nothing. A few pennies here and there. Is that any reward for the sacrifices we make? The loss of all things that make life worth living? When I entered the halls of Cambridge I thought my days would be spent in writing and thought and joy. Not this.’
Will clapped his friend on the shoulder. ‘You are having a black day, that is all.’
Marlowe shook his head, slopping beer drunkenly as he raised his pot to his lips. ‘Events were set in motion that night we first met, and I fear they are now coming to a head.’
‘Kit, I do not like to see you this way. Let me get you back to your lodgings … or at least to that bawdy-house filled with boys that you love so much.’
Kit pushed Will’s hand away. ‘We understand each other, you and I.’ He looked at Will with raw emotion. ‘Despite all the applause that follows
Grabbing his cloak, Kit had staggered out into the night, throwing off all Will’s attempts to draw him back to the fireside. At the time, Will had put that dark mood down to the drink and the regular melancholy of the writer, but now the note of finality in his friend’s words troubled him. Had Kit foreseen his own death? And had Will ignored those warnings? Had he failed his friend when Kit needed him most? If so, he was a poor friend indeed.
After a moment, shuffling footsteps approached from the other side of the deadhouse door. It swung open with a juddering creak to reveal the mortuary assistant, his beard unkempt, his eyes heavy-lidded. He wore only a filthy shirt and a pair of equally stained hose, the feet a dark brown. His breath had the vinegary stink of ale. His slow, drunken gaze lay on the three arrivals before he looked around for a body.
‘We have no deposit for you,’ Will said with authority. ‘We are here to see a body. A man, brought in this day.’
The assistant moved his stupid eyes from Will to Carpenter and then to Launceston. After he had taken in their fine clothes, he grunted and nodded, shuffling back the way he had come.
‘I think he means us to follow,’ Launceston sniffed.
In the cool entrance hall, dirty sheets lay on the worn flagstones alongside a pile of splintered boards used for transporting the bodies. Two lanterns glowed on opposing walls. The assistant took one of them and, holding it aloft, lit the way down a flight of wide stone steps. At the foot, a large cellar was divided into four rooms by arches, the stone walls black with moisture, glistening in the wavering light of candles. In each vault, large, worn trestles stood in rows. The body of a woman rested on one, her skin white and pockmarked, her neck broken. Her clothes were poor and filthy. A whore, Will guessed. A gutter ran across the centre of the stone flags where the blood and bodily fluids could be sluiced.
‘As cold as the grave,’ Carpenter growled uneasily, unconsciously rubbing his pink scar.
‘And as foul-smelling as the Fleet,’ his leader responded. ‘But we are all used to the stink of death by now.’
Launceston hummed a jolly tune.
The mortuary assistant led them to the farthest vault, where a heavily bloodstained shroud was draped over a body on a trestle. ‘This one?’ he grunted.
‘Leave us,’ Will said. ‘We would be alone with our brother in this sad hour.’
‘I wouldn’t be lifting the sheet,’ the assistant grunted, turning and shuffling back up the steps.
‘We should not be here,’ Carpenter said, a hand to his mouth. He took a step away from the trestle. ‘Why put ourselves at even greater risk of the plague?’
‘The Lord Mayor and the Aldermen have decreed that no plague victims should find their way into the deadhouse. They are dispatched directly to the pits for burial.’ Will eyed the rusty stains that covered the entire length of the sheet.
‘This business reeks of the Unseelie Court,’ the scar-faced man spat. ‘Whenever there is something that stinks of churchyards and night terrors, they are not far behind.’
‘They have been silent in recent times but they circle us like wolves, ready to fall upon us when we display the merest sign of weakness,’ the Earl agreed.
Will took the edge of the sheet and hesitated, thinking of Kit beneath the filthy blanket on the floor of Mrs Bull’s lodging house.
‘You know the bastards are skilled at finding weaknesses and exploiting them. They see our greatest desires, our basest yearnings, and they twist them and draw them out until we follow like fools.’ Launceston’s right hand trembled in anticipation as he watched his leader holding the sheet corner.
‘Get on with it, then,’ Carpenter snapped, flashing a glance towards the shape under the shroud. ‘If these remains can tell us aught of this mystery, let us look and be away.’
The Earl leaned over the trestle as if trying to see through the sheet. ‘You are abnormally squeamish, John. You are no stranger to death.’
‘Not in this form. Some deaths come naturally. Others are necessary. But this …’ Carpenter choked on his words as he pointed to the sodden sheet. ‘This is an abomination.’
‘Let us see.’ Will steeled himself and stripped back the shroud.
Carpenter recoiled, covering his mouth in horror.
Launceston still hovered over the trestle, bemused. ‘I think that is Gavell,’ he muttered.
The corpse was almost unrecognizable as the man who gambled away his meagre earnings in the inns of Bankside. Where two brown eyes had been were now black holes. The straw-coloured hair still stood up in tufts on the head, but the skin of the face, neck and torso had been carefully removed to reveal the oozing, red musculature beneath.
‘Why, this is the work of a master,’ the Earl breathed. He hovered for a long moment, seemingly oblivious to the meaty smell coming off the body. In a slow examination, he moved around the torso, his nose a hand’s-width from the flesh. ‘See here, and here,’ he whispered. ‘The merest knife cuts. The skin has been removed with great skill. This is no butcher’s work.’ His brow furrowed and he looked up. ‘The curious knife you described, the one wielded by your masked attacker. Could it have been designed for this?’ He waved a hand across the sticky corpse.
‘I would say’, Will mused, ‘that it would have been perfectly designed for this task.’ He had a sudden vision of himself lying upon the trestle.
‘What is the point?’ Carpenter’s voice was almost a shriek. ‘Kill a man and be done with it, but why take time to flay him, unless you have lost your wits?’
‘Why, indeed?’ Will rubbed his thumb and forefinger thoughtfully on his chin-hair. He felt a wave of compassion. Gavell was by no description a good man, but he deserved a better ending than this.
‘Wait, what is this?’ the Earl mused. He indicated black streaks smudged across several areas of the raw flesh. Examining them for a moment, he shook his head and moved on. Finally he stood back, his breath short. ‘This may simply be a work of art, like one of Marlowe’s plays. The same attention to detail. The same loving care.’
Will stared into Gavell’s empty eye sockets for a long moment, allowing the detail of the murder to settle on him, and then he said, ‘No. Two spies dead. An attempt on the life of a third. I cannot believe that it is by chance. Turn the body over.’
‘God’s wounds!’ Carpenter cursed. ‘Leave the poor sod be.’
‘If this is a plot, we must divine its nature from whatever we have to hand,’ Will stressed. ‘Turn him over.’
Muttering oaths under his breath, the scar-faced man kept his eyes averted as he gripped the sticky shoulders. Launceston took the ankles without a second thought, and together they eased the body off the puddle of congealing blood with a low, sucking sound. Carpenter grimaced.
Gavell’s grisly remains clunked face down on to the trestle. Will pointed to a mark carved into the muscle of the dead man’s back: a circle, bisected at the compass points with short lines, and with a square at its centre.
‘From this we can surmise that Gavell was not simply dispatched because of the work he did,’ he said. ‘This is not a crude murder. There is thought and meaning in this design.’
‘But what does it mean?’ the Earl asked.
Circling the trestle slowly, Will ignored the question and reflected on the matter at hand. ‘Is someone
