The Legacy of the Lynx: Three people, two murders, one oath... Page 6

  All done now, and only a naked man upon his bier, a dark stain spreading out about his body as the last of the water made its way from skin to wooden grain. the grey hair upon his chest taking on a life of its own as it dried in the candle light, springing back into its accustomed curls. The man looked older than he had when he was dressed. His skin sagged, deprived of the musculature needed to give it substance, and the flesh of his face pulled away from eyes and mouth, giving the impression of the drop and droop of palsy. The skin was blotched, blossomed over chest and legs with yellow and purple bruises, the base of his buttocks a vivid purple where the blood had finally settled and coagulated once the body had come to rest on the beach wrapped up in his weed.

  Joachim went off to the sacristy to fetch some shrouding and a sack in which to gather up the dead man’s clothes and belongings. George had been tasked, in Joachim’s absence, with folding the dead man’s hands across his chest and closing his eyes. He could use candle wax if necessary, for they’d already tried to do this several times, and each time they had been unnerved to find the eyelids sliding back to half-mast, the clouded blue irises of the man’s eyes staring right back up into the world they could no longer see.

  George did as directed, dribbling on a little wax before gently easing the eyelids shut and holding them closed, feeling the pulse of his blood at his fingertips as he did so. The skin beneath his touch was thin and flaccid, reminding him of the new-born bat he’d once found fallen from the gable-end of the barn. He’d only known it was there because he trod on it and heard the crunching of its tiny bones beneath his boot. He’d looked down to see the slight, dark smudge of its blood upon the step, one tiny wing thrown free into the cone of light that came from his lamp. He’d leant down then and seen the wing, smaller than the length of his smallest finger, beating frantically against the sandy dust it was lying in, and a single claw – like the tendril of a plant – extending beyond, scratching at the dust as if it was trying to write some final message to George, its murderer. He’d felt such pity then, and such revulsion, that he’d picked up the tiny animal between forefinger and thumb and flung it as far away from him into the dark night as he could, his heart beating, beating, and wishing all the while he’d not been the one to do that stepping, to have obliterated such a fragile fight for life.

  Only when he was sure the tallow had firmly set did George lift up his fingers, relieved the eyelids this time remained shut. The worst was over, George told himself, and only the lesser duty left of placing the man’s hands across his chest. As he performed this final task George couldn’t help but notice the unnatural bulge of Golo Eck’s right shoulder where George had previously pulled his arm clean out of its socket. In trying to right it now, he suddenly understood what he’d already seen out on the beach and that something about this manner of the laying of his arms was all wrong.

  He looked closer then, and saw how bruised were the man’s wrists and forearms. And they weren’t just bruised but abraded, and in a way he’d seen before when cattle, sheep or goats fought against the tethers they’d been put in for one reason or another. He’d seen such marks on men too – thieves and drunkards for the most part – locked into the pillory, restrained at ankle and wrist, coming out two days later rubbed raw almost to the elbows, unable to stop fighting against the wooden stocks that held them to their punishment. He knew there’d been lace cuffs about those wrists, had seen them first-hand when he’d taken away the cuff-link, and more recently at the undressing. But he understood they’d been not nearly tight or hard enough to cause this much damage, no matter that the man had presumably been jumping from a sinking ship, fighting for his life.

  Joachim chose that moment to return and was already speaking as made his way from sacristy towards transept.

  ‘Can I ask you to take this out to Mr Peat?’ he was saying, beginning to pile Golo Eck’s clothes and belongings onto a large pewter tray, having been unable to find a sack close to hand. He stopped abruptly when he saw George’s face, the concern on it, the way he had stepped back from the corpse, pointing mutely at the arms he had just folded across the dead man’s chest.

  ‘George, whatever is it?’ Joachim said, putting down the tray, his gaze following George’s indicating finger. ‘Is there a problem?’ he asked as he came around and stood beside George who responded by lifting up the candle he’d used for closing up those blue and blinded eyes.

  ‘It’s his wrists and arms, Brother. Take a look at them.’

  Joachim did, but only a cursory glance before switching back to George’s face.

  ‘Well yes,’ he said. ‘They’re bruised and scratched. However else would they be? You know how a man’s flesh swells when he’s been in the water, and he’d shirt cuffs on, mind. And cufflinks.’

  He’d been about to make a small joke about those cufflinks but George was shaking his head vigorously.

  ‘No, no,’ said George, his voice anxious and pitched too high. ‘I mean, I know. I know about the cuffs, of course I do, but these here marks weren’t made by anything like as skinny as them lacy doo-dahs.’

  Joachim frowned, looking back down again at the purple circlets and scratch marks that went all about the man’s wrists and partway up his forearms almost to his elbows.

  ‘Them’ve been fettered,’ George said quietly. ‘Them’ve been tied. I’d swear it on my life, Brother. On my life. He was in the water but he was tied when he went in there, and alive long enough for them there bruises…’

  George stopped abruptly, finding it too hard to comprehend what must have happened to this man who might have survived the shipwreck, just as his kinsman Ruan Peat had done, except that unlike Ruan someone had made damn sure that he did not.

  ‘Are you certain?’ Joachim asked, for it did not seem to him an absolute at all.

  ‘Just look,’ George said and turned Golo’s left arm up, exposing its underside, an inch-wide bruise about his wrist where all the blood vessels beneath had been ruptured.

  Joachim bit his lip and shook his head, seeing it too.

  ‘Then someone has to tell the lad,’ he said, ‘because surely for him this will change everything.’

  9

  AN ISLAND NOT SO GREEN

  DUBLIN, IRELAND 1798

  Fergus got off the boat in Dublin and felt immediately and astonishingly at home, only fifteen when he’d left, heading away on his own great adventure. Getting down to Wexford was his primary goal, but first they’d decided it best for Fergus to make contact with an old acquaintance, who might be able to help him on his way.

  Ever since the ultra-Protestant Puritan Oliver Cromwell had declared the union of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland in 1649, there’d been a constant undercurrent of trouble. In the last few years – inspired by the Revolution in France – a new and more powerful group had emerged. The United Irish were attempting precisely what their name implied, their aim to unite a large portion of the populace – poor and wealthy alike – into their rebellion for Independence against English rule. Quite how bad it had got neither Golo nor Fergus had fully appreciated, all news being filtered through the myopic reports of the English press. They had, though, unearthed a few more spirited articles in an independent Scottish broadsheet more sympathetic to the Irish cause.

  ‘Look at this,’ Fergus pointed out to Golo when he first came across them. ‘I know this name, Peter Finnerty. I was apprenticed to their Printworks for a few months before we left.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Golo replied with interest. ‘So you were an aspiring journalist in your youth? Why doesn’t that surprise me?’

  Fergus smiled, for that had hardly been the case. He’d been shoe-horned into the job by his father when Fergus made it clear he wasn’t going to follow his paternal footsteps into the law. Yet he remembered the Printworks with great affection, Jerome Finnerty being a kind and tolerant master, if a little eccentric. He had the apparently unique affliction of being born with freakishly elongated big toes which forced him to wear shoes far
too large for the rest of his body. The waddle those shoes gave his gait conveyed an undeserved impression of oafishness and imbalance, which could not have been further from the truth. On warm days Jerome preferred not to wear proper shoes at all, opting instead for sandals, his two big toes heading out over their top edges like unexpected isthmuses, constantly being stubbed, grazed and stood on, so they no longer had any nails.

  ‘I doubt Jerome is still alive,’ Fergus told Golo with a pang of regret, ‘but certainly his son was named Peter, a little younger than me to be sure.’

  Golo smiled, tapping at the broadsheet and its article with the stem of his unlit pipe.

  ‘Well then,’ he said. ‘I know we were discussing trying to get you passage further south and nearer Wexford, but it strikes me that Dublin and this Peter are better places to start. Information, Fergus, and knowledge. They are always the key.’

  Fergus set out from Usher’s Quay towards the north side of Dublin, where Finnerty’s Printworks were located, a bubble of excitement in his chest. But when he got to the bridge to cross the Liffey he found his progress barred by a large and impenetrable crowd.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Fergus asked of no one in particular, imagining maybe a feast day, when one saintly effigy or another was paraded through the streets of the city from church to cathedral or back again.

  ‘Another hanging,’ the woman to his right replied.

  She quickly crossed herself as a temporary gibbet came into sight, rolled up from the curve of the bridge from the other side and pushed into place at its apex. Right behind it came a group of uniformed soldiers dragging two men so extensively chained they couldn’t move without the soldiers’ help, who were none too kind about giving it.

  ‘For why?’ Fergus asked, thinking thievery or murder, his eyes fixed on the gibbet and the soldiers shoving wedges against its wheels to stop it shifting when the inevitable came.

  ‘You been hiding in a molehill?’ asked the woman, incredulous. ‘They’re both ours, man, may God have mercy on their souls.’

  Fergus didn’t understand but had no choice but to stand fast. He was locked in on every side by folk pushing forward, craning for a better look. He’d no choice but to watch with the rest as the first of the shackled men was hauled up the steps onto the gibbet’s platform, a black sack shoved without ceremony over his head followed by a noose the size and flexibility of a goose’s neck. The crowd hushed, and from inside the sack came a muffled shouting, Fergus far slower to understand than everyone about him who swiftly took up the chant, repeating the man’s words, stamping their feet in rhythm.

  Erin go Bragh! Erin go Bragh! Erin go Bragh! Erin go Bragh!

  The growing strength of the chant was loud and unsettling – to Fergus at least – an unpredictable wave surging through the crowd only to be pulled back at the last moment. It was replaced by a communal gasp and sigh when the trapdoor beneath the condemned man’s feet was released. Down he went and quick, the rope thankfully performing its duty well, snapping his neck bones so one moment he was alive enough to shout out a last truncated Erin go Br…and the next was an empty vessel, the rope sliced through and down he went – out of sight, out of life – into the carapace of the gibbet, trapdoor swiftly put back in place to make a solid standing for the next man to take the fall.

  The soldiers were discomfited by the animated hostility of the crowds, no matter they’d been expecting it, and wasted no time bringing the second man up the steps. The quicker it was done, the quicker they could get out of here, but the men and women gathered on Fergus’s side of the bridge were only silent for the time it took the first man to drop, and that was no time at all. Now they were all starting up again, small noises from one and then another until, like a flock of swans alarmed by some strange shadow at the edge of their shared vision, every individual took courage from their neighbours and shouted louder and louder.

  They continued until they were as loud as they could be, egging each other on with their incoherent yelling until the blond-haired, uncapped captain of the execution detail raised a warning arm. From where Fergus stood the man looked like an angelic choirboy, nothing threatening to his gesture, but the crowd knew different. They wavered but did not stop entirely, not until the choirboy gave a curt nod of his head and his soldiers raised their guns, aiming them indiscriminately towards the townsfolk gathered on the bad side of the bridge.

  Fergus took a quick pace back in alarm, bumping hard into the man standing immediately behind him who did not take his cowardice well and punched him hard in the left kidney, shoving Fergus back into his allotted place. The danger was real and immediate, Fergus could feel it, and would have thrown himself to the ground if there’d been space, but was kept aloft by the people all around him, everyone packed together like bricks in a wall. The second man had a second black hood pushed down roughly over his face, a second noose flung about his neck, the crowd going quiet for just long enough for the condemned man to get out his own cry of rebellion.

  ‘Christ save me and the gree...’

  The last consonant cut off as the choirboy himself pulled the lever and the trapdoor disappeared beneath the man’s feet and down he went. Utter silence then, only the eerily loud creak as the rope stretched and twisted as the man’s body jerked, his death not so quick as the one that had gone before, and far too prolonged for anyone to have the stomach for.

  ‘Christ save me and the green,’ a single voice rose up from Fergus’s left but the choirboy captain was having none of it.

  ‘Level guns,’ he ordered, and his men swung their guns around and aimed them at the crowd.

  ‘Christ save me and the green,’ another voice, wavering, coming from somewhere at Fergus’s back, but there was no heart in it, not with the threat of bullets about to be fired without discrimination. The man on the gibbet was still kicking feebly, the black sack going in and out, in and out about his mouth as his body fought to bring in breath – or death – despite itself. Sweat prickled at the nape of Fergus’s neck and then, without conscious thought, his hands went to his mouth, cupping his lips.

  ‘Christ save me and the green!’ he yelled, loud as he was able, sending the small woman next to him ricocheting to one side as he took a step to brace his legs as he shouted again, other men dotted throughout the masses joining in, only a few of them, but as loud as they could make it. It didn’t last long, half a minute if that, until the first shot cracked through the air above their heads and smacked into the ground behind them. Another followed, and another, and then the crowd were picking up their feet and running, as was Fergus, who was tugged along by the man who had previously punched him in the back.

  ‘Well done, son,’ Fergus heard the man saying before they were parted, Fergus exhilarated, his heart thumping with fear and adrenalin as he scrambled out of distance of the English guns, soon far away, melting into the backstreets with all the rest.

  Me and the green.

  Lord knew why he’d been the one to begin the shout, certainly Fergus didn’t, only that he’d been caught up in the moment, horrified by the inhumanity of that second hanging. Now his heart was pumping and his feet were running, taking him along the streets he’d known as a lad and they didn’t go a step wrong, kept him going and going until finally he was where he wanted to be, walking now, hardly any breath left in him. Here he was, outside Finnerty’s Printworks, only a knock on the door between being outside and going in.

  10

  SEA AND SALT AND BEES

  WALCHEREN PENINSULA, HOLLAND

  Ruan sat outside the chapel on a small stone bench, listening to all the noises produced by a hospital for the dead and dying. He heard the muffled cries and moans coming from the patients immured within its walls, the soft sounds of brothers’ sandals hurrying – always hurrying – across the courtyard from one part of the building to another. He heard the shuffling of cattle and goats within their outhouses and byres whilst they waited to be fed or milked.

  He’d known nothing about t
he services these Servants of the Sick provided when he’d arrived, and hadn’t wanted to know any more of them. However, the Brother who periodically arrived to redress his wounds insisted on filling the silence. He told Ruan how they were an Italian-based order founded by St Camillus in Rome in the 1580s, active ever since, spreading slowly across Europe, primarily through fields of battle where they aided the wounded and buried the dead, the Walcheren Peninsula being as far north as they’d so far got; the place everyone nearby was brought to when they were sick or on their last legs; or after a shipwrecking, as in Ruan’s case.

  He cowered against the stone that was hard at his back, below his buttocks, the skin of his hands white about the knuckles as they gripped the thick slab of the seat. His black hair was matted and fell maddeningly across his forehead but he didn’t want to move a muscle, not even to shove it away. He found some relief in the dark veil it was drawing between himself and the afternoon that had no right to be so bright.

  He deliberately slowed his breathing, hoping that by doing so he could maybe doze off. With luck, if he did, he’d slip off the bench and bash his head, then at least he’d be able to remain here a little longer. He toyed with the idea of re-opening the wound on his arm, but it had already begun to scab over beneath its bandage. Maybe if he rubbed a little dirt in it…

  Come back, fever, do your worst. Keep me here a little longer, keep me here until someone arrives and tells me what to do.

  He withdrew into the carapace of his youth and ignorance like a hermit crab diving into an empty shell, dreading that at any moment someone would come and winkle him out. He wanted to stay until he had external direction. He didn’t want to have to think about what he was going to do if that really was Golo inside the chapel. Maybe he’d made a mistake. Maybe he still had too much salt in his eyes and it was making him see things that weren’t really there. It was true his sight was a little blurry at the edges, and that was enough to convince him that of course it hadn’t been Golo.