The Cornerstone (17 page)

“What is’t?” queried the second man.

“Tis a maid, don’t ye see? All by ‘erself there…”

Adrenalin flashed through Claire in a great white wave of alarm. Gulping air, she scrambled to her feet and turned to run up the bank, mud sucking at her shoes, but the taller man was too fast. He caught her in no more than half a dozen leaping strides, and clamped his filthy grease-coated arms, thick as oak branches, around her waist and held her squirming until his companion could catch up. Her mind rebelled—the immediate danger was overwhelming, but more compelling was the fact that this creature of her hallucination was solid. It held her as firmly as any live person could.

“Oh god,” she squeaked, pushing and kicking against the man. Her hair came loose, falling in a wheat-colored tangled mess over her shoulders.

“Wot we got ‘ere?” queried her captor, grabbing her by the hair and pulling her face back for a better look, which allowed her the same. Crude patch over one eye, stiff stringy hair near shoulder length, stubble of beard, and half an ear, over which a thick whitened scar pulled the skin tight on either side of its zigzagged line.

“Hold ‘er, mate, I’m coming,” called the second man, stumbling in an awkward, club-footed gallop like a hobbled donkey. “Wot is she, then?”

One-eye hawked and spat onto the dirt, then laughed in loud barks at Claire’s appalled face. “Somebody’s cast-off. Got on naught under ‘er coat but a bodice of some sort and pantaloons, as yer can see.”

“Aye, I see that fine enough,” shouted the other at close range, as if his hearing were none too good. His chest heaved with labored breathing, and his shoulders sloped off-center from his twisted torso.

“Please let go,” Claire pleaded, knowing in her gut such entreaties were useless, as was struggling in the man’s iron-hard grip. He was built like an ox, and smelled like one as well. She was holding her breath, trying not to breathe in the man’s overpowering aroma of carious teeth, musky sweat, badly tanned leather jerkin, and pants stiff with feces or stale urine. “I don’t have anything worth taking, no money, no jewelry...”

One-Eye laughed in her face. “She says she dunt ‘ave anything we want…‘ere’s what I want!” He ripped her sweater and medic’s smock off her shoulder, exposing her breast and engulfing it with four blackened fingers. The ring finger was missing at the knuckle. Claire screamed and tried to jackknife her knee into his groin. The hand released her breast and smashed across her nose and upper lip so fast she hung, stunned, across his arm for several seconds, lights arcing across her brain, before she fully understood what had happened. Testing her lip with her tongue, she felt a tear and tasted blood.

“Aw, why’d ye want to smash ‘er face, Fergis? Now she an’t so pretty as she was,” whined the twisted man, pawing at her shoulder.

“Would ye be trying to tell me how t’handle a wench?”

“Nay, but—“

“Whoreson, ye’d not even know wot to do wi’ the leavin’s when I get done with ‘er, you bloody sod.” Claire swung, dazed, as the man sidestepped a lunge from Club-foot. “Dog’s body!” laughed One-eye.

“Son of a plague-gutted whore, I’ll kill ye!” screamed the twisted man, pulling a short knife with a blackened blade from his jerkin.

“Come at me then, swine,” barked One-eye. He tossed Claire aside like a bundle of rags and took a fighting stance. “I’ll slice up yer liver an’ make to sup on’t, then I’ll have this skinny maid’s arse all to meself. Avast, filth!” He crouched, laughing between broken teeth.

Club-foot lunged at his companion, shrieking incoherent curses. Off balance, he careened into the pit of One-eye’s abdomen, where he punched vigorously at the stained codpiece.

“Arrrgh! I’ll rip out yer lights for that,” the big man bellowed.

Blind with pain and fear, Claire inched her way over a heap of rocks and rubble, expecting rough hands around her throat with each breath. But as the sound of their scuffle escalated, soon she was scrambling up the sloping bank and over a low stone wall. At a stumbling run, she crossed a rutted road and ducked down a narrow dirt lane between clusters of thatch-roofed houses. A gurgling scream in the direction of the river sent her sprinting over a cloud of chickens and on past the last house in the row to an empty cattle byre under the canopy of an ancient oak.

The dry, clean hay smell was heaven. Crawling under a head-high drift, Claire lay still, listening for sounds of pursuit. Instead, she heard two male voices in soft discourse—clearly not the two from whom she’d just escaped. She guessed the speakers to be near the trees on the far side of the byre.

“T’would seem the stone may needs be moved shortly, if he’s of a mind to keep it.” An old man’s raspy voice. His breathless, halting speech revealed his cardio-pulmonary disease to Claire’s trained ears. Her mother sounded that way.

“You made a clever choice in your successor, my dear doctor, appealing to his artist’s lust for fame and fortune, although why you chose not to keep it longer yourself after all the trouble it cost you—and me—to make it I cannot fathom.” The second speaker sounded younger and foreign, his voice silky, yet resonant and elegantly enunciated.

“Aye, ‘tis true enough.” Footsteps crunched over dry grass and twigs as the pair moved closer. “For all my learning, there was no wisdom in this matter. But I suspect you knew…have known all along…how I might best be used to your own ends.”

“Nay, not my ends but those of my master. Relinquishing the
buachloch
to another does not absolve you from our original bargain.” The voice was smooth as satin, with undertones of something else… Claire couldn’t put her finger on the exact quality that made her skin prickle but she was suddenly trembling far worse then she’d been during her encounter with two of London’s finest lowlifes. The fear was nameless, but palpable.

“I knew that.” The old man’s voice was resigned. “I simply could not continue, e’en though it meant a swift decline in health and fortune once ownership’d been given away. The fact that ‘twas you and not the Lord Gabriel who did come to fetch me on my deathbed was no surprise.” His voice sounded threadbare, worn thin and infinitely sad. Claire shivered. What was he…a ghost? She must be full-blown, completely delusional to even be thinking such a thing.

The honeyed voice laughed softly. “You were not entirely forthcoming with our Master Marlowe about her ladyship and her needs…how if he failed to feed her, old age might o’ertake him in a most unpleasant way. He’d not be shielded from the arrival of the Black Carriage in that case.”

“If I’d told him all, he’d not have taken possession of the stone. No sane person would.”

“Indeed. I thank you, Professor Dee, for your recruitment of our illustrious playwright. I have enjoyed a fruitful, if reluctant, connection with him in your stead these twenty years past, despite the fact of him carelessly getting himself murdered—albeit temporarily. In his present guise he’s sent many a sacrificed soul down the path straight to Hell, for which I am most obliged. But as you see now, the threads of Fate pull taut. A choice looms.”

“I wonder if he will choose to retrieve it.”

“If not, then I shall collect his soul and you needs must find Mistress Banshee a new owner. A small but necessary request from my master.” Silence fell between them. “How shall I serve thee, my good doctor, once this task is done?”

“I would see the Great Library of Alexandria, before the fire…”

“Be assured, I shall be your perfect companion.” Soft laughter encircled the byre and sent a wintery chill over Claire’s skin.

Dee’s voice took on a sour tone. “I find no mirth since I was laid in the ground. Not e’en my daughters mourned long my passing.”

“Mirth is where you find it. I have enjoyed eternal amusement in tangling the skeins of human lives and then standing aside to see how they struggle to get the snare unraveled.”

The old man’s voice softened. “I suppose ‘twould explain why ye chose not to interfere when the boy came to me at my deathbed. I revealed all our secrets, y’know. What we twain had done together.”

“I care not, nor does my master. But it does add sauce to the game.” There was silence, then the same voice again. “Ah, see where the moment arrives.” The footsteps headed away from Claire’s hiding place. She hardly dared to breathe.

Inexplicably, a swell of clapping and voices charged with excitement rose on the breeze and died away. Puzzled, Claire dragged herself out of her hiding place. It was nearly dark outside as she struggled to her feet, unsteady and lightheaded. More cheering and shouts, punctuated by loud guffawing laughter. A carnival?

Holding onto the gate of a stall, she touched her face—it felt puffy around the mouth. The split inside her lip where One-eye had smacked it against her teeth stung like crazy, but at least it wasn’t bleeding much now. Claire took a deep breath. The evening air carried scents of the river and night-blooming flowers. Hallucinations complete with smell-o-vision. Why couldn’t she wake up? She tried to work her way back to what had happened before she’d landed on the bank of the Thames, but at that moment an explosion of cannon fire pounded her eardrums like thunderclaps. A loud hurrah rose with the shots, cheers and shouts that suddenly shifted to shrieks and wails of terror. Something violent and terrible was taking place just out of sight.

Claire stumbled away from her sanctuary and through the grove of oaks behind the byre. Coming out into a small clearing, the source of the commotion filled her field of vision. Flames and a pillar of smoke infused with swirling sparks climbed from the circular roof of a round, windowless building hulking just beyond the line of trees. Shocked, she watched in fascination as tendrils of red-orange and magenta writhed under and over wood shingles with their dry thatching, dropping sparks and smoldering planks down on the heads of a crowd of people now pushing over each other through a narrow door in the wall facing her.

Horses screamed and thundered away from the building, knocking bodies down and trampling them in their panic to escape the growing inferno. Strangely, Claire felt a flicker of recognition igniting in her brain as flames encircled the timber and plaster walls, clawing toward the heavens.

The sickening, pungent smell of burning flesh mixed with the stink of pine resin slapped her face on the quickening breeze. Unable to look away, she searched her memory for the scene, and suddenly she had it. Here in living color was the event she’d read about in the Shakespeare anthology: it was the Globe Theatre, in Shakespeare’s London, burning to the ground from cannons fired during a performance of Henry
VIII
. Claire’s mouth fell open. No longer consumed with how she happened to be here or why, she gawked, paralyzed, at the three-tiered tiring house that sat above the roofline with its curtained balcony and flaming pennants smoking in the light breeze. With an inevitable rending noise, the structure tore loose from the support posts of the upper gallery and crashed down out of sight, presumably onto the stage and all the groundlings, actors, and patrons unable to escape to safety through the single narrow exit.

Claire stood transfixed, taking it in, watching the green and argent halos given off by flames and smoke that now defined the theater walls. She was seeing first-hand the destruction of the famous landmark.

Claire stumbled out from under the trees and into the melee of crazed animals and frightened people, the heat of the blaze at their backs. They jostled and shoved at Claire in their panic, their burnt hair and seared skin terrible to see. Abruptly, a heavy body fell against her, shoving her off balance. She stumbled in terror, but an instant’s glance revealed it wasn’t One-eye come for his wench—it was something much worse, something barely human.

“H-help me, damn ye!” it rasped in a strangled voice, a sound like sandpaper scraping an open wound. It was a man, but only barely so. Its burned, shriveled skin spoke of fire and the grave; one eye seemed damaged beyond repair. Claire felt light-headed. Stars danced in front of her eyes.

“I…oh god,” she squeaked, staring into the dark pool of the fellow’s good eye. Red flickers danced in the iris, reflecting the hell exploding behind her. There was something horrifyingly familiar in that look.

“Verily, mine eyes doth deceive me…‘tis
you
!” burbled the man-thing. With clawlike hands it clutched to its sunken chest what seemed to be a heavy, round object wrapped in animal hide. Leaning against her, the creature sent a reek of roasted flesh sweeping over them both. She vomited instantly and violently.

Sagging with its weight, the creature shifted the object clumsily into the crook of one arm and latched his free hand around Claire’s bicep with appalling firmness. The fingers were filthy and the nails split, as if they’d clawed through solid earth.

“Let go of me!” she screamed, the heat of the inferno baking her bruised face. Terrified, she dragged the man-thing toward the line of trees and the river. The wattle-and-daub with which the exterior theater walls had been sealed roared with such heat Claire imagined the lashes searing from her eyelids. The tops of the nearest trees were starting to smoke. Fleeing peasants and ladies in ruined finery surrounded them as the air filled with cinders and cursing voices.

“Come on wi’ ye,” yelled a woman running toward her from one of the timbered houses beyond the oaks. “Every hand’s needed!” She tossed a crude leather bucket at Claire’s feet. It dawned on her that a bucket brigade was being formed to haul water up from the river. It was a futile effort, of course, if this place followed the course of history as she knew it. The Globe would burn to the dirt on which it was built, claiming a number of lives among its ashes, and would be reconstructed the following year on roughly the same spot.

“It won’t help…” she said to the woman’s disappearing back. Beyond the trees and between the row of houses she saw the bucket line forming; already sloshing containers were coming hand over hand toward the front of the line where people with handcarts and wagons waited to receive them.

The charred man clung to her arm with an iron grip. “Help me,” he gasped. Claire forced her way toward the shadows under the oaks, the creature dragging heavily behind her. “I cannot hold the stone…ye must take it yourself, Mistress Porter.”