Then you have stolen this one.
No, sir, mine has been stolen. This… creature… was left in its place.
Let me see its face by the light. Topcliffe bent down toward the face of the child in the gloom. He pulled back the swaddling bands from its head and looked intently at it. The child’s face was small and round, its eyes spaced widely. Too widely. There seemed to be no chin to speak of and the ears were curiously low. Any mother, Topcliffe thought, would want to disown such a thing. Come in with me. My boy Nicholas tells me you have had a long vigil here. I’ll beat his arse raw for leaving you out in weather like this.
He pushed back the oak door to his home. Rose hesitated, fearing to enter. The hallway was lit by the flame from a candle, which cast strange shadows in the breeze from the open door. She stepped forward into the unholy gloom.
On a dark-stained coffer lay a large gilt-bound book, which, though she could not read, she recognized as a Bible. Topcliffe took Rose Downie’s right hand from the baby and held it down hard on the book, as if to ensure there was solid contact. Do you swear by Almighty God that the baby you are holding is not yours?
Rose felt colder inside the house than outside in the winter wind. There were strange smells in this place; it held the chill and smell of a slaughterhouse. I do swear, sir; it is not my baby. My baby, William Edmund Downie, has been taken from me. Please help me, sir. I believe that only you can help.
Where is your husband, Mistress Downie?
He died, sir. He was out with the trainband at Mile End Green by Clement’s Inn after church a month past, and his hagbut did explode.
Topcliffe touched her arm with seeming compassion. His hand remained there, keeping her close to him. I am sorry to hear that, Mistress Downie. England has need of such men. Such a thing should not befall a pretty wife.
Tears welled up in Rose’s eyes at the memory but she refused to weep. She had been heavy with child and he was late home from practicing firing his arquebus and wielding his pike. He, like thousands of other good men, had been doing his duty, she knew, training week after week out in the open countryside or within the brick walls of Artillery Yard. He had volunteered himself for service as part of the Carpenters Company contingent. It was men like her husband who would stop the Spaniard. That day, she had waited for him on the road, but instead of his jaunty step and broad smile coming toward her, she saw six other members of the trainband approaching, pulling a handcart with what, at first, she took to be a dead animal. Then she saw that it was his bloody remains and she collapsed fainting. Later, they told her his arquebus had misfired and exploded in pieces, ripping open his throat. They had been wed less than a year, by the Bishop who would later baptize their child. Her husband’s name was Edmund and she called him Mund. He was such a fine man, a yeoman carpenter with shoulders as wide as his smile. On the day of their wedding, they had scarcely been able to wait for the Bishop to give his blessing before retiring to their room to tear the clothes from each other’s backs. When Mund died, she felt that her life was over. She hungered each night for his body over hers. But instead of the joy of him, she had nothing but tears. And then the baby came a week after his death and she began to find a little life again. He was a boy and he was perfect in every way. His name was William Edmund, but she called him Mund, like his father. He would be the new man in her life.
Come further into my home, Topcliffe said, his arm moving around her shoulder, and have a draft of beer, for you must have a thirst to slake.
If she had been asked to tread through the portals of hell, she could not have been more scared, yet she could not say no to this man. She knew his repute as a brute, but she also knew that he had power. Her friend Ellie May from the market had told her she must go to him, for he was reputed to know all there was to know in London; he could see into souls and was privy to dark secrets that no one else could know, Ellie had told her.
In his teeth, stained mottled amber, Topcliffe clenched a long wooden stick, which he drew on every so often, and then blew out smoke. She looked at it astonished, as if he were breathing sulfur from the fires of Satan, for she had never seen such a thing. He laughed at her bewilderment. It is a pipe of sotweed, from the New World. He called in a servant to bring drink, then another to stoke the fire in the hearth and-as the man crouched to the grate with bellows and logs-cursed him for letting it go so low.
He asked her questions. How she survived, where she lived. She told him she was a malkin-a kitchen drudge- in the buttery of a great lady. She had left service when she married Edmund, but on his death she had been received back into the household in her old serving job.
As she talked, Topcliffe smiled at her with his hard, dark teeth. Eventually he put down the sotweed pipe. Well, Rose, I should like to help you if I can. We must find the mother of this changeling you have brought us.
Again he put his arm around Rose Downie’s shoulders, drawing her to him. We must look after Her Majesty’s subjects, must we not, especially the widow of a fine young man who died for his sovereign. Tell me, Rose, where was your baby stolen?
She recalled the day precisely. It was a week past, when the child was just twelve days old. She had gone to the market for cheeses and salt pork. Her son was swaddled and she held him in her arms. But there was a disagreement with the stallholder and she had put the baby down for just a short moment because her arms were full of groceries and she was counting out the farthings to pay for them. The argument became heated and the short moment of leaving little Mund in a basket by the stall became a minute or two. She was still angry when she went to pick him up, but then her anger turned to horror, for her baby was no longer there. In his place was this monster, this creature, this Devil’s spawn.
Well, we must find little William Edmund, Topcliffe said. But first, let us become better acquainted, Rose.
His arm was strong around her now, and he pulled her down. She did not resist, as if she half expected this as part of the price. In one movement, he lifted her kirtle and smock, turned her with a strength she could not defy, and, without a word, entered her with the casual indifference with which a bull takes a cow.
Chapter 5
In theCrypt of St. Paul’s, the searcher of the dead stood in his bloodstained apron over the unclothed carcass of Lady Blanche Howard. For a long while he was silent. With his strong hands he moved her poor head this way and that with practiced gentleness, examining her wounds; he did the same with her paps and with her woman’s parts; he held up the scarce-formed baby, still attached to her womb by its cord, and looked at it from all sides. He ran his fingers through the woman’s flaxen hair and he explored inside the pits of her arms, the backs of her legs, and the soles of her feet.
The stone walls of the crypt glistened with trickles of water. The Searcher parted the legs of the cold body and examined further. He removed objects and put them to one side dispassionately. He moved his face near the fair V of her womanhood and sniffed.
Above them, in the nave of the great cathedral, the throngs of people went about their business, dealing, conspiring, laughing, fighting, robbing each other, or simply passing the time of day. But down here, the only sound was the shuffling of soft leather soles on stone and the occasional drip of water from the walls and ceiling. Shakespeare stood back and watched. The Searcher, Joshua Peace, was so intent on his work that he seemed unaware of his presence. Shakespeare liked Peace; he was a man of knowledge, like himself, the type of man to shape the new England now they were almost rid of the superstitions of the Roman church.
Peace was of indeterminate age, perhaps late thirties but he looked younger. He was slim but strong and his head was bald on top, like a monk’s tonsure. He sniffed some more, around her mouth and nostrils, then stood back from his work and met the eye of John Shakespeare. There is the smell of fire on her, and also the lust of a man, he said. And not just that smell, Mr. Shakespeare-there is the three-day smell of death.
Three days?
Yes. Three days at this time of year, the same as a day and a half in summer. Where did you find her?
In a house that had been burned out, toward Shoreditch.
Well, that explains the smell of fire. From the smell of her skin and mouth, I can detect no poison. I take the cause of death to be the slash of a butcher’s blade or some such to the throat. Tell me, was there a great deal of blood around the body?
