S Parris - Prophecy

Finally I force myself to look at Abigail’s face. Bleached and tinted orange in the torchlight, I am amazed at how serene she looks for someone who has so recently met a violent death. This in itself strikes me as odd; during my years on the road I saw the corpses of men stabbed with blades and there was no such placid expression, rather a twisting of the features, their death throes written into their final expression.

I gesture for Walsingham to hold the torch up to her face; he does so, both of us kneeling now in the water that has slopped around the body, pooling in the worn dips of the old stones. Abigail’s unseeing eyes are fixed on nothing, but the whites are bloodshot, the left one entirely red. There is bruising around the mouth and nose, but no marks on the neck as there were with Cecily Ashe.

‘She was in the water?’ I ask, my voice coming out as barely a whisper.

‘Tied by the hands to one of the mooring rings at the dock here. One of the kitchen girls found her when she noticed the door to this room had been left open. She says she saw the loading-bay doors open and then something white floating in the water, like a ghost.’ He grimaces.

‘She was meant to be found, then. But from her face she didn’t drown,’ I say, almost to myself. ‘I think she was smothered, then stabbed very precisely after she stopped moving. He must have been waiting and taken her by surprise when she appeared —‘ I break off. When she appeared expecting to meet me.

Walsingham rises stiffly to his feet.

‘He came in here, I think.’ He holds up the torch and I see that on the opposite wall from the door where we entered is a wide set of double doors with a heavy bolt across them. Walsingham beckons to me, then hands me the torch and draws back the bolt, opening the right half of the doors, which swings inwards. I see that they open directly into the arched tunnel running under the building, with two wide stone steps leading to the water. The tunnel is the width of a small barge and its arched roof perhaps ten feet high, clearly built to allow boats carrying supplies to be brought directly from the river to the palace kitchens where they can be unloaded into this room. As the end of the tunnel is blocked by the metal grille, it would be impossible to gain access to the palace except through these double doors.

‘This door was open when she was found,’ Walsingham says. ‘So I surmise he came in by boat, the same way he escaped, and she must have opened the door for him herself.’ He rests a hand on the door frame and peers out over the black water softly slapping against the steps in the little channel. ‘She was floating here, right by the dock.’ He points to the water just beneath the step. ‘You’re right — this was meant as another display. If he had not tied the body up she might have sunk or drifted out of the tunnel into the river — he intended for her to be found quickly. Perhaps even while the concert was in progress.’

‘Again the mark of the prophecy — Saturn this time. He wants to leave no doubt that these deaths are connected. And this dagger —‘ I pause again, looking up at Walsingham as another memory surfaces. ‘The doll! Cecily Ashe was found holding a doll with red wool for hair that we assumed was intended as an image of Queen Elizabeth. It was pierced in the heart with a needle.’

‘I remember it well.’ He rubs the back of his hand across his chin. ‘Made like a witch’s poppet. Her Majesty was deeply disturbed by it. And now he has taken to using human dolls. But the intent remains the same, do you not think — to mimic the death of the queen?’

‘As heralded by the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn,’ I muse.

‘I recall Her Majesty pointing out this girl to me once when her ladies were gathered in the Presence Chamber,’ Burghley offers from the doorway. ‘She asked me if I did not think the girl the very likeness of herself in her youth. The comparison amused her. And indeed, when you looked closely, it seemed there was a distinct resemblance, though it was just the red hair, I suppose. Poor child.’

‘And yet …’ I shake my head as I shift my position by the body; my knees are growing numb from the wet stone. As I continue to stare at Abigail’s marble face, I realise that my attention has grown analytical, my reasoning mind has taken over from the emotion I felt at her death a moment earlier. ‘Something is not right here.’

‘You certainly have a gift for understatement, Doctor Bruno,’ Burghley says drily.

‘I mean to say — my theory must be wrong. Now that I look closely, the facts do not support it.’

Walsingham gives an unexpected bark of mirthless laughter. ‘It is a rare man who can admit that, Bruno. Most of my acquaintance strain always to bend the facts to their theories. Explain yourself.’

‘It doesn’t make sense. I had believed that Cecily Ashe was killed because she had been part of a conspiracy to murder the queen and she had perhaps changed her mind, or somehow become a threat to that plot and the other people involved. And now Abigail, who was suspected of knowing her friend’s secrets, and who may well have been seen talking to me, is also dead. But then, why, in both cases, leave the bodies where they will be found, within the court, and displayed so as to point explicitly to the queen’s death at the hands of Catholic assassins? If the very purpose of killing these girls was to silence them, to protect the conspirators …’

‘Perhaps the purpose was to punish them publicly,’ Walsingham says sagely. ‘If the killer knew or suspected it was too late to keep them silent, he may have chosen to make an example of them instead, for their betrayal.’

‘And jeopardise his own plot in doing so?’

‘Perhaps there is more than one plot,’ Burghley suggests.

‘God’s blood, William, there are a hundred plots, perhaps a thousand!’ Walsingham exclaims, pressing the palm of his hand to his forehead and beginning to pace again in the confined space between the open loading bay and Abigail’s body. ‘Most of them at the level of that sorry fellow picked up on the road from York, waving his pistols and ranting. But when we have a bottle of poison almost in the queen’s own bedchamber, brought there by a girl who owns a ring bearing the impresa of Mary Stuart, and Howards lurking about the French embassy talking of an invasion force, I think we may safely assume we are dealing with one extremely serious conspiracy to regicide and war.’

‘Then I ask again — why call attention to a plot to kill the queen if these deaths are to safeguard one?’

‘I don’t know, Bruno — to sow fear and confusion? To lead us in one direction while they attack from another? In any case, I thought you had made it your business to solve this without anyone’s help.’ The quiet anger in his voice is unmistakable. He makes a gesture of exasperation with both hands, waving the flaming torch alarmingly; its guttering light briefly illuminates a glint of something at Abigail’s neck. I reach forward to touch it and instinctively my outstretched fingers shrink from the chill of her skin; again I recall how close she stood to me under the Holbein Gate, the warmth and solidity of her flesh that time I clutched at her arm when we first spoke in the queen’s privy apartments at Richmond. All that eager life, pinched out as easily as a candle. I set my face firm and reach out a second time, willing myself not to recoil; from her cold flesh my fingers hook out a sturdy gold chain fastened at her throat. Its pendant has slipped round behind her head and become tangled in her hair; impatiently I fumble to free it, a few strands of red-gold hair coming away in my hand with the chain. Attached to it is a lozenge-shaped locket, also carved in gold.