Circle of Shadows (30 page)

It was with great sadness he saw earth in the stomach and throat. Of Kupfel’s strange drug of pacification he could find no sign, and no other sign of violence on the corpse other than the wound on the wrist. There was nothing that would speak to him. He noticed that her nails were very short. He could still smell rosewater on her skin.

‘There is no need to turn round, Krall,’ he said at last. ‘But could you have water fetched please, and fresh linens.’

The waterfall was indeed a pretty place. Michaels had led the priest and Georg up the track, having told them his only clue was the word of a simpleton, but they still came readily enough. The priest of Oberbach was a man of about his own age who said at once he thought it his duty to go with them, and Georg was happy to lend his shovels and his sweat for the price of a drink.

The path to the base of the waterfall was narrow and overgrown. Where it reached the base of the falls it widened out into a flattish space where a small party might watch the waters tumble down in stages, veils of white spume rushing from one stage to the next over granite edges. The banks were thick with bright green moss and bracken beginning to unfold. Spring seemed to be advancing more quickly here.

The priest sat on a flat rock on the edge of the clearing and removed his glasses to polish the spray off them. ‘This used to be a favoured spot for courting couples when I was a child,’ he said, hooking them back over his ears and squinting up the slope to where the head of the falls was lost among the beech and brambles. ‘After the war it became the fashion for the young people to meet more under their parents’ eye and parade around the square. I wonder why that was?’

‘Too many bastards and six-month babies bred in the woods,’ Georg said, yawning. ‘And Gertie, who used to live in the farm by the track before Rebecca, was a bitter woman! No one could walk by without her offering some spiteful comment then running into town to tell everyone who had passed. It became a byword for a girl having a bit of a slip, you know. People used to whisper that she’d been “taken to the falls”.’

‘Oh, I see,’ the priest said, smiling. ‘Look – Herb-Robert! Spring will come, after all.’

Michaels paced the edge of the clearing. ‘She said that she left a wreath on the grave.’

Georg poked at the ground with his shovel. ‘The bank is too steep for burying on the other side. If the girl is here she’s within thirty yards east of this spot. Now the brambles are thick and old, so let’s look for where they ain’t.’

‘Shall I …?’ The priest looked up at them.

‘No, Father,’ Georg said. ‘You take your rest here and look at your flowers. We’ll call you if we find anything.’ Then he added more quietly to Michaels, ‘You know God loves you when He sends you an honest landlord and a blind priest. You sweep to the right, me to the left.’

It took some forty minutes before they found it. Michaels had to work hard to focus his eyes as he worked. He wondered if the villagers had betrayed him, murdered the blacksmith and decided it was safer to blame him for the death than pass it off as accidental. He should have abandoned Mrs Padfield’s sister and simply ridden out until he got back to England. To stay so close to that mean little village on the word of a simpleton and for a stranger … He could have reached the coast and arranged for word to be sent back to Mrs Westerman. What did these deaths mean to any of them? They had enough to spring Clode from prison, and surely that was all that was needed. They could let the court look to its own and head back to where they were wanted. He put his hand to his beard and pulled at it. Not that he had any right now to curse someone for interfering. He had seen that child all bloody and acted because he had a back broad enough, an arm strong enough and all his conviction. Well, Mrs Westerman and Mr Crowther had the learning and the smartness, their way of going about in the world, and they had their convictions too.

He frowned. There was an old trunk fallen a yard or two away, propped up on its own stump and bleached. Something hung on it, a woven circlet of twigs and reeds with the remains of rotted flowers dotted round it, held like a murderer’s body in the cage to decay in public. Behind it lay a rockfall spotted over with bracken and bramble and new saplings struggling for their chance at light with greedy new leaves. There was something wrong in the way the soil lay. He felt a turn of sadness in his stomach and called Georg to his side.

‘What do you think?’

The man came and fiddled with the scarf around his throat. ‘I’ll fetch the shovels.’

As soon as they felt the soil with the blades they nodded at each other. The priest had come with Georg, and was knocking the brambles away from his coat with his Bible. He noticed them pause.

‘What is it? Have you found something?’

‘Not yet, Father,’ Georg said, moving the earth in shallow bites. ‘But we will. The earth here has been dug.’

They worked slowly, and from their first sight of a snap of fabric, got on to their knees and used the shovels as if they were trowels. Michaels had thought to bring the priest along only because he knew it was right to have some sort of authority in the place as they did this work, but now as the patch of fabric became a dress it was a comfort to hear his voice reading quietly from the Book of Psalms. He was very different from the drunkard in Mittelbach. No smell of brandy on him, but a weary sweetness in his manner that Michaels felt as something like a blessing.

Michaels began to work along the dress, loosening the soil until he realised he was not feeling vines now in the earth under his fingertips but human hair. The priest paused. She had been buried face down.

Sitting back on his heels and wiping the sweat and muck from his eyes, Georg said, ‘She needs a box to put her in, and we’ll need a few extra hands to manage her back along the way.’ He stood and brushed the soil from his knees. ‘Will you come back with me, Father?’

‘No, no,’ the priest said quietly. ‘I’ll watch with Mr Michaels over this poor soul.’ The dress was a dark blue.

H
ARRIET RETURNED TO THE
palace with a fierce frown drawing her eyebrows together and Graves staggering under the weight of a number of volumes. He placed them carefully on the little writing-table in her room and gingerly stretched his fingers.

‘I hope you made more of that than I did, Mrs Westerman,’ he said.

‘I can hardly say, Graves,’ she said, taking the first volume from the pile and turning the pages. ‘Alchemy again. These drawings are very beautiful, are they not? But they seem to me to be fairy stories for adults. With so many meanings available … it is like some drug for the imagination. Everything has a dozen possible resonances and so a manner of significance to every creature on God’s earth.’

Graves drew a circle on the polished surface of the little walnut side-table next to him. ‘An alchemical emblem of life and balance scrawled on the wall where a woman is murdered.’

‘There is ritual in these murders, Graves. Why drown a woman on dry land, or choke another with earth in the confines of the palace, if it were not vital to the killer that they die in such a manner?’

‘A sense of the theatrical?’ Graves said. ‘A demonstration of power? There is something grandiose here, don’t you think? Overblown? I saw a production of
Caractacus
at Covent Garden in seventy-six where the gold of the setting overpowered the music so completely, they might as well have not bothered giving it voice at all.’

When she did not reply, he looked up. Mrs Westerman was a little too casual for him in her handling of the rare texts of the Sovereign’s Collection; she had in her hands a volume he suspected of being a survivor of the Renaissance, and was holding it at arm’s length and turning one way and another. ‘Do treat those poor things carefully, Mrs Westerman,’ he said in a pleading tone.

Harriet turned the book towards him. It was open at a double page showing a variety of strange-looking symbols, pentangles studded about with astronomical figures picked out in gold and red.

‘Beautiful,’ he said.

‘Do you think so? Perhaps, but this one’ – she tapped one in the centre of the right-hand page – ‘I am sure I have seen this somewhere before.’

Graves realised she was already alone with her studies so stood to take his leave. ‘Are you sure you will not come to the castle?’

She looked up at him. ‘No, I think not. I must read.’ She flashed him a tight quick smile and returned to her books.

Crowther found Harriet some time later, still surrounded by the volumes from the library, but with a light in her eyes. She became still while he told her of the body of Countess Dieth and what he had learned from it, but when he asked her about the fruits of her own labours she became quite animated again.

‘These are fascinating, Crowther,’ she said. ‘In another hour I shall have the secret for making gold from lead.’

‘I had quite enough of alchemy yesterday, Mrs Westerman. Do not tell me you have turned mystic?’

She smiled. ‘It is strange, many of the books Beatrice took were not about alchemy as such, but more about magic generally. Spells and seals. Ways to become invisible, discover secrets or treasure. No, I have not turned mystic, but there is beauty here, and such imagination.’

‘It is nonsense,’ he said.

She raised a hand and let it fall again. ‘Powerful nonsense, if you believe in it. I have also been thinking of Kupfel’s shaman and his ingredients. Many of the men who sailed with my husband knew the waters round the Dominican Isles,’ she said, ‘and they feared what they found there. They would tell legends of men brought back from the dead and made to serve the magicians that summoned them. If one were ever allowed on the ship, they said the spirits of the sea would rise up in rage and drown everyone on board. Do you see what I mean, when I say belief gives these things power? Perhaps those men were people who had been treated with some of the strange remnants Kupfel has gathered together. He thought himself in hell when he took the paralysing drops; whatever Clode took made him see devils. Many men might think they had died and been summoned again from hell.’ Crowther nodded reluctantly. ‘I thought them only stories that sailors tell, like the kraken and mermaids. Horrible to think there might be some truth in them.’

‘But why, Mrs Westerman? Why have these individuals been chosen to suffer such torments and then be killed in such a way?’

‘Are you encouraging me to speculate, Crowther?’ She was teasing him, but he could not help that.

‘I suppose I am to a degree. I will try not to do so again.’

Her eyes danced then she turned towards the window again and became serious. ‘Opportunity? This madman wants blood, so he takes it where he can and then performs his strange killings. That might answer for those earlier deaths – men who lived on their own. But what could be more difficult than killing in the middle of the palace! It does not answer.’

She put her chin in her hand and drummed her fingers on one of the volumes on the table. Crowther watched her. It had, he admitted silently to himself, become one of his pleasures over the last years to watch Mrs Westerman think.

‘Let us suppose we are right about those previous deaths. These are all individuals who had great influence with the Duke, or in the case of the writer, some influence on the general society. Could they be political assassinations? But then this element of theatre in the deaths, the ritual …’

Crowther picked up one of the volumes from her pile and began to turn the pages as he spoke. ‘A performance, but a private performance; a ritual, but it has some purpose. The removal of the blood …’

‘Blood has great significance in all these volumes, it seems to me. Though they normally ask that the magician use his own. There then follows a great deal of chanting.’

‘Of course blood is significant,’ he said. ‘Every child knows blood somehow contains the spark of life, and that if we lose enough of it we cease to be. But what led you into these paths, Mrs Westerman? This symbol?’

‘And your list of what was pilfered from Herr Kupfel. The librarian, Zeller, was intrigued by our little design. He says it is an emblem of alchemy.’ She took one of the volumes from behind her, opened it and turned it to face him. The picture was a complex one, filled with figures and symbols. A crown, a salamander, a bearded face, but the central form of a seven-spoked wheel placed over a triangle seemed identical to the design chalked on the door to the room where Dieth was murdered.

‘It seems very like.’

‘It is, isn’t it? And it appears in one of the books stolen from Kupfel. Shall I explain the symbolism of the original to you?’

‘I don’t think that is necessary,’ Crowther said, studying it. ‘The spokes are the seven stages of alchemy, each also related to one of the seven heavenly bodies; here are the four elements; the three points of the triangle are labelled body, spirit and soul. It is like one of Mrs Bligh’s fortune-telling cards, full of great, but somewhat imprecise meanings. What is it, Mrs Westerman?’

‘Just that I was at some pains to commit to memory the seven stages of alchemy.’

He smiled.

‘Seven stages, just as there were seven glasses,’ she added. ‘Now what else, seven ages of man, days in the weeks …’

‘Celestial bodies, as I said. By the old count.’

‘A number of some significance then?’

‘Most of them are.’

She leaned back in her chair. Crowther noticed for the first time the remains of a meal amongst the books. He hoped the books would be returned to Herr Zeller unstained.

‘But do you not think, Crowther, you would have to hate someone very much, to kill them in this way? These people were not chosen at random. It feels … like revenge.’ She twisted her mourning band on her finger, thinking of Manzerotti.

‘Mrs Westerman, give me your hand.’ Crowther spoke quite sharply, so she put it out to him at once. He took it between his own and twisted up the mourning band to the knuckle. In the three years she had worn it, the ring had made itself part of her. The space below was a little paler than the rest of her finger and slightly indented. Crowther’s touch was dry and cool. ‘I am a fool,’ he said.