Shadow of the Raven (4 page)

G
reat Tom was tolling ten as Thomas walked under Wren's pepper-pot dome and up to the doors of the Christ Church Anatomy School, Oxford. Within moments the familiar shock of hoarfrost hair that belonged to Professor Hans Hascher appeared to greet him. The professor, a native of Saxony, had been most helpful in his dealings with Lydia's late husband, Captain Michael Farrell. He had put his own laboratory at Thomas's disposal as the young anatomist had tried to prove Farrell's innocence.

“It's good to see you again,” said the Saxon, lunging forward and kissing Thomas enthusiastically on both cheeks in the continental manner. His English, although understandable, was heavily accented.

“And you, Professor,” said the doctor, taken slightly aback by the effusive welcome. “Although I am sorry it is a postmortem that reunites us,” he added.

Hascher tilted his snowy white head. “And not a pretty sight, I fear,” he groaned.

Without ceremony he led Thomas into a small room with high windows at the back of the school. While the light might have been adequate, the ventilation was not, and the stench so familiar to Thomas, though not yet nauseating, indicated that the unfortunate victim had already made his presence felt. The covered corpse lay on the dissecting table in the middle of the room. The two men approached it, and with a silent nod Thomas indicated he was prepared. The professor then pulled back the cloth to reveal the face of Jeffrey Turgoose, staring blankly up at the ceiling. His eyes were wide open and his features frozen in shock. Apart from a long, thin scratch on the man's cheek, which seemed to have been recently inflicted, there were no other outward signs of violence on his face.

Thomas glanced 'round at his colleague. “So, Professor, we have work to do,” he said, divesting himself of his coat.

He donned his leather apron and laid out his instruments. The saw, the curved knives, the trocar were always arranged in the same order so that he could reach for them blindly, without having to turn away from the corpse. The professor, meanwhile, silently lit lanterns and fetched clean water in a sort of well-rehearsed priestly ritual that always preceded an autopsy examination. All was set.

Knowing the story of a dead man in life, when his heart still beat and the blood still coursed through his veins, did not make the anatomist's task any easier. Quite the opposite. Each organ held within it an imprint of his history, each slice of brain tissue a fragment of a memory. Thomas always had to remind himself to put up his emotional shield and render himself detached as long as he was in the presence of a cadaver. A murder, however, threw up its own conundrums. For the task in hand, it was the immediate past of the victim that interested him. Where had Mr. Turgoose been found? By whom? Where was the weapon that had discharged the shot?

Sir Theodisius had been able to answer some of his questions, but not all. The coroner had been given a thirdhand account of events by Nicholas Lupton. The source could therefore not be relied upon for accuracy or impartiality. It was nevertheless all that Thomas had to work on for the time being. The report ran thus:

Thomas paused briefly out of a sense of reverence before he began the grisly task in hand. Professor Hascher, at his side, also took a moment to compose himself. At least he could be grateful that this corpse was relatively fresh. Mr. Turgoose had been felled only three days ago, and the cool weather meant that putrefaction had not yet begun in earnest. At the young doctor's signal, Hascher took a deep breath and drew back the rest of the covering to reveal the corpse in its entirety.

Forcing himself to focus, Thomas leaned over the cadaver. Mr. Turgoose had been divested of his clothes and shoes, something of which Thomas did not approve. He felt it vital to view the body as near as possible to how it was at the moment of death. Irritated, he glanced at a pile of garments on a nearby table. There were buckled shoes, too, still caked in mud.

Starting at the feet, his magnifying glass in hand, Thomas detected nothing untoward, save a small bruise on the right foot. The lower torso, too, was devoid of injury on first inspection, so it was to the chest that Thomas devoted most of his attention. Leaning over the thoracic cavity, he examined the mortal wound. There was little doubt in either man's mind that a gunshot was the cause of death. It was also clear from the amount of blood loss that the missile had punctured a main artery.

“The extractor, if you please, Professor,” said Thomas, peering into the wound. The shot had entered the victim's body on the right lateral chest, shattering a rib. It had gone on to pierce the right lung and caused damage to the right atrium of the heart and the pulmonary artery before lodging itself between the second rib and the flesh. Death would have been instantaneous.

Taking the instrument, Thomas inserted the shaft deep into the wound; then, turning the handle to lengthen the screw, he could feel it latch onto the lead ball. It was a procedure he had undertaken only once on a living patient, and that was when the shot had pierced the bone and the shards threatened to infect the wound. Too many a man had died of sepsis rather than by the ball, in his experience. There were those who still believed that the shot itself was poisonous. Up until relatively recently, such wounds had been scalded with a red-hot iron or oil. At least Mr. Turgoose had been spared the lingering death accorded to so many soldiers who fell afoul of such ignorant practices in field hospitals. Thomas nearly always preferred to leave the shot in situ, knowing removal would most likely lead to infection and inevitable death. In this case, of course, the threat of corruption was not an issue, and he carefully excised the missile. The mortified flesh made a strange sucking sound but yielded up its unwelcome visitor without too much resistance. Walking over to the window, where the light was much brighter, he inspected the shot. Professor Hascher joined him.

“Vhat make you of zis?” asked the Saxon.

Thomas was silent for a moment as he studied the lead ball under his magnifying glass. “I am puzzled,” he said at last.

“Puzzled?” repeated the professor. “How so?”

Thomas walked back to the corpse and dropped the shot into a kidney dish on the adjacent table. “ 'Tis so small. No bigger than a pea.”

Professor Hascher, peering over the dish, had to agree. “But big enough to kill poor Mr. Turgoose,” he ventured, shaking his head.

Thomas eyed him intently. “Of that there is no doubt,” he replied. “But for highwaymen and footpads the blunderbuss is the usual weapon of choice.”

Hascher pictured the large, cumbersome gun with its splayed muzzle, and nodded. “Boom!” His hands jerked upward and he spread out his fingers to signify an explosion before returning to glare at the wound.

“This wound is clean,” said Thomas. “This is the only shot and it is small in caliber.” He squinted at the lead in the kidney dish.

“So if not a blunderbuss, zen . . .”

“I'd say Mr. Turgoose was shot with a pistol, and a small one at that,” said Thomas. He flung a look over at the clothes, crumpled and bloodied, on the nearby table.

Without a word, both men advanced to inspect the disheveled pile. There was something discomforting to Thomas about going through a dead man's clothes, like checking his bills or reading letters from his wife. He picked up the pair of worsted stockings. Both were splashed with blood mingled with spots of mud. The breeches, too, were spattered, but it was the fustian coat that had borne the brunt of the terrible affair. The professor held it aloft so that Thomas could inspect it more easily. The right breast was drenched in dried blood and at the center of the large, dark red stain was a hole. The Saxon was about to fold it and return it to the bundle, when Thomas stopped him. Experience had taught him always to look in a dead man's pockets. He delved in, first to the left, which he noted was torn, then the right.

“What have we here?” he asked, pulling out a crumpled scrap of paper.

The professor leaned in, frowning and hooking his spectacles onto his nose.

“Well, well,” muttered Thomas as he scanned the note. Written in an ill-educated hand were scrawled the words:
Beware of Raven's Wood.

U
p in the woods that spilled onto the Boughton Estate, the men were hard at work coppicing in the coupe. The longer spring days saw them rising with the birds and taking up their tools, not downing them again, save for the odd break, until dusk. The woodland floor should have been bursting into life by now. But where clusters of cowslips and celandine would normally peep their yellow heads above the leaf carpet, the beech mast still lingered underfoot. Spring was late.

The trees in this coupe were hazel, beech, and a few sweet chestnut. They were particularly good for fencing. They stood with their branches thin and straight and pointing upward, like hairs on the heads of frightened men. Because their arms had been lopped before their prime, their branches neither thickened nor spread. They could not reach out and entwine in a thick canopy as they did deeper inside the forest, so that grass and moss grew at their feet, enabling cattle and pigs to graze and forage freely in the mire.

On this particular morning, two men and a boy were working the stools to the northeastern corner of Raven's Wood, cutting mainly hazel, but a few ash and sweet chestnut standards, too, that were allowed to grow bigger for sturdier roof timbers. Although it was mid-April, the leaves of all but the oak had still not been persuaded to unfold themselves. The men did not complain. It made their task much easier. It was seven years since the older ones had last worked the area. The poles on most of the trees had grown high, upward of four feet from the crown, and straight, too. There was good timber to be had for fencing and roofs; firewood, as well. It was Chilterns wood that kept London fires aglow day and night, and the coppicers could barely keep up with the demand. Nearby an old mare grazed contentedly. She'd been unhitched from the wagon and hobbled. By the end of the day, she'd be pulling it down the hill into Brandwick piled high with timber.

Abraham Diggott—or Abe, as he was known—had the most years under his belt. He'd been born in the forest and had worked the trees for near on half a century, and now his face and hands were as gnarled as the broadest oak. It was often said by those who knew him that when he cut himself, it was sap, not blood, that ran from his veins. The dull thud of the ax, followed by the rasp of the saw, were sounds as melodious to him as the call of any nightingale. And seeing the bodies of his son and grandson move in and out of the dappled shade of the coppice as they cut through wood gladdened his heart. This joy, this sense of being alive, was what the forest gave him. These days, however, he knew his body was failing him. It no longer obeyed his commands. Like a blunt ax, it was not fit to work; only unlike an ax, it could not be peened and sharpened. His time was quickly passing, and he knew his son, Adam, tall and broad, would soon have to take charge.

He'd taught him well, showing his heir by example that the quality of the cut was more important than the tool used and that not all species of tree reacted the same. The common alder was best left untouched, and if an ash was coppiced in winter, the stool might not throw out shoots for fifteen months or more.

Adam's son, Jake, was also learning. Just thirteen years of age, he already knew how to slice a clean pole. But his grandfather feared the days of the younger ones could be numbered. Rumors had been blowing around like fallen leaves for days, and when the mapmakers came, the woodsmen knew them to be true. The place his family had called home for generations would soon be subject to an Act of Enclosure. The very trees they were felling would be used by the Boughton Estate to fence off not just the commons, but the forest, too. Their livelihood could be cut away anytime soon, just as surely as their saws could sever a branch from its trunk.

When they stopped to sup their small beer close to midday, it was clear the same thoughts were troubling Adam.

“We're building our own coffins,” he told his father. They had become just three in an army of men Nicholas Lupton had engaged to fell trees for the very posts and fences intended to bar them from their livings.

Young Jake was at the whetstone that had been nailed to a stump nearby, sharpening the billhooks. Adam did not want him to hear what he had to say. The older men sat on mossy trunks and ate hunks of bread. A weak sun trickled through the trees. The air smelled sweet with sap and was full of birdsong.

“There'll always be need for us coppicers,” replied his father through a half-chewed mouthful of crust.

“Aye, but we won't be our own men. We'll be under Boughton's yoke,” countered Adam. He'd heard the stories from Northampton and from south of High Wycombe. Families were being driven out of woodlands and off commons. Forced to pack up their belongings and leave their messuages, they had no other choice but to head for the towns and cities to find work. A few had not gone quietly. They had gathered in the village square and broken windows. They'd even fired a hayrick in Fritwick, but in the end those who weren't jailed still had to pack up what few belongings they had and depart.

“If this petition goes through, we'll be turned out of the forest.” Adam clapped his hands on his broad thighs. “Mark my words.”

Abe, his gray hair flecked with bark and twigs, shook his head. “We've been through hard times before, son, and we will again.”

Adam was not so sure. His father was of the forest, a man of the trees and of the seasons. To him everything had its turn and its place, a natural order and rhythm. But life was not so simple. One family's winter did not always give way to spring, and the promise of a good harvest was so often dashed by violent storms.

“I'll not stand by and do naught as they close the wood to us.” The younger man jerked his head in Jake's direction as the boy sat peening an ax. “I owe it to myself and I owe it to him.”

His father shrugged his withering shoulders. “You'll do what you must do,” he said. “Like you did the other day.”

Adam shot him a nervous look. “What do you mean?”

Abe gave a wily nod as he recalled seeing sooty smears on his son's forehead and neck. “I know you'll put up a fight and I know you won't be the only one.”

Adam sighed deeply. “We stand to lose everything, Pa,” he said.

The old woodsman nodded and was silent for a moment before he raised his gaze toward the crowns of the trees in the coupe, as if he half expected to take some inspiration from them. He chewed his scabby lip until finally he said, “You've a future ahead of you, son. You must do what you think fit. Only have a care for Jake. He needs you, and so do I.”