mist.
‘…of God,’ he was saying.
‘Mercy?’
‘A storm like this is seldom seen this time of year. People are saying it was the rage of God against the mire of sin and heathenism in this town.’
‘Who’s saying that?’
He smiled grimly, made no answer.
‘Master Roberts is asking for you.’
‘He’s about?’
‘He’s been about over an hour,’ Cowdray said. ‘He bids you join him in the abbey. In the outhouse behind the abbot’s kitchen, where the… where the body lies. Your man’s cadaver.’
Always a dark shadow in front of the light.
‘Now?’
‘I’ll prepare your breakfast, meanwhile. Not a patient man, is he, Master Roberts?’
The hut seemed to have been a relic of the abbey’s occupation by the Flemish weavers in Edward’s reign. Its shutters had been nailed tight, its roof patched with straw. I approached it lightly enough through the fresh, chilled morn. But when I reached its open door my euphoria was broken by the foul, piercing stench of corrupting flesh.
And it was this that brought back all that had come before the excursion. Those candlelit revelations.
What happened to your servant… terrible almost beyond belief… but all this talk of devil magic, sacrifice…
‘Where the hell have you been?’
Dudley, in the doorway, in his drab clerk’s apparel, more gaunt than ever I’d seen him.
‘I slept late,’ I told him. ‘The storm…’
‘Kept all of us awake. Except for this poor bastard.’
His eyes were burning dully, not now with the fever but with a driven rage, as if some cold engine worked within him. He stepped outside, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth and moustache, grains of sweat still agleam on his forehead.
‘Go in. Go and look.’
‘Robbie, I’ve seen all I can bear to see. What’s the use?
‘No!’ His features sharpening, jaw tensed. It was like he’d come out of a long sleep, was smitten with urgency, real life flung in his face. ‘Look again, I pray you. Closely. You know about these things, you’ve studied anatomy.’
‘I’ve studied books on anatomy-’
Books, books, books…
‘John, listen to me. You were quick to deny this was ritual sacrifice. Well, if not that, then what? What’s his body have to tell us?’
‘Robbie, I doubt you’re even well enough to be-’
‘The hell with me. Go the fuck in.’
I nodded. Stepping unwillingly inside the hut, breathing through my mouth.
It was, in truth, no bloodier than a butcher’s shop, but the sight of remains such as these will always bring me to the brink of despair. Hard not to feel that the spirit itself has not been forever extinguished and, after all I’d seen this past night, what a grievous loss that would be.
The body of Martin Lythgoe lay upon a board made from two mangers. It was dull and did not glisten. The candle had been knocked away from the mouth and lay beside the body, no longer spectral and nothing of the tor about it now. Merely a squalid insult to life and humanity.
‘What can I…?’ I was near to tears, shaking my head in despair at my uselessness. ‘What can I tell you, Robbie… more than you can see for yourself?’
The right arm bridged the yawning chasm of the chest, and inside its elbow was lodged the crushed and shrivelled orb of Martin’s heart. I remembered the phantasm of him I’d seen through the dust, trying to hold it all in, and he hadn’t spoken then, and he wasn’t speaking now.
The left arm dangled over the side of the board, and Dudley lifted it, supporting the hand, free by now from rigor mortis.
‘What do you make of this?’
I bent over, with some reluctance, holding my breath.
‘Oh.’
Wouldn’t normally have noticed it. You’d see the invaded chest, the ripped-out heart, and would turn away sickened before you’d mark the small but meaningful smitterings of dried blood on the fingertips, the blackened, broken nails.
‘The middle finger, John. The way the nail’s been all but torn away. See?’
‘Done as he fought back?’ I squatted down on the greasy straw on the floor, took up the cold, marbling hand at eye-level. ‘Or maybe it suggests the body was moved after death?’
‘Either of those is possible,’ Dudley said. ‘But I think it’s something worse. Look again. Closer.’
‘What’s this…?’
Brown flakes which had fallen into my palm. Seemed unlikely to be dried blood.
‘Rust.’ Dudley knelt beside me. ‘It’s from an old iron nail. See it?’
‘Where… Oh, Jesu-’
The length of it was wedged hard under the split and blackened fingernail, all the way to its root, where the point stuck out. I let the hand fall, in horror, wincing.
‘Hammered in,’ Dudley said. ‘Under his nail, until the head of it broke off.’
‘Then this is…?’
‘Torture,’ Dudley said. ‘Before he died, this poor bloody man was tortured.’
I came weakly to my feet, trying to think of another explanation and could not.
‘Why?’
‘Why are men usually tortured?’
‘To make them confess to…’
‘Uh huh.’ Dudley shaking his head. ‘To make them talk.’
‘About what? What would he know? He was a stranger here. He only came because of…’
‘Us. He came with us. He knew who we were and why we were here.’
‘And is that to kill for?’
Dudley looked at me as if I were a child, while the eyes of Martin Lythgoe, cold as pebbles, gazed forever into the cobwebbed dark.
‘We need a witness to this,’ Dudley said. ‘Is Carew here yet? Or where’s… that other fellow?’
‘Fyche.’
Shows this picture of himself as a Godly man in combat with the forces of Satan, and at the core, I’ll swear… that’s where you’ll find the real evil.
‘We don’t talk to Fyche,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure we even talk to Carew.’
Dudley looked at me with narrowed eyes.
‘Take my word,’ I said.
‘All right. Fetch Cowdray, then.’
‘No… That is… there’s someone more qualified.’
Clawing aside cobwebs hanging thick as ship’s rigging and stumbling to the doorway for air.
XXXIII
A Man’s Path
An element of self-interest. I’ll admit that. Matthew Borrow, a medical man and surgeon, would be the best
