Mask of Night Page 23

  Whether it would be enough for this crew to stand and hurl insults in our direction or whether – their baser appetites not yet being sated by their activities indoors – they wanted to do us actual damage, I don’t know. We didn’t wait to find out. Or rather Abel didn’t. Some panic overtook him and he started off down the filthy street. After a moment’s hesitation I followed him close at heels.

  In the noise and confusion the hooded individuals may have run off or it may be that we took a different turning from them. Anyway, we lost sight of the pair, being more concerned with preserving our skins from a gaggle of brothel-creepers.

  We got away from the outraged customers of the stew easily enough but returned to the Golden Cross with only one solid piece of information to show for our skulk in the alley: that our fellow player Laurence Savage, who was now tucked up in one of the communal beds and snoring blissfully, frequented stews. Well, he had gained more satisfaction than we had this evening. At least I hoped that he had.

  Dwale

  A good harvest – yet in this upside-down world it is only the springtime not autumn. And another strange thing, this is a crop which grows the more you reap. The dead pile up, and your hand is not always needed now to put them in their place on the pile. Now nature will handle them by herself. In some ways this is to be regretted since the pestilence is a crude instrument while you are continually refining your methods, ever since the early demise of the dog and the death of old mother Morrison. Now you can judge doses to a nicety. The only “crudeness” came in the way you dealt with the carter Hoby but that was inevitable. He was stealing your profit. Besides he was a frightened little man and sooner rather than later would have revealed himself or been revealed.

  You are immune, though, in your armour. You will not suffer yourself to be discovered, to be revealed.

  This is as well since there are stirrings of suspicion. In particular Revill the player is pushing his nose in and you have decided to cut it off – to cut him off – if it can be managed discreetly, as it should have been in the case of Doctor Fern. You had hoped to decoy Revill to that old woman’s house and deal with him there, but something went wrong, he smelled a rat and did not appear. Or could not be found. Then Kite took fright at some provoking words of the player – most likely uttered only to test his response – and scuttled off to the house in Shoe Lane.

  All that is required is calmness and self-control. You are very much afraid that Kite is no longer capable of showing such qualities. Underneath his cocksure surface there is a well of fears. It is only a matter of time before he too is invited to join the pile of the dead. Then it will be a fitting moment for you to decamp with your goods, your pot of money.

  More important than goods and money, you will depart with your precious preparations and potions, which give you the power of life and death. With belladonna and beautiful lady, with devil’s herb and dwale. With monkshood, wolf’s bane and friar’s cap. The words are a spell. Merely to recite them is comforting. They can open the doors to the other place.

  They say that poison is a woman’s weapon. Why is that? Is it the domestic preparation, the kitchen utensils, the grinding and mixing, the “cooking” that is sometimes needed? Is it that poison is most efficiently and painlessly served under the cover of necessary food and drink, the woman’s province? Or is it, as a fool would claim, that poison suits the fainter heart of a woman? Yet it is not a faint-heart’s instrument. Which requires the greater courage, the stronger nerve? To administer the fatal dose, either all at once or piecemeal, and then to wait in an agony of suspense which is almost as great as your victim’s? Or to act when the blood is up and to run your victim through with a knife or sword, scarcely aware of what you’re doing? You have done both so you know what you’re talking about. The first deed demands coolness and premeditation, while the other one needs nothing more than a hot head and a nimble wrist.

  These are . . . interesting reflections. Some time, when this present trouble is over, you must write them down.

  “This is a dangerous course, Nick.”

  I’d lost count of the number of times Abel Glaze had said this. He meant well all right, but his words were only making me more frightened, something which was very easy to do at this moment. I was lying on a couch in a stranger’s house. Abel was kneeling on the floor, his wallet unfurled in front of him. We had a small amount of light from a few candles, good quality ones. It was still daylight outside but, being trespassers, we did not dare to open the curtains.

  “Tell me again about the . . . what did you call them? . . . the pallets?” I said, more to stop Abel talking about the dangers which I was running than because I really wanted to be informed about the strange individuals he’d mentioned a few minutes earlier. He was outlining some of the methods which can be used to create a false impression of sickness or disease.

  “Palliards they are called. Or sometimes clapperdudgeons. I’m surprised you’ve never heard of them.”

  “I haven’t got your underworld experience, Abel.”

  My friend bristled slightly at this. He didn’t always like to be reminded of his coney-catching days or rather, if he did talk about them, it had to be on his own terms. He refused to look at me but knelt over the outspread contents of his capacious wallet, drew a candle closer and, with the aid of a couple of tiny wooden scoops, mingled the sticky ingredients of two or three tiny pots. Pots of grease and pouches of herbs were the tools of Abel’s one-time trade. They’d been as essential to his old business as a hammer and chisel were to a mason but my friend still carried them everywhere with him. I’d twitted him once about the way he clung to these relics of his life on the road, conning the public, tricking charitable passers-by. He responded with some mangled proverb about any rabbit worth its salt having two holes to go to. I took this to mean that, if he ever grew tired of play-acting (or if play-acting grew tired of him), then he could resume his life as a wandering coney-catcher.

  “Palliards,” I said. “What about them now?”

  “Palliards fall into two classes,” said Abel, talking in that abstracted way which people use when their hands are engaged in tricky operations. “The real ones and the artists.”

  “Artists?”

  “Fakes, you would probably say. But they show great skill in adorning their bodies with sores and raw places.”

  “How?”

  “With crowfoot and salt usually, sometimes mixed with spearwort. They rub these items together and then lay them on the part which they wish to afflict. Afterwards they cover the skin with cloth which sticks to the flesh, so when the linen is torn off the place is all fretted and raw.”

  “Ugh.”

  “That is nothing. The real artists will sprinkle ratsbane on top of the wound.”

  “Like sugar on comfits – very tasty,” I said, divided between interest and disgust, and remembering Thornton the bookseller and his pouches of arsenic or ratsbane.

  “Except that the palliard aims to make himself untasty,” said Abel, glancing up at me. “The ratsbane causes the sore to look even uglier and so excites the greater pity.”

  “And the more alms.”

  “Of course. These people aren’t in it for love of their art.”

  As he’d started to expound these methods of trickery Abel’s tone had grown less abstracted and almost eager.

  “After all, Nick, we players make ourselves up for money. We cover ourselves with bloody clothes, we blotch our faces and pretend to be sick or dying or dead, for cash.”

  “And love of our art.”

  “Tell me, Nick, what is our purpose in this house? For sure, we’re not here for our art – or for cash.”

  “We’re here to catch a murderer or two,” I said.

  Abel and I were in a stranger’s empty house, courtesy of Jack Wilson. The house was in Grove Street, off the High. It was a fine house and belonged to the wool merchant husband of the woman called Maria, the one whom Jack had been seeing – or seeing to, perhaps. Our playing
comrade had been looking forward to a few extra days in Oxford enjoying the delights of bed and bawd, and so he’d been disappointed and almost angry when the woman, taking fright at the tightening grip of King Pest in the city, left suddenly to join her husband in Peterborough. Or it may have been that the merchant, concerned for his wife’s health, had summoned her to his side. Whatever the reason, her departure had left the house empty; shuttered and curtained and without servants.

  The fault was mine. I couldn’t deny that it was mine. Illicitly entering a man’s house was a serious enough crime. The only excuse was that we – Abel, Jack and I – intended no harm, but were bent simply on righting a series of wrongs and uncovering a much greater crime.

  In the normal way my conscience would have quailed at the notion of trespassing like this on another’s property. But these weren’t normal ways or normal days. The pestilence was already making a difference to the ordinary, ordered life of the town. It was a strange season. There were many little indications of this, such as the more frequent tolling of the church bells and the abandonment of street markets as well as the stop which had been put on our playing at the Golden Cross. The highways were less crowded, except in the area around the Carfax crossroads where the mortality bills were published and where the prophets of doom were continuing with their God-given work. I’d witnessed another one that very morning and on this occasion there’d been no Ralph Bodkin to break up the crowd. The speaker, not Tom Long but another man, was comparatively subdued. He did not attack anyone but urged repentance on his listeners and they responded in a similarly muted fashion.

  But the taverns were still full and, if the brothel in Shoe Lane was anything to go by, the stews were attracting plenty of customers. In a way this only served to confirm how serious the situation had become, for there was a hectic quality to the manner in which people took their pleasures as though they were determined to snatch at what might be a last opportunity for enjoyment. I dare say some of those who were laying out their final shillings on a final whore or their tenth mug of beer were the same gents who’d been listening, with nodding heads and contrite hearts, to the penitent urgings of the Carfax preachers. One more beer before the bier, eh? I’d have felt the same contrary tug myself: to prepare myself for heaven, but also to waste my last few hours on earth. I would have felt this, I say, if I hadn’t been engaged on a more personal quest to get to the bottom of the Oxford mystery.

  Anyway, all of this perhaps doesn’t excuse our illegal entry into the fine house in Grove Street. But it may explain it. Fortunately I wasn’t alone in this enterprise. I hadn’t had to work too hard at persuading Abel Glaze to help me. For one thing I no longer needed to convince him of the truth of my story – he’d seen for himself those hooded figures sweeping by under the mask of night, and may have felt that his own panicky flight had enabled them to give us the slip. Whatever the reason he seemed willing enough to remain in Oxford for another day or two, arguing that he was as likely to be exposed to the plague in London as here.

  We’d confided in Jack Wilson, newly disappointed in his amour with the wool merchant’s wife. I’d explained my suspicion that, among the legitimate body-bearers, there was a band of two or three individuals taking advantage of the sickness in this city, and contriving to enter plaguey houses in their hooded guises (which had the added benefits of hiding their identities and giving them an official, not to say frightening aspect). It wouldn’t be difficult to play the part of a bearer unlawfully, or even to obtain the post with proper authority. It is dangerous work, and there is no great press of applicants.

  Once they’d got inside a house on the pretext of fetching out the dead our false friends would help themselves to the choicest portable items, such as silver salters or candlesticks. These valuables were easily removed at the same time as they carted off the bodies for burial in one of the common pits on the outskirts of town. As if for their greater convenience the authorities, in a measure intended to lessen public alarm, had laid down in the plague orders that bodies were to be cleared away in the evening or early morning, as at Mistress Root’s house. Such periods on the margins of the night made their discovery even less likely. Anyway who would think – or wish – to challenge a couple of corpse-carriers in a cart?

  What these two or three felons were doing was exactly what the Kentish Street nurse-keepers had been accused of planning to do by their Southwark neighbours, albeit on a smaller scale. They were robbing the dead.

  Talking to Jack, I didn’t enlarge much on my further suspicions that something more than mere robbery was involved in this business. I was fairly certain that several of the “plague” victims had been helped on their way by doses of poison and also had a feeling that robbery wasn’t the sole motive. It wasn’t so much that the theft of a few valuables was insufficient reason for a series of killings. Men have killed each other over a single shilling or less, while the haul of goods from the dead houses would be worth many hundreds, even thousands of shillings. Furthermore the penalty of the law is the same whether you steal a shilling or another’s life. So if you’re going to be hanged for the one offence you might as well be hanged for a string of worse ones . . .

  Even so, this reasoning didn’t quite fit the case. All this wickedness and elaboration – the bird-monk costumes, the ingenious application of poisons, the use of pestilence as cover for murder – appeared somehow excessive. It was out of proportion to the objective, which was nothing more than the amassing of a heap of items, however valuable. Yet a bad thief might think it a good bargain. Who knew how such an individual might choose to balance his scales? Despite all this I was certain that there was more to be discovered.

  Anyway, Jack and Abel and I conferred about some of these things. I’d described the failure of the plan to track Kit Kite and his confederate from the house in Shoe Lane. Our quarry had eluded us then. Jack promptly launched into some rambling episode from his childhood about how, when out hunting, his father had advised him that the most effective way of catching your quarry was not to pursue it but to trick it into running or flying in your direction. And somehow the idea emerged of enticing Kit Kite and the other hooded figure into coming to us – or more precisely, to me – and seeing where that led us (or, more precisely, me). Which might happen if it was put about that I was dying of the plague, since these individuals were drawn to plague victims like flies to rotten meat.

  “All right,” I said, “but there is one small objection. I am not – as far as I know and God be thanked for it – dying of the plague.”

  “You’re a player, Nick,” said Jack, “while I’ve noticed that Abel here is a dab hand with the face-paint. He could make it appear as though you were sick or dying.”

  “I’ve done it often enough,” said Abel, causing Jack to look puzzled.

  “It won’t work,” I said. “For one thing, if I’m right and this pair are robbing the dead even while they’re taking away their corpses, then they’d have nothing to gain by carting off a defunct player. I’ve got little more with me than a spare shirt and a couple of books – and precious little more than that back in London. No, we need a better bait than this. We need a prosperous citizen of Oxford.”

  “Like Edmund Cope.”

  “Who?”

  For answer, Jack Wilson made the sign of the horns in the same way that Will Sadler had when referring to another Jack – Jack Davenant the landlord of the Tavern.

  “Oh, your wool merchant. His name is Cope?”

  “The one whose wife you’ve been coping with,” Abel added.

  Jack’s grimace showed that this was a sore point. He no longer referred freely to Maria. Evidently he’d been hurt by her abrupt departure, as if she didn’t have the right to save her own skin.

  “Cope is a prosperous citizen of Oxford. He has a fine house in Grove Street,” said Jack.

  “And it’s empty, you said,” I said.

  There was a pause.

  “Well then . . . ” I said.

 
So this is how I came to be reclining on a couch in a stranger’s house while my friend Abel Glaze was kneeling on the floor, with his make-up wallet spread out in front of him. I was about to be made dead.

  Getting into Edmund Cope’s house hadn’t been difficult. In fact it had been a simple matter of turning a key in the door. Somehow or other Jack Wilson had obtained the key, either given him by the pliant Maria or got hold of in some other fashion which I didn’t choose to enquire into. In the rush to depart, the wool merchant’s wife had decamped with her servants (no doubt even more eager to quit plague-ridden Oxford than she was) and left the place less secure than they might have done. So a single key sufficed.

  Jack didn’t seem over-bothered that we were entering into another man’s house. I suppose that when you’ve already trespassed on that man’s wife, then his estate seems rather secondary, mere goods. Or it may have been that Jack felt so aggrieved by Maria’s fearful departure that he was searching for some way to get back at her, and that occupying her and her husband’s house was as good as any other. As I said earlier, this was a strange season in Oxford. Ordered, everyday life had begun to break down.

  Anyway, here we were in the house of the prosperous citizens of Grove Street. It was well furnished, with many valuable items, portable items.

  Abel advanced towards me, carrying a candle in one hand and a little earthenware pot in the other.

  “I am ready,” he said.

  “Make me dead, Abel.”

  “I could whiten your face first with egg-shell and alum like a fashionable lady’s, but to my eye you look white enough already.”

  “I expect I am. Fear.”

  “Then I shall simply apply a few tokens on the visible places, Nicholas, but they will not stand much inspection.”

  “Just as long as they don’t recognize me.”

  If our scheme worked, then my hope (hope – ha!) was to be carted off by the bearers without their paying too much attention to the nature and quality of the corpse they were carrying. Because if I was right in my suspicion that their primary purpose was to rob the victims’ houses of valuable stuff then they wouldn’t be too interested in the dead themselves, only in their belongings. Also I’d seen the casual way they manhandled Mistress Root’s corpse.