The Raven's Head (25 page)

As her head rises through the hole in the floor, the first thing that strikes her is the heat in contrast to the chill of the chambers beneath. It is emanating from a glowing charcoal fire burning in a round copper bowl balanced on three legs, the feet of which are fashioned into giant eagle claws.

A huge glass flask, like a bird’s head with a long glass beak, is suspended over the fire. The inside is clouded with dense red steam; it condenses at the top of the flask and trickles down through the beak-like projection into a series of tubes and vessels ranged in a cascade down a set of wooden steps to the floor. Gisa is so fascinated by this waterfall of glass and hissing steam that she has almost forgotten her new master, until he speaks.

‘You must come earlier in future. There is much to be done, much for you to learn. Time is the most costly ingredient of all. It must not be wasted.’

Sylvain is standing in front of one of the small slit windows. He seems more like the shadow of a person than flesh and blood, for the light behind him throws his face into darkness, save his eyes. They glitter, an iridescent green, like the flies that swarm over corpses in summer. He is clad in a plain black robe. The hem trails on the dusty boards and the folds are caught about his waist by a broad black leather belt, whose silver clasp is formed from two interlocking snakes. In his pale, bony hands, he is twisting a length of white cord.

Gisa staggers back, almost falling through the trapdoor, terrified that he means to throttle her. Sylvain lunges at her and grabs her, jerking her towards him as she is about to collide with some glass flasks on the floor behind her.

‘You must take care as you move about. If a flask breaks it will mean the ruin of months of work. And tie your hair back with this.’ He hands her the cord. ‘Otherwise the flames may catch it.’ He reaches out and strokes back a strand of long ebony hair. ‘We don’t want you to set yourself on fire . . . not yet, anyway.’ He smiles as if he means this as a joke, but his tone makes it sound more like a prophecy.

She catches again the faint smell of urine that always clings to him, but cannot tell if it emanates from his clothes or the flasks, maybe both. He watches her as she fumbles to pull back her hair with the cord, her fingers made clumsy by his unblinking gaze. When he is satisfied, he steps back a little and regards her, pressing his fingertips together as if she is a painting or a piece of sculpture and he the artist creating her.

‘First I must impress upon you that you are never to speak of what you do here, or what you see. My work must be carried out in secret, for there are many in this world who would seek to take what I have learned. Kings have held men captive for years to gain such knowledge. Popes have sold their souls for it and countless lesser men have killed and been killed in pursuit of it. But the royal art must not be perverted by greed. Unlike Father Arthmael, I seek only life itself, but he seeks a power greater even than the grasp of kings or popes. He will not succeed!’

Sylvain is not looking at her now. He is declaiming to an invisible army, swearing an oath before a holy shrine she cannot see. ‘Some of what you see, my child, may make you afraid, revolted even, but you must remember that all life is born of corruption. The reborn can rise only from death and decay. Resurrection springs only from the tomb. Just as the fly is generated from the mud, the eel from the slime of the fishes and the tree from a seed buried in the dirt, so it is from filth that we shall draw forth the greatest treasure of them all. Do you understand?’

Gisa nods, as she knows she is expected to do, but she does
not
understand.

‘The day will come soon when you will beg your uncle to let you remain by my side night and day, for you will desire nothing more than to become part of this great work.’

She tries to suppress a shudder, fights to keep her face impassive. She will never,
never
beg to be with him, not even for a single hour, let alone a whole night. But her years of massaging soothing unguents into the intimate caverns and hairy crevasses of her aunt have taught her how to keep her revulsion concealed.

‘But today we will begin the work where all must start, with the
prima materia
, the spring of putrefaction. And to do that we must prepare the white water and the red. In the chamber below you will find the seeds of moon poppy and moonwort with bunches of dried lunarie. Can you recognise these plants?’

‘Of course.’

He nods approvingly then turns to the table and selects a large glass flask. ‘You will place the seeds in this flask and carry it up to the roof.’

With a single finger, he gestures towards a ladder that is propped against the wall. Above it is another trapdoor, like those through which she has already ascended except this one is closed.

‘The poppy and moonwort seeds you must spread at the bottom of the flask,’ he continues. ‘The stems of dried lunarie you will stand upright in it and arrange them such that any dew that falls from the moon tonight will run down the white discs of the lunarie and fall upon the seeds beneath. See that they are well protected from the wind. Alas, it is not a task I can perform, for it must be a maid who collects the dew . . . a
virgin
maid.’

His gaze fastens on hers, as if he has the power to see deep inside her soul, and though she has not the slightest reason for guilt, she suddenly feels as if that soul is dirty, contaminated. But as soon as he dismisses her, she is awash with relief, grateful for any task that will take her away from him. He stands too close, always too close.

She descends to the chamber below, cradling the wide glass flask. She works her way methodically around the shelves, ignoring the minerals, the scrapings of grave mould, the dried insects, powdered shrews and desiccated organs of frogs and foxes, mice and moles. All of these she knows from the apothecary’s shop – indeed, her uncle has supplied most of them. She recognises her own writing on many of the labels, though not the strange symbols that have been added. One wall of the chamber is dedicated to plants, and here she finds what Sylvain has asked for, seeds of moon poppy and moonwort and the dried stems of lunarie, with their silver-white, parchment-like discs.

Now she must climb back up the ladder to the roof, but it will mean passing through his chamber again. It will mean squeezing past him. She tries to delay the moment. She makes another circuit of the chamber, peering into jars, opening boxes, pretending she is still searching, should he glance down through the open trapdoor. She tries to memorise the location and contents of each of the containers in case she should be required to fetch something else. She rehearses what each thing is used to cure as she used to do in the apothecary shop, when she was trying to learn. She finds the kind of comfort in the repetition that a nun might find in reciting a familiar prayer.

Ashes of a young kite’s head – that prevents gout
. Does her new master suffer from such an affliction? She hasn’t seen him limping.
Dried viper to counteract the snake’s venomous bite.
She reads the labels she wrote in the apothecary’s shop and each is like the strands of a rope, holding her fast to the safety of the shore –
turpentine, myrrh, gum-elemi, quicksilver, alum, sulphur, brimstone.

A wooden box catches her attention. This one has no label. It did not come from her uncle’s shop, of that she is sure. The tops and sides are carved with a repeating pattern of the hooked sun-cross. It is too ornate to be used in a store room. Surely it should be on display in the house. She raises the lid. It does not occur to her not to do so.

She sees a mass of bones and the shining white dome of a skull. That it is a human skull momentarily startles her, but it does not frighten her. On the shelves of her uncle’s shop a jar contains the powdered skull of a suicide, a well-known cure for the falling sickness. And in another of Uncle Thomas’s small caskets are fragments of the skull of a hanged man, with a piece of the rope used to dispatch the poor wretch. These ease the agonies of those afflicted with blinding headaches. Apothecaries regularly purchase the heads of felons from the executioners, while the less scrupulous obtain their supply much more cheaply from the enterprising youths who steal them from the maggoty corpses in the gibbet cages. Legal or otherwise, there is always a lively trade in cadavers.

But Gisa can see at once that this is not the skull of a hanged man or, she devoutly hopes, of someone who committed self-murder, for it is far too small. The owner of this little skull never lived long enough to become a man. These are the bones and skull of a young child. And the bones are fresh. They have not been dug up from some ancient grave. She has seen enough human and animal remains in her uncle’s shop to be sure of that.

How did these bones come to be in the tower? Children die of many things – fevers, starvation, accidents. Death is an all-too-common visitor to many households. But why was an innocent child not given a Christian burial or, if the poor mite was unbaptised, at least laid to rest somewhere close to a church where the shadow of the Holy Cross might fall on it? Apothecaries do not trade in the bones of children.

Above her, she hears the heavy tread of her new master, pacing up and down before the flames in his copper pot. She knows he is waiting impatiently for her. She shivers: the tower room, which was cold before, now feels as if it has been encased in ice.

A dragon springs therefrom when exposed in horses’ excrement for twenty days.

A bald man with a face like a sow’s arse thrust his leg out between the benches in the ale-room, barring my way and nearly tripping me.

‘Here, muttonhead! I’ll have some of that sweet rabbit, and Hugh here, he wants eels. Bring strong ale now and plenty of it. Think you can manage to remember that, codwit? And hurry up before my belly jumps out of my throat and goes hunting for its own meats.’

Hugh winked at him. ‘Maybe we should put a tar barrel up his arse and set fire to it. That’d make him dance more lively.’

All the men at the table roared with laughter. I forced my lips into a rictus grin, as if I shared the joke, and headed for the back door of the tavern that led out to the kitchens.

Another hairy-fisted man grabbed my thigh as I passed his bench. ‘Here, where’s my rabbit? I asked for it an hour since.’

He’d asked for it barely a
pater noster
ago, and if he kept grabbing my leg like that he’d be wearing the rabbit stew in his crotch, which might at least dampen his ardour even if it didn’t cool it. One of the serving girls gave me a sympathetic glance as I wrested my leg away. They had it worse. They were fighting off hands all night.

Mistress Ibby squeezed around the table with two brimming flagons in each hand. It was little wonder she’d muscles like a blacksmith. ‘Did your old master not teach you how to carry more than one dish at a time?’ she snapped. ‘You’d best take over in the kitchen and send the girl in here.’

If she thought my skills were any more suited to basting and stirring, she was going to be sadly disappointed, but I couldn’t afford to tell her that. I’d given her the impression that I’d worked in the Fiery Angel. Apparently it was one of the busiest pilgrim inns on the road to Becket’s shrine at Canterbury. I’d learned the name of the inn from the friar on the ship – he’d boasted to his little flock of having stayed there. There wasn’t a shrine in England the man hadn’t visited, or so he said. I’d told Mistress Ibby it was the most commodious and best-appointed place in those parts, where all the wealthy pilgrims stayed, which was what the friar had said. I didn’t suppose for one moment it was true, but Canterbury was so far from Lynn I gambled she wouldn’t know that.

Working as a scullion in a piss-poor quayside tavern had most definitely not been my idea. I had intended to sell the raven’s head immediately, dress myself as a gentleman and make for Walsingham or some other place where I could make my fortune inventing stories for those who’d reason to fear their sins might soon catch up with them. That had been my plan, but I was now beginning to believe that the raven had hatched another, one that was very different from my own.

After the encounter with the silversmith, though somewhat shaken, I’d continued to try to find a buyer for the bird’s head. I’d tried shopkeepers, both English and foreign merchants, and even some of the wealthier pilgrims. All admired the craftsmanship. Each was fascinated by the object. Most appeared to covet it. Then, as I was on the very brink of parting them from their money, they would recoil and thrust the head back at me, as if I had dropped a scorpion into their hands.

No one else noticed the tiny symbols the silversmith had seen, though I saw them more distinctly with each passing day. But some swore the bird’s eyes blinked at them, others that they heard a raven cry out, or felt a throbbing as if some invisible heart was sending blood coursing round the disembodied head. Some men said the metal became burning hot in their hands, others deathly cold. A few could not explain their fear, saying only that they could tell it was unnatural, cursed, an object of death. Foolish as it sounds, I was beginning to believe the raven did not want to be sold.

I made one last attempt to offer it to a captain aboard his ship, persuading him that it would be the ideal object to trade for a good sum in a foreign market or else take home as a gift for his wife. He, too, seemed interested and we had just got around to naming a price, when a sudden and violent gust of wind came out of nowhere. It tore through the ship’s bare rigging, rocking the hull, so the great ship juddered and convulsed at its moorings as if it was about to break its back. None of the other ships in the harbour was touched by the gust.

Even beneath his deep tan, I could see the blood drain from the captain’s face. He flew into a rage, accusing me of cursing the ship by bringing a raven aboard. He said every seaman knows that a raven flying too close to the seashore is an evil omen, for its croaking cries up a storm. On reflection, I was lucky that when he threw me bodily off the ship it was onto the quayside, not straight into the sea.