The Heretic’s Creed

by FIONA BUCKLEY

  There was no result. A surge of exclamations had followed Mistress Gould’s outburst and my courteous knock hadn’t been heard. I tried again, louder. There was still no result. I lifted the latch and edged the door open, just a little, so that I could peer round it.

  The ladies of Stonemoor were embattled. There is no other word for it. They were, virtually, in two camps, facing each other. Each had, so to speak, a spearhead in the form of one lady standing forward of her supporters. One was Mistress Philippa Gould and the other was Mistress Bella Yates. They were both red in the face and trembling with fury and they were confronting each other across a space of only a few feet. Crowded behind each of them, was a group of ladies, presumably adding up to the rest of Stonemoor’s occupants. All were angry and mulish and some of them were shouting. All were dressed alike, in the dark-blue gowns and wimples and little ruffs, and it was hard to recognize faces but I did see Mary Haxby and Annie among Bella’s supporters. Philippa’s, who were slightly greater in number, included Margaret Beale, whose bright brown eyes were flashing fire, and Angelica Ames, who was actually shaking her fist.

  I had been very stealthy, but when the door opened, the movement caught Mistress Gould’s eye. Suddenly, she swung round and stared at me. Then she pointed, and numerous pairs of startled eyes followed her finger.

  ‘Quiet!’ She shouted it like a word of command from an officer to a band of soldiers and quiet actually fell. ‘Mistress Stannard? What are you doing here? This is a private meeting!’

  ‘Will Grimes is here,’ I said. ‘He has brought salt and candles and wants to buy medicine for Master Butterworth. We said we would try to find someone to attend to him.’

  Mistress Gould flung up her hands. ‘As though I hadn’t enough to deal with. Very well.’ She swung round again, glaring furiously at Bella Yates and her entourage. ‘Very well. It seems that although I am the senior lady here, your abbess in all but name, I am not to be allowed to discipline someone whose behaviour, frankly, has been not only disobedient but stupid, the action of someone who knows nothing about anything but still takes it upon herself to inflict her ignorant ideas on the rest of the world. So be it! Bella! Go and see this man Grimes and supply him with the medicine he requires. Go now!’

  We got quickly out of the way as Bella went.

  TWELVE

  Dangerous Questions

  ‘It’s raining again,’ said Brockley.

  It was hardly necessary to say so, for we could all hear it. We were gathered in Sybil’s and my room, and could hear the wind flinging it against the windows. We had returned from that uncomfortable discovery of the Stonemoor ladies in conflict to find that our rooms were once more as dismal as when we first saw them. The skies had now become so heavily overcast that we had lit candles. I knew, though, why Brockley had stated the obvious.

  ‘We need to get away from here as soon as we can,’ I said. ‘If the weather keeps us here tomorrow …’

  ‘If it does, we had better go on doing what we’ve been doing for most of our time here,’ said Sybil. ‘I think we’d do best to keep to the guest quarters, play games, sew, talk only of harmless subjects, make no attempt to enquire into anyone or anything, and pray for the skies to clear.’

  ‘You are right. But the sooner we are on our way, the better,’ said Brockley grimly. ‘None of us knows what is wrong here but something is and we’d rather not be here when whatever it is comes to a head.’

  Dale, her protuberant eyes bulging, said: ‘Do you think we’re in any danger?’

  ‘I hope not,’ I said. ‘I don’t see why we should be, but …’ I did think so, of course, but I could not have pointed to the source of it.

  ‘I suppose,’ said Sybil, ‘that that red chalk mark really is Master Spelton’s mark? There couldn’t be a mistake of some sort?’

  I picked up a candle and all four of us made for the window seat. I threw up the lid. The red chalk sign was there, on the underside. It was a little bigger than the one that Cecil had shown me, but it was cut cleanly into four equal segments by the red chalk cross inside. There was no question about it.

  ‘I don’t think we can doubt this,’ Brockley said. ‘And it’s in the sort of position where Master Spelton very probably would place it. It most likely wouldn’t be noticed by a woman just opening the lid to put something in or take something out.’

  ‘If one of the ladies did notice it, she might not pay much heed,’ said Sybil. ‘The ladies … they’re not … not …’

  ‘Keenly alert?’ suggested Brockley.

  ‘Mistress Gould is,’ I said. ‘And Angelica Ames. But they don’t go in much for doing menial work. They wouldn’t often open storage chests. The rest … I know what you mean. I think Mary Haxby would just say to herself, “Oh, a red chalk pattern, how odd,” and then shut the lid down. So would Annie.’ I closed it myself and went to sit down on the bed. I was trying to think.

  ‘What have we got now?’ I said. ‘We know that Christopher was here, and we know that Philippa Gould and her ladies have denied it, to the men from York, and to us. We have also seen the ladies quarrelling violently about something. Might it be about the lies they have told concerning Christopher? And possibly – Hardwicke as well?’

  We all considered this for a moment. Dale sank on to a stool, looking petrified. Then Sybil said: ‘The book is still here. And if Christopher Spelton came here to fetch it, he either left without it or … And did Bernard Hardwicke also come here? And if so, why didn’t he collect the book? It doesn’t make any sense at all.’

  ‘Are we wondering,’ enquired Brockley, ‘whether neither Master Hardwicke nor Master Spelton actually left Stonemoor House? That they are prisoners here still – or …’

  ‘Dead? Could the ladies possibly have … but whatever for?’ I cried out. It was a cry of anguish because it was Christopher we were talking about and I did not want Christopher to be dead. ‘Philippa Gould offered the book for sale; invited Doctor Dee to buy it! Why should she want to harm whoever came to collect it?’

  ‘She’s quarrelling with her sister,’ Sybil said. ‘And the rest of the ladies are split between them. They could be quarrelling because of the lies that have been told, but could it be about the book instead? That Yates woman doesn’t approve of the book; she said so.’

  I was trying to think. ‘Since Christopher felt the need to leave that mark, it means he did sense danger here. I think that’s definite. Oh, dear God, I wish we could leave at once! Or yesterday! If only we could understand what kind of danger it can possibly have been, here in a house full of middle-aged, devout ladies! I’ve been afraid of this place all along but I can’t see why. I wish I could even begin to work out a theory …’

  I stopped. An extraordinary thought had come to me, had surfaced in my mind like a leviathan emerging from incalculable depths.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Brockley, watching me.

  ‘When we were all looking at the book,’ I said, ‘didn’t we all feel that Mistress Gould’s manner was, somehow, odd; confused, surprised … didn’t we even comment on it? Well, when Philippa Gould was showing it to us, I noticed things … only at the time, I only noticed them in passing. They didn’t seem important then. Look, Cecil described the book to me. He got that description from Doctor Dee who in turn got it from his friend, the executor of the will left by the father of a woman here, called Eleanor Overton. Well, a description passed from one person to another – from the executor to Doctor Dee to Cecil, possibly via the queen! – could easily get garbled. I fancy that that’s why I discounted the things I noticed. I dismissed them too easily, I think.’

  Sybil looked bewildered. Brockley said: ‘Madam, what are you talking about?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘either Hardwicke or Christopher did collect the book after all. I can’t see beyond that. I can’t make out what happened next, but I can’t help wondering because …’

  ‘But the book’s still here! We’ve seen it!’ Sybil expostulated.

  ‘Hav
e we?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Sybil. ‘We did see it. Mistress Gould showed it to us.’

  ‘Did she?’ I asked.

  ‘Madam, what is all this?’ Brockley was impatient.

  ‘I had a dream,’ I said. ‘I dreamt I was looking for the book and I found it but it turned into a demon with yellow fangs. Well, yellow-ish. The same colour as the cover on that book. That’s one of the things I noticed. It’s suddenly begun to niggle at me.’

  Once more, I could hear Cecil’s voice in my head. ‘Cecil said that according to the description he had – which he got from Doctor Dee who got it from the Overton executor – the book was bound in white leather, with the title and the name of the author on the front in gold leaf. The book we saw was a dirty cream – a yellowish cream. That’s why the demon in my dream had yellowish fangs. The dream was telling me that the book wasn’t the one it was supposed to be.’

  ‘But the book’s cover could have been white to start with,’ Sybil broke in. ‘Perhaps the executor just said that to Doctor Dee – that it was white originally, and Doctor Dee didn’t pick up the hint it had darkened with age.’

  ‘That could be so,’ I agreed. ‘But that’s not all. I couldn’t make out much of the gold-leaf lettering on the cover, but I did recognize at least some of the letters. Cecil said that there was a gold leaf pattern on the cover. I don’t call a crescent moon and some stars a pattern, and even though, as I said, I couldn’t make much sense of the lettering, now that I really think about it, I’m becoming more and more certain that it didn’t say Observations of the Heavens by John of Evesham. The lettering bothered me even then but I didn’t know why. It’s just come to me. I don’t think that the letters I could make out fitted in with that title and I don’t think the words were the right length! And besides, do you remember how Mistress Gould paused in that odd way when she set eyes on the book. Suppose she was surprised because it wasn’t the book she expected to see?’

  ‘But she pretended that it was,’ said Brockley.

  Sybil said: ‘If she expected to see the real book, she would have been startled. She didn’t have time to think. She might have pretended, just to gain time.’

  ‘In that case,’ said Brockley, ‘what does she propose to do now? Try to cheat us by sending the wrong book away with us, and hope that it will be taken for the right one? Surely not!’

  ‘She might,’ said Dale. ‘One book about stars and moons and things, with numbers in it and things like that, might be very like another. Perhaps even Doctor Dee doesn’t know exactly what to expect.’

  ‘I think he does,’ I said. ‘He’s seen a copy of the book, belonging to someone else. He probably remembers.’

  ‘Can’t we just ask Mistress Gould about it?’ said Sybil. ‘Wouldn’t it be simpler? We could even ask her why she didn’t tell us that Master Spelton was here.’

  Brockley and I looked at each other and between us there occurred one of our curious moments of mental rapport. I hoped that Dale wasn’t aware of it. Then we both looked at Sybil, with pitying regret.

  ‘Mistress Jester,’ Brockley said, ‘we know that Master Spelton was here. We also know that he has disappeared. The man Bernard Hardwicke has also disappeared and although we have no proof that he came here, he did intend to and he seems to have vanished after he left York, bound for Stonemoor. That happened to him and to Master Spelton. It seems possible, even probable, that whatever happened to them, it was the same in both cases. Which in turn suggests that Hardwicke came here too. It looks as though their disappearances really are connected to Stonemoor. I see it now.’

  ‘It could be,’ I said, ‘that in both cases, they found something here, something that the ladies didn’t want anyone to find.’

  ‘What sort of thing?’ Dale wanted to know.

  ‘It could be anything,’ I said. ‘Something to do with a Catholic plot, perhaps. That’s more likely than anything else. Though where, in that case, the book comes in …’ I shook a puzzled head. ‘John of Evesham’s book may even have nothing to do with it. But whatever it was, the ladies might have realized that suspicions had been aroused. Perhaps both men asked questions. In that case, this could be a very dangerous place for nosy people who ask questions. The more innocent and gullible we seem to be, the better! We are certainly not going to ask Mistress Philippa Gould anything whatsoever.’

  No, we weren’t! Most certainly we weren’t! Spelton’s red chalk sign was a warning and I had taken it to heart. If there were plots under this roof, I didn’t want to enquire into them.

  But the oddity about the book troubled me. There was a mystery surrounding it, and there was certainly a mystery surrounding Christopher’s red chalk sign. Two mysteries under one roof? Could they possibly be separate? They were far more likely to be facets of one central mystery.

  I said: ‘I really think that what was in that box, wasn’t the book we have come for, and somehow I can’t quite believe that it has nothing to do with … whatever made Christopher Spelton put his mark here. I would like to see that book again, examine it at leisure, taking time over it, and not with Mistress Philippa Gould looking over my shoulder.’

  Brockley said: ‘We know what that means, madam.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Secret wanderings after dark and work for my picklocks. But I think it may be necessary.’

  THIRTEEN

  Menacing Whispers

  ‘You don’t like doing that sort of thing,’ said Sybil, and Dale looked worried.

  ‘I hate doing that sort of thing,’ I said.

  I quailed at the thought. I had had to do such things so many times. I had in my time opened quite a few document boxes belonging to other people; once, I had entered a bedchamber to examine a corpse, and once opened a strongbox in the captain’s cabin on a ship. I had always, every time, been in dread of being caught so that although I was skilled with the picklocks, my hands invariably shook when I used them. I had been caught, too, on one very memorable occasion. One never got used to it. The fear was the same every time, and this place, Stonemoor House, was frightening me quite enough already. But …

  It would have to be done. I couldn’t not do it. ‘It’s the only way. Brockley is right. Yes it will have to be at night. This night, I suppose,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to waste time. We should leave here tomorrow.’

  Brockley said: ‘If you are serious, madam, then I suggest that we wait until we can hear what you say is matins being chanted, or sung, or whatever the proper word is. I imagine all the ladies attend. That would be the safest moment.’

  ‘I am glad you said we,’ Sybil observed. ‘I don’t think either Dale or I would want to be left to wait and wonder.’

  ‘No. Though …’ Dale bit her lip, and fell silent.

  Poor Dale. Life with me so often meant being frightened, and with good reason. Just now, I heartily sympathized with her.

  ‘I agree,’ I said, ‘that you should come with me. We must warn Joseph – just in case. He must know what is happening. I must give him a letter to take to York, if he can get away and we cannot.’ I took heart. ‘But even if we are caught, what can Mistress Gould do to us? She surely can’t make all of us disappear! Or imprison us all, either. It’s the sort of thing that might become noticeable!’

  ‘That would apply if we just asked openly for another look, ma’am,’ said Dale, but I shook my head at her.

  ‘I know. But I don’t want to make them – or even just Philippa Gould – aware that we … that we have suspicions about this house, or any kind. Just in case something is seriously wrong here. If we let the ladies know that we are, well, wondering about this household, that will give them a chance to … to hide traces or prepare lies. I can’t put it more plainly than that. It sounds very vague,’ I added lamely. ‘But that’s what I feel.’

  ‘But what could be going on here?’ asked Sybil. ‘I can’t even begin to imagine.’

  ‘Nor can I,’ I said. ‘But I think there’s something. In fact, I
feel sure of it, and I don’t want us to fall foul of it.’

  We could do nothing until nightfall. Time dragged. I wrote the letter for Joseph and Brockley took it to him. Cogge was back from the farm and with his help, they set about exercising the horses, and I, left behind in the guest quarters with Dale and Sybil, found myself intolerably restless, staring from windows, pacing up and down the hall. The rain stopped, which was a relief, for no one fancied riding out into a downpour next morning and we were all agreed that we would go tomorrow unless conditions made it totally impossible.

  At last, unable to settle, I said: ‘The path down the hill is usable. Brockley and Joseph and Cogge have been riding up and down it, taking all the horses out to stretch their legs. Let us go into the village and call at the tavern to find out how Master Butterworth is faring. Grimes said he was poorly.’

  We put on cloaks and hats and set out. The air was cold and damp, but fresh, and the deathly silence which had prevailed while the snow was on the ground had lifted. We could even, somewhere, hear birdsong. The downward path was certainly muddy but we went slowly and from the foot of the hill it was only a short distance to the tavern. It was closed when we got there, but there was a volley of barks from the tavern dog and then Will Grimes darted out to meet us. Darted is a better word than any other; there really was something unearthly about the way he appeared in front of us so suddenly. He stood in our path, gripping the dog’s collar with one hand. ‘Comin’ to call, are thee?’

  ‘We’ve come to see Master Butterworth,’ I said. ‘Is he better?’

  ‘You can come in and see him and welcome,’ said Will sourly. ‘But better, no, he ain’t. Mistress Bella’s done him no good this time, though I don’t doubt she’s tried. It’s a bad day and a sad day, that it is.’

  We followed Will into the tavern. It was dark inside, since all the windows were shuttered, presumably as a signal that the tavern wasn’t functioning today, and the usual tavern smell of ale and sawdust was mingled with something else, which after a moment, I recognized. Someone, recently, had been sick.