‘Aye,’ Dowling nodded gravely, ‘and we have the husband to consider.’
John Giles, of course. The chicken running headless while the fox sits complacently in its lair biding its time. ‘What do we do, then, about Hewitt?’
Dowling wriggled on his seat. ‘I will talk to the Mayor again, but it will not be easy. He will want to know why we concern ourselves with Hewitt now that Joyce is dead.’
He was right. The Mayor would be a waste of time. ‘I will go to Cocksmouth,’ I said. ‘Perhaps I can establish the source of this mystery there. There is some devilry at the root of this which I do not yet comprehend.’
‘Would you have me come with you?’ Dowling asked.
It was kind of him, but he didn’t know what he was volunteering for. I declined the offer and we went our own ways.
Cocksmouth. Cocksmouth was north and west, beyond Buckingham. It was a long journey and I would be gone from London at least three days. Plenty of time for reflection.
My father was not an educated man, a deficiency that I did not hold against him, God knows. Yet I could not fathom why he made such importance of the need for me to study at Cambridge on the one hand, yet behaved with such stubborn disregard for good logic and sense on the other hand – if ever it came from my mouth. Whatever opinion I expressed, observation I made, could be guaranteed to elicit contradiction. The same determination that I should enjoy greater fortune than he appeared to stir a bitter jealousy against me. His head was like a sealed globe within which wild storms continually raged. Whenever he opened his mouth a violent gale blew. My own policy to deal with such contrariness was to remain silent in his presence. The fewer words I spoke, the kinder the climate. So. Tomorrow to Cocksmouth. Birthplace of my mother’s ancestors. A place where pigs foraged before finding themselves strung up with their guts sliced in the front room of my uncle’s house. Godamercy.
I walked south, deep in gloomy thought, pushing through the crowds on Cornhill, heading for the bridge. I walked straight, taking no notice of the tradesmen striding down the streets as if they owned it, shouting out their wares so that all could hear within a half-mile radius.
I hated Shrewsbury and Keeling, and all like them. Before I had never cared, they were the distant purveyors of venerable wisdom. Now they were cold calculating politicians, supreme saviours of their own skin – and hunters of mine. It was mid- afternoon and London’s walls felt oppressive, the crowds pestilent. I strode out onto the Bridge and marched down the middle of the road, avoiding the clamourings and cajolings of the shopkeepers. By the time I reached the wooden drawbridge to the Southbank I was sweaty and my temper had subsided into a mere simmering brew of resentment. As the mists thinned I became more aware of my surroundings. I passed beneath the arch of Nonsuch House. Its copper-covered cupolas shone like blood. I turned to gaze upon the heads that waved stiffly on the end of tall wooden poles, grinning teeth and dull hair coated with a fine layer of freezing frost. A peeling face stared sadly at me from the top of its pole with dull mouldy eyes as it swung over the edge of the archway. The meat on the head was white and torn. I recognised Colonel James Turner, wealthy goldsmith and embezzler. I looked into his eyes, noted the jagged cuts about his neck, the ragged state of his head where the crows had been feeding. He had been loved and respected once. Not any more.
No politics here on the Southbank. This was where the poor people lived. No politics because there was no money. This was where the leatherworkers and feltmongers lived, free of the powers and sanctions of the livery companies based north of the river. This was where the breweries were based, the brothels, the worst of the alehouses, and most of London’s beggars. The City dignitaries would not allow them to cross the Bridge into the City. It was also the place, I suddenly realised, reading the billings plastered here and there, where Harry Hunks was fighting in about twenty minutes’ time.
I hurried towards the bear-ring at Paris Gardens. The crowds milled around, ordinary folk in working clothes, men mostly, debating the prospects of the dogs against blind Harry. I paid my dues and found a seat. The acrid smell of stale sweat filled the air. There were two or three hundred people crammed into the ring, all crowded round the small arena. A single solid pole stood up in the middle of it. Chained to the pole was a big brown bear, his fur matted and dirty, moulded with his own excrement. Peering forth through streaming eyes, small and caked with hard lumps of dried pus, he waved his nose in the air, seeing what he could through smell and sound, his eyes useless. This was blind Harry Hunks, hero of the Southbank.
Two men jumped out into the arena, one struggling to hold a rope attached to the collar of a huge grey wolfhound, big as a man, its mouth and nose strapped in a leather muzzle. The dog strained forward, eyes and nose and every sinew pointed at the prowling bear. Saliva dripped from its muzzle and it growled in violent greedy anticipation. The two men looked much the same. A small fellow with barrel chest strode out into the ring and began introducing the afternoon entertainment, loud and bellowing, striving to rouse the crowd into a state of excitement. At last the time came and the crowd quietened, expectant. The two men crouched and took off the muzzle and the dog sprang forward, launching itself at the bear’s neck. But blind Harry could smell the dog, could hear the dog, and had been waiting for this moment just as avidly as the crowd. With perfect timing the bear rose up onto its haunches and casually swiped a great paw with talons extended. The wolfhound caught the blow across its jaw and ended up in the dirt on its head, tumbling over and against the palings. It rose to its feet unsteady and dizzy, shaking its head, surprised and confused. Blind Harry resumed his prowling, facing away, but fully aware of the dog’s whereabouts, its uncertainty and reluctance to continue. Blind Harry roared, and the crowd sat back satisfied, their fears that this giant dog might hurt blind Harry allayed. The dog trotted forward, growling again, but more timorous now, hovering out of blind Harry’s range, snapping, dashing forward and backward, looking for an opportunity. But blind Harry was ready every time, a seasoned veteran, too clever by half.
‘I love old Harry Hunks, don’t you, my lover?’ A woman leant across me and put a hand on the top of my thigh. She looked at me with bright, lively, brown eyes, round and wide, laughing, enticing. She allowed her hand to drift across my groin, resting momentarily upon my crotch before withdrawing once more to my thigh, then away.
‘Aye.’ I nodded.
‘Let me take you to the Leaguer, lover. We’re all clean at the Leaguer, can take away all that anger I see in your face.’ She smiled, lips parted, her teeth white and clean. She looked at me with an excitement of her own, the anticipation of a done deal.
‘Aye. Why not.’ I stood and let her lead me by the hand.
It was a little while later that it again occurred to me that I had been displaying less wit than a Kynchen cove and less fortitude than Agnes Hobson. I had to take to heart the lesson of blind Harry Hunks, and I had to begin by visiting my father.
Chapter Twelve
Hempe
It is very probable the male avoids the female for no other reason than that of nourishment, and the female the male because it is like the hop in being a gross feeder.
‘He’s gone.’ My mother stared into space out of her one good eye. She always stared into space, for she was afraid of people, afraid that they would pick her words to pieces and make her feel foolish.
‘What do you mean – gone?’ I stood opposite her, ducking and weaving, trying to place my face in her eyeline. Her hand wandered up to her eyepatch – whereupon I stepped back hastily and let her look where she wished. It was a strategy she used that if any got too close, then her hand would go to the eyepatch and lift it. You did not want to see what lay under the eyepatch.
‘He went away the day before yesterday.’ Her hand stopped in mid-air and slowly sank back to her lap.
‘Aye, he did,’ her brother Robert called from the table. I turned to face him, though it was an even more disgusting sight than my mother’s ravaged eye
. He sat at the table with his stomach hanging naked out of his torn shirt. Grease dripped from his chin and pieces of half-chewed pork flew across the room towards where he spoke. At the moment he was speaking to me.
I sidled around the room to position myself behind a giant pig carcass. The head sat in a dish on the table in front of Robert’s right elbow. Its lazy eyes followed me about the room as I walked. ‘Where did he go?’
‘Don’t know,’ Robert wiped his sleeve across his mouth, then sneezed. I will not describe one of Robert’s sneezes in detail, nor the consequences of it. This place was a disgusting and dirty hovel, populated by imbeciles and Whoballs. It was the country. My mother slowly turned her head towards me, her good eye momentarily making contact with mine before slipping away again to regard the earthy floor. I remembered who had done that to her eye and how. It was a recollection that still froze my thoughts.
‘He went with two men.’ Robert wiped a palm across his hair so that strands of it stood on end.
My disgust for this place was suddenly forgotten. In the context of events to date, his words made the hairs on my neck prickle. ‘What two men?’
Robert picked up a rib and stabbed it at me. He was offering me it to eat. I declined. Shrugging, he started to chew at it himself, making sure he had a mouth full of meat before replying.
‘One was the same man what came a week or so ago and helped him write that letter. The second man I have never seen before.’ Sticking out his bottom lip and furrowing his brow, he looked to my mother. ‘I think they were friends of his from London, wasn’t they?’
‘I don’t know.’ My mother shook her head slowly. ‘He didn’t say nothing to me.’
‘What were their names?’
‘Din’t say.’
I regarded them both with critical eye. My mother sat calm with her hands on her lap, peering at something on the ceiling. Robert drew a pork rib across the edge of his front teeth in an attempt to clean it of every speck of meat that still clung to it. Neither was worried in the least – yet he had left the day before yesterday?
‘Tell me what they looked like.’
‘They were dressed like city folk, Harry!’ Robert screwed up his face and talked to me like I was the idiot. ‘They was dressed like you.’
‘Where did they go?’
‘Don’t know. He din’t tell us, did he?’ Robert belched and noticed his stomach was uncovered. He fiddled with the edges of his shirt then cast an eye in my mother’s direction. I hoped she washed it before she attempted to mend it.
‘You have no idea where he went?’
‘He’ll be back,’ Robert declared confidently.
‘None round here know where he went?’
‘You could ask.’
I could stand it no longer. I found that I had stopped breathing, holding my breath that I would not say something that I would later feel ashamed of. I looked to my mother.
‘One of the men came here and wrote a letter. Tell me about that.’
Upon seeing that I spoke to my mother Robert stretched his arms wide, swivelled his beady eyes about his head a few times, then stood up with a mighty grunt. He shuffled out the door in the direction of his shed and was gone.
We were left there, my mother and I, in sad silence. I let the question sit, knowing that she would answer it once she was sure that the words she planned were the best she could think of. I sat myself on the other side of the room with my hands between my knees and looked away.
Finally she spoke. ‘They wrote it in here, at the table.’
I looked at the table.
‘He told me to leave them alone,’ she said quietly, nodding her head in the direction of the back room. ‘I went in there.’
I looked towards the back room. My grandmother lay in there with her eyes closed, breathing quietly.
That was it. My mother said no more.
I asked everyone in Cocksmouth if they had seen my father, or could tell me in what direction he had gone with the two men. All that I established was that they had headed south, on the main road to London. I stopped at Byddle and Haremear, the next two villages along the road, but learnt nothing new. Since my face was not known in those parts it was optimistic to expect that I would be told anything – if indeed there was anything to tell.
Fact was – my father was missing.
Chapter Thirteen
Penny-royall
Pulegium when dry is said to flower in midwinter. Costaeus tells the same story and says there is a similar example in the case of the Black woodpecker, whose body hung up by a string has been observed to shed its old feathers in the Spring and grow new ones. Both these stories are not worthy of belief.
It took us three hours to get to Epsom – the roads were frozen into hard ridges. I was bounced up and down between roof and seat like a rubber ball. After much experimentation I found a comfortable position with one arm wrapped around the frame of the coach window and one leg held out straight across the seat. Dowling sat opposite me with his baggy, blue cloth cap pulled down over his ears, eyelids drooping, trying hard to stay awake. His guts must have been full of iron shot. My teeth started to rattle.
He was a good man to have on your side, I reflected, even though he was so filthy smelly. When I’d told him what I found at Cocksmouth he had fussed over me like a big, fluffy white hen – assuring me that he would talk to the Mayor, that he would be successful in commandeering enough men to scour the roads between here and Cocksmouth. It was some comfort insofar as I knew it was all that could be done. But they would not find him. Someone had taken him.
We hit a ridge so hard that my legs left the seat and my head hit the roof with such force that I saw lights twinkling before me. I cursed so loudly that Dowling opened one eye and frowned at me disapprovingly. Hill! The knock had juggled my brains and Hill’s face appeared before me. I had told Hill that I was going to Cocksmouth before I was locked up in the Tower. Hill, my great friend, who was now snug in Shrewsbury’s pocket. I felt an urge to stop and persuade the driver to turn round, go back to London so that I could find Hill, make him talk to me. I sat staring out of the window, not looking at the terrible dreary scenery we passed. No. He had urged me to go to Epsom. It was the only advice he had. If he wanted us to go to Epsom, then we would go. Let’s see what he had in store for us. Though I felt like the man that takes an hour to step out onto the ice, only to crash through it and drown.
When we arrived I climbed out of the coach onto Ormonde’s driveway with legs of jelly and something trying to drill its way out through my forehead. Dowling stepped out sleepily and took a deep lungful of cold, clean air before smiling happily. The only sound was that of crows complaining in the distant woods. It was an angry, lonely noise that cast a morbid tone upon the frosted fields and the silent, square white house with its big, black empty windows. I noticed a patch of catmint nestled in the grass close to the front door. If you set it, the cats will eat it; if you sow it, the cats can’t know it.
Another old servant wandered out of the front door to meet us. The world was full of doddery old servants it seemed. With great enthusiasm Dowling stepped forward to greet him. They had a laugh and a joke about something. It gave me time to empty the contents of my stomach discreetly behind the coach. Our coachman shook his head and regarded me with offended eyes, like it was some comment upon his wretched driving. I spat the last of it and immediately the air tasted fresher and my soul breathed easier.
Dowling appeared at my shoulder. ‘He says that William Ormonde is not at home, but that he will ask if we may talk with Mary Ormonde.’
The servant stood waiting for us, blinking anxiously. Once he saw us walking towards him, he turned and trotted back towards the house, hurrying to be first across the threshold. Inside it was much colder and darker than I remembered it. Tapestries hung on the walls I had not noticed the last time, old and frayed, colours faded. Water dripped somewhere, its slow rhythm the only sound to be heard.
Dowling took off his ha
t and stuck it in his pocket. ‘A man might hear a mouse sneeze.’
‘We don’t receive many visitors. Just Mr Ormonde and his daughter.’ The servant coughed breathlessly and bowed again. He led us past a square, wooden staircase with dark polished surface down a dingy corridor. At the end of it was a large room with good light soaking through long windows. Mary Ormonde stood amidst a collection of old embroidered chairs. The room smelt damp and I could almost feel the water clinging to my skin, pervading my clothes. I imagined the chairs to be wet to the touch.
‘Please sit,’ Mary Ormonde gestured. She still wore mourning clothes, a dark dress that fitted snug about her hips. Her eyes were still bright green, and still stared straight into my soul. Smiling at me gently, she stood calm like an old friend. ‘An unexpected visit,’ she said.
‘Aye.’ I sat down on one of the chairs. It seemed to be dry.
Her scent drifted up my nose and I immediately started to think about renewing intimate acquaintance. She sat with hands folded neatly on her lovely lap. ‘What happened to your head?’
‘I was hit on the head in the process of seeking who it was killed your sister.’
She nodded and looked at us both enquiringly, as if to ask why we had come back when all was been and done. ‘The man Joyce.’
Dowling spoke with a low sombre tone. ‘We think that the Lord Chief Justice has hung an innocent man.’
‘An innocent man?’ She pursed her lips and sounded very disappointed. Like someone’s dog had died. Then she resumed her previous pose and looked at us both with that enquiring gaze again. No sign of remorse. Then she lifted a finger into the air and pursed her beautiful lips again. Those lips transfixed me, luscious and ripe. ‘If this man Joyce did not kill my sister, then why was he hung for it?’
‘There lies a question, madam.’
‘Indeed. Lord Keeling himself tried Joyce, I understand.’
The Sweet Smell of Decay Page 13
