I opened the neck of the little bag and tipped the contents out into my hand. A length of thin silver chain slithered and settled in the hollow of my palm, and there was a pendant suspended on it.
A pendant on a silver chain… Why did that strike a note of memory?
I bent down closer to the light of the candle flame and studied the pendant. It was a round silver coin, or so I thought at first. Then I saw that it had a strange design etched on it, unlike that on any coin I’d ever seen. The lines were worn with age but I could see what they depicted. It was a strange figure made up of a man and a woman, half and half, wearing one crown, their disparate feet standing on the back of a two-headed dragon’s back.
I had seen that image before.
Silently I beat my fist against my forehead in frustration, trying to make my mind work. It was terribly important – somehow I knew it was – but I couldn’t find the connection. Something I’d seen, or been told… But I was so tired, so worried, and I was only keeping despair and a flood of tears at bay by sheer will power.
I lay back, the pendant and chain clutched in my hand, and tried to relax. I seemed to hear Gurdyman’s voice, intoning the chant he uses to enter the meditative state. Oh, how I wished he was there with me.
Perhaps the fervour of my wish conjured up some element of my beloved teacher; I don’t know if that is possible. If anyone was likely to hear my desperate need and respond, though, it was Gurdyman.
All at once my mental turmoil began to ease. I closed my eyes, and I seemed to feel a cool hand on my forehead; someone was reassuring me, telling me everything would be all right, although I didn’t know who it was. I didn’t exactly hear words spoken; it was more a thought, put into my head. I welcomed it.
And in that dreamy state everything clarified. I knew where I’d seen that strange image before: it was the subject of a painting in Osmund’s workroom. It had been beautifully done, and I could see in my mind’s eye the rich blue of the man’s knee-length robe, the soft pale folds of the woman’s gown and the faint glitter of gold of the single crown on the two heads.
I think I must have slept for a while.
I opened my eyes to daylight. And I remembered where I’d heard mention of a pendant.
Gerda had worn a pendant on a thin silver chain. Jack had found that out when he went back to Margery’s to find out if Gerda had been robbed. The pendant had been missing from her body when she was found, but it hadn’t been worth much – the girl called Madselin had told Jack it looked ancient, and was worn very thin – and nobody had bothered to find out what happened to it.
Not of any great value, and we’d all forgotten about it. Other people may have had an excuse for that, but I hadn’t. I knew it was important, the moment Jack mentioned it. The question What was on the pendant? had leapt into my mind from somewhere and I should have gone on asking it till I got an answer.
How on earth, I wondered, did it come to be in Osmund’s cell? Was he – could he have been – one of her clients? But no, he was training to be a priest! Priests are men, said a solemn voice in my head.
I had to go back to Margery’s. Jack and I had been before and talked to the other girls, but perhaps we hadn’t asked the right questions. I got quietly out from under my blankets, tiptoed across the room and, taking a deep breath, went in to Jack.
Father Gregory sat beside him, still as a statue save for the fingers on his rosary. He opened his eyes as I came in. He smiled. ‘The patient is sleeping,’ he whispered. ‘He has been restless but he is quiet now.’
I leaned over Jack. He was deathly pale and very still. I put my hand on his forehead. He was cool. I watched his breathing. Steady, deep. I put my fingers to the pulse beating in his throat. It was fast, but not as rapid as it had been yesterday.
‘What have you got there?’ Father Gregory asked. I still held the pendant in my other hand. I held it out to him.
He studied it for some moments. Then he said, ‘Animus and anima.’
‘What does that mean?’ I had tensed.
‘The male and female principle,’ he said, still staring at the pendant as if he found it hard to tear his eyes away. Finally he looked up. ‘It is an ancient symbol, representing the union of the two sides of human nature. Don’t ask me any more’ – he held up his hand as if physically to ward me off – ‘for such matters are evil and forbidden, and I must neither speak nor even think about them.’
His mouth said the words, but I read a different message in his wise old eyes. A message that said, You should go on asking, for it is knowledge, and no knowledge is intrinsically evil.
I said, ‘Will you sit with Jack a little longer, please?’
He nodded.
As I ran along the quay towards Margery’s establishment, I was thinking hard. Animus and anima. It was, I now realized, what I’d seen in the shining stone when Jack and I discovered Morgan and Cat. The words, like symbols, had flashed out at me, but I’d had no time to absorb them. Like far too many other things, they’d gone to the back of my mind and become overshadowed.
But they weren’t overshadowed now, they were the one thing I couldn’t stop thinking about. If Father Gregory was right, and that strange design represented animus and anima, then it was what we had all been looking for, since it appeared to link Gerda with both Morgan and Osmund: it connected three of the victims.
But how? Gerda didn’t have a secret workroom, and she wasn’t a magician or a magician’s apprentice. She was a prostitute; her parents were dead, her kin all dispersed and either unable or unwilling to take her in, which was how she ended up at Margery’s.
I had reached the firmly closed door of the brothel at the end of the quay. From somewhere within, I could hear someone busy at the wash tub; a woman’s sweet voice, raised in song. I went round behind the long building and came to the laundry, where a plump woman with red cheeks and even redder hands was bending over a tub, elbow-deep in soapy water.
‘I need to see Margery,’ I said. ‘It’s urgent.’
‘Come back later,’ the woman said with a grin. ‘When she’s awake.’
‘It’s about Gerda.’
The name acted like a spell. Instantly the woman stood up, wiped her hands on her apron and led me inside the main building. We went along the passage to where Margery sat up in bed, not asleep but combing out her hair.
She recognized me, but, before she could speak, I held up the pendant.
Her eyes widened. ‘Where did you get that?’
‘It’s Gerda’s, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. Give it to me!’
I closed my hand on it. ‘It was found in the cell of the young priest, the Night Wanderer’s fourth victim,’ I said. ‘Did he visit Gerda?’
‘A priest?’ She shook her head. ‘No. I’m not saying such a man doesn’t have recourse to girls who do what mine do, but he’d hardly be likely to frequent a well-known place like mine.’ She said that with a small show of pride.
‘And you don’t think Gerda saw him without your knowledge?’
‘I know all my girls’ clients.’ It was said with utter certainty.
I clutched the pendant tightly in my hand. ‘Could it – the pendant – have been a gift from one of her clients?’
Margery shrugged. ‘I suppose so, but it was a poor gift if so. She was worth better.’
‘Could she have bought it or’ – I hesitated – ‘stolen it?’
‘She didn’t steal it!’ The suggestion made Margery angry. ‘And I don’t believe she bought it. Show me again,’ Margery commanded. I held it out to her. ‘Yes, it’s just how I remember. But look: it’s obviously ancient. The pendant itself is a bit bent, and the etched pattern is blurred with long wear. It was worn thin, see?’ She pointed. ‘I reckon,’ she said slowly, ‘it was some old family thing that had been handed down. Gerda would have treasured it, even though it had no value, because it was all she had to remember her parents and kin by. She was an orphan, you know.’