Mask of Night (26 page)

The feet positioned themselves wide apart and there was a grunting and heaving from above. The two intruders pulled the body of Mistress Root off the bed, none too gently or respectfully. It landed with a thump on the floor. Shadowy figures bent down and half carried, half dragged the body from the bedroom.

I caught a glimpse of the pair as they reached for the corpse. Only a glimpse but it was enough to confirm that they were the hooded, beaked figures I’d seen on two other occasions in this town. The white sticks or wands were the insect-like horns they carried. Seeing them, I was frightened, even more frightened than before, but somehow not surprised by the sight.

As they moved the woman’s body one of her shoes fell off. If either of the men noticed, neither came back to retrieve it. There was a slithering and thumping from the lobby before the house door opened and closed with a bolder sound than previously. I waited, expecting to hear the creaking of the cart. But no sound came. I concentrated on a feather which was hanging down from the mattress in front of my face. It quivered with my breath. The door to the bedroom was still open. The stretch of floor between where I was lying and the way out seemed as big as a ploughed field. In the middle of the floor Mistress Root’s shoe lay abandoned.

Eventually I heard the cart departing. I counted to a hundred, and then to another hundred for safety’s sake. I eased myself out from under the bed. I was covered in dust and feathery stuff. I brushed myself down, taking longer over it than was perhaps necessary. I picked up Mistress Root’s shoe and placed it carefully on the bed. It was a smart chopin, with a raised sole to keep the wearer out of the mud or, in Mistress Root’s case, to give her an extra inch or so in conversation. I felt a sudden jolt of anger. She might have been a formidable creature, but what had she done to deserve to die? There was a hollow where her body had lain. The two images, run through with pins, had been left behind by the hooded figures.

There was nothing more to be done here. I went into the dark lobby and tried to open the front door but it was locked. The “visitors” had arrived with a key and they had evidently departed with it too. So I passed into the dining-room, paused and looked around for a moment before moving on to the casement by which I’d made my illicit entrance in the first place. Once again I opened the window. This time I checked in each direction. My luck was holding. Cats Street was empty. I swung myself over the sill and hopped out into the lane, then strode off towards the High.

Or rather I made to stride off but my attention was immediately caught by the front door. A cross had been daubed in red on it. The paint was fresh and glistened slightly. Even as I watched, a streak ran down like blood from a wound. It was a careless job. I don’t suppose that Alderman Farnaby back in Southwark would have approved, it would not have fitted his feet-and-inches specifications. But the cross did its job of warning off any curious neighbours or passers-by from this solid house in Cats Street, since it announced that the place was sealed up on account of the plague indoors. This explained the pause between the departure of the hooded men from the house and the noise of the cart retreating. One of them had been employed in daubing this crude sign on Mistress Root’s door while the other had no doubt been loading the body on to the cart. I wondered what had happened to the third man, since I’d definitely seen three of them on my first night in Oxford.

My heart beating very fast now, I walked down the High. It was still relatively early on this cold spring morning, but a few more people were about. There were half a dozen carts trundling by in both directions, ordinary conveyances loaded with ordinary goods and driven by ordinary folk. No hooded individuals with a corpse for luggage. They would have been rather noticeable, after all. They would surely have wished to avoid being noticeable. I assumed therefore that these anonymous beings had not driven off in this direction.

I needed to get away somewhere, and think about what I’d just witnessed.

It took me only a few minutes of threading through back streets and alleys to gain the isolation of the meadows by Christ Church where I’d walked with Susan Constant several days before. Then we’d talked of her suspicions that her cousin was being poisoned and of hooded figures and of images stuck through with pins. She’d retracted everything that she’d said, but that didn’t mean that it wasn’t true. I could testify to the truth of at least two of these items.

Scarcely aware of the rushing water at my side, I walked furiously by the river bank, trying to order my own headlong thoughts.

First of all, there was the distress of discovering Angelica Root. A little debt of grief and silence was owing to her, even from one who had scarcely known her.

Close on the heels of this distress, very close, was the fear that I had been left vulnerable to the plague by being inside the same house, the same room, as the late Mistress Root. This fear – more properly, this terror – would have been enough to make some men run wild through the streets, tearing off their garments and throwing themselves on their knees with supplications to the Almighty for deliverance. With others, it might have driven them not to frenzy but to a final debauch. And others still would simply have curled up and waited to die.

I dare say I would have reacted in one of these ways, if I’d genuinely thought that I had been exposed to a plague victim. But, however Angelica Root had met her end, I did not believe that she had fallen under the scythe of King Pest.

For one thing, judging by my brief view of her while she lay on the great bed, she did not show the tokens, the swellings and buboes. For another, if she had been surprised by the infection, then it had been a sudden attack, remarkably sudden. Why, I had seen Mistress Root laughing her head off at the bawdiness of Thomas Pope as he played the Nurse in
Romeo and Juliet
scarcely more than twelve hours earlier. No sign of anything amiss there. I am no physician but, like everyone, I know that one of the worst aspects of the pestilence is its tendency to
toy
with its victims, to stretch them out on the rack of suffering rather than ending their lives with one certain stroke. So if Mistress Root had succumbed to the plague and died in less than a single circuit of the clock then she had been – in one sense – a lucky woman.

No, although I didn’t know what had happened to her, I did not think that this was the cause of her death.

Leaving aside the question of how she died, I grubbed around on the edges of the business, trying to pick up a few conclusions.

To start with something small.

Like the two clay images, transfixed by pins. These were similar to the one described by Susan Constant as having been left outside her family’s house, apparently directed at her cousin. Too similar for coincidence. Did the presence of these figures on Mistress Root’s bed point to a connection between the nurse and her one-time charge? It was Abel Glaze who’d suggested that the old woman might have been so hostile to the notion of marriage that she’d resorted to extreme means to keep Sarah away from it. A ridiculous idea, but even ridiculous ideas turn out to be true sometimes . . .

Then there was the question of those shoes.

(This was the second time within a few days that I’d stopped to consider a dead person’s shoes. I recalled the strange business of Hugh Fern’s changing his footwear twice, before his appearance on the stage of the Golden Cross Inn and then once more before his death.)

The chopin discarded in the bedroom in Cats Street was for wearing outdoors, unlike the pumps or slippers which you might have expected a woman to put on when she enters her own house, for comfort’s sake or to keep the mud and muck from her floors. The fact that Mistress Root was still wearing her street shoes when I found her could suggest that she’d died not long after returning home the previous night. Perhaps the hooded figures were lying in wait for her outside. That would explain how they’d obtained a key to the house.

This chain of reasoning wasn’t very strong but it tended to reinforce the notion that, whatever the cause of death, it wasn’t the plague. A doctor might have been able to tell – had any doctor been permitted to examine her, to anatomize her – but the unfortunate woman would already be on her way to a burial-pit, a place somewhere on the edge of the city well away from the most populous areas and set aside for plague victims.

For Angelica Root had been presented as a victim of the plague. That was the clear message of the red cross on her door. It was the only explanation for the presence of the hooded figures, whose garb – I now realized – might have been protective. I had never seen such garments before but they could have been put on for a practical purpose, as well as for the purpose of instilling fear. This pretence of the plague would account too for the way in which they’d been able to remove her body with relative boldness in broad daylight and from a house adjoining the busiest thoroughfare in the town.

The assumption I’d made earlier about hooded figures carting off corpses and their need to avoid being noticed was wrong. It didn’t matter if they were noticed.

They were not worried about being stopped and interrogated on the contents of their cart, because anyone seeing them would do nothing but avert his eyes and say a prayer under his breath, perhaps crossing himself. Not a person would think of intercepting a plague-cart in a town where the disease was beginning to take hold. Nobody would question these drivers, however outlandish their costumes.

They could get away with murder.

The murder of Mistress Root, for example.

That Mistress Root had been murdered was not a completely implausible speculation. She wasn’t exactly a harmless old woman. I wouldn’t have liked to be on the receiving end of her meaty fists. However, it was not her prowess in a fight but the secrets she kept which made her dangerous. More particularly, she had summoned me to a meeting to pass those secrets on, maybe. The note was still in my pocket. By the fast-flowing Isis I took it out and, although I knew the words by heart, re-examined the wrinkled paper as if it might yield more information.

You are right to suspect foul play in the death of Hugh Fern. We must talk in private.

Here was sufficient reason for her death, surely. But what had she been going to tell me? And why
me
? Because I was the only one to be suspicious over Fern’s death? How had she discovered my suspicions?

A sudden idea flew into my head. Not a welcome one.

How could I be sure that the note had actually come from Angelica Root? I’d not seen anything in her hand before. I held up the paper against the thin sun which was beginning to break through the clouds. I sniffed at the writing. I tried to decide whether it was in a woman’s hand – or a man’s. There was a firmness to the writing. But then, if the old nurse had penned it herself, the hand would have been firm. Nor was there anything special about the wording of the message except for a certain directness – again, typical of Mistress Root. I felt the texture of the paper, rubbing it loosely between my fingers. Unfortunately, as I was doing so, a gust of air lifted it from my hand. I made to grab it but it skittered out of reach and over the water, and the little piece of evidence connecting me to Mistress Root and the house in Cats Street disappeared downriver. It wasn’t much use that I could recall its exact wording.

Well, if the vanished note had been written by someone else then that person could have had only one motive. To trick me into coming to Mistress Root’s house and once there to . . .

I thought of the way the casement window had been left conveniently ajar, almost inviting me to climb in. I recalled the way in which the two “visitors” had let themselves in with the key and proceeded to go into the other rooms as well as upstairs before reaching the bedchamber. Were they looking for Mistress Root, since she might have expired anywhere in the house?

Or were they looking for Nicholas Revill?

There’s nothing to see
, one of the hooded individuals had said.

But there was something to see, there was a body lying on the bed in front of them. Did he say that before glimpsing the dead nurse, or were the two of them looking for another somebody?

Had they thought to trap me in the house, to take me by surprise and then to deal with me?

Only one of the hooded figures had spoken. As well as the comment about seeing nothing, he had made that riddling reference to “naughty man’s cherries”.

There was something half familiar about the voice, muffled though it had been by the hood.

My thinking being more or less done for the time being, I left the meadows by the river and made my way back towards Carfax and the Golden Cross. It crossed my mind that I should report my discovery of Angelica Root to the authorities, but now there was no body to be produced, and the only evidence of any wrongdoing, a crumpled note which might or might not be in the dead woman’s handwriting, was lost. Anyway, if poor old Root really had perished of the plague then the last thing the coroner or magistrate would wish for was an investigation into her death. What would be the point? What was one death among so many?

I encountered that familiar ostler Kit Kite in the deserted yard of the Golden Cross. He was idling his time. I stopped to idle it with him.

“Good day, Nicholas,” he said.

“Master Kite.”

“Out and about early?”

“I have been exploring the town.”

“I hear you are leaving soon.”

“Only me?”

“Ha, I mean your Company is leaving, Nicholas.”

“Then I’m sure you are better informed than any of my Company – apart from the seniors. There are no secrets in an inn.”

“I keep my ear to the ground.”

The little ostler tapped himself on his sandy head, and giggled.

“An odd expression, that,” I said. “I mean, no one really keeps his ear to the ground.”

“I dare say they don’t, but it is a figure, you know,” said this learned handler of horses.

“A figure of speech, just so,” I said.