Dark Fire

  ‘I don’t blame you.’

  He stared at me aghast as a thought struck him. ‘Could it have been Elizabeth Wentworth who killed the boy? Was that why she lost the will to live after the girl was put in with her? If that’s the girl’s brother down there—’

  I thought a moment. ‘No. Joseph said Elizabeth had a cat she was devoted to. Needler said it ran away, but I think it’s her cat down there. No, it wasn’t her. I think young Ralph did this. First the animals, then the child.’

  ‘But then—Don’t you see? This gives Elizabeth a motive to put the boy down the well! You could say it was apt justice for the wretch. Perhaps she found out what he was doing—’

  ‘But why, when Needler pulled Ralph from the well, did he say nothing about the animals or the dead child?’ I shook my head. ‘He must have seen what was down there. I have to see Elizabeth again - I have to get her to talk.’

  ‘If she’s still alive.’

  ‘I’ll go first thing tomorrow. Thank you for what you did,’ I added awkwardly.

  Barak gave me a sombre look. ‘You think me hard, but I’d never hurt a defenceless creature.’

  ‘I believe you,’ I said. ‘Come, let’s get back to Chancery Lane.’

  He nodded. ‘All right. Jesu, I’ll be having nightmares tonight.’

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  NEITHER BARAK NOR I slept well that night. There had been a message from Guy when we returned, saying Elizabeth was a little better, her fever lower. He also asked me to call on him to discuss ‘the other matter’. Barak had ridden out again to Joseph’s lodging house, with a message for him to meet us at the gaol at nine.

  As I dressed on that seventh of June I thought how much I had to do that day; visit Elizabeth, see Guy, then answer Cromwell’s summons. My heart sank at the thought of that last. There were only three days left. But by now, hopefully, Cromwell would have questioned Marchamount. If Lady Honor knew nothing, and Rich and Bealknap were out of the picture, that left only him. I hoped he would lead the way to the Gristwoods’ killers; but what if, under pressure, he gave Cromwell the Greek Fire formula? Well, I thought as I dressed, if he did, that was out of my hands.

  Barak wanted to come with me to Newgate. He could not find his riding shoes and asked me to wait for him. I stood outside the house. The morning was hot again but a wind had risen, a hot breeze that sent little white clouds racing across the sky. Simon appeared, leading the horses.

  ‘Out again early, sir?’ he asked.

  ‘Ay. To Newgate gaol.’

  The boy squinted at me from under his blond mop, his narrow face full of interest. ‘Has Master Barak been fighting robbers, sir? Is that how he lost his hair?’

  I laughed. ‘No, Simon. Do not be so nosy.’ I looked at the sturdy little shoes he wore. ‘Are you used to these now?’

  ‘Yes, thank you, sir. I can run faster, which is well with all the messages I have run lately.’ He smiled at me hopefully.

  ‘I suppose it is. Here’s sixpence then, towards new shoes when those wear out.’

  I smiled as the boy ran back into the house. It struck me I knew nothing of the poor lad’s background, only that he had come to the door and Joan, liking his looks, had given him a job. Another of London’s innumerable orphans, no doubt.

  Barak appeared and we set off. As we rode down Fleet Street I told Barak my burn was giving me pain and I intended to consult Guy after we had seen Cromwell. I was worried he might want to come too, but he only nodded. His face was still marked with the shock of what he had found down the well; I was surprised how deeply it had affected him. But then, of course, he too had once been a beggar boy.

  Joseph was waiting outside the gaol. He looked tired and unshaven, his cheeks sunken. He could not go on like this much longer. I told him I had had word Elizabeth was a little better, and that seemed to cheer him.

  The gaoler answered our knock. ‘William!’ he called out. The fat turnkey appeared.

  ‘We would see Mistress Wentworth,’ I said.

  ‘How is she this morning?’ Joseph asked at the same moment.

  ‘I don’t know,’ the turnkey answered. ‘No one’s been up there - we don’t want her fever. Apart from that black apothecary; he came again yesterday, but maybe gaol fever doesn’t affect such as him.’

  ‘Will you take us to her?’

  The turnkey grunted, but led us away to the stairs. It was a relief not to have to see the Hole again. I turned to Joseph as he followed me up the winding stair. ‘I have some news,’ I said. ‘Some fresh evidence at last. I want to try again to get Elizabeth to speak.’

  A desperate hope lit Joseph’s features. I looked at him seriously. ‘I must tax her with some hard things, sir. Things that will not be good to hear. About Sir Edwin’s family.’

  He took a deep breath, then nodded. ‘Very well.’

  The turnkey let us into Elizabeth’s room. The breeze blew through the barred windows, stirring the cloth on the little table. Elizabeth was lying on her back, very still, but at least she was not twitching and muttering now. Her face was pale. I took a stool and sat down, bending forward so my face was close to hers. Joseph and Barak stood behind me, looking on. I saw the cut on her lip was unhealed, there was a nasty black scab all round it.

  She must have been awake for as I leaned close she opened her eyes. They were dull and heavy. I took a deep breath.

  ‘Elizabeth,’ I said, ‘Jack Barak here has been down your uncle Edwin’s well.’ Her eyes widened slightly, but she did not speak. ‘We broke in last night, and took off the cap that had been put over it. Barak climbed down and saw what was there.’

  Joseph’s mouth fell open. ‘You broke in!’

  ‘It was the only way, Joseph.’ I turned back to the silent girl. ‘We placed ourselves in danger, Elizabeth, to find the truth. For your sake.’ I paused. ‘We saw them. All the poor animals. Your cat. And the boy.’

  ‘What boy?’ Joseph’s voice was sharp with fear.

  ‘There is the corpse of a little boy down the well.’

  ‘Oh, Jesu.’ Joseph sat down heavily on the bed. I saw tears well up in Elizabeth’s eyes.

  ‘I am sure you did not do those terrible things, Elizabeth—’

  ‘Never,’ Joseph said hotly. ‘Never!’

  ‘Was it Ralph?’

  She coughed, and then finally spoke, in a low, sighing voice. ‘Yes. Yes, it was.’

  Joseph brought his hands up to his mouth, his expression horrified. I could see the thought had come to him, as it had to Barak, that here was a clear motive for Elizabeth to kill her cousin. I continued quickly. ‘When I visited your uncle Edwin I noticed a bad odour coming from that well, and remembered Joseph telling me Ralph’s body had a terrible smell on it when it was laid out at the coroner’s. Elizabeth, when the steward Needler went to fetch up your cousin’s body he must have seen what was down there, yet he said nothing and the family sealed off the well.’ I paused, but though tears trickled down Elizabeth’s cheeks her stare remained dull and hopeless. I went on.

  ‘That must have been because the discovery of the boy down there would have resulted in a separate investigation. Needler said nothing in order to protect someone else. Who was it, Elizabeth?’

  ‘Speak, girl, for Jesu’s sake.’ Barak said with sudden anger. ‘You are putting your uncle through the torments of the damned.’

  ‘You return to Judge Forbizer in three days.’ I said quietly. ‘If he cannot be satisfied, if you still do not speak, you will be crushed.’

  She looked at me, her eyes empty. ‘Let the crushing come. You cannot help me, sir. No one can. You must not try, it is no use. I am damned.’ She continued, with a dreadful calmness. ‘Once I believed in God, God who took care of all his creatures and showed man how he should live well and be saved by study of the Bible. The Bible the king gave to the people. I believed God helped us through the fallen world.’

  ‘So should we all, Elizabeth,’ Joseph said, clutching his hands together. ‘So must we all.
’ She gave him a look I realized was pity, wincing as salt tears flowed onto her cut lip.

  ‘What about the justice of this world?’ Barak asked. ‘What about punishment for murderers?’

  She only glanced at him; his words did not stir her this time. ‘I told you what was down there would shake your faith,’ she told me. She paused, then let out a long, groaning breath. ‘First Mother died, so painfully, from the great lump in her chest that wasted her to nothing. Then Father died too.’ She coughed again. I offered her a bowl of water but she waved it away, looking at me fixedly.

  ‘I sought consolation in books of prayer, sir. I entreated God to help me understand, but I seemed to be praying into a great dark silence. Then I was told our house was lost, our house where I grew up and was happy. I thought I would go to Uncle Joseph’s in the country, but he said I must go to Uncle Edwin’s.’

  ‘It was for your good, Elizabeth,’ Joseph said desperately. ‘We thought it best for your prospects.’

  ‘Grandam and Uncle Edwin did not want me, I knew that. They thought with my rough ways I might spoil their turning their three children into gentlefolk. But they did not know how cruel they were. They did not know how Ralph would torture any animal he could lay hands on, exploring all the different ways to inflict pain. Sabine and Avice brought him my poor Grizzy.’

  ‘Sabine and Avice!’ Joseph’s voice was incredulous.

  ‘Ralph got them to bring him animals - they thought what he did amusing, though they didn’t like getting blood or fur on their clean clothes. They were glad to have me to tease and torment, to relieve their boredom. They always used to say how bored with their lives they were.’

  ‘What about your uncle Edwin?’ I asked. ‘Your grandmother? You could have appealed to them.’

  ‘Grandam knew, but she turned her blind eyes from it. She kept everything from Uncle Edwin, what his children really were. He cared only that they should make the best show they could as young gentlefolk.’

  I passed a hand across my brow. ‘It sounds like madness, a madness the three of them infected each other with. Then you came—’

  ‘I did not know about Ralph at first. I thought he was different from his sisters; he was not fine manners one minute and cruelty the next, in the beginning he was friendly in a rough boy’s way. I look like him, you know. Maybe God has chosen me to suffer for all their sins - do you think so?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It is you that are choosing to suffer now.’

  She shook her head. ‘Ralph took me for a walk and showed me a fox he had caught in a trap and left until it was weakened. He had come with a needle to put its eyes out. I freed it and told him it was a wicked thing he did. That turned him against me. After that he joined with his sisters in finding ways to torment me.’

  ‘You should have told Edwin,’ Joseph said.

  Elizabeth smiled then, a smile so despairing it chilled me. ‘He would have believed nothing against Ralph or the girls. And Grandam cares only to see the girls well married. Sabine has a fancy for the steward Needler and Grandam used that, used him to try and keep the girls under control. She needs them to behave well on the surface until they have found rich young men.’ She looked away. ‘Pity any such gentleman, not to know what he has married until it is too late.’

  ‘What about the other servants? How much do they know? There must have been - been terrible cries from the animals.’ All at once I felt sick, black bile curdling in my stomach.

  ‘Ralph did his vile deeds down the well. He had a little ladder. It was his torture cell as well as his hiding place. I think the servants heard things, but they said nothing - they wanted to keep their positions. Uncle Edwin pays well even if he makes them all go to church twice on Sundays.’ Elizabeth had stopped crying now, her eyes had taken on a more focused look. ‘I remember Ralph had talked of finding some beggar child to toy with, but the girls said he must be careful not to be caught. There was a little crippled boy and his sister who begged around our street.’

  ‘And the girl was Sarah?’

  ‘Yes. When poor Sarah was put in the Hole I remembered her. Ralph must have enticed her brother away.’

  ‘Dear Jesu,’ Joseph said. ‘The coroner will have to be told.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘But the family may try to turn the beggar boy’s death against Elizabeth. Perhaps get Needler to say he did not see the beggar boy.’

  ‘That won’t be believed, surely.’

  ‘Public feeling has been stirred against Elizabeth. Remember that pamphlet? Forbizer will not want to let her go. And who did kill Ralph? Or was it an accident, Elizabeth? Did he fall?’

  She turned her face away. I wondered, for an awful moment, had she done it after all? But then why had Needler said nothing when he saw the well?

  ‘Ralph must have been possessed,’ Joseph said. ‘Possessed by some demon.’

  ‘Yes.’ Elizabeth spoke to her uncle directly for the first time. ‘By the devil, or perhaps by God, who is one and the same.’

  He looked aghast. ‘Elizabeth. That is blasphemy!’

  She lifted herself on her elbows, coughing painfully. ‘Don’t you see? That’s what I’ve come to understand. I know now that God is cruel and evil. He favours the wicked, as anyone who looks around the world can see. I have read the Book of Job, read the torments God inflicted on his faithful servant, I have asked God to tell me how he can do such evil, but he does not reply. Does not Luther say God chooses who will be damned and who saved, before one is even born? He has chosen me to be damned and for my damnation to start in this life!’

  ‘Rubbish!’ I turned with surprise to Barak. He glared at her. ‘You should listen to your self-pity.’

  Then she lost control. ‘Who else has pitied me? My faith is gone, I wait for my death so I may spit in God’s face for his cruelty!’ She glared at Barak, then leaned back, exhausted.

  The words rang round the room. Joseph waved his hands anxiously, as, though he could bat them away. ‘Lizzy, that is blasphemy! Do you want to be burned as a witch?’ He put his hands together and began praying aloud. ‘O merciful Jesu, help your daughter, strike the beam from her eye, turn her to obedience—’

  ‘That’ll do no good!’ Barak shouldered past Joseph and leaned over Elizabeth. ‘Listen, girl. I’ve seen that little boy. His death should be avenged. Ralph may be gone, but there are others who covered up his killing that beggar child as though it was a thing that mattered not at all. And his sister, Sarah, maybe they’ll release her from Bedlam when they find her brother was taken and killed?’

  ‘Release her to what?’ Elizabeth asked despairingly. ‘To beg again, or go for a whore?’

  I put my head in my hands, full of the horror of it all; a cheerful innocent girl, visited with calamity after calamity and then the appalling, relentless cruelty of Sir Edwin’s monstrous family, finally turning her fury on the God who had seemed to desert her. She had been pious once, no doubt, but the terrible blows she had suffered had turned her faith inside out. And was there not an awful logic in her belief that God had deserted her? Surely he had? I thought of the thousands of children who lay abandoned, begging in the streets.

  Joseph was in a terrible state, wringing his hands. ‘She could be charged with blasphemy,’ he moaned. ‘Atheism—’ I glanced at the door, wondering whether the turnkey had been listening, for if he had Elizabeth’s words were indeed enough to put her under a new charge. But undoubtedly the man would stay clear of the sick chamber.

  ‘Calm down, Joseph, for mercy’s sake,’ I said. I looked at Elizabeth. She was sobbing now, a low miserable keening. ‘Is it a wonder she has been driven to think as she does?’

  Joseph looked at me aghast. ‘You are not excusing—’

  ‘Elizabeth.’ She looked up at me again. The outburst had brought some colour to her white cheeks. ‘Elizabeth, whatever you think God has done, surely Barak is right? It is your uncle Edwin’s family you should be blaming, for it was they that did the evil. And if one of them killed Ralp
h, you should tell. They should be brought to justice.’

  ‘They will not be. I am damned, I tell you.’ Her voice rose again. ‘Let God have his way, let me be killed. Let his work be done!’ She lay back, exhausted.

  ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘Then I shall have to confront the family myself.’

  She did not reply. She closed her eyes. She seemed to have retreated back into that dark place where she lived now.

  After a few moments I rose from the stool and turned to the others. ‘Come,’ I said. I opened the door and called for the turnkey, who had retreated to the bottom of the steps. We left the cell, Joseph stumbling and almost falling.

  Outside the gaol he shivered, despite the heat. ‘I thought it could get no worse,’ he said quietly.

  ‘It was enough to freeze the blood, I know. But I beg you, Joseph, remember Elizabeth’s mind is distracted, remember what she has been through.’

  He looked at me and I saw stark terror in his face. ‘So you believe her,’ he whispered. ‘My brother has spawned a family of devils.’

  ‘I will find who did this,’ I said.

  He shook his head, his mind in utter turmoil. We took him to a tavern and sat with him half an hour while he calmed himself. By then it was time to go to Cromwell.

  ‘Come, Joseph, we will ride with you as far as your lodgings,’ I said. ‘Then we must catch a boat. We have business at Whitehall. Perhaps we may leave our horses at your lodgings?’

  He looked up with a flaint flicker of interest. ‘This other matter you are engaged on, it is a matter of state?’

  ‘Yes, it is. But I will have an answer from your family, Joseph, I promise.’

  ‘He will,’ Barak added encouragingly.

  Joseph looked at me.

  ‘Do you want me to come with you?’

  ‘No. I will go alone, or with Barak here.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ he said, his eyes full of fear, ‘be careful.’

  Chapter Forty

  THE THAMES WAS BUSY and we had difficulty finding a wherry at the river stairs. Barak cursed roundly, fearing we would be late. At length a boat arrived and we sailed upriver, a strong southerly wind plucking at my robe and driving the craft briskly through the water. I thought of Elizabeth, how terrible her state of mind must be, her whole being dominated by her hatred of the savage God before whom she meant to martyr herself. I shuddered at the darkness that overlay her mind, even as, I felt, I understood it. I glanced at Barak: he sat hunched and gloomy in the stern of the boat. I thought perhaps he understood too. But we but dared not talk of such things before the boatman.