A Rustle of Silk: A new forensic mystery series set in Stuart England (A Gabriel Taverner Mystery)

by Alys Clare

  So I told her.

  She pulled out a stool from under the table and sank down on it. ‘I’ve been thinking the same thing,’ she said calmly. ‘It’s logical, really. Who else would want rid of you except someone who feared you’d steal their business?’

  She had it in essence, so I didn’t bother to point out the difference between a surgeon and a physician. ‘Well?’ I demanded.

  She thought for a while. She repeated some of the names I already had, most of them in Plymouth, and added a couple I didn’t, from up towards Tavistock. Then, frowning, she fell silent.

  ‘Oh, and there’s Black Carlotta,’ she added after a moment.

  ‘Black Carlotta?’

  Sallie waved a vague hand. ‘She’s a witch.’ The wandering hand flew to cover her mouth and her eyes widened in horror. ‘No she’s not!’ she squeaked. ‘Of course she isn’t, how could I possibly have said that!’ She had gone quite pale.

  I reached out and patted her shoulder. ‘It’s all right,’ I said softly. ‘There’s only you and me here, and I won’t tell anyone what you said.’

  She nodded her thanks, clearly unable to speak.

  I understood her distress. You never refer to anyone as a witch, even your worst enemy. The consequences for them, should someone overhear and decide it’s up to them to do something about it, are just too dreadful.

  ‘So, Black Carlotta,’ I prompted, after waiting what I thought was long enough for Sallie to collect herself. ‘A wise woman? A herbalist?’

  Sallie nodded. ‘She treats people for nothing, or, maybe, for what they can give her,’ she said. ‘She’s good. Kind, too. She’s calm and reassuring with women in childbirth, and she’s trained other women in her ways.’ She met my glance. ‘Please don’t do anything that might bring danger to her door,’ she whispered.

  ‘Of course I won’t.’

  I meant what I said. Country people needed women like this Black Carlotta. Besides, I very much doubted that it was she who had been menacing me.

  On the other hand – an idea struck me – she might have a good idea who was behind the offerings …

  ‘Do you think Black Carlotta would see me?’ I asked Sallie.

  ‘Why? What do you want with her?’ she demanded.

  I met her suspicious eyes. ‘I’d like to ask for her help.’

  Black Carlotta did not appear to have a regular home, or not, at least, one that anyone knew about. When I had finally persuaded Sallie to give me a hint, at least, of where I might find the woman, she would do no more than give a few locations where Carlotta had been known to treat people. Accordingly, later that day I saddled Hal, whistled for Flynn and set off to find the places. Most of them were in out-of-the-way spots – one right up on the edge of the moor – and appeared to be deserted.

  Tired and frustrated, I turned for home.

  My road took me past Tavy St Luke’s, and I decided to check up on my young farmer before I went back to Rosewyke. I tethered Hal, left Flynn panting in the shade, tapped on the door and went inside.

  William lay on a pallet, propped up by cushions. Katharine crouched beside him, her hair now restored to order under a prim headdress and her expression a great deal more tranquil than it had been this morning. That tranquillity, however, shattered as she saw who her visitor was.

  ‘Oh! Oh, no!’ she whispered.

  Then, before I could even try to reassure her, she had leapt to her feet and scurried out to the kitchen, from where I could hear the sounds of water splashing, as if someone was thoroughly washing their hands.

  William, hampered by his injury from a similar escape, looked up at me ruefully.

  ‘This is rather embarrassing, doctor,’ he began. He gazed imploringly at me, clearly inviting a response. I held my peace. ‘Er – it was her idea.’ He jerked his head towards the door through which his wife had just fled. ‘She’s worried about the money, you see. We’ll pay you for this morning, of course we will, and please don’t think I’m not grateful because I am, more than I can say, but, you see, she’s a lot cheaper and if there’s going to be the need of continuing care, she – Katharine – says we can afford her more readily than we can you.’

  I thought I understood.

  I knelt down beside him. ‘Of course I need to be paid,’ I said quietly, ‘since, just like everyone else, I have to eat, and food doesn’t come free. But you won’t find me unreasonable.’ It was not my policy to set one level of charges and demand them from every man, whatever his means.

  William blushed, and turned his face away. ‘My apologies, doctor.’

  ‘Accepted.’ I stood up again. ‘Now I think, don’t you, that it’s time I met my successor.’

  Without waiting for his response, I strode out to the kitchen.

  Katharine was standing in the middle of the room. At my abrupt entry, she took two rapid steps away from me, half-concealing herself behind the figure in the far corner, who was facing away and wiping dripping hands on a grubby length of linen.

  ‘Am I addressing Black Carlotta?’ I asked.

  The figure turned to face me.

  She was old. Quite amazingly old, with strands of pure white hair escaping from under the elaborate and voluminous black headdress and a face browned by countless suns to the colour of a chestnut, deeply lined and wrinkled. The eyes, however, were ageless: pale grey, the whites as clear as a child’s.

  ‘You are,’ she replied. ‘What can I do for you?’

  I hesitated. Stop treating my patient was the obvious answer, but I had just spent half a day looking for the woman and it didn’t seem sensible to antagonize her. ‘I’d like your advice.’

  She raised one eyebrow. Then, neatly folding the piece of linen and depositing it by the sink, she said, ‘Let’s walk together, then.’

  She nodded to Katharine, took one last look at William and then led the way out of the house. As she strode on, I untied Hal’s reins, clicked my fingers to Flynn and, leading my horse, hurried after her. Then, for the second time in a day, I found myself talking to a new acquaintance as I headed for home.

  ‘You mustn’t mind Katharine,’ said Black Carlotta. ‘She lost a baby only a few months after she and William were wed, and, try as they might, she can’t conceive another.’ She flashed me a swift glance. ‘Desperate, she is. It’s turned her mind, although, way I see it, she’ll come back to herself once there’s a baby in the cradle.’

  I nodded thoughtfully. ‘Any reason why she slipped the foetus?’

  ‘None that I could detect.’ Another glance, and this time there was a glint of something – amusement? – in the ancient eyes. ‘You’d maybe know better, being a navy surgeon.’ And having all that experience of gravid women, hung unspoken on the air.

  ‘I’ve trained in London as a physician since leaving the sea,’ I said mildly, determined not to rise to her dangling bait, ‘although I’d be the first to admit that when it comes to women in general and not just the pregnant ones, I have a great deal still to learn.’

  She nodded once, a quick, curt action. As if in confirmation, she muttered, ‘It’s the beginning of wisdom when you recognize all that you don’t know.’ I felt I’d passed some test. ‘Liked what you did for young William,’ she added. ‘Not seen such a treatment before. Works, does it?’

  ‘More often than not.’

  She nodded again, and I had the distinct impression that an egg, turpentine and rose-water poultice had just been added to the long list of remedies she stored in her old head. Not that I minded: it hadn’t been my idea in the first place, and I was fully in favour of the spread of new, improved methods.

  ‘What advice did you want from me?’ she asked presently.

  I told her. It didn’t even occur to me to hedge, or prevaricate, or disguise my question with subterfuges. She was an honest woman; that was as plain as the spring sunlight on the young green leaves. In my experience, honesty demands honesty.

  She walked on for quite a long way. Then she said, ‘Know Josiah Thor
n, from over by Buckland?’

  ‘No. Should I?’

  ‘Maybe you should. He’s a doctor – a physician’ – she gently mocked my use of the word – ‘only I don’t reckon he ever had any fancy London training.’ She pronounced it Lunnon.

  My senses sprang to the alert. ‘You think it could be him?’

  She held up her hand, swiftly, firmly. ‘I don’t think any such thing. I’m just asking, do you know him?’

  ‘As I said, no.’

  She stopped, turning to look me full in the face. ‘Maybe you should. Now, I’ll bid you good day.’

  And she was gone. Gathering up the long, flowing black skirts, hitching the battered old pack higher on her back, she leapt nimbly over the ditch running beside the track and scampered off up the shallow bank like a startled deer. I tried to follow her progress and see which way she went but she was too fast for me, dipping behind a small spinney of young oaks and vanishing from sight.

  I mounted Hal and rode on home.

  The days went by. April went out in a week of violent weather: heavy rain, at times turning to sleet, and a south-westerly gale blowing hard from the western approaches, driving swathes of sea waters up the Tamar and washing high tides even as far as the Tavy. I did not forget about searching for Josiah Thorn and, indeed, before the storms hit I ventured up to Buckland and on towards Tavistock, enquiring here and there for him, but met with no success.

  I was deeply engaged in a challenging project. While in London learning my craft as a physician I had been one of a small group of like-minded men who, well away from the lecture halls and the ever-alert eyes and ears of our teachers, sought answers to the great medical questions of the day by a method which, we very well knew, would have been frowned upon by our superiors; probably to the extent of having us dismissed from the college and banned from any chance of further tuition. We called ourselves, with an inflated sense of our own importance, the Symposium. What we were doing amounted to medical heresy, for we were attempting to peer through the obscuring veil that stated unequivocally that Disease A must be treated by Remedy B and asking ourselves, what if we were to try something different? Something – and the word was surely anathema to the medical world – new?

  Once our studies were complete and we went our separate ways, I lost touch with many of the group. If they now felt ashamed of their rebellious attitude and opted to blend in smoothly with established medical practice, I didn’t blame them. Life was tough, and money hard to come by. No matter what your profession, as a general rule it was easier – safer – to toe the line and not upset people. But two of the men felt as I did; like me, they were unwed, and without dependents; this gave us the freedom, I believe, to take a few risks. The three of us were in regular contact, sharing our thoughts, laboriously copying out the documents on which we worked and dispatching them for comment and contributions. We tried to meet when we could; one man lived in Bristol, the other had stayed in London, so such meetings were not as frequent as we could wish. We were planning to get together later in the year, in London, and already I was excited at the prospect. I loved my life in Devon, but sometimes the longing for like minds with which to converse – and to argue – became overwhelming.

  My field of interest then was the matter of the humoral theory: that long-held, unquestionable doctrine that we all contained the four humours – black and yellow bile, phlegm and blood – and that each related to a particular type of person – melancholic, choleric, philosophical and sanguine respectively, although that is gross over-simplification. Any sort of sickness was regarded as an imbalance between the humours, probably caused by a blockage, and the usual remedy was to relieve this blockage. Bowels would be purged by the administration of a strong laxative; the stomach emptied by an emetic; poisons encouraged out of the body by powerful diaphoretics to encourage sweating; too much hot blood flowing through the body by bleeding. Everyone believed this was the right – the only – way. They had been believing it since the golden days of Classical Greece.

  In my early days as a ship’s surgeon I had been as unquestioningly accepting as everyone else. But, as the years passed and my carefully kept record of patients, their treatments, my observations on the effectiveness of these treatments and the eventual outcome steadily grew to the size of a small library, I began to wonder. In my work at sea I dealt with more than my share of terrible wounds, as I have said. Now the accepted treatment for a man who had lost a vast amount of blood and was weak, pale, sweating and feverish was to bleed him and keep on bleeding him.

  The trouble was that it didn’t work.

  Sometimes nothing else worked, either. But, just occasionally, it did. I once tended a sailor who had lost half his hand, neatly removed by a huge splinter of wood torn out of the side of the ship by an incoming cannon ball. We put in to a port on the mouth of the River Plate and, as the crew tucked into ruby-red beef fresh from the cow and fresh, dark green vegetables, I persuaded my patient to eat up. At first he refused, for he was nauseous, in pain, hectic with fever. But I wouldn’t give up, and in the end – probably because he knew it was the only way I’d leave him alone and allow him to sleep – he gave in. Appetite comes with eating, as the old saying goes, and soon my patient was stuffing himself as fast as food could be brought.

  He recovered.

  I had been wondering ever since why he recovered. If, as I believed, some substance in the good, fresh food had somehow fed his blood, then the truth was that bleeding such a patient was the very last thing a doctor ought to do. And that was alarming, to say the least. But I would not abandon my research and, when my colleagues in London evolved the idea of each of us pursuing secret studies of our own, my choice of topic seemed to have been made for me.

  So now, spurred on by the prospect of meeting my fellow Symposium members later in the year, I had once more thrown myself into the theory of the four humours.

  It would have been good to have shut myself up in my study and lost myself in my work while the present foul weather persisted, but it was not to be. A bout of fever broke out on the Plymouth waterside and one of the less hostile sawbones down there sent word to me, on the off chance that the malady was one with which I was familiar from my travels. It shared many of the characteristics of tropical fevers: very high temperature, blinding headache, rash, haemorrhage, stools running like brown water, eruptions in the skin; and for a while both the sawbones and I feared we were witnessing the start of a serious outbreak. Fortunately for Plymouth, however, whatever fever it was turned out to be largely non-fatal (only two deaths out of seven victims, both of them weary old sailors who had probably been nearing the end of their days in any case) and not very contagious.

  May announced herself with brilliant blue skies and long, sunny days. My household and I went up to Tavy St Luke’s for the May Day celebration, a rambunctious affair which lasted from noon until well after dark and, to judge by various abruptly suppressed cries and furtive rustlings in the undergrowth clearly audible as I finally staggered home, would lead to a crop of babies around February.

  It was a lush time. The grass in the pastures grew so quickly that you felt you could see it, and the milk produced by the house cow turned rich, abundant and creamy. Sallie was busy in the dairy, utilizing the bounty to make butter and cheese, sporadically helped by a large, round-faced and singularly plain girl called Dorcas, who lived in Tavy St Luke and was some distant relative of Sallie’s. It occurred to me to wonder who, out of Tock and Dorcas, was the brighter. There wasn’t a lot in it.

  I was standing at my study window one morning soon after the start of the month, stretching my back after too long bent over a treatise on the treatment of bronchial disease in infants, when I spotted a man on a horse turn into the track and ride up to the house. Sallie was scrubbing out the dairy, and I knew she hated to be seen by ‘company’ when she was sweaty, flushed and dishevelled. Samuel and Tock were somewhere outside, but it wasn’t their job to answer the door. So I went down myself.


  I opened my heavy oak door just as the man, dismounted, raised a hand to knock.

  He was a large man; taller than average, broad in the shoulder, long-limbed and with the sort of girth that suggested he enjoyed his food. He was dressed in a well-worn doublet over hose and good boots, over which he wore an ankle-length, sleeveless garment in fine black wool. This, together with the vaguely scholarly black cap he had just swept off, gave him an air of authority. His hair – short, thick and standing up as if he’d been running his hands through it – was sandy fair, his beard had highlights of ginger, and his eyes were a clear, brilliant blue with not a hint of green or grey.

  He was about to speak when I forestalled him.

  ‘Julius Caesar,’ I said with a grin.

  A slight frown briefly replaced his smile of greeting but then it cleared. ‘The man from Devon!’ he exclaimed. ‘Well met, my friend!’

  During my time of study in London I had taken to visiting the Globe theatre. I enjoyed the writing of William Shakespeare in particular, and, from the way he described the country and his clear love of it, I’d taken him for a Devon man till someone said he came from Stratford. One of the last plays I’d seen was Julius Caesar. In an early scene – just after the soothsayer issued his warning about the ides of March – the emperor declaimed, ‘Let me have men about me that are fat!’, adding some remark to the effect that he found lean and hungry-looking men dangerous. A big fellow standing right at the front of the groundlings had said – a little too loudly – ‘I’m your man, Caesar!’, making the crowd around him burst into laughter and momentarily stopping the action. The actor playing Caesar hadn’t looked at all pleased, but everyone else had loved it. Afterwards, enjoying a few mugs of beer in a Southwark tavern, I’d come across the man, and the discovery that we were both Devonians had been all the prompting we needed to have several more mugs of beer. We’d ended the evening singing dirty songs and holding each other up as we staggered along the river, trying to find a craft to ferry us back to the north bank and our lodgings.