NINETEEN

Gurdyman sat by the hearth in Mercure’s house. Dawn had broken and he was alone, for Hrype still had not returned and Mercure was, as so often, out in his workroom, where Gurdyman suspected he had been all night. There was a sweet smell in the air, which Gurdyman thought was burning apple wood. He was tired, strained; he could still feel Hrype’s fury in the little room, for all that many hours had passed since his abrupt departure. Gurdyman fancied he could see the anger as jagged, brilliant blue lines that cut across the soft early light.

He slipped into a daydream, on the edge of a doze. He had hardly slept, and he knew such states were easier to enter when the mind was fatigued. He thought about Hrype, and the dislike of Lassair that ate into him. He is jealous of her, a calm voice said in Gurdyman’s head.

Then his mind slowly filled with images of Lassair. She was in deepest distress and he made an involuntary movement, as if his body had already made the decision to find her, help her, support her…

But he didn’t move.

The sweet woodsmoke smell intensified. Gurdyman’s mind relaxed. He saw shapes, coalescing into vague human form. A tall, pale figure, black-shrouded, which slowly melted and re-formed.

Some time later – he thought only a short time had elapsed, but then he noticed the sunshine outside, although, strangely, that observation seemed to go as soon as it had come – Gurdyman woke. Mercure was bending over the hearth, stirring something that spattered in hot fat in a shallow pan, and an appetizing, savoury smell filled the air.

Gurdyman looked at him, still confused. I was more deeply asleep than I imagined, he thought, for I know I am awake, yet I am disoriented.

Mercure turned to him, smiling. ‘I have been neglecting you, old friend,’ he said. ‘Now I intend to make up for it, for I am preparing eggs and black pudding, and we shall sit by the fire together and speak of the long years of our acquaintance.’ He paused. ‘Where is Hrype? I am cooking for him, too, so perhaps we should call him?’

‘He’s gone.’ Gurdyman was mildly surprised that Mercure hadn’t noticed.

Gone?’ Mercure spun round, and Gurdyman caught a glimpse of his expression. But then Mercure smiled, and, in a tone of casual interest, said, ‘He comes and goes according to some deep and complex plan of his own, that one.’

‘Indeed he does,’ Gurdyman agreed. ‘Just now, I suspect he is somewhere out in the wilds, quite alone, for I told him some truths about himself that I do not think he wished to know.’

Mercure nodded. ‘Ah, but it is ever our lot, my old friend, to see beyond the vision of normal men, and, when we relate what we see, our words are seldom accepted in the spirit in which they are delivered.’

‘Hrype is far from being a normal man,’ Gurdyman observed. He knew exactly what Mercure meant by the word.

Mercure looked at him with interested eyes. ‘So it is as I suspected,’ he murmured. ‘We proliferate, do we not?’

Gurdyman watched him. He looks weary beyond endurance, he thought with a surge of pity, as if his work demands more of him than he has left to give.

‘Sit and eat,’ he urged. ‘I worry about you, Mercure. Working alone as you do, you have nobody to regulate your days.’

‘I manage well enough,’ Mercure replied.

There was silence for a while as they consumed the hot, savoury food. Then Gurdyman said, ‘Hrype will, perhaps, visit the town. I hope for news, for I am anxious to return. I have been grateful for your hospitality, Mercure, but if the danger is past I wish to be back in my own home.’

‘Say rather back at your work, my old friend,’ Mercure said with a grin. Then, raising his head, his large dark eyes on Gurdyman, he said, ‘But please, do not go yet. Think what became of Morgan and young Cat.’

‘I do, constantly,’ Gurdyman said. ‘However, you forget that I too have my young adept, and I have the strongest sense that she is in danger.’

‘Danger,’ Mercure echoed. ‘It is all around, yes.’

A soft humming seemed to start up. Gurdyman shook his head, wondering if it originated inside his own ears. He glanced at Mercure to see if he had noticed, but he was calmly carrying on with his meal.

Something was happening.

Gurdyman felt as if his limbs were slowly turning into soft wool. He slumped back against the wall, relaxed, drifting into a trance. Mercure seemed to be similarly affected: his eyelids were drooping and his empty bowl fell from his limp hand and rolled away. Somewhere in Gurdyman’s head a warning note sounded. As if a part of his mind fought whatever was overcoming him and his companion, he saw an image of Lassair, and she had tears on her face and an expression of dread in her eyes. Then he saw a tall, stooping figure in a dark hooded cloak, and when the figure of horror turned to stare at him, its face was dead white and it had dark holes for eyes.

Gurdyman struggled. He saw Mercure fall over sideways, gently, a smile on his face, and curl up, surrendering. Gurdyman struggled against the enchantment. Lassair was in terrible danger and he must find her, go to her, use the mighty power of his lifetime’s accumulation of strong magic to fight off whatever loomed over her and keep her safe.

He managed to get up on to his knees. Then the humming suddenly intensified, so that the whole of the little house seemed to thrum, and he fell back. His eyes closed, and the trance took him.

They took Jack to a small cell off the room at the tavern which Walter and his men were using. He was alive. That was as much as I or anyone could say. I didn’t let myself think about how much blood he had lost. Could a big man go on living when he had been so gravely depleted?

In my panic, as we settled him on a narrow cot, I kept looking round for someone to tell me what to do. I had never taken charge of a really serious case. There was always Edild, calm, serene, quietly watching me and guiding me when I went wrong or didn’t know what to do. Gurdyman, too, knew so very much more than I did about the human body and how it works, and while I might not have had his reassuring presence when I tended severe injuries and diseases here in the town, he was always there for me to talk to, giving his advice and explaining how he would have set about the appropriate treatment.

I realized quite soon that the only person telling me what to do was me.

Furthermore, the others – Walter, Ginger and their companions; the kindly and anxious man and wife who ran the tavern – made it perfectly obvious that they were looking to me to save Jack’s life.

I bathed and cleansed the wound so that I could see just how badly hurt he was. Gaspard Picot’s treacherous little blade had gone into the big muscle in Jack’s chest, just to the left of his breastbone. Had it gone in straight, it would have pierced his heart. It went in at a slight angle, and so he still lived. He was very well-muscled and it was probably that which had saved him from instant death, for at that angle the blade wasn’t long enough to reach the heart through all the muscle.

Gurdyman had explained to me the theory of the Arab doctors who taught him when he was young, to do with how blood goes round the body. They said it went in little tubes, some leading away from the heart and some returning to it. If that was right – and my own observations told me it was – then I was guessing that the knife thrust had torn one such tube inside Jack’s chest. If the blood stopped before he lost too much, he would live. If the wound was too big to mend itself, he wouldn’t.

I stitched him together as best I could. Both my teachers are wonderfully nimble-fingered, and neither is satisfied with me unless I perform as well as they do. With Jack’s blood still pumping up under my hands, I compromised, sacrificing a bit of neatness for speed. I hoped it was the right thing to do, and I prayed, harder than I’d ever prayed for anything, that it was.

Some time in the middle of the morning, I realized that the bleeding had slowed. The pads pressed to his chest were still colouring red, but slowly now, as if the blood was only seeping. Jack was still unconscious – luckily for him he had been all the time I was sewing the wound – but once or twice he stirred slightly. I knew I must get him to drink, and I asked the innkeeper’s wife to have clean water ready. Delighted to have something to do, she rushed off and presently returned with a huge bucketful.

I smiled involuntarily. She seemed to think I was nursing a fully-grown horse.

The day went on. I managed to get a small mug of water into my patient. He felt cold, as the afternoon waned, and I asked for a fire. He still felt cold, so I got on the little cot beside him and took him in my arms.

I hadn’t realized that it was night until I felt a warm hand on my shoulder. Turning quickly round, I saw in the soft light of the fire in the little hearth that a grey-haired priest stood over the bed.

‘I am Father Gregory,’ he said quietly. ‘I am the infirmarer at the priests’ house, and I came to offer my help.’

‘Oh!’ Quickly I sat up, carefully pulling the covers up over Jack and straightening my gown. ‘Thank you, how kind.’

‘We all like Jack,’ he said solemnly. ‘He is a good man.’

I tried to gather my thoughts to explain to this kindly man what had happened, what I’d done to help, how Jack had been all the long day. But my mind was a blank. I looked up at Father Gregory, shaking my head. ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t seem to think,’ I said.

He took my hands and raised me to my feet. ‘Go and rest,’ he said firmly. ‘I will sit with him.’

‘Will you-’ I began.

I didn’t have to finish. ‘Of course I will,’ he said.

The tavern-keeper had made up a bed for me in a corner of the main room. I walked carefully between other sleeping bodies and sat down on it. A candle had been left burning to help me find my way. I was about to stretch out and try to sleep when I heard someone approach.

It was Ginger. ‘I found this, miss.’ He was holding out a little bag made of soft fabric. His face was wretched; I realized how much he and the others cared for and depended on Jack.

I held out my hand. ‘What is it?’

‘I don’t know,’ Ginger said, ‘I haven’t opened it. It fell out of your satchel when you were – when you tended the master.’

I took it from him. ‘Thank you.’

He nodded. Then he said, ‘How is he?’

‘He’s sleeping and so far he isn’t feverish.’ It was all I could say and no answer, because what Ginger was really asking was, Is he going to live? and I didn’t know. ‘There’s a priest with him,’ I added, in case Ginger thought I’d left Jack alone.

‘Aye, Father Gregory. He’s all right, he is.’ He smiled. ‘Get some sleep, miss. You look all in.’ He nodded again, then crawled away.

I knew I wouldn’t be able to close down my racing, panicky mind, so I thought I might as well investigate the little cloth bag. It was the object I’d found in the secret hiding place in Osmund’s cell, when Jack and I went to leave Robert Powl’s token.

Jack. Fit, whole, healthy. And now he-

I shut off that thought before it could undermine me.

I opened the neck of the little bag and tipped the contents out into my hand. A length of thin silver chain slithered and settled in the hollow of my palm, and there was a pendant suspended on it.

A pendant on a silver chain… Why did that strike a note of memory?

I bent down closer to the light of the candle flame and studied the pendant. It was a round silver coin, or so I thought at first. Then I saw that it had a strange design etched on it, unlike that on any coin I’d ever seen. The lines were worn with age but I could see what they depicted. It was a strange figure made up of a man and a woman, half and half, wearing one crown, their disparate feet standing on the back of a two-headed dragon’s back.

I had seen that image before.

Silently I beat my fist against my forehead in frustration, trying to make my mind work. It was terribly important – somehow I knew it was – but I couldn’t find the connection. Something I’d seen, or been told… But I was so tired, so worried, and I was only keeping despair and a flood of tears at bay by sheer will power.

I lay back, the pendant and chain clutched in my hand, and tried to relax. I seemed to hear Gurdyman’s voice, intoning the chant he uses to enter the meditative state. Oh, how I wished he was there with me.

Perhaps the fervour of my wish conjured up some element of my beloved teacher; I don’t know if that is possible. If anyone was likely to hear my desperate need and respond, though, it was Gurdyman.

All at once my mental turmoil began to ease. I closed my eyes, and I seemed to feel a cool hand on my forehead; someone was reassuring me, telling me everything would be all right, although I didn’t know who it was. I didn’t exactly hear words spoken; it was more a thought, put into my head. I welcomed it.

And in that dreamy state everything clarified. I knew where I’d seen that strange image before: it was the subject of a painting in Osmund’s workroom. It had been beautifully done, and I could see in my mind’s eye the rich blue of the man’s knee-length robe, the soft pale folds of the woman’s gown and the faint glitter of gold of the single crown on the two heads.

I think I must have slept for a while.

I opened my eyes to daylight. And I remembered where I’d heard mention of a pendant.

Gerda had worn a pendant on a thin silver chain. Jack had found that out when he went back to Margery’s to find out if Gerda had been robbed. The pendant had been missing from her body when she was found, but it hadn’t been worth much – the girl called Madselin had told Jack it looked ancient, and was worn very thin – and nobody had bothered to find out what happened to it.

Not of any great value, and we’d all forgotten about it. Other people may have had an excuse for that, but I hadn’t. I knew it was important, the moment Jack mentioned it. The question What was on the pendant? had leapt into my mind from somewhere and I should have gone on asking it till I got an answer.

How on earth, I wondered, did it come to be in Osmund’s cell? Was he – could he have been – one of her clients? But no, he was training to be a priest! Priests are men, said a solemn voice in my head.

I had to go back to Margery’s. Jack and I had been before and talked to the other girls, but perhaps we hadn’t asked the right questions. I got quietly out from under my blankets, tiptoed across the room and, taking a deep breath, went in to Jack.

Father Gregory sat beside him, still as a statue save for the fingers on his rosary. He opened his eyes as I came in. He smiled. ‘The patient is sleeping,’ he whispered. ‘He has been restless but he is quiet now.’

I leaned over Jack. He was deathly pale and very still. I put my hand on his forehead. He was cool. I watched his breathing. Steady, deep. I put my fingers to the pulse beating in his throat. It was fast, but not as rapid as it had been yesterday.

‘What have you got there?’ Father Gregory asked. I still held the pendant in my other hand. I held it out to him.

He studied it for some moments. Then he said, ‘Animus and anima.’

‘What does that mean?’ I had tensed.

‘The male and female principle,’ he said, still staring at the pendant as if he found it hard to tear his eyes away. Finally he looked up. ‘It is an ancient symbol, representing the union of the two sides of human nature. Don’t ask me any more’ – he held up his hand as if physically to ward me off – ‘for such matters are evil and forbidden, and I must neither speak nor even think about them.’

His mouth said the words, but I read a different message in his wise old eyes. A message that said, You should go on asking, for it is knowledge, and no knowledge is intrinsically evil.

I said, ‘Will you sit with Jack a little longer, please?’

He nodded.

As I ran along the quay towards Margery’s establishment, I was thinking hard. Animus and anima. It was, I now realized, what I’d seen in the shining stone when Jack and I discovered Morgan and Cat. The words, like symbols, had flashed out at me, but I’d had no time to absorb them. Like far too many other things, they’d gone to the back of my mind and become overshadowed.

But they weren’t overshadowed now, they were the one thing I couldn’t stop thinking about. If Father Gregory was right, and that strange design represented animus and anima, then it was what we had all been looking for, since it appeared to link Gerda with both Morgan and Osmund: it connected three of the victims.

But how? Gerda didn’t have a secret workroom, and she wasn’t a magician or a magician’s apprentice. She was a prostitute; her parents were dead, her kin all dispersed and either unable or unwilling to take her in, which was how she ended up at Margery’s.

I had reached the firmly closed door of the brothel at the end of the quay. From somewhere within, I could hear someone busy at the wash tub; a woman’s sweet voice, raised in song. I went round behind the long building and came to the laundry, where a plump woman with red cheeks and even redder hands was bending over a tub, elbow-deep in soapy water.

‘I need to see Margery,’ I said. ‘It’s urgent.’

‘Come back later,’ the woman said with a grin. ‘When she’s awake.’

‘It’s about Gerda.’

The name acted like a spell. Instantly the woman stood up, wiped her hands on her apron and led me inside the main building. We went along the passage to where Margery sat up in bed, not asleep but combing out her hair.

She recognized me, but, before she could speak, I held up the pendant.

Her eyes widened. ‘Where did you get that?’

‘It’s Gerda’s, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. Give it to me!’

I closed my hand on it. ‘It was found in the cell of the young priest, the Night Wanderer’s fourth victim,’ I said. ‘Did he visit Gerda?’

‘A priest?’ She shook her head. ‘No. I’m not saying such a man doesn’t have recourse to girls who do what mine do, but he’d hardly be likely to frequent a well-known place like mine.’ She said that with a small show of pride.

‘And you don’t think Gerda saw him without your knowledge?’

‘I know all my girls’ clients.’ It was said with utter certainty.

I clutched the pendant tightly in my hand. ‘Could it – the pendant – have been a gift from one of her clients?’

Margery shrugged. ‘I suppose so, but it was a poor gift if so. She was worth better.’

‘Could she have bought it or’ – I hesitated – ‘stolen it?’

‘She didn’t steal it!’ The suggestion made Margery angry. ‘And I don’t believe she bought it. Show me again,’ Margery commanded. I held it out to her. ‘Yes, it’s just how I remember. But look: it’s obviously ancient. The pendant itself is a bit bent, and the etched pattern is blurred with long wear. It was worn thin, see?’ She pointed. ‘I reckon,’ she said slowly, ‘it was some old family thing that had been handed down. Gerda would have treasured it, even though it had no value, because it was all she had to remember her parents and kin by. She was an orphan, you know.’

‘Yes,’ I said absently. I was thinking about possibilities: in particular, whether someone in Gerda’s lost family had been connected with magic.

And quite how I was going to find that out, I had no idea. Return and talk to the girls, once they were up? But I’d done that before, and they’d been able to tell me very little.

I turned to go. ‘Thank you for your time,’ I said.

‘Wait,’ she said. ‘How’s he doing?’

I shrugged. ‘He’s lasted the night and he isn’t feverish.’

She met my eyes. Both of us, I’m sure, were thinking the unsaid word: yet. ‘You take good care of him,’ she commanded. ‘Worth saving, that one.’

I was outside, just joining the track that led back along the quay, when I heard someone behind me. Someone called my name in a sort of whispered shout, and, turning, I saw the skinny blonde girl with rats’ tail hair and greasy skin who had been so scared by the Night Wanderer legends. She still looked terrified, and as she held out her hand to stop me, I saw that she had bitten her nails so harshly that the tops of the fingers bulged out over what was left.

‘Hello, Madselin,’ I said.

‘Hush!’ she hissed, although I hadn’t spoken loudly. ‘Come over here, where we won’t be seen or overheard.’ She grabbed my sleeve and pulled me over behind a half-ruined boat shed.

We stood in awkward silence for a while, and I found her wide, frightened gaze disconcerting. Also, I wanted very much to get back to Jack. ‘What do you want with me? I said, perhaps too impatiently, because her lips trembled and tears filled her eyes. ‘Sorry,’ I said quickly. ‘How can I help?’

She seemed to gather herself together, as if for a tremendous effort, then said, ‘I heard you just now, talking to Margery. I had to come after you! I should have spoken up before, should have told what I knew, but I was too afraid.’ The tears spilled over her eyelids and ran down her thin cheeks.

I took her cold hands in mine. ‘What should you have told?’

‘I heard them, see!’ she burst out, wringing her thin hands in distress. ‘It was the night before – before she died.’ Madselin swallowed a sob. ‘I was out with – well, never mind who it was, but he likes to do it in the open air when the weather allows and it was mild that night. Anyway, he’d finished his business and was away back to his wife and children, and I was making my way back to Margery’s, and I heard them!’ She looked pop-eyed at me, as if I should have known.

‘Who did you hear?’ I asked, fighting my desire to shake her.

‘Gerda and him! They were having a row, I reckon, and both of them were angry, yelling at each other. I wasn’t eavesdropping,’ she added hastily, ‘you could hear them a mile off! Anyway, I was quite close, so I stopped and watched, and I saw it all, though I didn’t let them see me.’

‘What was the row about?’ I could have asked her who the other person was, but I had a feeling I already knew.

‘He was so furious with her! Kept saying again and again how she was really sinful, and how wrong it was in God’s eyes to live the life she did, and how would the lord Jesus feel about her defiling her flesh? He was trying to persuade her to leave Margery’s and move into the little room he was renting as a workroom. It wasn’t much, he told her, and not very comfortable, and he wouldn’t be able to get her much food, but she’d be honest, and she could make her confession to his old priest and do her penance and God would forgive her and receive her back.’

‘What did she say to that?’ I asked when Madselin paused for breath.

‘She said, not bloody likely!’ Madselin answered with a feeble grin. ‘Then he started going on about how she could help him in his work and be useful to him, only I didn’t understand that bit, when you think what she did and what he was.’ She frowned. ‘But it sounded from his tone as if he really needed her.’

‘And she still refused?’ I prompted.

‘Oh, yes. Told him he could disapprove all he liked but she was happy at Margery’s, because they were kind to her and they didn’t try to bully her. She said she didn’t mind the old girl – Margery, I mean – and she really liked the other girls, and they were her family now.’

I thought about that.

‘Then he reached forward and stuck his hand down her gown, and I wondered what was going on,’ Madselin continued, ‘but he was just pulling out the pendant she wore, on its chain. I’ve been good to you! I gave you this! he yells at her, shaking it in her face’ – Madselin’s voice rose dramatically – ‘and then she pulls it up over her head and thrusts it at him. You can have it back! she cries. It’s old and it’s nasty, and I hate it!

‘And he took it?’

Madselin nodded. ‘Yes! She flung it at him and stalked off, and I watched him pick it up. He looked so sad,’ she murmured. ‘I felt sorry for him, even though he’d been unkind to her.’

‘And she was killed the following night,’ I said slowly, half to myself. I thought that perhaps, at last, I was starting to understand why.

The Night Wanderer, it seemed, had believed her to be something she wasn’t; something of vital importance to Osmund’s secret, other life…

I should have thought more carefully before I spoke, for Madselin was weeping in earnest now, the hands with their poor bitten nails up to her face in a hopeless attempt to hide her distress. ‘I know,’ she sobbed, ‘and I should have said what I’d seen, only I was so frightened! I thought he’d come back and do for me, too, if I spoke up!’

I put my arms round her and hugged her. ‘I don’t think it would have made any difference,’ I said. ‘And you were scared, like we all were, and nobody is at their best when they’re frightened.’

She seemed to take comfort from that and her sobs slowly subsided. When she was sufficiently calm, I walked with her the short distance back to Margery’s and saw her safely inside.

Then I hurried back down the quay.

I kept hearing Madselin’s voice when she told me what Gerda had said about the other girls: that they were her family now.

I thought about what I’d first been told about the Night Wanderer’s fourth victim: he was an outsider, new to the town, studious, quiet, kept himself to himself. New to the town… And Gerda, they’d said, wasn’t a local girl but had come to here after the deaths of both parents. She’d been the youngest child, still at home when the older siblings had gone, and none of those siblings could take her in when she was left alone.

She and Osmund were brother and sister.

Osmund had frequently been late for the offices and had been known to go down to the river. We knew about his workroom, but going there wasn’t the only reason he absented himself from the priests’ house. He used to slip out to meet his sister.

He hated what she did for a living but couldn’t supply the necessary support to get her out of it. Perhaps he felt guilty that he couldn’t offer her a home; that her being a whore was at least in part his fault. Who could say?

He had been trying to persuade her to become his assistant. His adept; his Soror Mystica; his sister in the great work, just as she was in the flesh and in the blood.

But she was afraid and unwilling. She had been killed, and then, only a few days later, so had he.

I was almost back at the tavern. I was running now, my satchel bouncing on my hip. Suddenly it felt as if a shock had run through me. I skidded to a halt, put my hand inside my satchel and felt the shining stone, almost too hot to touch.

The compulsion to look into it was irresistible. I ran to the line of warehouses, slid between two of them and took out the stone.

I had never known it so urgent. There was no waiting for murky darkness to clear; no patient following of the brilliant green and gold lines that seemed to lead the eye into its mysterious heart. The vision was right there and it felt as if the stone was hammering it into my head.

It showed me Gerda and Osmund. It showed me Morgan and Cat. Then, in clear detail, it showed me myself and Gurdyman.

Its message was devastatingly clear, but still it forged on. I saw the four victims throatless, bleeding, lifeless. Then, in an image of total horror, Gurdyman and I lay on the stone floor of the crypt, and we, too, had no throats.

Nausea rose up and overwhelmed me and I vomited and retched until I could bring up no more. Then, more frightened than I’d ever been in my life, I fled.

Загрузка...