‘The smell must be worse than we thought,’ I commented with a grin, then wished I hadn’t. Timothy looked for a moment as though he might burst into tears.
‘I’ve warned you, Roger, that this is a serious matter. Don’t make a jest of it.’ He rose to his feet. ‘I shall expect you back here after dinner, when Mistress Gray will join us. Now, off you go, and for God’s sake, take care. Make sure you’re not being followed. If anything — anything at all — arouses your suspicions, come back and try again tomorrow.’
Half an hour later, I crossed West Cheap, strolled through the goldsmiths’ quarter and bore right into the Shambles.
I had been able to smell it from some way off, the stench assaulting my nose from the second I entered Old Change. Up close, it was even more pungent, the cobbles slippery with blood and the central drain piled high with discarded animal bones and offal. Mind you, there was less waste here than in many other parts of London. There wasn’t much of any beast that couldn’t be used; eyes were a great delicacy, as also were brains, very tasty, like the innards, stewed with an onion, and some meat could even be scraped off the ears. A whole sheep or cow’s head could make several meals and feed a family quite cheaply, as I well knew. Adela was nothing if not a thrifty housewife. I had often enjoyed a pig’s cheek, although I have to admit to a certain queasiness about eating eyes.
Stinking Lane more than lived up to its name, the houses on either side being extremely close together and the smell from the Shambles getting trapped between them. There were other aromas, too; poor drainage meant that urine and faeces were mixed with rotting vegetables and the other detritus of daily life. (Urine and faeces? I’m becoming too nice in my old age. ‘Pee’ and ‘shit’ were words that would have served me well enough once.) Twice the soles of my boots slipped on the slime of the cobbles as I counted three cottages up on the left-hand side. I took a step back and surveyed the frontage.
There was only one window, located on the ground floor, and that was shuttered. The door, too, was inhospitably closed. I hammered against the wood and waited. Nothing happened.
I hammered again, louder this time, but again no one answered. A third endeavour produced the same result.
I felt suddenly angry and kicked the door violently, but my irritation was really directed more at Timothy and myself. Why had it not entered our heads that Culpepper might be out? Why had we expected him to be sitting there, awaiting our pleasure? He wasn’t even aware of our existence.
Refusing to accept defeat, I knocked a fourth time. The door of the next hovel was wrenched open and a young woman appeared, waving a broom with fell intent.
‘Stop makin’ that fuckin’ noise, can’t you?’ she hissed. ‘I’ve just got my baby off to sleep, an’ now you come along, wakin’ the dead with yer rattling and bangin’.’
‘I’m looking for Master Culpepper,’ I said. ‘Do you know if he’s in?’
‘No, I don’t,’ the woman answered viciously, but keeping her voice low. ‘I’m not ’is bloody keeper.’ She relented slightly. ‘’E were there first thing this morning, ’bout an hour ago. I do know that ’cos I saw ’im, throwin’ ’is rubbish into the drain. Gone out, I reckon. But ’e won’t be long. ’E never is.’
I thanked her and apologized for the disturbance, hoping I hadn’t wakened the child. She grunted, but gave me a nod of acceptance before whisking herself inside again and closing her door.
I decided that it would be worthwhile to wait around and return in half an hour or so, but as there was nothing in Stinking Lane or the Shambles to interest me, I decided that I might as well walk as far as St Paul’s. If memory served me aright, there was usually some sort of entertainment going on in and around the church or churchyard. I swung on my heel and, as I did so, saw a young man on the other side of the lane, walking in the opposite direction, going towards Aldersgate. I probably wouldn’t have thought twice about him, had it not been for the jaunty blue feather in his hat.
I knew him at once. The arrogant gait, as he picked his careful way across the slimy cobbles, and the self-satisfied smirk half seen on his face both told me that this was the same man I had noticed yesterday on the water-stairs at Baynard’s Castle. With a guilty start, I remembered Timothy Plummer’s admonition to keep my visit to Master Culpepper’s house as secret as possible. Instead of which, I had made enough noise to alert one of his neighbours and had then indulged in a loud-voiced conversation with her that, in this very narrow street, could probably be heard for quarter of a mile around. I cursed myself royally for the fool that I undoubtedly was. My anger and resentment were making me careless, and that could endanger my own life as well as those of others.
How long, I wondered, had Blue Feather been there? Was he, as he seemed to be, just passing by, or had he been standing opposite, unnoticed by me, for some little time, listening to my exchange with Humphrey Culpepper’s neighbour? I shrugged fatalistically. There was no point in pursuit: he would tell me nothing to any purpose even if I accosted him, and I would only draw attention to myself and put him on his guard. If, that is, he had anything to be on guard about. The chances were, it was mere coincidence that I had remarked him two days running — although I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe this. At least I had one advantage over the stranger; he didn’t know that I had spotted him the previous day and would therefore have no reason to think that I might be suspicious of him.
On this consoling thought, I made my way across the Shambles, down Ivy Lane into Paternoster Row and from there into St Paul’s Churchyard. After a moment or two’s hesitation, I decided to pay a visit to the library housed in the east quadrant of the north cloister, which I recollected from a previous visit as being a particularly fine one. The north cloister provided further entertainment in the shape of the lawyers who congregated there day after day, either touting for business or discussing with their clients ways and means of circumventing wills that did not favour them, or how to upset the land title of some relative whom they considered to have usurped their place, or how to get an annulment for a marriage that was beginning to pall. But today, although the north cloister was as packed as ever by these gentlemen, resplendent in their striped hoods and gowns, they failed to arrest my attention. What did was the series of paintings around the walls: a depiction of The Dance of Death, the grinning skeletons writhing and cavorting as they carried off their unwilling victims one by one. Perhaps it was because of the deaths of Jeanne Lamprey and Reynold Makepeace that they caught my eye and made me stop to stare, cold fingers of foreboding stroking my spine.
However we tried to cheat it, death was always lying in wait for us from the moment we were born. Young or old, male or female, king or commoner, it was there, its crooked, bony finger beckoning us on, all unknowing to our fate, leering at us with empty eye sockets, out of the dark.
Six
‘Chilling, isn’t it?’ asked a voice behind me.
I spun round to find Eloise Gray standing at my elbow, her eyes fixed on the wall paintings in front of her. She took a step backwards in order to see them better, almost colliding with a fat little lawyer fussing along the cloister in pursuit of a client who appeared to be getting away. He glared furiously at Eloise, but she remained oblivious of his displeasure.
‘What are you doing here?’ I demanded angrily, but she ignored me, too.
‘The Dance of Death,’ she murmured. ‘The French call it La Danse Macabre, and the original of this is painted around the cloister walls of the Cemetery of the Innocents, in Paris. The story is that your late king Henry saw it when he was in the city for his coronation and ordered it to be reproduced in St Paul’s.’