Imogen Robertson - Instruments of Darkness

“Half the city is on fire, they say.” She twisted a thin cord of her hair in her fingertips and examined the black ends as if she could read her fortune in them. “And the other half as like to burn as not.”

Clode nodded, wiped his mouth and reached for the other white roll on the table, his hunger fiercer than his distaste for it.

“They say even the Jews have put up blue banners and writ ‘we are all good Protestants here’ on the shop fronts.” She sniggered. “Didn’t know they could even write English. Just counting they do, isn’t it?”

When Clode spoke he sent a spray of plastery crumbs onto the table. “Lots of people know how to write.”

She shifted her weight onto one hip and lifted an eyebrow. “Well, I’ve never had need of it here.”

The move exposed her to the view of her master.

“Sephy! There’s other men need serving here!”

She looked over in his direction, her face a pinched figure of boredom and disgust.

“Coming!” Then, dropping her voice lower, “I shall turn witch and curse the old goat. I know what service he wants.”

She turned and sashayed away, looking back over her shoulder to offer a full smile.

Clode stood, and was out of the door again before his coins had stopped ringing on the tabletop.

They were beyond the level of the state rooms and climbing still into the more rarely used parts of the house before they spoke again.

“How is the wound?”

The maid paused and turned on the stair.

“It smarts, ma’am, but it will heal. I shall not stay here, though. This Hall is evil in its bones. I feel these things.”

She turned to continue the climb.

“I have sometimes wondered if this place had an evil at its heart,” Harriet said.

Crowther had seen too many evils done by living breathing men blamed on malignant spirits, even on God Himself. He saw it as excuse, an abnegation of responsibility. A weakness. He spoke sharply.

“For myself, Mrs. Westerman, I regard such things in the same manner I do the folk tales of sleeping with a pig’s bladder under your bed to bring on the birth of a male child, or leaving bread out for the fairies. I believe in what I can touch and see. If I do not understand it, I think that is a fault of my own intelligence, not proof of its otherworldly nature. I answer the questions of science-the rest I leave to priests and mystics.”

He realized he was speaking with impatience, and regretted it. The women, however, seemed too lost in their own thoughts to catch, or be offended, by his tone.

“There is evil here,” murmured the maid. “I can touch it in this house. I can feel it.” Then, “We are nearly there.”

They climbed another flight into the uppermost rooms of the house, and Crowther found his eyes struggling in the gloom. The wide-open proportions of the lower stories tightened and shrank here, and he had to fight the inclination to stoop as they stood on the bare floorboards of the upper landing.

“Lord Thornleigh is cared for in the old nursery.”

Crowther felt his skin crawl as they moved through the shadows.

“Is there anything you can tell us about Lord Thornleigh’s current condition?” he asked. Patience turned toward him and blinked slowly.

“He can’t speak. He can hardly move. He sleeps most times, but sometimes his eyes are open. He is fed food that does not need to be chewed and a cup is held to his lip to allow him to drink.” The maid paused. “I think he misses Nurse. He seems a lot less calm since she died. None of us likes to share the room long with him.”

Harriet stayed the girl’s arm just as she reached for the handle on one of the corridor’s tobacco-brown doors.

“Does Lady Thornleigh visit him?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes she visits him alone-at other times she does not bother to send us away. Not Mr. Hugh though. He never comes.”

She turned the handle.

After the gloom of the narrow upper corridor, Crowther was not prepared for the plain white walls of the room he now entered. It gathered the available morning light and threw it at him, so he blinked in the doorway. As his eyes adjusted, he picked out the fireplace, a maid shuffling up onto her feet next to it, placing her needlework down beside her, and only then he saw the high-backed chair facing her. It was as massive as a medieval throne. Encircling the back was a thick belt of leather. Another was visible on the arm of the chair. Crowther could see that it held in place a thin arm in a loose linen shirt, ending in a hand so white it was almost translucent, the fingers twitching convulsively every few seconds.

Harriet turned to the girl who had brought them up. “Thank you, Patience.”

Crowther heard the click of a coin, felt the girl begin to leave. The maid, who had stood, protested.

“Tell them only another hour! I shan’t stay longer than that.”

Patience closed the door without replying. The maid turned to them both with a frown. She was a squat little thing, red in the face, and her hands looked too rough to be doing fine needlework. Her eyes flicked from Crowther’s face to Harriet’s and back.

“What happened to her face?” she asked, referring to Patience.

Harriet looked at her a little coldly. “Some disagreement with Wicksteed.”

The squat maid screwed her own face up like an old handkerchief. “That little shite.”

“Take your seat,” Crowther instructed her.

She did so with a shrug.

Harriet waited at the door while Crowther walked around the chair till he could let his eyes fall on this Lord Thornleigh, Earl of Sussex, Baron of Pulborough, Companion of the Arms, one of the richest men in society. He was ready for the sight, but he still felt a cold sliver of shock twist into his spine.

The man in the chair was perhaps between sixty-five and seventy years old. His head had been shaved recently, and his scalp was dusted with new growth. The body was thin and wasted, a transparency wrapped around a skeleton. He would have certainly tumbled under his own weight, were he not held to the back of the chair by the thick leather band under his arms, which kept him pinned upright on his throne. Lord Thornleigh was dressed in a shift, and there was a rug over his knees. His arms were bound to the arms of his chair at the wrists. His jaw was slack, his head slumped loosely to one side, a thin sliver of drool hung from his mouth. His eyes were half-shut.

Crowther bowed. “Lord Thornleigh, I am Gabriel Crowther. I am a. . physician. May I examine you?”

He pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the saliva from the man’s mouth. As he did so, Lord Thornleigh’s eyes flicked up to his face. They were dead and empty, but still of such a startling ice blue Crowther almost leaped back. They reminded him of his own. Then Lord Thornleigh began to yowl softly. It was not unlike the cry of a baby in its formlessness, but it was older and more animal. Crowther thought of a wolf he had shot in Germany in his youth. It had not been a clean death and the despairing broken growl had affected him to the extent that he had never hunted again. He thought of it now looking into the white face in front of him. He glanced up and met Harriet’s eye. She looked a little sickened.

Crowther took the thin flesh of the lord’s right hand between his fingers and pinched hard. The hand jerked, and the sick man yowled again.

“Forgive me, my lord. I wished to understand the capacity for sensation in your limbs.” He watched the skin he had pinched drop back into place with the slowness of age, the blood retreat and return under its thin and failing protection. “Now if I may, I shall release your arms and look at you more closely.”

He bent over to undo the strap at the elbow and took the bird-like weight of the man’s arm between his hands. He glanced up again into the lord’s face. The dead blank look of a few moments before had dissipated. The eyes looked conscious and, to Crowther’s astonishment, afraid. The lord’s yowling increased in pitch and volume.