The Scar-Crow Men (16 page)

Her thoughts flashed to Will, who had helped secure the post for her, she knew, though he had denied it. He still treated her like the girl she was when they first met, at the cottage in the Forest of Arden, as he came courting her elder sister, Jenny. In frustration, she absently tugged at the blue ribbon holding back her chestnut ringlets, then glanced down at her slender frame. Could he not see she was a woman now? She had curbed her impulsiveness, a little at least, yet still he was blind to her charms. All he did was try to shield her from the work he did, and make light whenever she questioned him about serious matters.

Her simmering annoyance faded as she watched Elinor. At that hour, the older woman should have been hurriedly tidying the Queen’s make-up and removing the bowl of water
she had used for her ablutions, Grace knew, but instead she moved with a puzzling lethargy. No maid of honour would ever dawdle in Elizabeth’s presence while she lay in bed. The other ladies of the bedchamber had already departed.

Grace was transfixed by Elinor’s steady, purposeful steps, a cloth slowly folded here, an ornament brushed by fingers there, but no movement that could disturb Her Majesty in her half-sleep. To the younger woman, it seemed almost as if the maid of honour was circling Elizabeth, waiting for a moment to draw closer.

When the Queen’s eyes flickered, the other woman made her move. Like a snake, she darted low near Her Majesty’s pillow, her head turned away so Grace couldn’t tell what was being said. The younger woman was gripped by the oddness of the scene: against all convention, Elinor, rigid, looking away, speaking without being spoken to, and speaking at length.

The Queen appeared to be asleep, even as she responded.

After a long moment, the maid of honour stood up and Grace retreated from the door so she would not be seen. Hurrying across the Privy Chamber and out, she put on a bright smile to deflect the stern glance of the Gentleman Usher, but the incident continued to trouble her.

As she made her way to her chamber, she heard a faint commotion on the ground floor. Creeping down the echoing stone steps to the entrance hall, she saw an unfamiliar woman in a scarlet cloak ordering the servants to bring in her belongings. In the candlelight, Grace couldn’t see the woman’s face in the depths of her hood. All around her, the servants worked incessantly, carrying her possessions and preparing a room.

Grace caught the arm of one of the serving girls, still sleepy-eyed from being woken. ‘Who is that?’ she asked.

‘It is the Lady Shevington. Wife of the Viscount Shevington,’ the girl said with a country burr.

Grace’s puzzled expression brought a shy smile from the serving girl. ‘No one knew he had taken a wife,’ she whispered behind her hand. ‘He has not been seen at court for many months since he took up the Queen’s business in Ireland.’

Grace knew that meant Viscount Shevington was most likely a spy, reporting back on the tensions as the English attempted to secure control of Ulster, but news from that part of the world was always thin and frequently distorted.

‘Where is Viscount Shevington?’ she asked.

The serving girl flashed a glance at the woman in red. ‘Still in Ireland, Lady Margaret says. He will be joining her shortly to report back to the Queen.’

As the serving girl hurried about her business, Lady Margaret threw back her hood, revealing hair that was only a few shades darker than her cloak. It was the woman Grace had seen pressed against Will by the church in Deptford during Kit Marlowe’s funeral.

The lady-in-waiting felt a flush of anger tinged with jealousy. She hated feeling that way and left quickly, but she couldn’t stop herself wondering why the woman had come, what she wanted.

Back in her chamber, Grace threw the window open and leaned out into the warm summery night. As she looked around the inner ward below, she was caught by a curious sight. A man lowered himself by rope from a window and quickly found the dark at the foot of the walls. Shocked, she realized it was Will. He crept in the direction of the gatehouse.

As Grace began to wonder what secret business engaged her friend’s attention, the thought died suddenly. She thought she glimpsed more movement a few paces behind him, a blur as if it were only mist; or a ghost. Will was oblivious to his silent companion. She lost sight of the pursuer in the shadows, if it had even been there, but she couldn’t shake off the chill it left in her.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

BEDLAM
.

The screams rang out into the still dawn air, even through stone walls as thick as a man’s arm. His grim face shadowed in the depths of his hood, Will Swyfte hid in the lea of the hospital wall, making sure his arrival had not been witnessed.

With each passing moment, he felt his sense of foreboding grow stronger. Where were the Unseelie Court? Like ghosts, the Enemy were defined by the subtle patterns of terror they drew in the world, the trail of blood and ruined lives, but those otherworldly predators remained unsettlingly elusive. Though he could feel their eyes upon him, the tug of their subtle manipulations, he could not understand why they had not yet shown their hand.

Eyeing the feared Hospital of St Mary of Bethlehem, Will saw only a crumbling wreck, like those inside. Moss and sprouting grass and sickly twirls of elder had turned the roof green. Panes were cracked or missing and the gaps filled with mildewed wood, the glass too dirty to see out or in. Open sewers flanked Bedlam so that the air was always heavy with the stink of excrement. In the courtyard in front of the hospital, yellow grass grew among the broken cobbles and the cracked flags, and when it rained a stagnant pond grew like a moat to keep out the world.

Will knew that on Bishopsgate Street Without, just beyond the city wall, merchants travelling north to the villages or south into London often paused, thinking they had heard someone call their name, or a whisper from one of the passers-by, or some other voice rustling in the spaces among the rumble of cartwheels, the rat-tat of horses’ hooves, and the back and forth of sellers and apprentices. When they realized the true origin of the sound, they moved on quickly, their heads bowed as if the mere act of hearing would infect them with the illnesses of Bedlam’s inhabitants.

His black cloak billowing around him, the spy dashed across the open courtyard to the
main door. Will had heard that the governors of Bridewell, who had inherited the management of Bedlam from the City of London, were more concerned with the cut-throats and thieves in the great prison than with the insane patients of the Hospital of St Mary of Bethlehem. No one cared about those lost souls. No one remembered them, or wanted to remember them.

It was the perfect place to keep a devil-haunted man who had slaughtered an entire village.

Hammering on the old, splintered door with the hilt of his dagger, the spy waited for long moments until he heard unhurried footsteps shuffle near from the other side. The door creaked open to reveal the Keeper. The face was not one Will recalled from his last visit five years ago, but the hospital’s overseer was cut from the same cloth. It was not work for soft men, and his features carried the same marks of easy cruelty and quick brutality. Unkempt black hair, a beard that had not been trimmed in weeks, a filthy undershirt and brown jerkin, he could have been any rogue found in the more dangerous streets of the capital.

‘I would speak with one of the patients,’ Will said, keeping his head low so his face remained shrouded.

The Keeper hawked phlegm and spat. ‘Too early. Later. Family?’

Will pulled a leather pouch from his black and silver doublet and waved it in front of the overseer so the coins jangled.

Lizard-tongue flicking out over his lips, the man’s eyes sparkled. ‘Who do you want to see?’

‘One Griffin Devereux.’

The light died in the man’s face, and his sullen gaze flitted around the deserted courtyard over the visitor’s shoulder. ‘Nobody here by that name.’ Will found the lie so obvious he almost sighed at the Keeper’s brazen stupidity.

‘My time is short, my patience shorter. Take the money. Buy yourself a shave and a haircut. Some clean clothes. You may then be able to look in the mirror without retching.’

Growling, the man made to close the door.

Will kicked the heavy door so the sharp edge smashed into the Keeper’s broken-veined face. Blood spattering from pulped lip and gouged nose, the man howled as if he was one of his own inmates. The spy dived in, driving his fist into the dazed face, and as the overseer went down backwards, arms windmilling, Will caught the neck of his filthy undershirt to lower him slowly to the cold flagstones.

Whipping out his dagger, he pressed the tip against the man’s neck and leaned in so his face was close enough to smell the Keeper’s beer-sour breath. A droplet of blood rose where steel met flesh. ‘A good man has been murdered. My friends’ lives hang by a thread. Do not cross me,’ the hooded man hissed.

‘You … you are Will Swyfte,’ the Keeper gasped, his eyes glistening with tears of dread.

‘Take me to Griffin Devereux or I will cut you into chunks and feed you to the dogs on Bishopsgate.’

Dragging the whimpering man to his feet, the spy thrust him across the gloomy entrance hall and towards the Abraham Ward. Pitiful cries echoed from behind the locked door. Will kept his dagger at the man’s back as he fumbled through his jangling ring of iron keys and then they stepped into a long, dark hall that reeked of despair. Scattered with filthy straw, with cells on either side for the patients, the ward fell silent at first. But when the Keeper slammed the door and turned the key in the lock, the throat-torn screams echoed as one as if a great beast had been woken.

‘How many patients?’ Will asked, casting his gaze towards the clutching hands reaching through the barred windows of the cells. His nose wrinkled at the choking stench that rose up from the Great Vault, the hospital’s overflowing cesspit beneath the ward.

‘Twenty-one.’ The Keeper’s eyes flickered towards Will’s blade. ‘On the books.’

‘And the one we are visiting?’

The Keeper shrugged, said nothing.

Some of the patients were kept in chains in their filthy, vermin-infested cells and allowed no contact, ‘for the sake of their wits’. The calmer ones were free to roam around the Abraham Ward for a few hours a day. Some wore little more than rags.

‘Poor wretches. Who pays for their keep?’ Will enquired, his attention caught by one inmate who had the fresh, unmarked face of a child.

‘Their parishes, or a family member, or a livery company,’ the surly man grunted in reply.

‘And who pays for our patient?’

Again the Keeper didn’t respond. After a moment, he muttered, ‘I ask what I think I can get, depending on how fine their companions are dressed. No less than ten shillings a quarter. Some here have wealth. Merchants. Men from the law courts. We have a fellow from the university at Cambridge. One has been here for twenty-five years, another for nigh on ten.’

The cacophony of the Abraham Ward ended with the slamming of a sturdy door. The sullen man led Will down a flight of stone steps to the hospital’s vaulted brick cellars. The ever-present stink of the cesspit mingled with a smell of damp and age. The Keeper took a candle to guide them past rubble and puddles. Rats fled into the shadows before them.

At the western end of the cellars, a heavy door was set in the wall. Candlelight danced through the small, barred window.

‘He has many visitors?’ Will asked.

‘Only one in all the time he has been here. An educated man with the face of a boy.’ The gruff man looked Will up and down and added, ‘Good clothes like you. A cloak with crimson lining. Gold in his purse.’

Kit
.

Turning back to the door, the Keeper hesitated. He tried to moisten a mouth that had grown dry and sticky, his eyes flickering around as he fumbled with his keys. The candle flame threw wild shadows across the salt-encrusted brick.

‘Leave me alone to speak with him,’ the spy demanded.

‘Gladly.’

‘Raise the alarm and you will die. Keep your tongue still and you will get your coin.’

The man nodded, though Will could see the raw hatred in his eyes at his treatment. As he found the right key, the Keeper added, ‘Do not listen to his lies. He is the prince of lies.’

‘I will weigh all his words.’

The Keeper snorted, clearly believing that Will had misunderstood the severity of his warning. ‘I tell you this because I would not wish it upon any man. Not even you,’ the man continued, his heavy-lidded gaze filled with loathing. ‘He has a manner about him, friendly at first, but he worms his way into your skull, and soon you find yourself thinking things no God-fearing man would think. He can twist your thoughts with words alone, and make you do what he wants. Make you his puppet.’

‘He committed the acts of which he is accused?’

‘He is capable of them.’

‘Why do you keep him here, away from the others?’ Will glanced around the dank cellar.

The sweaty, overweight man bowed his head, his voice falling to a whisper. ‘On his first night, I placed him on the Abraham Ward. He spent the night whispering to a wretch in the next cell, a merchant, who cried and wailed for hours. In the morning, he was silent. He had plucked out his own eyes.’ The Keeper continued to stare at the door as if he feared it would suddenly fly open. ‘Devereux will never leave here. He deserves to have his head on a pike at the crossroads within the walls, but that will never happen. He has powerful friends. Sometimes I think they fear death will not hold him, and he will return to seek vengeance on his tormentors.’

No sound came from the other side of the door. Will had the feeling that the cell’s occupant was waiting too, listening to their breathing, his own breath caught in his chest as he anticipated a hand reaching out for the door handle.

Finally the Keeper stirred. He wrenched open the door and stepped aside to allow Will to enter. There was a space a little longer than the length of a grown man’s arm before a row of floor-to-ceiling iron bars. Beyond them was a cell larger than the ones that lay off the Abraham Ward, perhaps twelve foot square. Straw was scattered across the damp stone flags. Illumination came from a single stubby candle in a pewter holder placed on the floor against one wall. Rats rustled through the straw just beyond the circle of light, giving an impression that the cell was filled with many people.