The Black Book of Secrets (11 page)

Stirling’s performance in the street was the talk of the villagers
for three whole days. As far as they were concerned,
the reverend’s humiliation was just one more in the eye for
Mr Ratchet (who had watched the entire scene from his
window, barely concealed behind the curtain) and another
victory for Mr Zabbidou. The battle lines might as well have
been drawn in the snow.

There was no disputing Pagus Parvus had given Joe a
warm welcome. It could be measured almost from the
moment he defied Jeremiah Ratchet. This initial enthusiasm
had not waned – just the opposite, it had increased
immensely. Now at the very sight of him the villagers
behaved as if he were royalty. I swear upon my evil Pa that
I witnessed more than once some fellow kneeling before
him. Poor Joe, he could not go from one end of the street
to the other without being stopped a dozen times by well-wishers
enquiring after his health and his business and even
Saluki. Joe was always polite. His manner was consistently
warm and friendly, but I could tell that this adulation was
beginning to trouble him.

‘I did not come here to be venerated,’ he mumbled.

As I lay during long sleepless nights the same question
turned over in my mind: ‘What did you come here for?’ I
knew by now that things were not, and could not be, as
simple as they appeared. A man arrives out of nowhere in
an isolated village and hands over money from a bottomless
source for worthless objects and secrets. It didn’t make
sense to me, but whenever I tried to ask Joe about his past
he refused to engage and immediately talked about something
else.

I wondered whether Joe’s aversion to all the attention
was modesty and I paid little notice to his discomfort.
While he tried to avoid the limelight, I bathed in his
reflected glory. When I walked the streets of the City I was
nobody: in Pagus Parvus I was prince to Joe’s king. Of
course, Joe was the one they wanted to talk to, his was the
hand they wished to shake, but they spoke to me too, if only
to say good morning. It made me smile. If they had ever
seen me in the City they would have crossed to the other
side of the road.

Perhaps it was the fact that the village was so isolated
which made Joe (and me) even more special. But, special
or not, I had a feeling that as long as Jeremiah Ratchet was
in Pagus Parvus it wasn’t going to be enough.

Our days were always busy. I had my jobs to do and Joe had
his, but we were never rushed. Being in the shop sometimes
felt like being in another world where everything happened
at half speed. I never saw Joe make a hurried movement;
there was no urgency to his life, but, for all that, it was
difficult to shake off the feeling that we were waiting for
something to happen.

In the late afternoon, when it was quiet, Polly and the
Sourdoughs would have been and gone, we would both sit
by the fire and enjoy the warmth and the comfort it
brought. At such times I couldn’t imagine ever returning to
the City.

‘I’m never going back,’ I said to Joe one night.

‘Never say never,’ Joe replied quickly. ‘All things
change.’

Certainly my fortunes had changed. In my eyes Joe was
the father I had always wished for. I had new clothes which
he had given me. As for my rags, we both enjoyed watching
them burn on the fire. At least once a fortnight I relaxed
in front of the fire in a huge tin tub filled to the brim with
hot water, and every day we had two decent meals. The
Pagus Parvians had proved most hospitable and hardly a day
passed without some sort of food parcel being left on the
doorstep: rabbits, pigeons, sparrows (a delicacy in these
parts, marvellous stuffed with onion and alium) and occasionally
a whole chicken from the butcher’s.

‘Bribes,’ laughed Joe. ‘They think if they feed me I will
change my mind.’ He didn’t, but he still threw the meat in
the pot.

As the harsh memories of my previous life faded my
mind started to play strange tricks on me. I began to worry
that life was too good. Surely a boy such as I, with my past
and the crimes I had committed, deserved punishment not
reward? Joe tried to reassure me.

‘It’s common enough to think like that,’ he said, ‘to feel
unworthy of good fortune, but have you forgotten what I
said to you about luck?’

‘You said we make our own luck.’

‘Exactly. You made yours by coming here. Now you
work hard and you deserve what you have.’

‘But I never intended to come here,’ I insisted. ‘It was
chance that Ratchet’s carriage was outside the Nimble
Finger.’

‘But it was you who chose Jeremiah’s carriage.’

‘What if I had gone down the hill instead of up? I might
have worked with Job Wright shoeing horses. Then you
would have taken on one of the Sourdough boys when they
came up to see the frog.’

‘That is a possibility,’ said Joe, ‘but the Sourdough boys
are slow-witted.’

‘I can only do that because I went to Mr Jellico.’

‘But you sought him out.’

And so it would go on, in circles, until one evening Joe
asked, ‘Are you happy here?’

‘Yes.’

‘And if you could go back in time, to the City, what
would you change?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘If I had done something different
then I might never have met you.’

‘Exactly,’ said Joe with finality. ‘Everything that happened
to you, bad or otherwise, ultimately brought you
here.’

There the conversation ended because the shop door
opened and someone called for service. Joe always woke at
the sound of the door, no matter how deeply asleep he
seemed, but in case he didn’t Saluki gave a violent belch
whenever she heard someone approaching. I felt it was a
warning.

For a frog, Saluki was good company. When I had the
chance I liked to feed her, to watch her tongue shoot out
across the length of the tank and, almost too quick to see,
the bug or grub or insect would be gone. I had not taken
the lid off the tank again since that first day. Joe had forbidden
me to do so and I didn’t want to touch her.
Occasionally he took her out and held her in the palm of
his hand. He would stroke her back with such gentleness
and she seemed to glow and burped softly. I hadn’t forgotten
what he had said about gaining her trust and I
hoped that one day I would.

I remember those days in the shop well, warm and cosy,
away from the cold outside world. But of course the outside
world still came knocking at the door. The villagers
were obviously grateful for everything Joe had done for
them and gradually, one by one, they were freeing themselves
from Jeremiah’s iron grip. But their previous
desperation was now replaced by anger – that Jeremiah had
treated them so badly for so long, that he had taken so much
from them, that he had kept them living in fear. As each
managed to pay Jeremiah back the money they owed, they
wished to pay him back in other ways too.

One night we had a visit from the local physician, Dr
Samuel Mouldered. I wasn’t surprised. After all, Joe had
sought him out the previous day, as he did all his midnight
customers, and invited him up. Like most, he had an interesting
tale to tell.

Samuel Mouldered was a rather morbid man with a permanently
gloomy expression on his face so his patients
never knew if they were to live or die. They may have been
alarmed to discover that often the doctor did not know
either. You see, Mouldered wasn’t a doctor at all, just a convincing
quack who was on the run from a posse of duped
customers who had discovered that his miracle cure was
little more than boiled nettles and corked wine.

Pagus Parvus was an ideal hiding place for such a man.
To be fair, Mouldered was quite harmless. Since coming to
the village some ten years ago he practised medicine on the
premise that most illnesses burned themselves out over
the course of seven days. Thus he prescribed his miracle
cure (now a more palatable mixture of honey and beer) for
a week’s duration and on the whole achieved quite remarkable
results. As for death itself, no one ever questioned the
unusually high occurrence of heart attacks in the area. They
trusted the doctor and his diagnoses.

Samuel Mouldered’s greatest fear was that Jeremiah
would discover his secret.

‘I cannot promise that Jeremiah will never find out,’ Joe
had said, ‘but he will not hear it from us. You have my
word.’

Joe held the door open, but Mouldered seemed reluctant
to go.

‘The man is a monster,’ he declared. ‘For years we have
suffered at his hands. The villagers want revenge. I know
they hope you will help them.’

‘What can I do?’ asked Joe quietly. ‘I am merely a pawnbroker.’

‘That’s not what they think,’ muttered the doctor as he
stepped into the street. Joe merely shrugged and handed Dr
Mouldered a purse of coins.

‘
Vincit qui patitur
,’ called Joe after him, but he was
already out of earshot.

I looked at him.

‘Who waits, wins.’

I listened to Dr Mouldered’s confession, writing it all down
as was my duty, but I was uneasy. I asked Joe again if he
didn’t think we should do something.

‘People’s lives might be in danger,’ I said. ‘Dr Mouldered
doesn’t know what he is doing.’

Joe was adamant. ‘He’s not doing any harm. And there
is no one else in the village who could do his job.’

I protested some more and Joe had to remind me that
we were in the business of keeping secrets.

‘How long do you think we would last if we gave away
this information? The business would be in ruins.’

The business, I thought. What business? We certainly
weren’t making a profit. Surely the money had to run out
eventually and what would happen then? But I had slipped
into this way of life so easily and I couldn’t bear the thought
that it might change, so I kept my doubts to myself because,
whether or not I understood what was going on, I was
unwilling to do anything that might upset Joe.

Jeremiah Ratchet was close to his wits’ end. He had had just
about enough of Joe Zabbidou’s apparent disregard for his
standing in the community. His business, his lifestyle, his
pleasures were all in jeopardy because of that man. He
could hardly bring himself to say his name and even then
he could only spit it, usually accompanied by a shower of
brown stringy saliva and crumbs. Jeremiah liked to mull
things over at dinner.

Jeremiah rarely ate in his magnificent dining room and
usually took his meals in the study with a dinner tray on his
lap. It was a room of generous proportions, though badly
lit, and shelved from floor to ceiling. Each shelf was packed
tightly, bowing under the weight of an extensive array of
books. Jeremiah was a collector. He loved to have things,
sometimes for no other reason than that. He was not much
of a reader, mind; he found the concentration required
quite a strain on his head. As a rule he only kept books that
he thought would impress others or increase in price. As a
result the titles tended to be obscure and either full of facts
that he didn’t understand or plots that he couldn’t fathom.
Jeremiah was a fine example of the sort of person who knew
the cost of everything but the value of nothing.

In his study Jeremiah bit into a mouthful of lamb and
chewed thoughtfully on Joe Zabbidou. The man was a complete
menace. Earlier that day Job Wright had come up to
Jeremiah outside the baker’s and presented him with a
purse of money that covered over half his debt. Then, after
lunch, Polly told Jeremiah about the pair of horseshoes she
had seen in the pawnbroker’s window and Jeremiah knew
that once again Joe Zabbidou had been at work.

‘They’re lovely and shiny,’ Polly had said innocently. ‘I
should imagine Joe paid very good money for them.’ She
left the room quickly and Jeremiah was certain he heard her
sniggering all the way to the kitchen.

‘I should have thrown him out that very first day,’ he said
ruefully. ‘I left it too late.’ But even Jeremiah suspected that
it would never have been that easy.

Jeremiah realized of course that his tenants’ sudden
ability to pay was directly linked to the display in the pawnbroker’s
window. He reckoned, however, that Joe could not
possibly finance everyone’s debt and that sooner or later he
would be out of business and then everything would be back
to normal. But Joe did not operate within the usual constraints
of commerce.

Jeremiah shook his head slowly. ‘How can a man thrive
when he pays a small fortune for worthless junk?’ he asked
himself every day. And every day he waited for Polly to
come back from the Reverend Stirling’s so he could hear
the latest report on the shop window. And every day it
plunged him deeper into depression. How it had pained him
to call upon Stirling for help when he had proved to be little
better than useless.

‘What shall I do?’ moaned Jeremiah as he saw his income
dwindling further, for once all the arrears were paid, he
couldn’t possibly survive on rent alone.

He still had money in the bank, inherited from his
father, but it had been greatly depleted over the years by
his frequent gambling. Jeremiah’s high living had a price.
He owed money to his tailor and his hat maker, to his wig
maker and his boot maker, and he preferred not to think of
the debts that were mounting at the card table.

There was blackmail, of course. Since he had unearthed
Horatio’s little secret there had been no shortage of fresh
meat in his kitchen. And until recently there was Obadiah
and the grave robbing. Unfortunately, as far as grave
robbing was concerned, things weren’t looking too good at
present and not only Joe was to blame. Jeremiah’s bodysnatchers
(who also doubled up as bailiffs during the day
when Jeremiah needed help with an eviction) had brought
him the bad news a couple of nights ago.

‘The anatomists in the City don’t want the old bodies
no more,’ said one of the bodysnatchers. ‘They want fresh
young ones.’

Jeremiah groaned. ‘Don’t they understand? There
aren’t any young corpses in Pagus Parvus.’

‘It doesn’t have to be a problem,’ said the other man
carefully.

‘How do you mean?’ asked Jeremiah.

The wily pair exchanged knowing glances, which was
not easy through their black face masks, and burst into
throaty laughter. ‘Well, let’s just say there’s a young lad
up the hill, in the old hat shop, who would make a nice
specimen.’

‘Ludlow?’ asked Jeremiah. ‘But he’s alive and kicking.’

‘The fresher the better,’ said the first.

For a fleeting moment Jeremiah actually considered just
what they were suggesting. Many times he had wished never
to have to meet Ludlow’s knowing gaze again but, as a solution
to his problems, out and out murder was a little
extreme even for Jeremiah.

‘No, no,’ said Jeremiah hurriedly. ‘I’m sure that won’t
be necessary. There must be another way. What about
teeth?’

‘Teeth?’

‘I heard you can sell them,’ began Jeremiah, but the two
men just laughed. ‘Oh never mind,’ he ended despondently.

The men shrugged in unison. ‘Then there’s nothing else
we can do for you. Give us our money and we’ll trouble
you no more.’

And that had been that.

Jeremiah set aside his plate, the meal only half eaten, and
slouched back into his chair. He had no appetite. He was
too depressed to look at his books; not even
The Loneliness
of the High Mountain Shepherd
– his all-time favourite, on
account of the fact that shepherds tended to have a limited
vocabulary and to tell a simple story.

If Joe stayed in the village and continued as he had done
up until now, Jeremiah knew that it could only mean more
trouble for him. He was going to have to take matters into
his own hands.

‘Pagus Parvus is not big enough for the two of us,’ he
declared to the shadows. ‘One of us will have to go.’

Feeling very sorry for himself he trudged upstairs and
prepared for bed. He couldn’t resist looking out of the
window. By now it was an obsession. He could see the
pawnbroker’s shop at the top of the hill and the smoke that
curled out of the chimney every night into the early hours.

‘What is he doing up there?’ he asked himself for the
hundredth time.

Jeremiah was still no nearer to finding out why the
pawnbroker received visitors well into the night, and he
lacked the imagination to come up with an explanation on
his own. He had heard someone say that Joe was giving
advice but he could discover no more. He asked Polly many
times if she knew what it was all about, but she just looked
at him blankly.

If only I could find out, thought Jeremiah, then perhaps
I might be able to do something. But whatever night-time
trade was going on at the pawnbroker’s, no one would talk
about it. So Jeremiah drew his own conclusions and decided
that it was all part of Joe’s plot against him. Having concluded
thus, he was even more desperate to know the truth.
One morning, therefore, when the oldest Sourdough
dropped off the bread, he was waiting for him outside the
kitchen door and grabbed him by the scruff of the neck.

‘I want you to do a little job for me,’ he muttered.

‘Does it pay?’ asked the boy.

Jeremiah laughed and the poor lad was treated to a
panoramic view of the inside of his mouth. That mottled
tongue, the fleshy uvula, those stained teeth, the meat and
piecrust from the previous night still wedged firmly
between them.

‘I’ll tell you what you’ll get if you don’t do it,’ he hissed.
‘I’ll tell your father that I found you sneaking around my
kitchen looking for something to steal. Something like this,’
and with a sleight of hand that would have surprised even
Joe, Jeremiah somehow managed to take a silver candlestick
out of the boy’s pocket, upon which trick the poor chap
burst into tears.

Jeremiah released his hold. ‘Just do what I say,’ he
growled, ‘and you’ll be no worse off. You must find out
what’s going on at the pawnbroker’s.’

The lad hesitated, but the threat of his father was
enough. He really had no choice. It took him a week, standing
hour after hour in the freezing cold at midnight around
the back of the pawnbroker’s shop. And every night it was
the same. He heard the crunch of snow and the knock
at the door. He watched as Joe handed his visitor a drink
and sat him by the fire. In the corner he could see Ludlow
writing furiously in a large black book. He could not hear
what was being said, but he guessed quite quickly what was
in the leather bags that Joe handed over at the end of the
meeting. Eventually he decided he had learned as much as
he was going to (he was also becoming increasingly afraid
that Joe had seen him) and duly presented himself in Jeremiah’s
study.

‘So?’ asked Jeremiah eagerly. ‘What did you find out?’

‘They talk to Joe and Ludlow writes down what they say
in a big black book.’

‘And that’s it?’ It wasn’t at all what Jeremiah expected.

The boy nodded. ‘Whatever they’re telling him, it’s
worth money. Joe pays them, bags of it. Dr Mouldered
was there the other night. I couldn’t quite hear what he was
saying, but his face looked as if it might be important. And
I know my own father has been up there.’

So did Jeremiah. Elias Sourdough had paid him nearly
all his rent owing.

‘And what of the frog?’ asked Jeremiah in desperation.
He couldn’t see how any of this was going to help him.

‘She’s called Saluki. Joe treats her like she’s something
special. He won’t let anyone touch her, but sometimes she
sits in his hand. I reckon she might be worth a few shillings.
I’ve never seen anything like her.’

Jeremiah was perplexed. As he lay in bed that night
thinking over what he had been told, it gradually dawned
on him that, in fact, the Sourdough boy had given him
exactly what he needed to know.

‘The book,’ he said out loud and sat bolt upright. ‘The
book holds the answer.’

Jeremiah’s mind was racing. Whatever was in that book,
Joe was prepared to pay handsomely for it. It made sense
that if Joe somehow lost the book, or perhaps it was taken
from him, then he would also pay handsomely to retrieve
it. Or, better than that, perhaps he would agree to leave
Pagus Parvus
and
pay up in order to get the book back. With
Joe gone, all Jeremiah’s problems would be solved. Jeremiah’s
excitement mounted. What a fine revenge he could
exact for all the trouble Joe had caused him. But there was
one small flaw in the plan.

How do I get the book in the first place? he wondered.
But just before sunrise he had the answer. The time had
come for Jeremiah Ratchet to pay Joe Zabbidou a visit.