Tears of the Jaguar (29 page)

“What do you mean?”

“Lady Anne Clifford had five kids. None of the boys survived and none was called Edward. Maybe it’s a different family entirely.”

“He called her ‘mother’ in a letter I have. I think he was born around 1620. There’s nothing about him?”

“Not in the genealogical records.”

Deborah frowned. What had it said in the letter? Oh yes: “My honoured mother, for so I ever will think of you.”

What the hell does that mean? Was she his mother or not?

“Is there a precedent for someone like Lady Anne adopting a boy if her own sons didn’t survive?” she asked.

“It’s suspected that Lady Anne’s father George
effectively
adopted a boy fathered out of wedlock on a local servant girl,” said Hargreaves. “‘Old on, I’ve got it here.” There was a moment while he flipped pages, muttering “George Clifford” over and over as he scanned the pages. “Got it. An Ellen Smith had a bastard son called John in 1599. Ellen’s sister Alice was then a tenant of George Clifford, third earl of Cumberland...” He muffled the
receiver as he talked to someone else in the room while Deborah listened. “Barry will sort out your ticket, love. I’ll be with you in a sec. Tour will be delayed a minute.”

“I should let you go,” said Deborah, as he came back on the line.

“Castle’s been here a thousand years,” he said. “They can wait five minutes. Anyhow, where was I? This says Ellen went on to marry a Henry Hartley, raised the child as that man’s son, and lived well on a stipend from George Clifford that bought their silence.”

“And this Ellen Smith was based where?”

“Roughlee Old Hall,” said Hargreaves.

The name rang a bell—it had been part of that story told by the barkeep. Farther, Deborah had noticed on her map earlier. She snatched it up. “It’s little more than a mile from here.”

“But that still doesn’t help you,” said Hargreaves. “It shows a connection between the Cliffords and families in the Pendle Forest, but for one thing it’s twenty years too early for your Edward—Old George was long dead by 1620—and for another, the point of paying the family off was so the kid
wouldn’t
claim the Clifford name. If this Edward was calling himself Clifford then it’s a different situation entirely. He couldn’t do that unless he’d been welcomed into the family.”

Deborah felt defeated.

“I don’t understand it,” she said. “This guy seems to have been known to King Charles the First. May even have been some kind of prominent courtier, but I can’t find who he was.”

“Fear not, lass,” said Hargreaves. “I’ll poke around.”

“Thanks,” she said. “Oh, one other thing. You said that the gem found at Malkin Tower was bought by a collector of occult objects.”

“Supposedly,” he said. “The man who sold it is dead, and if anyone knows exactly where it went, no one’s talking.”

“Right, but when you first told me that, I didn’t actually know about the witch connection to Malkin Tower,” she said, feeling a little embarrassed by the admission. “I’m probably the first visitor to Lancaster Castle who didn’t know who its most famous inmates were.”

“Probably so,” he said with a chuckle.

“Anyway, that made me realize: the buyer you spoke of must have assumed the gem had power because of its association with the witches.”

“Right,” said Hargreaves. “It’s rubbish, of course, doubly so since there was no tradition of crystals or stones being used in witchcraft in seventeenth-century England. All that New Age stuff about crystals and Wicca is completely different. The Lancashire witches weren’t practitioners of some alternative religion. They were poor, uneducated people who clung to whatever power people assumed they had, and their charms—such as they were—were garbled old Catholic prayers tacked on to folk remedies and curses: old-fashioned sympathetic magic. They weren’t Goddess worshippers, they weren’t practitioners of some pre-Christian fertility religion, and they didn’t use magic stones. Whoever bought the Malkin Tower gem did so based on nothing more than coincidence or what we scholar types call
cultural association
.”

Another blind alley, then.

“OK,” she said, deflated. She scanned Clifford’s letter again and her eye fell on the phrase “Where I will alight, I cannot say, though I have a mind to explore something of the lands recounted by our infamous countryman, Thomas Gage.”

“Does the name Thomas Gage mean anything to you?” she asked, conscious that she was clutching at straws.

“Amazingly, yes,” he said. “He was an English Catholic who joined the Spanish Franciscans and went to Mexico as a missionary. He then converted to Anglicanism and wrote a rather unpleasant book about his former brothers and their work. It was published in...hold on...” There was a paused while he checked. “Sixteen forty-eight.”

Two years before Edward Clifford made a similar journey
.

That was something, she supposed. Clifford had intended to go to Mexico, to escape Europe entirely and make a new life for himself. She had guessed as much, but it at least showed she was on the right track.

So why didn’t it feel like she was making progress?

“Well, I appreciate your help,” she said. “If you stumble upon Edward Clifford’s name elsewhere, would you mind giving me a call?”

He said he’d be glad to and took down both her number and her e-mail address, but she hung up with a sense of having run into a wall. Before she shut the laptop down she did a quick search for crystals, experimenting with the key words “ruby,” “chrome,” “iron,” and a host of others. She got nothing that was clearly useful except the oblique remark that a combination of chromium and iron was indeed very rare but might enhance a ruby’s
optical properties
, whatever that meant.

She showered to clear her head, laced up her walking shoes, slung her laptop case over her shoulder, and set out heading west. She needed fresh air, and a walk to see to the historic grounds of Newchurch seemed in order. Following her map, she soon
reached the hamlet of Roughlee, once the home of Alice Nutter, the lady of property hanged as a witch in Lancaster.

Before long, she spotted the church with the swelling, gloomy mass of Pendle as a backdrop. There was a footpath that climbed up the hill, beginning with ancient stone steps, but Deborah had business in the old church first, and she entered the churchyard through a blue painted metal gate.

The church was like a dozen others she had glimpsed from train windows over the last few days: a rectangular nave with a sloping roof, and a square battlemented tower with a clock at the west end. She was looking it over casually, taking in the setting that had a kind of windswept beauty, when she saw something that made her breath catch. She stared at it, her eyes wide.

There was no doubt.

Halfway up the church tower, set into the stone, was a curious oval shape with a dark center: an elliptical eye exactly like the one that, alongside the Clifford coat of arms, adorned the ring they had found in Ek Balam.

Hargreaves hung up the phone and chewed his lower lip thoughtfully.

“Barry,” he said. “Fancy leading the tour?”

Barry, seventeen, an aspiring history student due to begin university in the autumn, had looked at him like he’d just divulged the whereabouts of the Holy Grail.

“Seriously?” said Barry, pushing his lank hair out of his eyes.

“Seriously,” said Hargreaves. “I want to nip down into the archives for a few minutes. You can handle this lot, right?”

He nodded at the assembled tourists who had clustered around the gift shop: a family with a petulant preteen boy, an elderly parson type, two enthusiastic American backpackers, and a dowdy middle-aged dear in a blue mac.

“Absolutely,” said Barry. “Brilliant. I won’t let you down, sir.”

Hargreaves smiled at the boy’s enthusiasm and on his way to the basement stopped into the kitchenette to make a cuppa.
After the water boiled, he put an inch of milk and two sugars in a souvenir mug, poured the boiling water into a pot with two teabags, and left it to steep.

The library was two doors and a short flight of steps down from the kitchenette. It may once have been a storage room that had been pressed into service as a dungeon when the castle got overcrowded. It was stone flagged and windowless, and had been used to store prison records for fifty years or so. Some of the older files were still here—or at least the pompous and partisan jottings that had passed for files in those days—but the twentieth- and twenty-first-century stuff had all been removed. Hargreaves was glad. One of the reasons he liked history was because the grim injustices of the past were just that: past. It was one thing to show the cramped cells to the tourists, or the manacles used to chain the Australia-bound deportees, or even the wheeled hanging chair, which had been used to get the lame Jane Scott to the gallows in 1828, but it was another thing entirely to have to deal with the reality of a modern prison.

The wheeled hanging chair had always haunted him, though. Jane Scott had been a pathetic and guileless creature who had attempted to cajole a man into marrying her by claiming to be a wealthy woman. In order to get that wealth, she had bought arsenic from a druggist in Preston where she lived, claiming it was for the rats. She blended it into a porridge that she fed to her parents. Her father had vomited most of it up, but the doctor had not been able to save her mother. The man she had been interested in, a man who had probably seduced her and then reneged on whatever promises of marriage he had made, was quick to witness against her and she had fallen apart. When the guilty verdict had been read to her, she had broken down, confessing to
the poisoning and to the killing of two illegitimate children, one hers, one her sister’s. By the time she came to be executed, her health declined so much that she could no longer stand.

Hargreaves had dreams about it. He wasn’t sure why. Nothing had stamped itself on his subconscious like that damned chair, squeaking on castors as the pitiful, stupid woman was wheeled out to her death. As he had told Deborah Miller, the tourists loved that chair, and it was only in that room that he was glad of the prison’s policy disallowing photographs.

Imagine them mugging for the camera beside that thing.

The castle was full of old horrors. It had, after all, been the site of brandings and beatings, incarcerations in darkness, filth and disease, and, of course, of countless executions—more than two hundred and fifty between the years of 1782 and 1865. But it was Jane Scott and her chair that had gotten under his skin and lodged there.

He shuddered and pushed the idea from his mind.

As Hargreaves turned on his computer—the one without the dodgy mouse—he remembered his tea. He was just stepping out when the phone began to ring. It was a prewar black thing that felt brittle and it seemed to ring out of the past. Hargreaves cursed, then resolved to get his tea anyway. The only person who knew he was there was Barry, and Barry would just have to fend for himself for once. If it was important, he’d call back.

He sipped at the tea as he carried it down the hallway, but it was too hot. He set it down on the stained table where he was working and started thumbing through indexes.

The royal court records were full of Cliffords, most of them connected to Lady Anne, but there was no Edward among King Charles’s courtiers. Then he tried searching family records on
court servants and pages, and there it was: Edward Clifford, a page attending on His Majesty for four years, starting in 1630. There were details of his conduct and training, so that the boy must have been considered something of a rising star. Hargreaves reached for his tea and sipped it, wondering why the boy seemed to be under the protection of prominent people, and why he needed it. After 1634, Edward was back in Skipton. In the 1640s, he did “honorable service” during the roundhead siege of the castle. He seemed to have had dealings with Cromwell himself in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War in London, but in 1649—the date the king was executed—he disappeared from the record entirely. He opened an e-mail message to Deborah Miller, typed in the pertinent details, and sent it.

He was about to quit when he spotted one last tantalizing reference, also from 1649. The Lord Protector—Cromwell—“on the advice of both George Withers and Sir Henry Mildmay,” earnestly sought out Edward Clifford “as a royalist traitor to the State.”
Withers and Mildmay
, thought Hargreaves, sipping his tea
. Why are those names familiar?

He opened a search engine and typed them in, but at the same instant, the phone rang again.

It was Barry, and he sounded rattled.

“What is it boy? I’m working.”

“Mr. Hargreaves,” he sputtered. “I’ve lost one of the visitors on the tour. She’s vanished. We were moving out of the Shire hall and I realized she wasn’t with us anymore. She could be anywhere. It could be part of a prison breakout,” he said, sounding hysterical. “I’m going to lose my job, aren’t I?”

Hargreaves told him to calm down and call the security office, and said he would be right there. He was smiling as he
hung up, but then he heard a sound in the stacks behind him, and his smile stalled. At almost the same instance, the colors on the computer monitor seemed to swirl so that he had to grip the table to keep from falling.