Sacrilege (30 page)
If I disliked the boy before, my contempt for him was doubled by the way he spoke to the old housekeeper, Meg, as if she were a dog, demanding she fetch more wine even while she was busy bringing dishes of food from the kitchen, which the boys all set to with their fingers. The second time he barked orders at her to bring up more bottles, I gently offered to help.
"If you just point me towards the wine cellar, I could save her the trouble--"
"For Christ's sake, man"--Nick spat half-chewed chicken across the table--"she's a servant. Let her do her job. Or don't you have servants where you're from?"
"I thought she might be tired," I said, glancing at Meg, who raised her eyes briefly and gave me a faltering smile.
"Well, if she's too tired, I can always get another servant who can manage the work," Nick said, with a malicious look at the housekeeper. She turned pale and shook her head vehemently.
"No, Master Nicholas, I have not complained. I'm going right away." She backed out of the room and I saw the fear in her eyes; she would probably not find another position at her age, and was stuck here at the mercy of this young brute.
"Got to remind them who's in charge," Nick said, to no one in particular, while Meg was still within earshot. His friends murmured assent, examining their new cards and wiping greasy fingers on their breeches. I felt revolted by the lot of them, and silently hoped they would drink themselves into a stupor as soon as possible, leaving me free to explore the house.
I drank slowly; at first, from time to time one of them would remark on it, calling on me to drink up, while the others cheered for my cup to be refilled, but as the evening wore on and their drunkenness increased, my behaviour attracted less interest. They lit clay pipes of pungent tobacco, filling the room with clouds of woody smoke that ascended to hover like a blue veil above our heads; beneath the table they passed around a piss
pot and soon the sharp smell of urine mingled with the pipe smoke and roast meat in the close air. I breathed through my mouth, fighting the urge to run outside into the night.
When dusk fell, Nick bellowed for candles to be brought, and the faces of the players were lit by that strange, wavering orange glow, creating shadows in the hollows of their eyes and cheeks as they leant forward over the table. By midnight, three of them had fallen asleep where they sat, heads resting on their arms on the tabletop, snoring with their mouths hanging wetly open, and the others continued their game half-heartedly, until Nick pushed his chair back abruptly, knocking over his tankard as he did so, and mumbled that he was for bed.
"Find a bed where you will," he slurred, pointing vaguely at the rest of us, then crashed into a chair and lurched towards the door, unlacing his breeches as he went. Two of the others heaved themselves unsteadily to their feet and stumbled after him. A crashing sound came from the corridor, as of someone falling into furniture. Only Bates was left, shuffling the cards and looking around the table at his fallen companions with disdain. He seemed worryingly alert. As his eyes came to rest on me, I quickly affected a cloudy gaze and swayed a little in my chair.
"Looks like we are the last men standing, Filippo," he said, a slight slur in his voice. "God, what I wouldn't give for a woman now. If only Nick had dismissed that old crone and got himself a young housemaid, we might have had some sport with her, eh?"
By way of answer, I let out a convincing belch.
"There is a bawdy house outside the West Gate might still let us in at this hour," he said, hopefully. "Shall we try it, you and I?"
I waved a hand imprecisely, shaking my head. "I would be no use to a woman in this state," I said, slumping forward across the table. "But you go."
Bates regarded me for a moment, then sighed.
"No. It can wait." He clicked his tongue impatiently and stretched out in his chair, his hands clasped behind his head. "God's blood, I had just as well go drinking with my infant nieces for all the company these
fellows have been tonight. We were supposed to keep on till dawn. You will take another cup, though, Filippo? Don't leave me up drinking by myself here. I'll wager you have some wild stories to tell from your travels." He yawned and filled his tankard again and turned to me, the pitcher held out expectantly. The flush in his cheeks from the wine made him look even younger, and I saw that, for all his swagger, he was still just a boy, afraid of the silence, of being left alone. If I had not joined the Dominican order and given my twenties to philosophy and theology, might I have ended up in this kind of company? I was glad now that I never had the choice. Reluctantly I raised my cup for more.
Bates continued to drink steadily while I concealed my desperation for him to join the others in sleep, and instead recounted the tale of a young man in Naples who makes mischief by advising his lascivious elderly neighbour on the best way to seduce a beautiful courtesan, ensuring that the old man is caught out by his wife, while the young hero becomes the girl's lover himself. Into the story I wove other characters: a miser, a conniving alchemist, and a pedantic schoolmaster, all bested by the wit of the young man, who I modestly implied was my younger self. Bates roared with laughter, poured himself more wine, and I watched in hope of seeing his eyelids droop as the story progressed. He had no idea, of course, that I was telling him the plot of
The Candlemaker
, a comedy I had written for the stage some years earlier; a ribald tale with a philosophical slant, filled with characters just like those I had observed when I first arrived in the glorious noisy, filthy, sexy chaos of the city of Naples as a youth. Bringing those streets to life made me feel how much I missed it.
It is rare that a storyteller feels delight at sending his audience to sleep, but I silently rejoiced when the wine and the late hour finally worked on Bates enough for him to stand up, sway a little on the spot, and then announce his intention of finding a place to bed down. I grunted, lay my head on my arms, and waited until the sound of his footsteps on the stairs and the boards overhead faded to silence.
My own head was more than a little fuzzy from the wine. I blinked
hard to clear my vision, and when I was certain that no one was stirring, I took the two longest candles from the table and moved as noiselessly as I could towards the door, leaving my fellow gamblers snoring, spit falling in threads from their open mouths to pool on the boards beneath their sleeping heads.
I crossed the stone-flagged entrance hall and took the passageway past the stairs towards the back of the house, where I found a large, well-appointed kitchen, evidently cleaned and scrubbed scrupulously by the housekeeper before she retired for the night. I paused and looked around, the candles' flames sending shadows skittering up the walls and across the black opaque panes of the casements. From somewhere in the distance came the drawn-out, wavering cry of an owl, a sound that never failed to make the hairs stand up on my neck, and I smiled in the dark thinking of the girl Rebecca and her belief that she had heard screaming coming from the burial ground. My fears that night were more prosaic; I did not want to be caught before I had a chance to uncover anything useful.
A cellar, I concluded, if it was used for storage, would most likely have some access from the kitchen. I moved carefully, anxious not to stumble into anything--pots, pans, brushes--that I might knock to the floor, announcing my presence. At the far side of the room, opposite the vast hearth with its rows of roasting spits, was a door set in a recess that appeared to open onto a rear courtyard. Beside it, an empty lantern hung on an iron hook, and with some relief I blew out one of my candles in case I had need later, and fitted the other carefully inside the glass, saving myself the trouble of shielding its flame with my hand. Immediately its light bloomed and seemed brighter, and I held it up as I tried the latch of the back door. This was firmly locked, but to the left was an archway that led through from the kitchen into a large pantry, its shelves stacked with jars and bottles, full sacks lying against the wall on the floor.
I lowered the lantern towards the floor and saw what I had hoped to find; a wooden hatch with an iron ring set into the flagstones. I set the lantern down on the floor and knelt beside it. Before I could reach out
a hand to the ring, my breath was stopped in my throat by the sound of tapping from the room behind me. I swallowed silently, barely daring to turn, and it came again, sharp and insistent, a tap followed by a kind of scraping.
Slowly, I pulled my dagger from its sheath; keeping it low by my side but with my arm tensed and ready to spring, I rose and moved back into the kitchen, one step at a time, holding the lantern aloft. The room was empty. I waited, straining to listen, until eventually the tap came again, from outside the window: tap-tap, tap-tap, scrape. I felt my legs buckle with relief as I realised it was the branch of a tree, nudged by the wind; I laughed softly, and heard the trembling in my own laughter.
I worked quickly this time, determined not to be distracted again. To my surprise, the wooden hatch in the pantry opened smoothly, revealing a narrow flight of stone steps leading into a musty darkness below. Their treads were worn smooth with age and sagged in the middle from the passage of feet; I thought with pity of the elderly housekeeper being sent to fetch and carry up and down these precarious stairs. But perhaps she knew them so well by now she could find her way easily even in the dark. I was not so confident; keeping my feet within the yellow circle of the lantern's glow, I descended carefully into a wide cellar, its ceiling supported in the centre by two thick stone pillars. Wooden barrels lined one wall, while another corner was filled with a jumble of what looked like broken furniture and a stack of crates, such as might be used to transport produce on a ship. I made a slow tour of the room with the light, examining objects, looking for traces of anything unusual on the floor or the walls, though already my heart was sinking with the weight of disappointment; I knew I was in the wrong place. The cellar had opened too easily to me; there was nothing hidden here but wine and refuse. The mysterious cellar Sophia had mentioned had to be elsewhere--yet where should I begin looking for it? It could not be more than a few hours until dawn, and I dare not be found wandering the house when the others awoke.
I gave one last turn, willing myself to see anything I might have
missed, straining so hard that it must have looked as if I was trying to see through the stone walls themselves. I stopped, struck by the thought. Perhaps that was it; this storage cellar was directly under the kitchen, but there could be more underground rooms beyond it, stretching out the length of the house. I shone the light again at the tangle of broken stools in the corner, splintered legs jutting into the air on top of an old wooden chest, casting spiky shadows on the ragged blocks of stone that shored up the wall of the cellar among the foundations of the old manor. Beside them, the stack of wooden crates, about the height of a man, very neatly placed. Too neatly, perhaps; I crossed the room, set the lantern on the floor, and tried to lever the boxes away from the wall. They were heavy, but I managed to shift them enough to feel into the gap behind, where my fingers brushed over wood, not stone.
Bracing myself, my palms growing slippery, I heaved the topmost of the wooden boxes from the pile and almost dropped it, staggering back under the weight so that my foot struck the lantern, which rocked for a few moments before mercifully deciding to stay upright. I steadied the box against my chest, the muscles in my arms standing out like cords as I set it on the floor with a heavy thud and paused to see if the sound had carried, sweat running down my collar at the exertion. What had Kingsley stored in these crates to make them so heavy? I lifted one edge of the wooden lid and found to my surprise that it had been left unfastened; inside was a pile of broken masonry. I lifted out a corner piece and realised letters were engraved on it, though faded almost smooth. This must be rubble cleared from the graveyard, the debris of old headstones. There could be no good reason for him to have squirreled it away in these crates, except as a useful deterrent against opening the door that clearly lay behind them.
One by one, breathing hard and pausing only to wipe the sweat from my eyes on the shoulder of my shirt, I moved the crates away until the low door stood clear. It was made of wood with iron studs, rising to a pointed arch in the old style and not even reaching to the top of my head. Naturally, it was locked. With shaking hands, I took out the keys I had
copied from Langworth and tried each of them. The third fitted, with a little tweaking, and I closed my eyes with silent gratitude as I heard the bolt slide back. Just as I was about to push the door open, I caught the sound of a footfall on the stairs behind me and whipped around, my hand reaching to my side for the dagger.
If I had been a more superstitious man, I would have cried out at the sight, because the figure on the stairs seemed at first glance to have risen from one of the graves surrounding the house; dressed in a threadbare shift with a shawl around its shoulders, unbound tendrils of grey hair standing out from its head, the sunken features lit from beneath by the candle it carried in a terrible rictus. It took me a moment to compose myself, even though my rational mind realised it was only old Meg, the housekeeper, roused from sleep, and that her dreadful expression was merely a result of her own shock at finding me here. I ran a hand over my mouth, took a breath to steady myself, then pressed a finger to my lips with an imploring look.
She appeared to consider this request for a moment, then stepped closer.
"If it's the wine you mean to steal," she whispered, "you won't find it in there. That door is locked, in any case."
I shook my head urgently and beckoned her nearer.
"I am not here to steal anything. I am only looking for answers."
I saw her face draw immediately tighter, as if she knew what I alluded to.
"Meg." I bent my head and fixed her eyes with my own in the shifting light. "I am a friend of Soph--" I checked myself just in time. "Kate. Your mistress. I am here to help her. She always said you were kind to her."
