The Tainted Relic (53 page)

‘This is the singer’s means of trade,’ said Abel, cradling the lute in his arms. The neck of the instrument was splintered and the strings tangled.

‘Singer? He’s a thief–or worse,’ I said, full of righteousness that we had tracked down the individuals responsible for Hatch’s demise.

‘It will be a long time before he makes enough money to buy another of these,’ said Abel, gazing on the lute as though it were a sickly baby.

‘Then he can always steal one,’ I said, wondering at Abel’s softness. I suppose it was because he had once earned his living by trickery that he had a sneaking sympathy with unreformed cony-catchers.

We returned to the priory and to the hall where Justice Farnaby was still sitting on his oak chair, as if waiting for more malefactors to be produced. I was eager to explain that we’d come back with proof, of a sort, as to the real identity of the thieves and probable murderers of Ulysses Hatch. Wapping Doll was still there. To her especially I was eager to show that I was no murderer. I handed over the box to the Justice, describing how this was the very object I’d first seen in Hatch’s hands and then in Perkin’s possession before it was seized by Nightingale. The cutpurse looked indignant but it was for form’s sake only. Gog and Magog could add their testimony to the effect that I was telling the truth, I said, appealing to the constables.

Farnaby opened the box and took out the fragile strip of parchment. He glanced at it for an instant then shut the box once more. He looked at Nightingale, who was still clutching his battered noddle, and at Perkin. He considered, for a long period he considered.

‘Wait in there with your friends, Master Revill,’ he said, gesturing towards a door at the side of the hall. ‘Let me hear what these individuals have to say for themselves.’

Jack and Abel and I filed into a room that must have been the kitchen to the refectory. There was an open fireplace with a roasting-spit operated by a small treadmill. A dog would have turned the treadmill in the monks’ time. The equipment was old and rusted. The kitchen door was firmly closed on us. Again, if we weren’t quite prisoners we weren’t free men either. My confidence that justice was about to be done dwindled slightly.

‘Where’s this bit of the “true” cross, then?’ said Jack. ‘All that Perkin had was the box which you said it was in.’

‘That’s only what he showed Nightingale, the empty box,’ I said. ‘Most likely he’d already taken it for himself. Maybe he was planning to sell it on his own account.’

‘If it ever existed,’ said Jack. In his irritation he tried to spin the treadmill, which was connected to the spit by a sagging chain. It creaked like some ancient implement of torture.

‘I saw it, I tell you, I saw it in Ulysses Hatch’s own hands.’

‘Well,
he
can’t testify any longer, can he? And now it’s vanished into thin air.’

‘Nick’s not the only one to know of it,’ said Abel, coming to my rescue. ‘Justice Farnaby mentioned it. Someone must have informed
him
.’

‘Wapping Doll,’ I said. ‘She knew about the cross, said it brought her out in goose bumps.’

‘Then her bumps can be brought in evidence,’ said Jack. ‘Until such time we shall have to say that the cross has gone.’

‘Perhaps this can be repaired,’ said Abel, changing the subject. ‘I’m not an expert, mind…’

Abel was still holding Nightingale’s damaged lute. And, watching him, an ingenious idea flashed into my mind. I recalled the scene of the two thieves standing in the shadow of the buttress. The way in which Perkin had been fiddling with the instrument while his friend was counting out the coins in his hand. Suppose that Perkin had got the bit of sacred wood after all and did plan to keep it for himself. Suppose the plan had come to him at the very instant the two men were counting out their money in the shade of the buttress. Perkin is holding the wooden box containing the item. He’s about to surrender it to the singer when greed gets the better of him. He palms the glass vial and, almost before he’s aware of what he’s doing, slips it into a convenient hiding place instead of handing it over. Then he shows Nightingale the empty box, pretending ignorance of its contents. Meantime the glass vial and the relic are somewhere else altogether.

‘Give me the lute, Abel. I’ve got an idea.’

Abel passed me the broken instrument. The neck was cracked and splintered and some of the strings had snapped. I shook the thing. Something rattled within. I dug my hand through the sound-hole and rummaged about the interior of the lute. With mounting certainty, I grasped hold of an elongated object. It didn’t feel like glass but wood. Too late I remembered Ulysses Hatch’s warning,
They say that to touch it is death
. But I’d already seized the wooden piece and was easing it out of the sound-hole. The thrill of being proved right banished fears of an old wives’ curse. Like a magician, I uncurled my palm and showed Jack and Abel what it contained.

‘See! I told you!’

‘Yes, I see it,’ said Jack. ‘So what?’

Only now did I glance down at the item in my palm. It was a shaped sliver of wood all right, but it wasn’t a piece of the True Cross. For one thing, the wood was new and unscarred.

‘That is a sound-post, Nick,’ said Abel. ‘Every lute has them. They’re put inside to strengthen the frame.’

‘So what exactly was your idea, Nicholas?’ said Jack. ‘That the cutpurse might have slipped what you’re searching for inside the lute?’

‘Stranger things have happened,’ I said.

I could see from the expression on Jack’s face that he was undecided whether to laugh or curl his lip in scorn. Abel merely looked baffled.

Luckily, at that moment the kitchen door opened and once again Gog (or Magog) ushered us into Justice Farnaby’s presence. The scene was much as we’d left it. Peter Perkin, still crestfallen, stood before the oak chair. Ben Nightingale was sitting on a bench, looking dazed. The aged clerk’s pen was poised above a pile of paper. The only change was in the expression on Farnaby’s face. Instead of looking grave and precise, he looked rather as Jack had done just now, somewhere between amused and scornful.

‘They say truth will out, don’t they,’ he said, half to himself. ‘Well, Master Revill, it appears as though you at least were telling the truth. The trouble is that a grain of truth is wrapped up in a tissue of lies.’

I nodded, though I hadn’t the slightest notion what he was talking about.

‘This person here,’ continued Farnaby, indicating Perkin the cutpurse, ‘has made a deposition to Pie-Powder Court. My clerk here will read out the salient features of it.’

The clerk, elderly, with grey hair straggling from under his cap, bent his head to the topmost sheet of paper and cleared his throat in a way that might have been thought excessive onstage.

‘Witness Perkin deposes…let me see…deposes that he is in the habit of attending Bartholomew Fair, sometimes in company with his good friend Benjamin Nightingale, ballad singer of Tooley Street…because he enjoys the honey tones of his friend’s voice when he sings…witness deposes that his mother, that is Ben Nightingale’s mother, knew what she was about when she married a man called Nightingale and that she must have had foreknowledge that her son would grow into a fine—’

‘Never mind all that nonsense,’ said Farnaby. ‘Get to the quick of the matter.’

Put out, the clerk snuffled. He coughed to clear his throat and moved his pen down the page.

‘…er…witness Perkin acknowledges that he is a dealer in small items…he calls himself a, er, “snapper-up of trifles”…this is his sole trade…Perkin says that he went to the tent of one Ulysses Hatch, publisher and bookseller, because he had purchased items from the aforesaid Hatch on other occasions. Once in the tent, Perkin was shown a box which contained a glass tube which contained, in turn, a piece of wood which the aforesaid Hatch claimed to be a fragment from the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. Witness states that he enquired as to the price of the item but then left the tent because his pockets were not deep enough for the item in question. Asked to explain this, he said that he didn’t have the cash. Furthermore, he said, he was somewhat alarmed by the presence of a talking raven in the tent. Outside the tent witness saw three gentlemen who from their shifty expressions he judged to be players…’

We stiffened at this but Justice Farnaby shot us a warning glance.

‘Perkin deposes that he later thought better of his rejection of the item and, after consulting with his good friend Nightingale, returned to the tent to make another offer to Ulysses Hatch, publisher and bookseller…’

At this point the clerk was overcome by a fit of coughing and lost his place in the text. Farnaby looked on with pursed lips. Presumably what we were listening to was what the Justice had recently referred to as a tissue of lies. Perkin as a snapper-up of trifles, eh? Well, that was one way of describing a cutpurse. The only accurate parts of the statement related to Perkin’s account of his two visits to Hatch’s tent. Whether he was there by chance on the first occasion or whether he was on the lookout for what he could filch, he’d been shown the glass vial. Hatch had obviously been as prepared to sell it to the cutpurse as to Tom Gally. Hadn’t he said he’d sell to anyone if the price was right? Perkin had left the tent, bumping into us on the way out. With or without consulting Nightingale, he’d gone back in an attempt to steal the relic. Perhaps he’d sneaked into the tent somehow, been surprised by Hatch and a struggle had followed. Perkin had wrested the pistol from Hatch’s grasp…so that it detonated at close quarters…but if that was so, surely he’d be covered in burns or scorch marks?

The clerk gave a final cough, expelling a bolus of phlegm into a filthy handkerchief. Then he resumed his, or rather Perkin’s, account.

‘…witness deposes that he entered Master Hatch’s tent to negotiate over the sale of the relic. There was a pistol lying to one side on top of a chest. Witness says he does not know whether he was more alarmed by the sight of the pistol or by the presence of the raven which told him to, er, jump to it. For a second time, the aforesaid Hatch produced the box which contained the glass vial which contained, in turn, a piece—’

‘Oh, get on with it, man,’ said Farnaby. ‘We know what it contained. To the quick of the matter.’

‘Yes, sir…witness Perkin states that the next thing which happened was…was that…’

But we were never destined to learn what happened next from the clerk’s own mouth for he was again seized by a coughing fit. His thin frame shook and he unfolded the filthy handkerchief again preparatory to expelling whole flights of phlegm.

Justice Farnaby, despairing of his clerk, had to speak up loudly to drown out the sounds of hawking and spitting. ‘In short, witness Perkin here claims that he is quite innocent of the murder of Ulysses Hatch, publisher and bookseller. He says that the real killler is—’

‘Shut your gob!’

As it happened, the clerk’s titanic throat-clearing ceased at the very moment that these heretical words rang out in Pie-Powder Court. Or rather, the words didn’t so much ring out as squawk out. Another oddity was that the words were delivered not from ground level, where a man might have been standing, but from many feet above our heads. The refectory was criss-crossed by beams.

We all looked up. On a beam almost directly above Justice Farnaby was perched a bird that I recognized. So did Peter Perkin. He held out a trembling arm.

‘That’s him,’ he said. ‘That’s the bird that killed his master. He jumped on the pistol as it was lying there and the thing fell sideways and got discharged somehow and shot Master Hatch in the throat.’

‘Shut your gob!’ said Hold-fast, and then for good measure, ‘Jump to it!’

The raven bent his head downward, assessing the effect of his instructions to the court. Nobody spoke. The Justice was silent. Even the clerk stopped examining the contents of his handkerchief to raise his head.

For some reason I straight away believed what Perkin had said. It was too ridiculous not to be true. Who could make up such a tale? I’d seen for myself the primed pistol and the way in which Hatch laid it carelessly to one side when we were talking. It was quite plausible that the bird had landed–clumsily, accidentally, even intentionally perhaps (for who can tell what was going on inside that dark little head)–on the thing and had set it off. Men are always shooting at birds. Why shouldn’t it happen the other way about, and a bird shoot a man? Even with a bird that had adopted a man and might be presumed to be his special friend.

Hold-fast wasn’t planning to submit to questions from anybody. He seemed to duck out of sight. But he was only gone for an instant. Next, with a flap of his black wings, he was down at ground level, although careful to keep out of the reach of all of us. He paraded up and down a stretch of flagstoned floor, more cocksure than any Justice you’ve ever seen. Mind you, he looked a bit ragged. Even at a distance his plumage did not seem as glossy as it had earlier in the day. His feathers were, literally, ruffled. There were smudges around his head. Exactly the sort of marks you might expect to see if a pistol had exploded somewhere in his vicinity.

What gave added credence to Perkin’s tale was the fact that Hold-fast was not talking now. No commands to ‘shut up’ or to ‘jump to it’ issued from his mouth. He wasn’t speaking because he couldn’t. Tucked athwart his beak was a glass tube, which he must have temporarily deposited up aloft so as to give us the benefit of his voice. It was, for certain, the vial, which contained a piece of…well, you know what it contained. It was as if he’d brought this item to Pie-Powder Court for proof and waited up in the roof until the right moment came. Then he’d flown down from the beam to show us precisely what he’d done.

And, having shown us, Hold-fast flapped aloft once more and resumed his perch on the crossbeam. Still clutching the vial, he waddled sideways towards the point where the beam joined the wall. Being a monastic building, the refectory was well supplied with windows. In the old days, before the suppression, they were probably filled with fine coloured glass. Now they were mostly unglazed so that the winter winds and the airs of summer could come and go freely through them. On a hot August day it was pleasant to have unglazed windows. Useful too for Hold-fast, who wanted to make his exit as easily as he must have made his entrance. Reaching the end of the beam, and with one final cock of his head in the direction of his human audience, he slipped over the lintel of a window and apparently vanished into the afternoon. I’ve seen well-known players, especially the clowns among us, make their exits in just that way. With a knowing nod towards the crowd and a kind of aren’t-I-the-very-Devil air to their departure.