Imogen Robertson - Circle of Shadows

‘Was she suffocated with the earth in her mouth?’ Harriet’s voice sounded hollow, and loud to her in the empty space.

‘Suffocated, I think,’ he answered, without looking up. ‘The earth may have been placed in her mouth after death however. If, when I open the body, I find there is soil in her stomach and throat, then we may conclude …’

‘I understand.’

Crowther moved to the other side of the body and stooped, apparently examining the left wrist. As she watched him, he became suddenly still, frowning, then he let out his breath and turned away. She had never seen him give any sign of distress or discomfort in the company of the dead; his normal attitude was a quiet curiosity.

‘Crowther, what is it?’

He stood aside.

Trying not to think of the living woman, Harriet finally stepped forward and looked carefully at the body. There were lines around the eyes, across the forehead that Harriet recognised from her own mirror. Then she examined the skin around the throat, the uninjured wrist, the nails on that clean right hand. No bruising she could see at all. No nails broken, no sign of restraint. It was just as they had been told of Lady Martesen’s body. She thought of Kupfel’s drug. The soil in the mouth. There was unlikely to be a ready supply of soil in the temple any more than there had been a convenient method of drowning Lady Martesen in the haberdasher’s back room. Whoever had done this had brought his tools with him. So he had planned these embellished killings; he did not slice the wrist, then change his mind.

She stepped round the Countess’s head to her left side, feeling like a traveller ordered by her guidebook to examine the peculiarities of a certain effigy, and turned her attention to the injured wrist. The deep slash had let the flesh separate to expose the meat and matter below. The hand was blackened with blood. It had run from the wound and across her palm, then travelled along the fingers. Its course was easy to read. The thumb was clean. She spoke as she thought. ‘The blood on the hand suggests the heart was still in motion when the injury occurred, does it not? This is a flow, a wound in living flesh.’ She glanced up at him and Crowther nodded. ‘We had thought the lack of blood might mean these wounds to the wrists were made after death, but it cannot be so.’ She remembered what Krall had said about the place where Bertram Raben had died. That there was not enough blood. And no mention of any blood at all at the scene of the death of Herr Fink.

‘That footman talked of blood in the room where she was found. You translated the word he chose as “drops”, if I remember.’ Crowther nodded again. ‘That does not suggest the quantity of blood that would result from this wound. It must have poured out. There should have been pools of it.’ The wound must then have been inflicted, and allowed to give forth a profusion, before the victim’s mouth and nose were sealed and her heart ceased to beat. So where in the name of God was the blood?

It came to her like knowledge remembered, a simple fact she had always known, but had forgotten momentarily. She felt her own blood begin to roar in her ears, and thought of an account Crowther had given her of an execution he had attended in Germany, of people crowding round the trunk of a freshly executed criminal with their cups held high to catch the blood that flowed, outpourings of the final beats of a heart that did not yet know itself dead.

‘Oh God, Crowther. Whoever did this collected their blood.’

Turning away, she walked quickly into the darkest corner of the chapel and put her hand against the wall. For a moment she hoped she might be able to control the clenching in her stomach, but as if it wished to taunt her with a separate will, her mind filled with every incident of blood-letting she had ever seen. With the eyes of a child she saw the door to her father’s room open and the local doctor emerge cradling a bowl of bright red from his regular spring bleeding; she found herself on the red-painted orlop deck of her husband’s ship assisting the ship’s surgeon among the shattered and struggling victims of a surprise attack from privateers; she was watching blood pool on the floor of the Great Chamber at Thornleigh Hall; she was bent over her husband while her skirts soaked in his blood; she was watching some man, a bowl in his hands, patiently collecting the flow from Countess Dieth’s unmoving, pliant fingertips. She struggled for the door, wrenched it open and stepped in to the courtyard, panting hard.

Crowther watched her go, but knowing what was in her mind did not follow her at once.

‘Mrs Westerman is a clever woman,’ Krall said softly.

‘Yes, she is. And it is both her gift and her curse that what she understands, she must also feel,’ Crowther replied. ‘Whatever good we have done in the past, at moments such as this, Mr Krall, I wish to God it were not so.’

The contrast between Mittelbach and Oberbach was stark. Turning off the road back to Ulrichsberg seemed to drop Michaels back into another age. One would have thought this country had been crossed by warring troops only months ago rather than twenty years in the past. It seemed a land whose people had been torn from it, and not returned. Though the rising ground to the north of the track showed signs of having been cultivated in the past, the terracing was only visible as ripples in the undergrowth. A few ancient, struggling vines curled up the remains of the poles. Near Oberbach they flourished, here they were broken and wild. The first house he saw was a ghost, the door hanging off and the garden all brambles. It was like the enchanted villages in the stories his mother used to tell him and he approached the huddle of dwellings expecting a witch.

No witch. Instead he saw chained to the flogging post in the mean village square a boy, not more than ten years old. A woman was crouching by his side, weeping and trying to wash the child’s wounds. The punishment was fresh; across the boy’s back Michaels could see the open wounds of whip blows. Six of them, and deep enough to scar. The boy was unconscious, his weight hanging from his wrists. The manacles looked too large for him. He was like a child in his father’s coat.

Michaels dismounted and led his horse to one of the buildings. There were two men standing outside with pint pots in their hands. They were watching the woman trying to support the child’s weight so the manacles would cut into her son no more, their faces blank.

‘What’s the offence?’ Michaels said quietly.

The man nearest turned and looked him up and down. He was shorter than Michaels by a head and his shape reminded Michaels of the snowmen his children had made in the churchyard that winter. They had lined the path to the church door, annoying the vicar and amusing the gentry. He had beaten them for the impertinence, but not hard. The snowman removed his pipe from his mouth and spat on the ground.

‘Whelp was caught stealing.’

‘Will no one help her?’

‘And risk a whipping themselves? No fear. Let her look to him. He is to be let down at dusk anyhow.’ Michaels looked up; the sun was not yet near its heights.

‘What did he steal?’

‘Water from the river, maybe. Headman asked the widow to keep house for him, but she’s too proud to fulfil all her duties.’

The other man laughed quietly to himself, then caught the expression on Michaels’s face and stopped.

‘What’s your business here?’ the first man asked.

‘Looking for someone. Woman, perhaps came through here two year ago, maybe stopped near here a while. Black hair, she wore down.’

‘She ain’t here no more. Never saw anyone like her.’ His answer was a bit quick and Michaels saw the other man’s eyes flick right and left.