Mask of Night (29 page)

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 from 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.

Whether it would be enough for this crew to stand and hurl insults in our direction or whether – their baser appetites not yet being sated by their activities indoors – they wanted to do us actual damage, I don’t know. We didn’t wait to find out. Or rather Abel didn’t. Some panic overtook him and he started off down the filthy street. After a moment’s hesitation I followed him close at heels.

In the noise and confusion the hooded individuals may have run off or it may be that we took a different turning from them. Anyway, we lost sight of the pair, being more concerned with preserving our skins from a gaggle of brothel-creepers.

We got away from the outraged customers of the stew easily enough but returned to the Golden Cross with only one solid piece of information to show for our skulk in the alley: that our fellow player Laurence Savage, who was now tucked up in one of the communal beds and snoring blissfully, frequented stews. Well, he had gained more satisfaction than we had this evening. At least I hoped that he had.

A good harvest – yet in this upside-down world it is only the springtime not autumn. And another strange thing, this is a crop which grows the more you reap. The dead pile up, and your hand is not always needed now to put them in their place on the pile. Now nature will handle them by herself. In some ways this is to be regretted since the pestilence is a crude instrument while you are continually refining your methods, ever since the early demise of the dog and the death of old mother Morrison. Now you can judge doses to a nicety. The only “crudeness” came in the way you dealt with the carter Hoby but that was inevitable. He was stealing your profit. Besides he was a frightened little man and sooner rather than later would have revealed himself or been revealed.

You are immune, though, in your armour. You will not suffer yourself to be discovered, to be revealed.

This is as well since there are stirrings of suspicion. In particular Revill the player is pushing his nose in and you have decided to cut it off – to cut him off – if it can be managed discreetly, as it should have been in the case of Doctor Fern. You had hoped to decoy Revill to that old woman’s house and deal with him there, but something went wrong, he smelled a rat and did not appear. Or could not be found. Then Kite took fright at some provoking words of the player – most likely uttered only to test his response – and scuttled off to the house in Shoe Lane.

All that is required is calmness and self-control. You are very much afraid that Kite is no longer capable of showing such qualities. Underneath his cocksure surface there is a well of fears. It is only a matter of time before he too is invited to join the pile of the dead. Then it will be a fitting moment for you to decamp with your goods, your pot of money.

More important than goods and money, you will depart with your precious preparations and potions, which give you the power of life and death. With belladonna and beautiful lady, with devil’s herb and dwale. With monkshood, wolf’s bane and friar’s cap. The words are a spell. Merely to recite them is comforting. They can open the doors to the other place.

They say that poison is a woman’s weapon. Why is that? Is it the domestic preparation, the kitchen utensils, the grinding and mixing, the “cooking” that is sometimes needed? Is it that poison is most efficiently and painlessly served under the cover of necessary food and drink, the woman’s province? Or is it, as a fool would claim, that poison suits the fainter heart of a woman? Yet it is not a faint-heart’s instrument. Which requires the greater courage, the stronger nerve? To administer the fatal dose, either all at once or piecemeal, and then to wait in an agony of suspense which is almost as great as your victim’s? Or to act when the blood is up and to run your victim through with a knife or sword, scarcely aware of what you’re doing? You have done both so you know what you’re talking about. The first deed demands coolness and premeditation, while the other one needs nothing more than a hot head and a nimble wrist.

These are . . . interesting reflections. Some time, when this present trouble is over, you must write them down.

“T
his is a dangerous course, Nick.”

I’d lost count of the number of times Abel Glaze had said this. He meant well all right, but his words were only making me more frightened, something which was very easy to do at this moment. I was lying on a couch in a stranger’s house. Abel was kneeling on the floor, his wallet unfurled in front of him. We had a small amount of light from a few candles, good quality ones. It was still daylight outside but, being trespassers, we did not dare to open the curtains.

“Tell me again about the . . . what did you call them? . . . the pallets?” I said, more to stop Abel talking about the dangers which I was running than because I really wanted to be informed about the strange individuals he’d mentioned a few minutes earlier. He was outlining some of the methods which can be used to create a false impression of sickness or disease.

“Palli
ards
they are called. Or sometimes clapperdudgeons. I’m surprised you’ve never heard of them.”

“I haven’t got your underworld experience, Abel.”

My friend bristled slightly at this. He didn’t always like to be reminded of his coney-catching days or rather, if he did talk about them, it had to be on his own terms. He refused to look at me but knelt over the outspread contents of his capacious wallet, drew a candle closer and, with the aid of a couple of tiny wooden scoops, mingled the sticky ingredients of two or three tiny pots. Pots of grease and pouches of herbs were the tools of Abel’s one-time trade. They’d been as essential to his old business as a hammer and chisel were to a mason but my friend still carried them everywhere with him. I’d twitted him once about the way he clung to these relics of his life on the road, conning the public, tricking charitable passers-by. He responded with some mangled proverb about any rabbit worth its salt having two holes to go to. I took this to mean that, if he ever grew tired of play-acting (or if play-acting grew tired of him), then he could resume his life as a wandering coney-catcher.

“
Palliards
,” I said. “What about them now?”

“Palliards fall into two classes,” said Abel, talking in that abstracted way which people use when their hands are engaged in tricky operations. “The real ones and the artists.”

“Artists?”

“Fakes, you would probably say. But they show great skill in adorning their bodies with sores and raw places.”

“How?”

“With crowfoot and salt usually, sometimes mixed with spearwort. They rub these items together and then lay them on the part which they wish to afflict. Afterwards they cover the skin with cloth which sticks to the flesh, so when the linen is torn off the place is all fretted and raw.”

“Ugh.”

“That is nothing. The real artists will sprinkle ratsbane on top of the wound.”

“Like sugar on comfits – very tasty,” I said, divided between interest and disgust, and remembering Thornton the bookseller and his pouches of arsenic or ratsbane.

“Except that the palliard aims to make himself
un
tasty,” said Abel, glancing up at me. “The ratsbane causes the sore to look even uglier and so excites the greater pity.”

“And the more alms.”

“Of course. These people aren’t in it for love of their art.”

As he’d started to expound these methods of trickery Abel’s tone had grown less abstracted and almost eager.

“After all, Nick, we players make ourselves up for money. We cover ourselves with bloody clothes, we blotch our faces and pretend to be sick or dying or dead, for cash.”

“And love of our art.”

“Tell me, Nick, what is our purpose in this house? For sure, we’re not here for our art – or for cash.”

“We’re here to catch a murderer or two,” I said.

Abel and I were in a stranger’s empty house, courtesy of Jack Wilson. The house was in Grove Street, off the High. It was a fine house and belonged to the wool merchant husband of the woman called Maria, the one whom Jack had been seeing – or seeing to, perhaps. Our playing comrade had been looking forward to a few extra days in Oxford enjoying the delights of bed and bawd, and so he’d been disappointed and almost angry when the woman, taking fright at the tightening grip of King Pest in the city, left suddenly to join her husband in Peterborough. Or it may have been that the merchant, concerned for his wife’s health, had summoned her to his side. Whatever the reason, her departure had left the house empty; shuttered and curtained and without servants.