wherever you go, I want Henshawe with you, or one of the other servants. Someone is to sleep with you at all times. If you see it again, or even think you do, scream for help."

  "How will you search the house for something invisible?"

  "Maybe Sinclair will know." He pointed a finger at Catherine. "But no more experiments. I don't want you luring this thing anywhere near you."

  "If I set out more meat, it might come again. You could see it yourself, and we could try to catch it."

  "No. That's an order, Catherine. I'll talk to Sinclair, but in the meantime, I want you safe."

  SINCLAIR was in his study when Bishop Marcheford, of all people, paid him a visit.

  He kept Marcheford waiting for ten minutes, just on principle, and when he finally entered the drawing room, he found the bishop standing at the fireplace mantel, running a finger along the bright feathers of a headdress from Nubia.

  "Be careful. That belonged to a witch doctor," Sinclair said.

  Marcheford was a slim man, but with a craggy appearance, his face deeply lined and his hands spidery and gaunt. "A child of God has nothing to fear from demons," he said. "Much less from a tool used in ignorant worship of them."

  "You're not afraid of the devil, then?"

  " 'The Lord is the strength of my life,' " Marcheford quoted. " 'Of whom shall I be afraid?' "

  "Of plague," Sinclair said. "Of famine. Of civil war."

  "All possibilities. But all under the rule of God."

  Sinclair opened his mouth to respond, then stopped. He wanted to say that this made God our enemy, and it was high time man took the business of life and death into his own hands. But there was no point in saying this to Marcheford. Especially not if Sinclair wanted the king's continued support.

  "What can I do for the Church?" he said instead.

  Marcheford's sharp gaze seemed to penetrate his forehead and see into his mind. Sinclair was not usually unsettled, but this man's grave demeanor unnerved him.

  "I want to know if you will grant safe passage to men of my choosing when the time is right," Marcheford said.

  "Safe? You do know we are bound for Chelsey's island."

  "That will do as well as any other place. God is there as much as in England, but I daresay there are no Papists."

  "Are Papists really so bad? They may disagree with your theology, but they're not as likely to starve or drown you as an ocean voyage."

  "Have you been to Spain?" Marcheford said. "I was there for a year as an ambassador for the king. I saw the Inquisition there firsthand." His voice dropped to an urgent whisper. "Men rounded up in the middle of the night with sacks over their heads, burned with irons or broken with hammers until they would admit to anything. Women and children, too, hung by their arms for days, or drowned nearly to death again and again. The lucky ones were merely burned at the stake." Marcheford's eyes burned into Sinclair's. "If Mary becomes queen, the same persecutions will come here."

  "She's a woman," Sinclair said. "She won't have the stomach for such ruthlessness."

  "Spain is already looking to pull her strings. There is a man, Diego de Tavera, here in the guise of an ambassador's aide. He is one of their chief inquisitors, and a bloody and brutal man. Diplomacy is not his forte. The moment Mary takes the throne, she will be under pressure to crush the Protestant Church."

  "And what business is that of mine?"

  He'd been hoping to prod Marcheford into anger, but the bishop fixed him with his eyes. "Are you not a Protestant, sir?"

  "I owe no vow to the devil in Rome, if that's what you mean." Though neither did he love the Cromwells and Cranmers of the world. What good had it done to steal lands and goods away from the monasteries and give them to the high lords, to drape their tables with altar cloths and decorate their walls with the portraits of saints? Now that the monks had been turned out into the streets, where were the safe houses for travelers to rest and receive a meal and a bed? Where were the hospitals and apothecaries? The Reformers might teach the doctrine of charity, but the poor were hardly the better off for it.

  "Then surely you would save any you could," Marcheford said.

  Sinclair shrugged. "I have passenger berths still unclaimed, meant for colonists who wish to stay with us. Anyone with strong arms and a willing spirit is welcome."

  "It's decided, then," Marcheford said. "I'll give you a list of passengers. But you must be ready to sail."

  "How much time do I have?" It was a treasonous question, but this whole conversation was probably treason.

  "Less than you think." Marcheford's face was grim. "The king died an hour ago."

  Chapter Eight

  PARRIS didn't need to go looking for Sinclair. Before he could finish instructing the servants on the need to keep Catherine under close watch, Sinclair appeared at his doorstep, pounding on the door like he would break it down. Parris opened it to find him spattered with mud and breathing hard.

  It was well after sunrise, but the fog obscured the morning light. Parris opened the door to let Sinclair in, but before he could speak, Parris thrust Catherine's sketch of the tamarin in his face. "Have you ever seen this before?"

  "What is it?"

  "Another of your mystery creatures, it would seem. It walks through walls, just like the beetle."

  Sinclair studied the sketch. "Where did you see it?"

  "Catherine saw it. Right here in my house." Parris put steel in his voice. "In her bedchamber."

  Sinclair scratched his chin. "I may have seen it."

  "Let me guess. On Chelsey's ship?"

  "It was just a flash. A shadow, two or three times. But now that I see this picture . . ."

  "It must have followed you here."

  Sinclair walked past Parris into the room and waved a dismissive hand. "It doesn't matter now."

  Parris caught his arm. "What do you mean, it doesn't matter? That thing attacked
my daughter!"

  "I came here to tell you to pack your bags."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "We need to leave. We have only days before our ship must depart."

  "Is that possible? Is the ship even ready?"

  "No. There are many repairs needed, and many supplies to be gathered. Nevertheless, we must leave. I would set sail to night if I could."

  Parris pointed at a chair. "Sit down and start making sense. What's happened?"