Treachery (31 page)

‘I can see nothing more natural than to be angry when someone you care for persists in wilfully destroying himself and those around him, against all advice,’ I say.

‘Exactly!’ she exclaims. ‘Robert was not a bad man, but he was unhappy. Since he returned from that first voyage with Drake, something was tormenting him. It wore away the good side of his character, little by little. If there had been children, it might have been different. But …’ She turns away, adjusts her veil.

I let this comment disappear into the sounds of the street, the raucous Plymouth goodwives and gulls vying to drown each other out. So they had no children; his fault or hers, I wonder. If she is about to come into a significant inheritance from her father, that would make her an attractive prospect to new suitors, who might give her children where Robert had failed. Sidney’s comment about rich widows comes to mind.

We have emerged into the square around the Market Cross, lively at this hour with traders and stallholders, shouting their wares from beneath coloured awnings that snap in the breeze like sailcloth. Raw-faced women with vast baskets balanced on their hips tout bread, fish, strawberries, fresh-cut reeds, and more pies; others, in cheap, bright gowns, move among the crowds, touting themselves. It is never too early for commerce, it seems. Ragged children chase one another through the throng, laughing and dodging fists and kicks as their keen eyes scour the ground for any fallen food that can be salvaged before the dogs grab it. Mistress Dunne lifts her skirts to avoid the fresh piles of horse dung and presses onward, her mouth set in a determined line, towards the ancient-timbered Guildhall, which overlooks the square, leaning forward on its row of wooden columns like a grandfather on a stick.

‘So, these creditors Robert trailed after him,’ I say, hurrying to keep up, ‘these are the enemies you spoke of?’

She purses her lips. ‘They were certainly not his friends, put it that way – although some started out as such. But I did not mean them – they were ordinary, workaday enemies. They were not the ones that frightened him.’

‘Then, who?’

She glances about and lowers her voice. ‘My husband was involved in something – I hardly like to—’

‘Sir!’ A hand tugs at my sleeve and I look down to see the boy Sam hopping from one foot to the other, his eyes lit up with delight at finding me again.

‘Good day, Sam.’ I make him a little bow and his whole face scrunches up with laughter. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Looking for something to eat.’ He draws a hand across his nose.

‘Did you find anything?’

He shakes his head and his lip juts out. ‘I picked up a bit of bread but my brother robbed it off me.’

He is a scrawny thing; I wonder if anyone feeds him at home.

‘Well, then.’ I slip a hand into my purse and bring out a penny. I indicate a girl standing nearby with a tray of fresh pies. ‘Get yourself a pie, and make sure you hide it from your brother.’

His solemn eyes widen and he regards the coin as if he has just witnessed a miracle.

‘I am going to find someone from the coroner’s office, Doctor Bruno,’ Mistress Dunne announces, with a dismissive glance at the boy. ‘You can stay here.’ She gestures to the maidservant to follow, puts her shoulders back and disappears through the main door of the Guildhall. Sam stands close to my side, turning his penny over and over in his hand as if he is afraid it might vanish. As I am gazing at the top of his head, an idea occurs.

‘Sam, you and your friends must know everyone in Plymouth, I think?’ I crouch to look him in the eye.

He bites his lip, torn between his desire to be truthful and his fear of disappointing me. ‘Not everyone who comes in off the ships. But the townsfolk, mostly I do.’

‘Good. I need to find someone. A girl. All I know is her name is Eve, and she probably works …’ I hesitate, seeing his earnest expression. How much do children understand at his age? ‘She might be one of the girls who works along by the harbour. One of the ladies who paint themselves.’

‘A whore?’ he says brightly. What is he – six years old, seven? I wonder if he has any concept of what a whore is. Growing up by the docks, they are as common a sight to him as fishermen or gulls, I suppose.

‘I think so. She used to work at a place called the House of Vesta until recently. I need to find out where she’s gone. It’s important,’ I add in a whisper, and pat my doublet where he knows my purse is stashed. He nods again. ‘Perhaps you could ask around. You can start now, if you like.’

He looks doubtful. ‘Can I have my pie first?’

I laugh. ‘Of course.’

‘Can I share it with my dog?’

I look around. The only dogs to be seen are mangy street scavengers. ‘You can share it with whomever you like. Just don’t let anyone take it from you.’

He grins, and scampers away, lightfooted, until he is lost behind barrows and swirls of bright skirts. I turn to see Mistress Dunne approaching with a gaunt young man in the robes of a clerk.

We turn a corner to find ourselves at the lych-gate of the church I visited the night before. The sun slides behind a cloud. A plump verger in a black cassock and violet chimere appears from the church door, exchanges a few private words with the clerk and greets Mistress Dunne with solemn murmurs of condolence, though his distaste for the task is evident in his jowly face. He is carrying an unlit lantern.

‘The coroner asked us to keep the body in the crypt until the …’ he hesitates, selecting his words carefully ‘… the manner of burial is settled upon. It’s the coolest place, you see. We are fortunate that the weather has been unseasonably cold for August, else the body would be corrupted worse than it is.’ He cannot quite disguise the wrinkling of his nose. It is clear that he would prefer not to have the corpse of a suspected suicide contaminating his church. He gives the impression that he would gladly drag the dead man to a crossroads and drive the stake through his heart himself, given the chance.

Mistress Dunne draws herself up, lifts her veil and looks him directly in the eye.

‘My husband will be given Christian burial as soon as the inquest is over tomorrow,’ she announces, in a tone that admits no contradiction. ‘Agnes!’ she snaps her fingers towards the maid. ‘See that this gentleman is recompensed for the trouble he has been put to.’

Agnes dutifully rummages in her skirts and draws out a purse. I cannot help feeling impressed by Mistress Dunne’s composure in facing down the censure of the Church; whatever she felt for her late husband, she seems determined to defend his name in death while she still can.

The verger immediately finds a more charitable spirit. ‘That is most generous, madam. If you would just follow me …’ He gives me a curious look, his small eyes resting on me in passing, trying to calculate my connection to the widow. He shepherds us along a narrow path around the north transept of the church until we reach a low doorway, which he unlocks with a key from his belt. As he opens it, he turns back to us.

‘Are you quite certain, madam, that you wish to proceed? The sight, you know – for a lady …’ He makes a little moue with his mouth.

‘Of course I wish to proceed, I have ridden from Dartington for the purpose. I do not expect it to be pleasant, but it is my duty.’ Mistress Dunne straightens up again and the verger shrinks under her gaze. He holds the door open.

‘You will forgive me if I remain here – we have incense burning, but …’ He does not need to elaborate. Mistress Dunne draws a handkerchief from her sleeve and presses it over her nose and mouth. I cover my lower face with my sleeve. The verger takes out a tinder-box and lights the lantern, handing it to the clerk and murmuring a few words as he does so. The clerk nods and, with his light aloft, enters a small vestibule and almost immediately turns right down a flight of stone steps. At the bottom he pushes open another door and the smell of putrefaction gusts out, thick as fog. I hear the clerk gagging, though he presses on, the small circle of light wavering forwards.

The crypt is low-roofed, supported by plain stone columns. It is true that the air is cold and damp down here, but evidently not enough to protect Robert Dunne from corruption, despite the incense burners set into niches in the walls. My stomach clenches and my heart is racing; the sepulchre stench takes me back to Canterbury the previous summer and the grisly discovery I made there in an underground tomb. My old dread of confined spaces rises up; I attempt a breath through my mouth but the air tastes metallic and sickly-sweet. I have to stop and lean against a pillar until I am sure I will not faint. Mistress Dunne walks on, her face set in that same resolute expression; if she is affected, you would not know it. In the wavering light of the lantern, I see that the clerk has turned slightly green.

At the far end of the crypt a makeshift bier has been created from wooden trestles and planks. On top lies a shapeless mound wrapped in a shroud. The smell of decaying flesh grows stronger as we approach. The clerk holds up his light and indicates the body, his face buried in the crook of his arm. Mistress Dunne looks at me. Since it appears no one else is willing, I step forward to draw back the winding sheet and force myself to look.

Mistress Dunne gives a little cry, muffled by her handkerchief, and clutches at her maid’s arm to steady herself. I do not blame her; no effort has been made to lay out the body with any humanity. The eyes stare out of the blackening face at some nameless horror on the ceiling, a vision granted only to the dead; the jaw has not been tied, and hangs slack in a hideous grimace, teeth bared and tongue lolling. Some unspeakable fluid seeps in a glistening trickle from the nostrils and the corners of the eyes. The clerk has turned from green to grey and is swaying slightly, the cone of light from his lantern sliding back and forth up the wall.

‘For the love of God, man, could you not have laid him out better, knowing his widow was coming? Bound the jaw and closed his eyes, at least,’ I say, angry not just that Mistress Dunne should have to see her husband like this, but also at the lack of feeling or respect for a fellow creature. She looks up at me, surprised.

‘Coroner said the body was not to be interfered with,’ the clerk mutters, defensive, barely opening his lips.

‘Would it have hurt to lay him out properly for burial?’

The young man’s mouth curls into a sneer. ‘With the burial he’ll have—’

‘The manner of my husband’s burial has yet to be determined,’ Mistress Dunne says, mustering her dignity. ‘Kindly leave us. I would like to pay my last respects.’

‘I’m not to leave the body unattended,’ the clerk says, trying to breathe through his mouth.

‘Why, do you think these ladies will tuck him under their arm and make off with him?’ His attitude is beginning to irk me.

‘You may jest, sir, but it wouldn’t be the first time a body’s been stolen,’ he says, pompously.

‘Well, then – you won’t mind if I just take a closer look? Hold the light nearer, would you?’

The clerk hesitates, but moves the barest step forward and lifts the lantern. Steeling myself, I wrap the end of the shroud around my fingers and tilt the corpse’s slack chin. A pale fat maggot falls out of the mouth. Mistress Dunne cries out. The clerk makes a violent retching sound and dashes for the door, dropping the lantern. With great presence of mind, Agnes grabs it; fortunately the glass has only cracked, not smashed, and the flame is still intact. From outside we hear the sound of copious retching.

Mistress Dunne has turned away, but she maintains an admirable self-control. Coroner be damned, I think; grasping the linen shroud firmly, I tear off a long strip and tie it around the corpse’s head so that the mouth no longer hangs so hideously. My stomach heaves as if on a strong ocean swell as I touch the fine hair, but when the band is knotted the poor man looks a little more presentable. I consider closing those dreadful staring eyes, but the thought of whatever is seeping from the eyeballs causes me to draw back, too squeamish to do him this final courtesy. I look down at his face in the candlelight. Robert Dunne was a broad-faced man with a heavy brow and strong, square jaw. His hair was thinning, though he kept it long on top. Although the face is mottled and bloated, I have some sense now of what he looked like in life. He has become a man, like me, like any other, rather than merely an inconvenience.

‘If they have their way,’ Mistress Dunne says, her voice muffled by her handkerchief, ‘he will be buried in this sheet and nothing more, tumbled into an unmarked grave at a crossroads out of town with a stake through his heart.’

‘It seems cruel to punish a man further when he has already dealt himself the ultimate punishment,’ I murmur. I have difficulty regarding self-slaughter as a sin of the same magnitude as murder; often I question whether it can be a sin at all. If a man’s temperament inclines him to melancholy, can he really be blamed if that melancholy overwhelms him? There have been times in my life, especially since I have been living in exile, when I have known the black glitter of despair, and understood all too well the lure of oblivion, the promise of an end to the constant battle of being. Of course, the scriptures tell us it is no end at all, only the beginning, but I have my own views on that. Sometimes only my belief that I have not yet given the world all that I am capable of offering has stayed my hand; this is a kind of arrogance, perhaps, but it serves.

‘My husband did not kill himself, Doctor Bruno,’ she announces firmly, through her handkerchief. ‘Let us keep that in mind. Though I agree with you in principle. And harsher still to punish the kin he leaves behind.’ She nods towards the body. ‘Can you tell anything from looking at him?’

I glance at her. She is clearly an intelligent woman; the least I can do, it seems, is refuse to treat her like a child.

‘If a man has died of slow strangulation, such as hanging by the neck,’ I say, indicating Dunne’s face, ‘the pressure causes the veins in his face and eyes to break, so you see crimson marks on the skin. And the eyes would protrude more, the tongue too.’

She nods, thoughtfully. ‘Yes, I once saw a woman hanged for a witch where she could not afford someone to pull on her legs. And if he had died some other way – could you not tell?’ Her eyes stray uncertainly back to her husband.