Death at St. Vedast

by Mary Lawrence

  Originally, the Rat Man had sought the stone for the transmutation of metals. He was a capable alchemist; his methods had gained much interest and envy among his peers. If any man could discover the stone, it was whispered, it would be he. He’d known success was close; he’d felt it in his core—the manifestation of change.

  But the change that happened was not what he had expected. . . .

  The Black Death raged across the continent and arrived on the king’s isle aboard a ship. In a matter of weeks, death held sway across the land. Swellings, the likes of which had never been seen, appeared under armpits, disfigured legs, necks, and groins. The buboes started as red bumps—like cherries ripe for the picking. If their victim had felt fine, the buboes could have been dismissed. But this fruit grew to the size of an apple, darkened to purple, sometimes to black—a fruit plump with rot.

  Along with the buboes came delirium, vomiting, and the intense desire to sleep. It was natural for a victim to yield to slumber’s escape, but doing so proved fatal. Inevitably, on the morrow, death would take a life.

  Havoc and heartbreak descended on London like a suffocating fog. Bills of mortality were posted, carts creaked through the streets collecting the dead, homes were quarantined. Barbers performed their bloodletting and the ditch latrines ran thick with putrid black blood. The alchemist watched healers dispense their futile concoctions: lavender and rose poultices for headaches, mint and wormwood to relieve nausea, vinegar to swab lanced wounds. No remedy proved effective against the cursed malady.

  Death claimed too many. The young were not spared, and it was this grievous injustice that the alchemist could not abide. He turned away from his covetous pursuit of gold and instead sought the elixir of life.

  Like Ferris Stannum, the alchemist had gone through the gates of projection, each stage building upon the successful completion of the previous one. He created the ambered glass wolf, ground it into a flour most fine. With kerotakis he had repeatedly sublimed the solution until one day he created a splendorous elixir. It did not glow like Ferris Stannum’s concoction—its allure was more subtle.

  A smell of roses so enticing lured the alchemist to believe he had found the sweetness of love, the essence of God and his angels. To the Moors, the scent of rose represented the sanctity of souls. He believed he had created the elixir of immortality.

  The final proof of an experiment is testing its effectiveness. As the smoke of purging fires smoldered outside his door and the echoes of the parish death knells rang, the alchemist crossed himself and drank down this potion, this gift from God.

  He dropped to his knees.

  The fluid ran down his throat like a river of fire, melting his flesh with the searing pain of a blacksmith’s glowing rod. Boiling blood filled his mouth, the dissolved debris of his inner flesh. He tried spewing the vile philter into a bucket, but with it he expelled the viscous lining of his throat. Indeed, the elixir had turned his organs to liquid.

  His life began to ebb away. This potion was not the manna from heaven he had expected. His teeth liquefied; he coughed up his heart; his vision was of torment. A chorus of demons surrounded him, grinning as they stripped his skin from his muscle. They placed a hook under his clavicle, then drew out his bones like a thread being teased from cloth.

  His punishment for manipulating the natural order of life was that he would forever be denied resolution of his own. He would forever be reminded of what he could not achieve. His was a perpetual purgatory.

  And as his screams rattled God’s ottoman, he was pitied from above but refused intervention. Into his open mouth poured the anguished cries of plague victims who had died before him. His transformation, indeed, his transmutation, was to become an empty vessel holding the cries and discarded souls of the loved and the forgotten, the victims of an unkind death from plague and the torment of unfulfilled potential.

  And so the wraith of the Thames existed between the living and the dead, dwelling in the dark corners of dreams and the imagination, doomed to ply the waters of his beloved city for . . . eternity?

  For centuries the Rat Man observed his city. He watched fires level neighborhoods, plagues wax and wane, people suffer from disease and endure the policies of brutal kings. He navigated the river, hunting for rats, dispensing with vermin, cracking their spines, and gnawing their bones. But what he longed for was redemption. He longed for a resolution to his grim existence.

  Until Ferris Stannum, no one had come close to creating the elixir of life. It wasn’t that the Rat Man wanted immortality—this limbo where he found himself was essentially never ending. Nay, what the Rat Man wanted was an end to his torment.

  Passing overhead was his greatest hope for ending that suffering. He’d watched Bianca Goddard since she was a young girl gathering plants at the river’s edge. He’d seen her give her tattered boots to a girl more desperate than she. Observing from his skiff, unbeknownst to anyone, he had grown to know her and to have faith in her. He glanced down at the kerotakis rolling in the hull of his wherry. A book of alchemy retrieved from the water’s depths—coughed up by the river as if ridding itself of something unpalatable—sat atop his pile of dead rats. The air felt different when Bianca moved through it. And here he stood, watching the wheels roll overhead as they carried his last hope away from him.

  CHAPTER 4

  As the pale light of morning squeezed between the buildings on Foster Lane, Bianca squeezed between the gathered onlookers next to St. Vedast Church. As slight as a coal tit, she slipped through the oglers without their noticing.

  In the shadow beside the church lay a woman—gray in pallor—a pool of blood for a pillow. Her head lay flat against the cobbles, almost as if a hole had been dug to cradle the back of her skull. On closer inspection, Bianca could see that her skull had been thoroughly crushed. Her bare feet, cold and still, resembled those of a carved effigy on a sepulcher. A thin smock ruffled in the wind, the only sign of movement. As yet, no constable or coroner had arrived, so Bianca took the opportunity to examine the body before the meddlesome officials intruded.

  Plenty speculated how the woman had met her end. However, no witness came forward to correct the conjectures, and no one recalled ever having seen her before. She was unknown and unremembered.

  Bianca knelt beside the body and studied the victim’s final expression. The woman’s eyes were wide and staring, perhaps a sign of bewilderment, perhaps regret or surprise. The woman had realized she was going to die.

  Had she tried to flee an assailant? If she had been forcefully bludgeoned from behind, thought Bianca, she might have landed on her face. Or perhaps she would have fallen in a crumpled heap. But this woman had landed on her back.

  The right leg crossed the left, causing a slight twist of her torso. If one were hit from behind, one would not land on one’s back with a leg overlapping the other. Bianca looked up. A beech tree grew beside the church, its upper branches stretching toward the roof, some brushing against it. The roof edge had no lip. There was no ledge—just a straight, smooth slope. If the woman had fallen from there, her body lay where one might expect it to land. If she had fallen from the tree, her body would have been closer to the trunk, not beyond the spread of its branches. Her smock would have been torn or ripped—which it was not.

  Assuming the woman had fallen, her body could have twisted—a natural reflex. In those last seconds she would have wanted to return to the safety of where she had been. Bianca gently turned the woman’s body onto her back, ignoring the protests about touching a corpse—especially if it was self-murder. With the victim’s front fully exposed, the crowd took a collective suck of breath. The woman was with child.

  “What mother would take the life of her child?” said a woman. The mention of it set off another round of signing the cross. “She is damned. Her soul is unclean.”

  “It may not have been self-murder,” said Bianca, looking round, then standing. “It appears that she fell from a great height. But it is also possible she did not willing
ly end her own life and that of her child. She may have been pushed.” There was a gasp from the crowd.

  “But why take her to a roof and push her off? There are easier ways to finish someone.” The woman who suggested this drew several leery stares. She met their dubious looks and put a hand on her hip. “Wells, climbin’ to a roof is a dangerous undertakin’ for both parties.”

  “Maybe they didn’t climb,” said Bianca, standing. “Maybe they were in the bell tower to start.”

  The sea of faces turned to gaze up at the massive structure.

  “Give way. Give us way.” The back of the crowd parted to allow a constable to elbow his way to the front. A coroner followed at his heels. When they were within a few feet of the body, the coroner moved ahead, his face taut with professional efficiency. The constable took one look at the victim, then faced the crowd and ordered them back.

  Bianca was relieved the constable was not Patch—an irksome lawman she had been unable to avoid of late. This constable possessed a capable air, and Bianca dared to hope he might actually handle the situation with some intelligence.

  The coroner examined the body, which amounted to crouching beside it and turning the victim’s head to look at the wound. He wiped his hands on the victim’s shift, then lifted the hem to peek at her round belly. His eyebrows jumped in recognition as he dropped the gown.

  He stood and addressed the crowd. “Is this woman’s name known? Has anyone seen her before?”

  No one volunteered a word.

  The constable rocked on his toes and projected his voice. “Who discovered the body?”

  The faint clop of a horse sounded; then a calm voice answered. “It was I.” The crowd moved aside to let a man forward.

  One might assume his opinions would be as narrow as his shoulders—as thin as a blade of grass. Men without chests seemed doomed to bend in the wind of others. “I am Henry Lodge of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths and churchwarden of St. Vedast.” His dress spoke of a man of station. His composed demeanor confirmed it.

  “Good sir,” said the coroner. “Kindly tell us how you came upon the body.”

  The churchwarden spoke in the measured tones of a man comfortable presenting his opinion. “It is a matter of duty that I visit St. Vedast in the early hours. I take inventory, unlock the belfry, check the candles. This morning it was quite cold. I wished to finish my duties early so that I could repair to the Goldsmiths’ Hall, where it is more comfortable.”

  “Comfortable?” inquired the constable.

  Lodge turned an indulgent eye on the lawman. “The guild office is never so cold as St. Vedast. I prefer not to spend my day blowing in my hands to warm them.”

  The constable gave a slight nod.

  “This morning as I neared St. Vedast, a man exited the side yard of the church. It is unusual to see anyone at that hour after such a cold night. But to see a man with an expression of panic on his face is particularly noticeable. My first inclination was that he was being chased. He ran into the lane and at the sight of me fled in the opposite direction.”

  “Did you see evidence of blood on his person?” asked the constable.

  “I did not. I expected a pursuer, but none emerged. I moved to the opposite side of the lane in case there was a lurker in wait. As I neared the side yard, it was clear someone was sprawled on the cobbles.”

  “Was the woman dead when you found her?” asked the coroner.

  “Quite.”

  The crowd murmured—as much from the succinct reply as from the cold manner in which it was delivered.

  “I left her where she lay,” said Henry Lodge. “There was nothing to be done but call for a ward. I sent the sexton to summon you.”

  The crowd rustled, allowing a second figure through. A priest, bundled against the cold in a heavy gown overcoat over his cassock, clutched a prayer book against his chest. At the sight of the body, his lips moved in silent utterance as he quickly crossed himself.

  He knelt beside her and began his prayers. His susurrations were sometimes drowned by the whistling wind or a nervous cough. One onlooker shouted that it was self-murder. The priest paused but then continued. “Réquiem aetérnam . . .”

  Once finished, he got to his feet. “If you have conducted your inquiry, I shall see to the body,” he said to the coroner, then sent a boy to find the sexton. “Have him toll the death knell and prepare to remove the body.”

  “Father,” said the constable, “this may be a self-murder. Unless we find evidence to the contrary, or we are able to find and question this fleeing witness, I will treat it as such. We can wait for a relation to come forward, but I doubt anyone will claim her. You may call a collector to dispose of the body.”

  “This woman died on St. Vedast’s grounds. If none shall claim her, then I shall see to her.”

  The constable, surprised at the priest’s dismissal of church doctrine, spoke. “There is no seeing to her. She has committed a crime against God. I suggest we drag the body through the streets facedown.”

  “I will not have it,” said the priest firmly. His words hung in the air, before a gust of wind blew them apart.

  “But she is a criminal,” argued the constable. “She has committed murder. I would not want her body to corrupt my graveyard. At the least, I hope your sexton buries her with her feet to the south. Let the flames of hell lick her toes.”

  “Sir, you are quick to conclude that this is self-murder when you do not know for a fact that it is,” said the priest. “St. Vedast’s graveyard is not yours. Nor is it mine. It is God’s. Let Him sit in judgment of her soul. We know not the bounds of His love and forgiveness.”

  In spite of the bitter cold, people lingered, eavesdropping and contributing their sometimes wild speculations regarding the death. Bianca remained near the officials, listening to their conversation. Unfortunately, she learned nothing more. She thought she might ask the churchwarden for a description of the fleeing witness; then she noticed, from the corner of her eye, a man slipping the priest a coin.

  She heard him address Father Nelson and heard the word “mass” before the crowd drowned his murmur. The dark fur of his collar lifted in the wind, obscuring his jawline and nose in profile. He wore the ubiquitous black and russet brown common to merchants—there was nothing to distinguish this man from others of his kind. Not even his cap set him apart. Bianca barely got a glance before he turned and folded into the crowd. Her instinct told her to follow. She edged through the onlookers, but her height was her disadvantage. She lost sight of him.

  Bianca knew that by leaving Southwark she would be mixing with more “citizens” and men of money. She now realized Foster Lane was rife with men of station.

  An extra mass is not common unless a priest is prompted to say one. Praying for a self-murderer was not done, but the coin provided motivation enough. Father Nelson encouraged the spectators to accompany him inside. “This is an unfortunate event for our parish. We must pray for God’s protection.”

  Bianca returned to where the maid lay just as the sexton caught up with the priest. The soiled threads he wore for his unsavory chores stank of clay. “I have not been able to sound the death knell,” he informed the priest. “The belfry is locked.” Father Nelson looked to Henry Lodge, the churchwarden.

  “I unlocked the bell tower.” Lodge was adamant.

  “Nay, sir,” said the sexton. “It is secured.”

  There began an argument. The churchwarden openly doubted the sexton.

  “Lodge, go with him and see,” said Father Nelson, putting an end to their quarrel. With a weary sigh, the priest made his way through the spectators, disappearing into the church.

  Reluctantly, the crowd dispersed, some following Father Nelson inside for the impromptu mass, others returning to their shops or homes. Bianca caught up to the churchwarden.

  “Sir,” she introduced herself. “You said you unlocked the bell tower. Perchance, could you have locked it, thinking otherwise?”

  “All was as it s
hould be.”

  “There was no sign of intrusion?”

  “There was not,” said the churchwarden. He quickened his step to be rid of her, but Bianca stuck to his side like a barbed seed.

  “I wonder if you might describe the man who ran from the side yard?”

  At first Henry Lodge did not answer. His disregard for her was palpable. But Bianca was not cowed by his superior attitude. He took a few more steps, then stopped, realizing there would be no getting rid of her until he answered.

  “He was of no import,” he said.

  “Do you recall how he was dressed?”

  Lodge’s eyes flicked down at Bianca’s brown kirtle, homespun, with a patch sewn hastily of a different color fabric. A look of distaste spread across his face. Bianca expected his disdain. He did not have to respond to a woman so obviously beneath him. But he surprised her and answered.

  “He was a man like most.”

  “A commoner, sir?”

  Henry Lodge’s mouth pinched. “Perhaps a man of desperation—why else would he be out at such an hour and not asleep in his bed?”

  “You remember no unique qualities? Perhaps a particular hat, a limp, or a trait that struck you?”

  The churchwarden looked past her, conjuring the man from memory. “Nay, nothing memorable.”

  Bianca waited a moment, then thanked him.

  “Ah, there was something that struck me about the man,” Lodge said as Bianca turned to leave. “He looked guilty.”