The Angel in the Glass

by Alys Clare

  All of which temporarily distracted me from the matter of the dead vagrant and the resolute denial of the Fairlight women that, despite the firm evidence to the contrary, he had ever been seen at Wrenbeare.

  Late in the evening I finally pushed my papers aside, stretched and, whistling to Flynn, went outside into the warm darkness to take the air before retiring to bed. Glancing up at the house, I noticed there was a faint glow from Celia’s bedchamber. She was, I thought, probably at her sewing. She and I are alike in that both of us have the ability to concentrate on a task for long hours without allowing anything to distract us. It’s a good thing that we are similar in this, because we understand each other and don’t become resentful or annoyed at the preoccupation.

  I strolled down the path to the road, my thoughts flitting here and there. I decided I’d call on Theo the next day, having abandoned him since our visit to the tavern. Then, hearing the sound of the river over to my right where it runs in its valley down to join the Tamar and the sea, I thought I might go and stand by the water awhile. I was on the point of heading over to where the narrow little path leads down to the river bank when I heard the sound of approaching footsteps.

  Since setting up my practice I have become accustomed to being called out at night and, knowing it is my duty, I never complain. Sometimes, however, I do give an inward sigh at the thought of the long hours until I get back to my house and my bed. Now, when I was already weary, was such a moment.

  But then it occurred to me that men coming to summon me – it’s almost always a man when the call comes at night – usually run, or at least sound as if they’re in a hurry. These footsteps were measured, perhaps even hesitant, and it almost seemed as if whoever had come seeking my help was reluctant.

  Turning away from the path to the river – Flynn took some persuading not to take it – I strolled down towards the road.

  And, in the soft late twilight, I saw Jonathan Carew walking towards me.

  ‘Is someone in the village sick?’ I called out.

  ‘No.’ He stopped.

  ‘Are you sick?’ I was quite sure, in that first moment, that he was. He was even paler than when I’d seen him a few days ago, and the dark circles around his eyes had intensified. His eyelids looked puffy, and I knew without asking that he wasn’t sleeping.

  ‘Jonathan, let me help you,’ I said. ‘You can’t continue like this, and I—’

  ‘I do need your help, Gabriel,’ he interrupted, ‘but not on any medical matter.’

  ‘But you’re ill!’ I protested. ‘Tell me what ails you, and perhaps I can offer a remedy.’

  ‘I am in no doubt as to what ails me,’ he said sharply, ‘and it is nothing that can be cured by prescribing this or that tincture or potion.’

  ‘What other help do you ask of me, then?’ I replied, equally sharply. ‘I’m a doctor, that’s what I do!’

  He reached out and briefly touched my shoulder. ‘I know, Gabriel. I’m sorry.’ He hesitated. Then: ‘Could we go inside? I do need to ask you something, but a measure of brandy would help me nerve myself to do so.’

  He spoke lightly, but I sensed he was deadly serious. Turning, I led the way back to the house.

  We settled in the library, which is at the front of the house on the left as you face it, and furthest away from Sallie’s room, off the kitchen. I didn’t want to wake her, and so, when I went to the kitchen to fetch the bottle and my heavy-based Venetian glasses, I moved quietly. Her snores continued undiminished and I decided I’d got away with it.

  Jonathan and I sat down in chairs either side of the table, and I poured out two generous measures of brandy. It was good stuff: a gift from a grateful ship’s captain whose dislocated shoulder I’d put back with a minimum of discomfort and in time for him to catch the tide. I didn’t ask him what cargo he was going off to collect, but I suspected the excellent brandy formed a part of it.

  ‘Now,’ I said, ‘let me ask you again: how can I help you?’

  Jonathan took a sip of brandy, then, with an appreciative glance, another. Then he said, ‘I told you when you came to see me in the church the other day that I am haunted.’

  ‘You did.’

  He met my eyes. ‘It is guilt that haunts me,’ he said softly. ‘Guilt at something that I did, several years back.’

  ‘I’m not the one to help with that,’ I replied. ‘Shouldn’t you refer it to the supreme authority?’

  He smiled briefly. ‘I’ve prayed, Gabriel. Believe me.’

  Something in his expression told me not to pursue that line. ‘Is this guilt one that can be assuaged by the taking of steps to redress whatever caused it?’

  ‘I’m hoping it may be, yes.’

  ‘And it’s in this way that you require my help?’

  He was silent for so long that I thought he wasn’t going to answer. But eventually he said, ‘I think I’m going to have to seek your assistance without telling why I need you to do what I’m asking of you.’

  I shook my head. ‘Jonathan, I don’t understand. Are you saying you’re going to ask me to do something but not explain why?’

  ‘Yes.’

  My first instinct was to refuse. If he wasn’t prepared to trust me with the full tale, then he could manage without me. But then I looked again at his haggard face. Noticed how the weight had fallen from him. Remembered that I liked this man. And I heard myself saying, ‘Very well, then. Tell me what you want me to do.’

  He closed his eyes and I had the idea he might be saying a silent prayer of gratitude.

  ‘Remember the lads who claimed to have found jewels in Foxy Dell?’ he said.

  Of all things, I hadn’t expected that. ‘I do.’

  ‘And how the farmer – Rogeus Haydon – said he was sick of people trespassing on his land and was going to set his dogs loose, and then did exactly that?’

  ‘Yes.’ I’d seen the dogs a few days ago when I’d had cause to take the track beside the dell. They were terrifying. Their threatening presence, not to mention their physical condition, added to my dislike of Haydon. Like most of the village, I thought he’d beaten the two lads too harshly for what was only a minor misdemeanour. I didn’t blame the boys’ father for having fought him.

  ‘I need to get into that dell where the lads had been exploring,’ Jonathan said.

  I was amazed. ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘I can’t explain!’ he exclaimed, exasperated. ‘I just told you that, Gabriel!’

  I nodded. ‘So you did.’ I crushed the various possibilities that were whirling through my mind, most of them unlikely and a few quite absurd. ‘So, you want some suggestions as to how to deal with the dogs?’

  His tense expression relaxed. ‘Precisely so.’

  I thought about it. ‘He keeps them hungry,’ I said after a while, ‘which increases their ferocity. They are probably quite unacquainted with kindness, so there’s no point trying to appeal to their better nature.’ I thought some more. Then: ‘We need to get hold of some pungent slabs of raw meat and a quantity of a powerful soporific. We’ll lace the meat with the potion, throw it at the dogs when they hear us on the farm boundary and hurl themselves towards us to see us off, and pray that they find the meat more appealing than us. We then wait while they gulp it down and the soporific takes effect and, as soon as it does, we’ll slip a length of rope through their collars and secure them, so that if they wake before we’ve done whatever you need to do in the dell, they won’t come at us.’

  Jonathan was staring at me. ‘You sound very confident, Doctor,’ he said dryly. ‘Is this something you’ve done before?’

  There had indeed been an occasion, a long time ago, when a similarly fierce guard dog had needed to be temporarily put out of action. Then it had been to allow me access to the private chamber of a very beautiful young widow whose father was somewhat strict about her visitors, especially male ones arriving without his invitation (although most assuredly with hers) during the hours of darkness. But I didn’t think I needed to t
ell Jonathan the details, and in any case it was so long ago that I couldn’t recall them with any accuracy. I simply said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Will it work?’ he asked quietly.

  I shrugged. ‘It depends on my managing to source a suitable soporific. I do not keep such medicines here, for they are dangerous in the wrong hands. But I have one or two ideas where they may be found.’

  He waited. ‘And?’

  ‘I’ll let you know if and when I succeed,’ I said.

  He must have picked up the reason for my pettiness. ‘So, you’re not going to give me a full explanation, any more than I gave one to you,’ he murmured, but he was smiling. ‘Well, I can’t say I blame you.’ He drained his brandy and stood up. ‘Thank you,’ he added.

  ‘As yet I haven’t done anything,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Yes you have,’ he countered. ‘You’ve said you’ll try to help, and that alone may be enough to allow me to sleep tonight.’

  I saw him to the door and watched as he walked swiftly away.

  I went back to the library to fetch the glasses and put them in the kitchen. As, finally, I went up the stairs, I saw Celia standing in the gallery that runs right along the back of the house, quite obviously waiting for me.

  ‘What did Jonathan Carew want with you so late?’ she hissed. ‘I said he was ill, didn’t I?’

  ‘He didn’t come to consult me as a physician,’ I said. ‘He wants me to—’ But I stopped. For one thing, I was pretty sure that our conversation had been confidential; for another, I still didn’t know what Jonathan really wanted.

  ‘What?’ Celia demanded.

  Knowing she wouldn’t give up, I said, ‘This is just between us, right?’

  ‘Of course!’ She looked stung that I’d even asked.

  ‘I need to get hold of a strong sedative,’ I said. ‘It’s not for Jonathan,’ I added hastily.

  ‘And you’re not going to tell me who it is for,’ she said resignedly. ‘A sedative makes people go to sleep, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Something such as poppy and mandragora?’

  I stared at her in surprise. ‘How did you know that?’ I was quite sure she hadn’t heard of it from me. I had used the combination in my days at sea for the worst of amputations, when it was a question of calculating the strength so as to keep the patient asleep while I cut and keep him unconscious – and unaware of the pain – for the first day or two of healing, yet not so strong that he never woke up. But it was dangerous and I was reluctant to risk it on human beings. There were other, less perilous ways of dulling pain.

  Despite what I’d just said to Jonathan, I wasn’t entirely sure about using it on dogs.

  Celia smiled. ‘Well, I didn’t until a few days ago. But I just happened to call upon someone who was preparing a whole lot of remedies, including such a potion, and she told me all about it.’

  Mentally I ran through a list of my sister’s acquaintances but none seemed likely to possess the skill needed to handle mandragora and poppy.

  Celia was watching me, a mischievous smile on her face. ‘Oh, come on, Gabe,’ she said softly. ‘Think.’

  ‘I am thinking!’

  Then, out of nowhere, I saw a face in my mind’s eye. Healthy, tanned skin, framed by thick, glossy black hair. Clear, bright eyes, blue-grey and very pale. Wide mouth and ready smile. Tall, elegant, with a figure to set a man’s heart thumping. Strong, capable hands. I seemed to feel those hands, firmly holding my head as it pounded with the pain that is an aftermath of my injury; I felt the fingertips, travelling gently over my skull and easing the agony.

  And, although she had helped me that day with touch alone and hadn’t even offered a painkiller or a sedative, I knew who it was who made the mandragora and poppy potion.

  ‘Judyth,’ I breathed.

  And Celia nodded.

  SIX

  I’d thought that puzzling over Jonathan’s secretive and mysterious mission might keep me awake, but the day had worn me out and I went to sleep quickly. Very early in the morning, however, as soon as I was alert enough to think, my mind went straight to speculation.

  The obvious reason for his wanting access to Foxy Dell was because there was something there that he needed. I thought about the place. It was right on the margin of Farmer Haydon’s land, close to where the track from the village passed by. There was a large stand of very old trees – beech, oak, some slow-growing but vast holly – and they formed a sort of rough circle around a deep, rock-studded hollow in the ground. Local legend said this had once been a quarry, and from it had been extracted the stones that built St Luke’s Church. If this was true, then the quarry was ancient, for the church dated to around the time of the Conquest.

  In the depths of the hollow there was a thick carpet of dead leaves, in which grows a tangle of ivy, fern and mosses, interspersed with a few spindly holly bushes. The area was too overshadowed to permit much light to filter down, and only the shade-tolerant plants thrived. Beech trees clung to the steep sides of the dell, and there were holes and animal diggings among their roots.

  Haydon’s irritation with the lads was understandable, to an extent, for the villagers had long tended to treat the dell as if it were common ground. The encircling trees made it a secret place for lovers, and the massive trunks and branches of the trees were a natural playground for adventurous children. Mushrooms grew in the moist soil in the autumn, bluebells in the deep shade in spring, and villagers helped themselves to both.

  But none of those activities or those bounties, I reflected, stretching, could be what Jonathan sought there.

  The lads, I remembered suddenly, had been so excited because they said they’d found jewels. I’d never thought that was likely, although we weren’t going to find out since whatever the boys had brought home with them, Haydon had grabbed back. As was his right, I reminded myself, the objects having been unearthed on his land.

  And, even if it had been jewels, what would Jonathan want with them, so urgently, so desperately, that he had sought my help and was quite prepared to countenance the sedating of a pair of powerful dogs?

  Impatient suddenly, I threw back the bedclothes and got up. Lying there trying to find the answer wasn’t getting me anywhere, and I’d be much better off starting my day and knuckling down to what it held in store.

  I’d hoped to slip out of Rosewyke unnoticed, but Sallie must have been listening out for me and she set about making me a generous breakfast. Then Celia arrived, still in her nightgown, her long fair hair loose down her back, and wrapped in a gorgeous silk garment that looked like a medieval monarch’s robe.

  ‘You’re up a lot earlier than usual,’ I greeted her as she sat down and helped herself.

  ‘Mm,’ she answered. I noticed that she kept glancing at me, suppressing a smile.

  When Sallie came in with more hot rolls and a fresh pot of preserve, she too started the surreptitious looks, and then she and Celia would exchange a knowing glance and give those almost imperceptible nods that women direct at each other when they think they’ve spotted something invisible to the lesser perception of a mere male. I always find it infuriating, although I try hard not to show it.

  Eventually, having wolfed down my food far too fast and given myself wind, I got up and left the table. Celia said, ‘Going somewhere nice, Gabe?’ and I heard Sallie suppress a chuckle.

  I ignored them both.

  I arrived outside Judyth’s small and immaculate little house so early that the dew was still sparkling on the colourful array of plants growing abundantly all around it.

  I tapped on the knocker – it was heavy, made of iron and in the shape of an angel – and peered in at the small, deep-set window beside the door. I could see along the dark little passage to the bright room at the far end, and all appeared ordered and tidy within. There was no sign of Judyth. I went round the side of the house, hoping to find her busy at some task in an outhouse.

  When I’d visited her house before I hadn’t seen the g
arden that adjoined the yard behind the house. Now, in the soft, warm sunshine of a late June day, the sight of it hit me with such impact on all my senses that I stopped still and simply drank it in. It was the smells, even more than the colours, the exuberant birdsong and the soft, buzzy sounds of industrious insects, that impressed, and even in those first moments I detected citrus, mint, sage, rosemary and cloves.

  I sensed her come to stand beside me. Turning, I saw that she must have come out of the lean-to beside the rear entrance, for the door stood open. She said, ‘Good morning, Doctor Gabriel. How can I help you, so early on a summer’s morning?’

  I heard the laughter in her voice, saw it in her shining eyes. I said, ‘I hope I’m not disturbing you.’

  ‘You are, but I don’t mind.’ She nodded towards the lean-to. ‘I’ve been hard at work since soon after sunrise and it’s high time I had a break.’ She led the way up the brick path to the back entrance and stopped at the door into the cool kitchen. ‘Sit down there, in the sun’ – she indicated a wooden bench set against the rear wall of the house – ‘and I will fetch a cool drink.’

  She wasn’t gone long. She returned carrying a tray laden with drinks – elderflower cordial – and some small golden biscuits. Despite my large breakfast, I took a couple. They were sweet and tasted of honey.