The Angel in the Glass

by Alys Clare

  ‘I know about his sickness,’ I said softly.

  She glanced at me. ‘Do you?’

  ‘I have spoken to Josiah Thorn.’ She was revealing secrets to me, and it seemed only fair to reciprocate.

  ‘But he was Sir Thomas’s doctor, and tended the whole family,’ she protested.

  ‘Yes, I understand that, and he was not indiscreet,’ I assured her. ‘I already knew enough to guess, and his silence confirmed that I was right.’ It wasn’t exactly how it had happened but I wanted to protect my friend. Especially as he was soon to sew up my wounds; it really wasn’t a time to risk anything that might antagonize him …

  ‘So, Sir Thomas died, with his secrets safely buried and only a half of one sketch of a beautiful young man to remind him of what he had lost,’ I said when Mary didn’t speak.

  I felt her slight start of surprise. ‘Agnes told you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She shook her head sadly. ‘And then that tramp turned up,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know what happened, but I can only assume he was rifling through Sir Thomas’s private papers searching for money or valuables, and it was only by chance that he had the old sketch in his hand when he was apprehended.’

  ‘Either that,’ I agreed, ‘or the sketch was what he had come for.’

  She said heavily, ‘Yes. That is what I feared.’

  ‘It is the more likely explanation, surely,’ I went on, ‘for why else did he have to be killed? Why else would Lady Clemence, Agnes and Avery claim so persistently that there had never been an intruder here?’

  She nodded. ‘He must have known, that poor, starving man,’ she said softly. ‘He came here looking for that sketch, and, for Agnes, for Lady Clemence, seeing him with it brought the past back with dreadful clarity.’

  ‘It was Agnes who killed him,’ I said. ‘She followed him to the hovel where he was sleeping and she suffocated him. He was thin and weak, and she was a solidly built, strong woman.’

  ‘Did she confess?’ Mary asked in a small voice.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the others …?’

  ‘Her sister and her husband, yes. As to her mother, I don’t know. She did not say that she had killed her.’

  ‘She would have been covered in her mother’s blood,’ Mary observed, ‘and she was not.’

  ‘You saw her soon afterwards?’

  ‘I did. It was I who went to wake her and tell her what had happened.’

  ‘And there was no time for her to have changed her clothes and washed off the blood? To have hidden the weapons and—’ I didn’t go on.

  Mary shook her head. ‘There was not. Moreover, I would swear to the fact that she was deeply and peacefully asleep when I went into her room. Is that likely, do you think, in someone who has just murdered their own mother?’

  ‘I would say it was not,’ I said slowly. ‘Except that …’

  ‘Except that Agnes Lond had lost her mind,’ Mary finished for me.

  There came the sound of footsteps; two sets. I heard Theo’s deep voice and another lighter one answering him. Mary and I looked at each other. I struggled to sit up straighter.

  She rose to her feet as Theo came into the room, the vague figure of one of his agents behind him. ‘Before you speak, Master Davey,’ she said, ‘will you please ask your man there to ride for Doctor Thorn at Buckland, as he is required to attend Doctor Taverner.’

  Theo did as she asked, and Gidley – I could see who it was now – hurried away. Then Theo came hurrying towards me, kneeling down in front of me.

  ‘Are you badly hurt?’ he asked. I couldn’t read his expression.

  ‘No. Cuts to my arm and shoulder that will need a few stitches, that’s all.’

  Now his emotion was clear to see; it was relief.

  While we waited for Gidley and Josiah Thorn, Mary and I told Theo what had happened. He went upstairs to look at poor Denyse in her bed and he stood over the body of Avery Lond for some moments. He went outside, presumably to look at Agnes, splayed on the ground behind the house. Then he came back to where Mary and I sat beside the fire and very vigorously poked it up, adding quite a lot more fuel. All of us, I think, were glad of the bright flames.

  I took advantage of Mary’s absence as she went to fetch us all a measure of brandy to ask him, ‘What of the big man? Did Jarman Hodge find him? Did he bring him in?’

  ‘His name is Paulus Fiske and he is now tucked up in a cell that leads off my cellar,’ Theo replied. ‘He’s not a prisoner – well, to be fair I suppose he is, since I’ve locked him in, but that’s only to stop him running off again. He’s been fed – not that he ate much, the state he was in – given hot water to wash in, and he has a couple of blankets to keep out the chill.’

  ‘And what does he say?’ My impatience was boiling up. ‘Did he come here hunting for the other one? For Jannie?’

  ‘There is a story to be uncovered, that’s for sure,’ Theo said, ‘but as yet I know very little of it. He – this Paulus Fiske – is in deep distress, he’s afraid, he’s lost and quite alone, all of which, added to the fact that he was starving and filthy, is why he’s now asleep in my cell, warm and fed. And,’ he added, eyeing me with a faint smile, ‘why I’m very much hoping this Josiah Thorn will be able to patch you up, since it’s you who is going to watch while I speak to Paulus Fiske tomorrow morning, and tell me how to penetrate his secrets.’

  EIGHTEEN

  Josiah Thorn’s hands might have been old but they had lost none of their skill or their delicate touch. I couldn’t say that it didn’t hurt when he stitched my shoulder and the soft flesh on the underside of my forearm, but it was bearable and he was quick. As he remarked, it did a doctor a power of good to experience the treatment he meted out to others.

  He told me very firmly that I was on no account to ride away that night. In case I decided to do so anyway, he told Mary to hide my clothes, which she had taken away to cleanse of the blood that seemed to have permeated and splattered over everything I wore. Unless I was proposing to ride home to Rosewyke in my skin, it looked as if I’d be staying at Wrenbeare.

  I didn’t relish the prospect, since I’d be sharing the house with three dead bodies and not a living soul. But Mary took pity on me and so, to my surprised pleasure, did Theo, and both of them offered to stay with me.

  Gidley was dispatched with more messages, this time to Theo’s and my respective households to explain that we would not be home that night. ‘Don’t you give too much in the way of explanations, lad,’ Theo warned him. ‘No need to alarm that pretty sister of yours, Gabe, that you’ve taken a wound. Especially,’ he added rather crushingly, ‘since it’s not a very serious one.’

  Mary made up beds and then, after making sure Theo and I had all we needed in the way of food and drink, she bade us a quiet good night and retired to her room. It was late now and, given the events of the day, I didn’t blame her. Theo and I finished off the small amount that remained in the late Avery Lond’s bottle of particularly fine brandy, then we too sought our beds.

  In the morning, I dressed in my freshly laundered clothes and after both of us had put away a reasonably decent breakfast prepared by Mary, Theo and I set off for his house, and the confrontation with Paulus Fiske. Mary left with us, although I noticed that, before he let her go, Theo made sure he knew where to find her if he needed her. She said little in answer to our questions about whether she had a place to go, and if she would be all right, save to say briefly that she was going to stay with the friends she’d fled to when Agnes Lond dismissed her from Wrenbeare.

  Earlier we had watched two of Theo’s men load the three bodies onto a cart and depart off up the road. They would be taken directly to the empty house where Theo rented the crypt, since, as he said, it would be grim for Paulus Fiske to share the cellar beneath Theo’s house with them. ‘Poor bugger’s near enough demented as it is without making it worse,’ Theo remarked glumly, ‘and I need to get some sense out of him.’

  Theo asked if
I would go down to the cell and examine the big man. ‘He’s been fed, watered and washed again this morning,’ he added, ‘and is altogether in a better state than when he was brought in.’

  I agreed. ‘What am I looking for?’ I asked.

  Theo gave me a slightly uneasy glance. ‘Not sure. The man’s … well, I’m not certain he’s right in the head. He moans a lot. Weeps.’

  ‘I see.’

  I went down into the crypt and the guard on duty let me into the cell.

  With a couple of Theo’s agents stationed unobtrusively out in the hall and a third, a particularly broad and strong man, just outside the front door, the interview with Paulus Fiske was carried out in Theo’s office, Fiske sitting facing Theo across the large desk and myself standing just behind Fiske. As Fiske squirmed and wriggled in his chair, Jarman Hodge slipped quietly into the room and came to stand beside me.

  The big man couldn’t see Jarman or me unless he turned his head, and as his frightened eyes were fixed on Theo, I was able to study him without his realizing it. He was huge, or it was fairer to say he had been huge, for now, although he still had the massive bone structure, the height, the breadth in the shoulder and the chest, the flesh had fallen off him and he looked as if he was close to starvation. He wasn’t hungry just now, though, for Theo’s wife Elaine had sent down to the cell a very generous breakfast, and Paulus Fiske was still slightly troubled by the wind that had been the inevitable result of wolfing down food on an empty stomach.

  Theo, apparently thinking that delay would only increase Fiske’s nervousness, began as soon as we were all settled. ‘Now, Paulus, you came here a few days ago looking for a friend, but before I could begin to help you, you fled.’ Paulus gave a soft moan. ‘Now, yesterday evening one of my agents saw you steal some eggs, and—’

  ‘I was hungry!’ Paulus protested. ‘I am very sorry, I know it is wrong to steal, and I will work to pay back the money if I—’

  ‘Never mind about the eggs,’ Theo said shortly, cutting across the flow of distressed words. Paulus, I noticed, had a marked accent, and I thought I detected the particular sounds of English spoken by a man from the Low Countries. ‘My agent followed you to a house on the edge of the moors, where earlier we had found the body of a vagrant, and you told him that the dead man was called Jannie—’

  ‘Ja, ja, Jannie, Jannie Neep,’ Paulus said eagerly. ‘My friend.’

  ‘Jannie Neep, yes,’ Theo went on, ‘and you said that this Jannie had come here for a particular purpose, which was to break into a big house called Wrenbeare that is the home of the Fairlight family.’

  Watching Paulus from behind, I saw him stiffen. I thought at first it was from a sudden increase in his fear, but, edging forward so that I could see his face, I realized I was wrong, for his expression was one of furious anger. He said ‘Thomas Fairlight,’ in a tone of cold fury, and then he spat on the floor.

  Theo, glancing briefly at the gobbet of spittle, said softly, ‘I see.’ Then, his blue eyes suddenly intent, he leaned across his desk towards Paulus and said coldly, ‘I will forgive that, since I sense you are very distressed, but in return for my leniency you will now tell me your tale, right from the start.’

  And, meekly and obediently, surprising us all, Paulus Fiske did exactly that.

  They had been boys, Paulus Fiske and Jannie Neep, fugitives, lost, desperate, very hungry, when they first fell in with the Frenchman Artus Bennart. Would it have been better if they had stayed huddled in their ditch that night and allowed Artus Bennart to walk on by? It was hard to say. He saved them from destitution, perhaps from death, but was the price worth paying?

  Artus Bennart was an artist: a master in the art of stained glass. His work was very beautiful and much sought after, but in his native France, where he was returning when he encountered and picked up the two boys, there were many men whose work was on a par with his. And so, after a brief visit to his tiny house in Chartres to collect one or two essential papers, he was going to England. For the English wanted to replace the beautiful glass they’d been forced to give up and see smashed under the iconoclasts and nobody in England could make it any more.

  Artus Bennart was a hard man driven by the urge for self-advancement, and in the course of a tough life he had learned that the most important factor was to look after yourself, because nobody else did. Accordingly, other, weaker people were there to serve him in that aim, and the two boys, enfeebled by all that they had been through and neither very sound in the first place, were like very small flies in the web of a particularly ruthless spider.

  Paulus Fiske at almost fourteen was already a large lad, tall, big and strong, eager to please because he had learned already that if you pleased those with power over you, they were less likely to beat you, starve you or otherwise abuse you. He became Artus Bennart’s workhorse and, from the day he and Jannie fell in with the master in stained glass, he rarely went to bed without some part of him hurting.

  In contrast, Jannie Neep, who was perhaps six months or a year older than Paulus – neither of them knew exactly how old they were, or where and when they had been born – was slim and graceful, he moved like a dancer, he had a body like that of the most perfect young Greek god and the beautiful, distant, serene face of an angel. As soon as Artus saw him, staring up anxiously from that ditch in the last of the daylight, filthy, bones all but poking through his smooth skin, he thought he might have found his model and his muse. Once he’d taken both boys to an inn and hosed them down, he knew he had been right.

  ‘We sail for England on the evening tide, my lads,’ Artus told them a week or so later when they had walked for several days north-westwards up to the coast, and the English Channel, grey and unsettled under rain and lowering skies, stretched out before them. ‘I hate England and I hate the fucking English,’ he added bitterly, ‘and I’m going there purely to make as much money as I can as swiftly as possible, then I’ll be off back home.’ He looked at the boys out of narrow, calculating eyes. ‘Now I’m not going to be too fussy about how I go about acquiring it, but when I go home, I intend to be laden down with gold.’

  He stared at the boys for a moment, and something in his face sent a shock of alarm through Paulus. Then he said in quite a different tone, jockeying, joking now, ‘Ever been on a boat before?’ Both boys shook their heads. ‘Well, you’ll heave and retch as if you’re trying to bring up your guts all the way through to your arseholes, but you’ll get over it.’

  His prediction was accurate. Neither Paulus nor Jannie ever forgot that interminable voyage, and even when they were on dry land once more in Plymouth, Jannie – always the more frail – went on being sick for another miserable three days.

  The boys didn’t know it, for Artus told them nothing unless there was no choice, but he had been contacted back in Chartres by a Devon family; old Catholics, who wanted to replace a triptych of stained-glass panels of the Holy Family that had been wrenched from the walls of their private chapel forty years ago by Thomas Cromwell’s thugs and which, before their own horrified eyes, had been crushed under the boots of the looters and the hooves of their horses. Now, newly arrived in Plymouth, Artus chivvied his workhorse and his model on the last leg of their journey, and so they came to the small inland town on the fringes of a great moor – neither boy ever learned its name – outside which lived the family who had engaged Artus Bennart.

  Artus did not allow his workhorse and his muse any free time. When they weren’t hard at work in their various ways, Artus made them stay in the dirty little room attached to the barn in which he worked. But one day Artus got drunk. He had just completed the first of his commissions, and the family were delighted with the Virgin and Child panel he had made for them. Jannie Neep had been his model for the Madonna; the beautiful boy could easily pose as a woman, for his androgynous looks were very adaptable. Artus had been extremely well paid and his purse was heavy with coin. Such was the family’s happiness at having found so fine a master in the craft that in addition
they presented him with a bottle of excellent French brandy, the very smell of which reminded him poignantly of his distant home. He drank too much of it and fell into a drunken stupor.

  Paulus and Jannie – who had not been paid and who didn’t get so much as a sniff of the cork of the brandy bottle – took their chance and went out exploring.

  And so it was that Thomas Fairlight, reluctant family man, married to an unappealing, discontented woman, father of two daughters, man of wealth and position in the area and recently made a justice of the peace, first set eyes on Jannie Neep. Thomas had been out riding and, hearing the sounds of splashing and merriment from the little stream that flowed close to his route home, went to investigate.

  Lust was instant, for Jannie and Paulus had taken off their clothes and were splashing in the stream. Jannie’s body was perfect. As was his face, which Thomas saw when he managed to tear his eyes away from the boy’s loins and look at it. Smooth, straight fair hair; high, well-marked cheekbones; firm jaw above which the cheeks were still a little full with the residue of childhood. Bright, light blue eyes under straight brows. Perfect nose. Lips, wide, well-marked, utterly sensual.

  Or so the besotted Thomas Fairlight said to himself.

  He followed the lads back to the dirty room beside the barn. Unable to leave the object of his sudden and furious desire yet afraid to approach – Paulus was an alarming figure – Thomas waited.

  And, very late that night, Artus Bennart woke from his drunken sleep with a crushing headache, a very queasy stomach and a desert-dry mouth, all of which symptoms miraculously melted away when the well-dressed man lurking outside told him why he was there and what he wanted.