by Clio Gray
CLIO GRAY
urbanepublications.com
First published in Great Britain in 2016
by Urbane Publications Ltd
Suite 3, Brown Europe House, 33/34 Gleaming Wood Drive,
Chatham, Kent ME5 8RZ
Copyright © Clio Gray, 2016
The moral right of Clio Gray to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-911331-44-5
EPUB 978-1-911331-45-2
MOBI 978-1-911331-46-9
Design and Typeset by Michelle Morgan
Cover by The Invisible Man
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface: You have to Kick a Mule to Get it Going
1: Half a Century in the Making
2: Bad Days, Bad Fleas
3: Goodbye Ring, Hello Road
4: Almost Stopped Before They’ve Started
5: Getting On, And Luck On Their Side
6: When A Handkerchief Becomes The Sky
7: A Body For The Body Sweepers
8: A Corpse Can Be A Heavy Load
9: An Island Not So Green
10: Sea and Salt and Bees
11: Arrival And Arrest
12: Servants and Subhumation
13: Mordeciah Crook Is No More
14: The Grimalkin Clause
15: The Battle Of New Ross
16: Behemoths, And The Wonders of The Deep
17: Burning Barns, Burning Men
18: Sunken Roads and People Dying
19: Secret Societies, Secret Names
20: The Rising Of The Moon
21: To the Windmill All
22: Decisions Made
23: Battle Sworn
24: The Small Iniquities of the Sewing Circle
25: Fevers, And Bad Old Men
26: And She Sees Maggots In Her Tidy House
27: St Drostan Forgets To Come Through
28: The Leaping of the Lion
29: Fire, and Burning Ambition
30: From Sea To Servants
31: And Now The Athenaeum
32: To The Singel All
33: Wind And Water, And Those Waiting To Be Buried
34: Louisa’s Laying Out, And Laying Down To Die
35: George And the Guildsman
36: Stars Align
37: And More Intrigue Yet To Come
38: Guildsmen, Golo, and Slip-sliding Eels
39: Brothers Betrayed
40: Confession and Confusion
41: Resolution and Sometime Redemption
42: And Right Back At You
43: Singing That Old Song
Historical Note
Extract from Deadly Prospects by Clio Gray
PREFACE
YOU HAVE TO KICK A MULE TO GET IT GOING
The secretary to the eighth Duke of Aquasparta was reading with great interest an open letter sent to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. The original missive had been printed a couple of months ago, it taking a while for the translations of the Transactions to filter through to the more far-flung parts of the continent such as Italy, and longer still before he could be bothered to flick through it and take a read. But this letter was enough to stop him in his tracks.
‘My name is Golo Eck,’ he read, ‘descendant of Johannes Eck, one of the five founders of the first scientific academy in Europe, the Accademia dei Lincei, begun in 1603 by the extraordinary vision of Federico Cesi, Duke of Aquasparta, 2nd Prince of Sant’Angelo and St Paul, Marchese di Monticelli, Lord of Porcaria, Civatella Cesi, and Marcellina Poggia Cesium, Noble Roman and Nobile di Terni.’
The iteration of the Cesi family’s standing in society were for him unnecessary, but he could see how others might be impressed.
‘My intension, in short,’ the letter went on, ‘is to restart the Lynx, resurrect Federico Cesi’s primary intentions which were to disseminate knowledge and encourage further study of the world in which we live. Towards this end, I have been gathering information on the whereabouts of the lost library of the Lynx, as that society was commonly called. Following the death of Federico Cesi it was absorbed into the Paper Museum of Giovanni Battista della Porta, a staunch member of the Lynx, but when della Porta died his entire library was dispersed and it has taken many decades for me to track down where it went, and to whom, and where it might be now.
‘But I have made great strides recently, and I now believe that the greater portion of the Lynx Library lies in three separate places: a private collection in Wexford, Ireland; the Athenaeum in Deventer, and the Biblioteque Nationale de France. This last is of most concern, as I have learned that within the next few months it will be openly coming up for auction, and therefore the possibility is that it could be dispersed towards the four corners of the earth and never be reunited with the Lynx.’
So much, so true, the secretary thought, but what he read next was more perturbing.
‘My plea therefore,’ went on this Golo Eck, ‘is that those of you who already understand my concerns, as well as those of you who are only just learning of them, be both vigilant and generous. This is a matter of principle for the entire scientific community of the world, for if we don’t act soon then we will certainly lose the chance to bring back together our shared history, by which I mean the history of the Lynx, our stepping stone from darkness into light.’
There was more, a lot more, about the importance of the Lynx not only as a physical body of scientists but as an idea, about the necessity in these times of uncertainty to collect together the lost library, give it the chance to breathe fresh air into its lungs and thereby invigorate the entire corpus of scientists scattered across Europe and beyond. It was also a well aired grievance that all the most prevalent journals had huge backlogs, that it could be months, often a year and sometimes two, before a submitted paper saw the light of day. If the Lynx was re-established – and with it it’s notoriously forward thinking Imprimatur that could have a paper go into press within weeks – then the ramifications were huge, but still he hesitated.
The letter smacked of a scam, but if so it was a good one, this Golo Eck asking for any donations towards the purchase of the various parts of the lost Lynx library to go through the Royal Society in London, no obvious way for Golo Eck himself to profit from it, at least not directly. But someone could profit from him, that much the secretary realised as he read through the article for a second time.
He’d spent a while, when he’d first got here, going through the many documents kept by the Cesi family – which was his job, after all – and he knew all about the founding members of the Lynx: Federico Cesi, Francesco Stelluti, Anastasio De Filiis, the Scotsman Walter Peat and his great friend Johannes Eck from Deventer. He was also aware of the unsavoury scandals that had surrounded them – admittedly mostly originating from Cesi’s own father who was as welded to the Church as a barnacle to its shell. Heresy, sodomy, exile and murder were the worst of them, not to mention the concomitant crimes of
the more famous moths attracted to the Lynx’s flame, those men it had nurtured and supported when no one else would. Like Galileo Galilei, for instance. And he could think of one family, and one person in particular, who absolutely wouldn’t want Golo Eck dragging up the old history of the Lynx, especially not now.
Scam or no scam, Golo’s letter sparked off the secretary’s own little scheme inside his head. Knowledge, after all – as the founding constitution of the Lynx proclaimed with such fervour – was its own raison d’être, and he thought long and hard about how best to make it work in his favour. He was no fool, no everyday man on the make, and so he took his time before drawing out his quill, licking it, dipping it into his ink, beginning a not-so-open letter of his own.
The Lynx might be rising somewhere in the badlands of Scotland, but the secretary of the eight Duke of Aquasparta was about to set a hunter on its trail.
1
HALF A CENTURY IN THE MAKING
LOCH ECK, ARGYLLSHIRE, SCOTLAND 1798
‘What the curse is he doing now?’ Ruan Peat asked sourly, pacing the floor for the umpteenth time before coming to rest by the large window and tapping the glass impatiently with his fingernails.
‘It’s not going to help, you interrupting him every five minutes,’ Fergus commented, regarding the younger man’s back, the tense hunch of his shoulders, the bone at the nape of his neck moving between the shadowed hint of hairline and his collar as if it was a snake about to burst from his skin. Ruan took a step backwards and grimaced at his reflection in the window. Beyond it lay the grey stretch of the loch: the stunted birches and alders cowering at the base of the hillside rising up sharply from the farther shore. He knew how they felt, that yearning in their bent-low branches to stretch and grow, the urge they had to reach towards the sky despite the winter winds that always kept them down.
‘But does he have to check everything three times over?’ Ruan complained, turning back to look at Fergus, who didn’t appear to have moved a muscle, sitting at ease on one of the several trunks they’d packed with the possessions needed for their journey.
‘Now you know that’s not entirely fair,’ Fergus said. ‘He just wants to make sure everything’s locked up tight so it will be fine for you when you get back.’
‘What makes him think I’ll ever want to come back?’ Ruan said loudly. ‘I’ve been cooped up in this hole all my blasted life and as far as I’m concerned once I’m out, I’m out.’
Fergus smiled. His grizzled beard made it hard to detect but Ruan had grown up with the man and knew every twitch of him, or thought he did, and he bridled, started pacing the floor again.
‘You think you know me,’ Ruan said, stopping his pacing long enough to kick hard at one of the heavy sea chests. ‘But I’m near of age now and my own man, and what gives Golo the right to think he’s going to live out his life somewhere new and exciting and send me packing back here with my tail between my legs?’
Fergus didn’t smile this time. Angry words were buzzing on his lips but he held them back.
‘I’ll go see how he’s getting on,’ Fergus said instead, pushing himself off the chest and standing up.
He was around the same height as Ruan Peat but had a good fifty pounds on him and it crossed his mind to give the lad the thrashing he deserved for his ingratitude but reined it in. This was Golo’s big day after all, and he wasn’t going to let the likes of Ruan Peat spoil it for the old man; but his blood was boiling and before he left the room he turned back.
‘He’s spent half a century aiming for this moment,’ Fergus said, ‘and God help me I’ll swing for you if you try to ruin it. Why not think on what’s he’s done for you, for a change?’
Ruan stopped where he stood and stared at Fergus with open animosity.
‘And why don’t you?’ Ruan spat out the childish retort, a hard gnawing starting in his belly. ‘You’d be nothing but a couple of muddy footprints without him, you and your father. Ever think on that?’
Fergus stood in the doorway looking daggers at Ruan Peat. It hadn’t always been like this between the two of them, but every time Ruan had the upper hand. He was family, after all, and Fergus was not, and there was the end to it.
‘Just make sure you know what you’ve got before chucking it all away,’ Fergus gave his parting shot, exiting the door and slamming it shut behind him before Ruan could get in another word.
Fergus didn’t move away immediately but leant his back against the wood the second he’d closed it. He hoped to Heaven everything went to plan, and that this trip of theirs would force the boy to grow into the man he already believed himself to be.
‘You know as well as I do that his head’s halfway up a creel!’ Ruan shouted through the wood, banging at it with his fist to make his point, realising that Fergus was just the other side. Fergus flinched at the accusation and closed his eyes. It took all his self-restraint not to fling the door open again and give Ruan a good kicking.
‘All those times he’s sent you off,’ Ruan went on without remorse. ‘Don’t think I don’t know what you were doing. Trotting off with his precious letters so nobody can interfere with them. And who the bloody hell would do that anyway? Mad as a toad with a stick up his arse…’
‘Enough, boy,’ Fergus growled, angered that Golo’s minor paranoia should be described so crudely.
Certainly Golo was a little obsessed, as all great men were, but it was not the time to argue. They’d be off in the next few hours and, after they’d reached Port Glasgow, he and Ruan would be going their separate ways for a few months at least, and thank God for it. He cricked his head to one side, clenched his fists, wondering how it would feel to squeeze the life right out of the last line of the Peats, and nobody to cry about it but Golo Eck.
2
BAD DAYS, BAD FLEAS
WEXFORD, IRELAND 1798
Jesus and Mary, but last night had been close. Greta’s skin felt like it was crawling with snails just to think on it. It wasn’t the first time she’d been stopped, but those men were huge in their uniforms and iron-tipped boots and could have stomped her into the ground, crushed her bones into a thousand pieces, and no one any the wiser.
Peter would have noticed – eventually – that she hadn’t turned up, but by then she’d’ve been nothing but a skinful of maggots. Plenty others had gone the same way, pouffed out of existence; who knew where and who knew when, but gone all the same.
She was stiff all over. She’d spent the night scrunched up beneath an overturned cart, the stink of its rot and mould rubbing off on her clothes, taken in with every breath. She supposed she must have slept at some point but it didn’t feel like it. She stamped her feet to get her blood moving, but not too loudly, not knowing how far – or how close – she was away from the English encampment. Running blindly through the night was not the best method of judging how far you’d gone and in what direction. She shook her head, could feel the fleas skittering across her scalp, caught one of them as it made its way out of the thicket of her bound hair and onto her forehead.
‘Bastard shitty bastard bastards!’ she hissed between gritted teeth, capturing the escapee between finger and thumb, easing their pressure so she could see it.
Satisfaction, no doubt about it, at its capture. She squinted with concentration, manoeuvring her thumb, getting ready to sever its shiny body right down the middle with her nail. But her fingers were too cold for the delicate operation. She misjudged, and before she knew it the little brown bastard had leapt away before she could give it the execution it deserved.
‘Bastard bastard, shitty, shitty little bastard…’
Greta was almost crying. She scratched madly at her head with both hands, dislodging all the scabs, finding some satisfaction in the mild pain this caused her, stopping every now and then to ease one scab or another along the length of her hair until it came free, looking at it briefly before flicking it away into the undergrowth. Enough was enough.
She savagely ripped her knife out of the sheath
on her belt. She was lucky she’d been left with it. The soldiers had had no problem finding it when they’d searched her, patting her down a bit too thoroughly for comfort, and not just one going at it, but several more.
‘Got to make sure you’re just a lassie passing through to market,’ they’d said, squeezing her small breasts as if there might be secrets hidden there – as if she was stupid enough to think that wouldn’t be the first place they’d look.
It had only gone further once: stinky soldier fingers poking inside her. Vile that had been. More than vile, more like violation. Exactly like violation. Not that she’d told anyone about it. Not even Peter. That would have meant going through it all again, and she preferred not to think about it.
Preferred instead to crush every little bastard flea she could get her fingers onto. So this particular one getting away was a defeat she could not bear and she took hold of her knife and started chopping at her hair, hacking it away inch by inch, lock by lock, curl by curl, until all she was left with was a bare couple of inches of reddish stubble sticking up into the morning.
Take that, you little fecking eegits, Greta thought, putting away her knife. And take that, the fecking rest of yous, she thought as she kicked away the remnants of her hair until it was all disappeared into the grass around her so thoroughly it might never have been.
Maybe she was starved of sleep; maybe she was freed by the shearing of her hair; maybe it was because she had no need to hide that red hair under her bonnet anymore – a bonnet now stamped into the mud – but whatever it was, Greta had a sense of being free and alive again, and within a couple of minutes had snatched up one of those shitty fleas that had given her so much discomfort, caught it up and snapped it in half, leaving a smear of blood on her finger – her blood – the other half stuck to the ridges of her thumb, its tiny, tiny forelegs still scampering until Greta scraped it off against her jerkin, not out of pity but disgust.
