We were here because we’d been spying intermittently on the ostler Kit Kite. That sandy-haired gentleman was, in my opinion, if not exactly the key to the mystery, a means by which one might get at the key. Kite had returned to his post in the stables during the day but Abel had seen him, from our vantage point in the inn chamber, once more entering the back-street house as the light faded from the sky. From the fact that the ostler had rushed off there earlier after I’d tantalized him in the Golden Cross yard with the reference to “naughty man’s cherries”, as well as from my observation of the white stick or cane propped against the wall in the lobby, it was evident that this pinched dwelling was serving as some kind of base for . . . for what exactly?
I didn’t know. That’s what Abel and I were doing here, loitering in the alley, trying to find out. But this wasn’t entirely a shot in the dark.
While most of my fellows were packing up to leave Oxford, I’d spent the afternoon in pursuit of one or two notions. My first call was on a bookshop in Turl Street. I’d already dropped into this place a couple of times. The shopkeeper, one Nathaniel Thornton, was a dusty old man with a straggling white beard. He was very ready to chat with me – booksellers seem to fall into two classes, the very talkative and the very silent. He was not impressed to find that I was a member of a company of players since he shared the prevailing Oxonian view of acting as no profession for a gentleman. When I pointed out to him that he had William Shakespeare’s poem Lucrece on his shelves as well as a battered copy of Venus and Adonis, and that this Shakespeare was our very own author, Master Thornton said, “Ah yes but the poems will last, mind you, unlike the man’s plays.” (I might have disputed this but wasn’t sure enough of my ground.)
On this occasion I explained to Thornton that I was looking for a book that might give advice on devices and preservatives to keep off the plague, since I was returning to London, an even more plaguey spot than Oxford if that was possible. There was some truth in what I said – anyone would be glad of any instrument that might keep the thing at bay – but I was really in search of information on poisons and thought it best not to come straight out with this, rather to work round to the subject.
“Some say that a unicorn’s horn is the best specific against the plague,” said the bookseller.
“What’s your view, Master Thornton?”
I was humouring the old fellow but I was also curious. It seemed to me that a lifetime spent selling books, especially in a learned city, must impart a certain wisdom.
“They say that Alexander the Great went to immense labour and expense to procure a unicorn, and even so could not find one alive. That being the case, Master Revill, it is strange how frequently one finds the horn of the beast ground up into a powder and on sale at street corners. You’ll have to pay for it, mind you – but it is common.”
“What do they use?”
“A shoe-horn usually, broken and ground up and mashed with something else. The ignorant are easily deceived.”
I smiled smugly, as one of the non-ignorant, the undeceived. Master Thornton continued in his ruminative way, “When it comes to warding off the plague now, some people make great claims for the onion. Peeled and left to lie in the rotten place.”
“At least it’s cheaper than unicorn,” I said.
“And more effective, since your onion is a great sucker-up of infections, which is more than I have ever heard said for a shoe-horn. But I have a different preservative.”
“So what would you use, Master Thornton?”
He reached into a drawer of the desk behind which he was sitting and extracted three soft leather pouches attached to cords.
“When I go out I wear one of these about my neck. It is recommended by several authorities such as Doctor Bodkin in this very town.”
Naturally my ears pricked up at the mention of Bodkin. The bookseller opened one of the little pouches to display its contents but I could see only a grey powder.
“This is arsenic. Ratsbane. So far I have been preserved, but I do not go out much, mind you.”
The reference to arsenic was my cue and I asked Master Thornton whether he could recommend any herbals which dealt with poisons and other noxious substances, since it is frequently observed that a little danger will often work to keep off the greater. The bookseller knew his stock and indicated three or four volumes at the end of a shelf in the corner. He did this without moving from his station behind the desk, and I didn’t wonder at his claim that he rarely stirred from his shop.
The most promising volume looked to be a Herbal by one Gerard Flower, a graduate of this very university as I saw on the title-page, and a highly appropriate name for an author writing about plants and their properties. But I realized that I would need more than a few minutes flicking through its pages in the corner of Nathaniel Thornton’s shop. It cost five shillings, however, and I was not willing to part with so much money for a book that I needed only for one particular purpose and would probably not consult again.
We entered into negotiations. In the end I came to an agreement with Nathaniel Thornton that I could borrow Flower’s Herbal on condition that I bought a copy of WS’s Lucrece for two shillings, which I did on the spot and willingly enough. For an additional sixpence Thornton offered to throw in another item which, after a moment’s hesitation, I accepted. I promised to return the herbal book within a day or so, and was pleased that he was willing to trust me with it.
As I was leaving the bookshop I encountered William Sadler. In his high-handed way he reached for the two books I was carrying and examined them cursorily.
“Poetry I can understand since you are a player, Nicholas, but a herbal . . .?”
“Perhaps I am trying to educate myself, William. About mixtures and preparations.”
“Potions and stuff such as Romeo used?”
“Perhaps. You enjoyed our play?” I said, since he’d given me the cue.
“Oh, it was well enough, although personally I could not swallow dying for love.”
“Only a play,” I said.
Sadler disappeared into Thornton’s shop, leaving me to reflect that if it had been part of the intention of the late Hugh Fern to encourage this man to feel the force of passion then the Doctor’s shade must be feeling disappointed.
I returned to Carfax and consulted the plague orders which were posted on the church doors of St Martin’s. Even though the information also appeared in other public places, there was quite a gaggle of townspeople in this central crossroads, bad news being infectiously attractive. The mortality bill showed how the numbers of the dead in the various parishes had increased in the two weeks or so since the Chamberlain’s Company had been in Oxford, after that first reported outbreak in the Folly Bridge house. Angelica Root did not figure on the list yet, her death presumably being too recent. Although the numbers of dead were small by London standards, the increase was rapid, probably on account of the compact nature of the town.
The plague orders, as opposed to the mortality bills, concerned the appointment of scavengers and examiners and watchers and the like. These are people enlisted from the ranks of ordinary citizens, who find themselves with (generally) unwelcome duties to perform in time of plague, such as ensuring that the streets are kept clean or seeing that no one enters an infected dwelling. The orders were not so interesting to the bystanders as the list of the dead, which caused much finger-pointing and tutting and whispering but little open grief as far as I could see.
I couldn’t find Kit Kite’s name on the published orders, although that didn’t necessarily mean that he and his accomplice were self-appointed to their role.
I wasn’t absolutely sure what that role was . . . though I was beginning to have an inkling of what it might be.
I remembered how, when Abel Glaze and I were walking along Kentish Street on the edge of Southwark, we’d encountered the group of neighbours outside the infested house, together with Alderman Farnaby, the beadle and the constable. There’d been a near fight be
tween one of the locals and the old women, the sisters who’d been appointed as nurse-keepers. And I recalled the words which the neighbour had uttered: something about preferring to have rats at her linen or moths in her cupboard rather than letting any keeper inside her house.
And – what was more to the point regarding this business unfolding in Oxford now – the neighbour had as good as accused the nurse-keeper of being prepared to commit murder on her charges, or at least to speed them on their way with a smothering pillow or a pinching shut of the nostrils with fingers.
I’d no idea how justified such an accusation was. But the fact that it could be made suggested that there was probably some truth behind it. It didn’t take much cynicism about human nature to suppose that not all the persons appointed to watch over a dying household would be shining models of honesty, that some might be tempted to snaffle up the odd, portable item. They might even consider themselves entitled to do so, on the grounds that they were putting their own lives at risk by their charitable work, that the dying had no further use for said portable items, & cetera. It didn’t take a much further descent into cynicism to imagine other persons – more ruthless ones – crossing the boundary and deciding to hurry on nature’s work by the application of pillows or fingers.
Or poison.
A poison known as “naughty man’s cherries”.
Deadly nightshade.
I was fairly certain that Mistress Root had not perished of the plague. Of course, she might have dropped down dead from an ague or some other cause – I couldn’t tell, I was no doctor, and even a doctor might not have been able to say. All I could say was that she’d appeared in rude health the previous evening during our Romeo and Juliet.
A natural death might still have been the natural assumption, however well she’d seemed. We all know that death can strike like a thief in the night when it’s least expected. But thieves in the night can be human ones too. So I was looking not to an act of God but to the hand of man. And in this case there was the “cherries” comment made by the hooded individual whom I believed to be Kit Kite. There was also the note to consider. The note unfortunately lost to the fast-flowing Isis but whose teasing hints I could easily repeat. You are right to suspect foul play in the death of Hugh Fern.
If the note really had been written by her and if she had been intending to pass on her suspicions to me, possibly going so far as to name someone she considered responsible for Fern’s death, then that someone had ample motive to want her out of the way. The assumption of foul play in her case as well as Fern’s became even stronger if the note had been penned by another, by the unknown someone in fact, with the purpose of luring me into a trap.
This reasoning may seem a bit thin on paper, written down in black and white. But I had another supporting piece of evidence which pointed to wrong-doing, albeit without proper proof. When I’d climbed through the window of the house in Cats Street I had noticed in an abstracted way that the dining-room contained some decorative bits and pieces, including an item in the centre of the table, probably a salter, probably a silver one. I couldn’t be certain since I had other things on my mind at the time. But before I’d made my exit through the same dining-room window, I had taken a longer look round the room and registered that the table was bare. Other items – portable ones – might have gone too from elsewhere in the chamber.
So it seemed as though the “thief in the night” description was appropriate in a different way. Angelica Root had not merely been struck down by death but had been robbed by him as well. A dangerous witness had been silenced, and a profit taken in the shape of a silver salter and other objects.
My next step was to consult the book which I’d borrowed from Nathaniel Thornton.
I was taken aback by the poison contained within its pages. Even though I’d acquired a smattering of knowledge about dangerous plants from my mother or my playfellows or simply from instinct, I had no idea that I’d spent every waking moment since birth on the edge of an abyss. Flower’s Herbal opened up a perilous gallery in which almost every root, every bud, every leaf and seed could be employed for nefarious purposes. Nature was a veritable arsenal, and the cautious man would never eat or drink again for fear that, by accident or another’s malicious design, he might swallow one of her fatal gifts.
However, it was only one little area of this great, wild world that I was concerned with. I discovered that “naughty man’s cherries” was another name for the nightshade, as Abel had said, and also that it was known under several other guises such as belladonna, and beautiful lady, and devil’s herb, and dwale. Gerard Flower – whose word had to be believed since he was a Master of Arts at the University of Oxford – said of the nightshade that it had been the “ruin of many a simple unwary soul, tempted by its dark and clustered fruit”. It was only outdone in efficacy, he claimed, by monkshood. This plant, familiar to the learned as aconite, was an even more potent and quick-acting poison. Monkshood could also assume various names – like some human malefactors – being known as wolf’s bane and friar’s cap as well as having softer, more deceptive appelations such as Cupid’s car. Cupid’s car? Well, there’s no accounting for names sometimes. In short, Master Flower instructed me, monkshood might be termed the Queen-mother of poisons.
And in short, it seemed to me from my reading and from the phrase I’d overheard that Angelica Root had been poisoned with a preparation of nightshade, perhaps mixed with wolf’s bane (since the two combined well and were more than twice as noxious together). She had surely been murdered to silence her, and her abrupt death was connected – though I couldn’t yet understand how – to the mysterious end of Hugh Fern. I was convinced now that, contrary to appearances, the Doctor’s death had been no suicide. Equally, I was determined to sink my teeth into this mystery before it sank its teeth into me.
So this is how Abel and I came to be loitering in an alleyway in a dingy maze of streets at the back of the Golden Cross Inn. We’d been waiting here for the best part of an hour now and so far had seen nothing more than the trickle of customers to and from the bawdy-house.
Then Abel tugged me by the sleeve.
“Look, Nick,” he hissed.
A shape, a familiar shape, was passing by the mouth of the alley, coming from the direction of the brothel.
“Isn’t that . . .?”
“Yes,” I said. “That is Laurence Savage.”
We paused to take in the information that a fellow player had been availing himself of what the town had to offer in the way of flesh.
“So the old Savage has been making a pig of himself in the pleasure house,” said Abel.
I was mildly surprised, Laurence never having expressed much interest in these matters, but it would be convenient to have something to twit him with in future.
“He told me that he had a friend,” I said, perhaps a bit priggishly, “but I did not know she was a whore.”
“I have heard that you were close to a whore once, Nick.”
“That was completely different. Nell was a city girl, refined and capable, working in a place that was like a mansion. She could even read and write – after her fashion. Not like the country girls and clapped-out serving-women they’ve got in there. Probably got in there, that is, how should I know?”
“What’s that line about protesting too much?”
We were so carried away by this friendly dispute that our voices had risen above a whisper and we were neglecting our watching duties. It was dark, of course, but suddenly it seemed to grow even darker as two more shapes swept across the alley-mouth. By the time we’d gathered ourselves to peer out they were rounding the corner at the top of the narrow little street. But the brief glimpse of their backs was enough to show that they were cloaked and hooded, like the figures I’d seen on my first night in this town, like the figures I’d half seen from under Mistress Root’s bed. Since we hadn’t been watching the door of Kit Kite’s house (as I thought of it) it was impossible to say whether the figures had come f
rom there or whether one of them was Kite himself. But I would have bet heavily on a “yes” in both cases.
Abel clutched at my arm.
“My God, you were right. What are they?”
“Later,” I said. “Let’s see where they’re going.”
For it was evident that the two men, garbed in outfits that were a cross between a monk’s and a bird’s, were going somewhere and were surely up to something.
But we were not destined to go much further in our pursuit.
As we emerged from the alley which had been our skulking-place, there was a cry from the front of the stew.
“There they are!”
“Peepers!”
“Spies!”
I’d been wrong to suppose that our presence in the alley had not provoked much attention. A gaggle of customers from the bawdy-house were massing at its tight little entrance. By ill fortune Abel and I had emerged at exactly this moment. They couldn’t have seen much perhaps, but I could imagine the comments that had been thrown about inside concerning a couple of dubious characters outside. Obviously they’d think of us as . . .
“Stew kites!”
“Queer-birds!”
“Punk watchers!”
. . . that odd brand of man which – so Nell had once told me – loiters about outside houses of ill-fame sniffing the air and hoping for a glimpse of naughtiness, but without ever going inside; a brand which is (rightly) regarded with resentment and suspicion by the madam and her brood as being bad for business.
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