‘That is not true,’ he replied. ‘Elizabeth, your mother sickened and died. There was nothing I could do.’
‘Lies!’ the girl shrieked.
The man and his wife stared in horrified silence at this young girl who, when darkness fell, became another person. A veritable virago, a hag of the night, who claimed that the ghost of her own mother visited her to denounce both of them as murderers, assassins, poisoners.
‘Listen!’ she hissed. ‘Mother comes again!’
The man let his arm fall from his wife’s shoulders as a shiver ran up his spine, the hairs on the nape of his neck curling in terror. Sure enough, throughout the house the tapping and knocking began. First downstairs, then further up as if something was crawling between the wall and the wainscoting, slowly, cautiously, like a creature spat out by Hell, making its loathsome way towards this bed chamber. The knocking grew louder and began to fill the entire room. The man clapped his hands to his ears.
‘Stop!’ he yelled. He plucked the crucifix from his belt and held it towards his white-faced daughter. ‘In the name of Jesus Christ, I command you to stop!’
But the knocking continued — a rattling clatter which threatened to beat him out of his wits.
‘I can take no more,’ the woman beside him hissed. ‘Walter, I can take no more.’
And she ran down the stairs, leaving her husband transfixed in terror. Suddenly, the knocking ceased. The girl leaned forward, the skin of her face not only white but so taut it gave her a skull-like appearance, heightened by the raven-black hair tied tightly in a knot behind her head. The man took a step forward and looked into his daughter’s face, so pale, so chilling: her eyes were lifeless, two spots of black obsidian, glaring hatefully towards him, the red, soft lips curled in a bitter sneer.
He was about to take another step forward when the rattling began again, a quick juddering noise, then fell silent. The man caught that dreadful, well-remembered stench. His courage draining from him, he fell to his knees, staring pitifully at his daughter.
‘Elizabeth!’ he pleaded. ‘In the name of God!’
‘In the name of God, Walter Hobden, you are a murderer!’
The man lifted his head. His white-faced daughter was staring at him, lips moving, but the voice was that of his dead wife. Her precise intonation, the way she would emphasize the ‘R’ in his first name.
‘Walter Hobden, a curse on you for the wine you gave me and the red arsenic it contained — a deadly potion which rotted my stomach and cut short my life to leave you free to indulge your filthy lusts and hidden desires. I was your wife. I am your wife. And I come from Purgatory to warn you! I shall haunt you for as long as your soul is stained with my blood. Believe me, I have seen the place in Hell prepared for you. You must confess! I must have justice, and only then will you receive absolution!’
Walter Hobden crouched, shivering in terror.
‘No! No! No!’ he murmured. ‘This is not true! This is a lie!’
‘No lie!’ the voice shrieked.
Hobden could take no more. He turned and crawled like a beaten dog from the room, running down the wooden stairs as his daughter shivered, closed her eyes and fell back against the bolsters.
Hobden closed his own chamber door behind him, leaning against it sucking in air as he stared, wild-eyed, at the fear-filled face of his second wife. She thrust a cup of claret towards him.
‘Husband, drink.’
He staggered across, snatched the cup from her hand and gulped the rich, cloying wine.
‘What shall I do?’ he asked hoarsely. ‘Why does Elizabeth do this to me?’
He came and sat beside her on the edge of the bed. She grasped his hand as he gulped the wine; his fingers felt like slivers of ice.
‘Eleanor?’ He stared over the wine cup. ‘What can be done? Is she possessed? Has some demon taken over her soul?’
Eleanor’s sharp eyes flickered in contempt. ‘She’s a liar and a mummer!’ she jibed. ‘She has taken to her bed with the vapours.’ She wiped the sweat from her husband’s brow. ‘Walter, she is tricking you, playing some evil game.’
‘How can she be?’ he replied. ‘You hear the knocking. I watch her hands. They are above the blankets. How could she arrange that, eh? Or the terrible smell or that voice? I have searched her room when she has been asleep and I can find nothing.’
‘In which case,’ Eleanor replied sharply, ‘she is possessed and should be removed, together with that aged beldame her nurse, to some other place. A hospital, a house for madcaps. Or…’
‘Or what?’ he asked hopefully.
If this is true, if her mother’s ghost returns, then it must be a demon in disguise to spit out such lies. And both she and the room must be exorcized and blessed.’
‘But who can do that?’
Eleanor prised the wine cup from his fingers. ‘Priests are two a penny.’ She put her arms round his neck and kissed him gently on his cheek. ‘Forget these ghosts. Your daughter is a trickster,’ she whispered. ‘And I’ll show her up for the liar she is!’
CHAPTER 1
Sir John Cranston sat in the window seat of a bed chamber in a house in Milk Street just off West Cheap. He stared through the mullioned glass window which gave a good view of the church of St Mary Magdalen, watching a prosperous-looking relic-seller lay out his stall and shout for custom. Cranston smiled mirthlessly as the fellow crowed, his words carrying faintly from the street below.
‘Look, I have Jesus’s tooth which he lost at the age of twelve! A finger of St Sylvester! A piece of the saddle on which Christ sat when he entered Jerusalem. And in this casket, specially embossed, the arm of St Polycarp — the only thing left after the lions tore him to pieces in the arena at Rome! Gentle folk all, these relics, blessed by the Holy Father, can and will perform miracles!’
Cranston watched the crowd of easily gulled spectators cluster around. A rogue, he thought. He looked across at the corpse laid out on the four-poster bed, the winding sheet, carefully wrapped round it, exposing only the face which now lay back, jaw gaping, eyes half-open.
‘I am sorry, Oliver,’ Cranston muttered to the silent room. He got up, crossed to the four-poster bed and stared down at the grey, sunken face of his former comrade.
‘I am sorry,’ he repeated. ‘I, Sir John Cranston, King’s Coroner in London, a man who sups with princes, the husband of Lady Maude of Tweng in Somerset, father of the two poppets, my beloved sons Francis and Stephen — I am sorry I could not help you. You, my comrade-in-arms, my right hand in our battles against the French. Now you lie murdered and I can’t even prove it.’
Cranston gazed round the bed chamber, noting the rich possessions: the silver cups, the finely carved lavarium, cupboards and chairs quilted with taffeta, the silken cushions, testers, the gold filigree candelabra.
‘What does it profit a man,’ Cranston muttered, ‘if he gains the whole world — only to be murdered by his wife?’
He fished in his wallet, brought out two pennies, fixed them on the dead man’s eyes then covered the face with the sheet. He sighed, walked to the foot of the bed, and jumped at a sudden scurrying sound behind him.
‘Bloody rats!’ he muttered as he glimpsed the sleek, long-tailed, fat rodent slide under a cupboard and scrabble at the wooden panelling. Another darted from beneath the lavarium and easily dodged the candlestick an infuriated Cranston flung in its direction.
‘Bloody rats!’ he repeated. ‘The city’s infested with them. The heat’s brought them out.’
He stared at the lonely, sheeted corpse of his friend. He had arrived to find Sir Oliver Ingham not only dead for hours, but with two rats gnawing at his hand. Cranston had roared abuse at Ingham’s pretty young wife but she had smiled slyly and said she had done her best to protect her husband’s body since it had been found by a servant earlier in the day.
‘He had a weak heart, Sir John,’ she lisped, one soft, white hand on the arm of her ‘good kinsman’ Albric Totnes.