The Secrets of Life and Death (7 page)

‘It’s really slow.’ The girl’s face was surprised.

‘Your body temperature’s lower, too. Feel my hand.’ She stretched her arm within reach of the teenager.

Sadie frowned, but reached out her fingers to touch Jack’s skin lightly for a second, then withdrew. ‘You’re cold.’

‘So are you. Your body temperature has dropped about two degrees. Mine is even lower.’

Sadie felt her other wrist. ‘So, something’s wrong with me. Why aren’t I in hospital? They must have medicines …’

‘Not for what’s wrong with you. You need to be inside the sigils.’

‘What?’

Jack leaned forward and caught the edge of the old carpet. Pulling it back she revealed the arc of symbols burned into the old wooden boards. Maggie had done it with a soldering iron when Jack was a child. ‘There’s a circle on the floor and another up there.’

The girl looked up, squinting to make out the cream symbols painted on the yellowing white of the ceiling. ‘So these are what … magical? You believe they are some sort of … supernatural cure?’ She jingled the manacle on her wrist, the chain reaching through a hole in the centre of the carpet. Her voice was sceptical. ‘O … K.’

Jack stroked the dog’s head. ‘You passed out between the priest hole and the middle of the circle, don’t you remember? Even a few seconds and your heart slows down. We had to draw the sigils all over your body just to keep you alive. We call it “borrowed time”.’

Sadie pulled the jumper from around her neck, squinting inside the T-shirt underneath. ‘What … ? Who drew all over me?’

‘Maggie did. She’s the person who really saved you. She knows all about this stuff.’

Sadie pulled her clothes back around her shoulders, crossing her arms over her chest. ‘So, why?’

Jack rolled dog hair off her hands and onto the floor. ‘People like you and me, saved from death, we’re valuable. We are worth thousands to the right dealer.’

The girl’s face paled and she froze, hands tight on the blanket. ‘Dealer? Like … selling me?’

Jack shook her head. ‘Don’t be an idiot. Roisin – you don’t remember her, but she was here when you were really bad, she helped look after you – Roisin is a seer, she gets visions. She saw you, dying, in the city centre and told me to find you. To try and save you.’

‘But I didn’t die …’ Sadie’s voice was hard. She leaned back on her cushions, and looked around the room, gaze darting over the wall of bookcases, and the doors into the hall and kitchen. ‘When will I get better, then? When can I go home?’

Jack stood up, opened a door on a cupboard, the top piled with papers. She took out a dog brush. ‘I never went home.’ She started grooming the dog’s thick pelt.

The words seemed to hang in the air, over the sound of the crackling of the fire and the bristles sweeping through the dog’s coat.

‘You can’t keep me here for ever. I’ll get out.’

‘You’ll understand with time.’ Jack turned back to the girl, seeing her blue eyes staring at her, but brimming with tears.

Sadie dashed her sleeve over her face and sniffed. ‘You have to let me go. If you don’t, I’ll get out, I’ll tell the police.’

Jack felt a lurch in her chest at the memory of Carla saying much the same thing.

‘I can’t let that happen again.’

‘Again?’ The girl was sharp, jumping on every snippet of information.

‘The last girl here, was like you and me. The same sickness. She … bolted, she escaped. She didn’t understand, she wouldn’t listen. She died a few minutes after leaving the cottage.’ Her throat tightened, roughening her voice. ‘That was after months here. All you would have to do is step into the kitchen and your lungs will fill up and your heart will stop. It’s the way you were supposed to have died. Choking on your own vomit.’

There was a long silence, then the girl broke it. ‘I’ve never even been drunk before.’

‘It doesn’t matter now, that was your old life. Now you have a new one. You’re on “borrowed time”. If we get one herb wrong, leave one sigil out or let you go out of the circle, you will choke to death.’

‘The lands of Europe are scourged by the Inquisition, at the expense of many a fine English or Dutch sailor or anyone who espouses the Protestant creed. Konrad von Schönborn, a knight of the Holy Roman Empire, is an inquisitor with the ear of cardinals. Yet no one who has met him could doubt that he wields a sword with as much force as his crucifix, and carries the authority of the Pope himself.’

Edward Kelley
16 November 1585
Niepolomice

In these barbaric lands, it was customary for travellers to share beds. Climbing between coarse sheets, next to my mentor, I had not expected to sleep well. I was grateful to be given a bed at all. My head was full of tales of English sailors tortured by the Inquisition. But the mattress was well stuffed with bracken and soon Dee’s soft breaths soothed me into sleep.

I awoke to the scraping of the door over dry rushes. The fire’s embers still smouldered, the light glowing on a yard of steel advancing towards my nose. It is these moments when your body freezes, even as your mind races for your dagger. Another man followed the first, carrying a shuttered lantern.

The form behind the broadsword was stocky and concealed within a cloak, and he stepped towards me on quiet soles. My horrified eyes were drawn to them, mud-stained calfskin riding boots, laced up the front. I was about to die as I had lived, the son of a shoemaker.

I then realised that Dee too had woken. I pushed myself to sitting and flattened myself against the wall, away from the tip of the advancing blade. My fingers fumbled beneath the blanket for my stiletto.

‘How may we help you?’ Dee said, in courteous Latin.

‘
Exsisto silens
.’ Be silent. Something in the words froze any movement and the sound in my throat. It was the tone of command, coupled with the touch of the sword tip nudging my throat under my chin. It gleamed, the cold burning my skin like ice.

‘Put the dagger away.’ The other man spoke in a soft voice. Even as my trembling hand dropped the few inches of blade I had started to hold up against the apparition, I recognised the tone. It filled me with a mixture of relief and indignation. The man swept the hood off his head and turned towards the light.

‘Do you not recognise me, Master Edward Kelley?’ he said, in perfect Latin.

‘Your Majesty.’ I bowed as best I could, huddled against the wall.

He swept off his cloak, making the small fire waver, and smoke drift around the room. He spoke in a low growl to his companion, who lowered his sword and walked over to the fire. He pushed another log on with his foot, then set the lantern upon the table. In the light, I recognised the man seated beside the king at dinner.

Dee gestured the king to the chair. ‘Your Majesty, if you will sit and tell us how we may serve you?’ He sat up in bed as if he were accustomed to armed men waking us in the middle of the night.

The king sat in the chair. The big man leaned one shoulder against the door as if he would stop an invasion.

‘My half-brother, Count Miklós Báthory.’ The king set his own sword, point down, against the arm of the chair, always within reach. ‘You may speak freely before him. He has my absolute trust.’ He spoke in another tongue, and the big man nodded, once.

Dee nodded to the count, and I managed another bow as I scrambled out of bed and onto the low stool.

‘I need your help, and the utmost discretion. I have a niece, and she suffers from the most serious disease.’ The king’s face creased into wrinkles, as if careworn. ‘No physician can help her.’

Dee held out his hands. ‘If my studies in natural science can help in any way …’

The king ran his hand through dark hair, speckled with age, and glanced at me. ‘What ails Countess Erzsébet is not something a doctor can heal. Have you heard the story of Anna, my sister?’

‘I am sorry – we have been here so little a time,’ Dee said.

The king cut him off with a wave of his hand. ‘It is better that you hear the truth from me, rather than the lies people spread. All you need to know is that my youngest sister Anna was born in the most strange and … demonic of circumstances.’

Dee pulled at his beard, as he did when he was lost for words. ‘I am no expert on demonic forces, your Majesty. Can you explain further?’

I watched the other man, his eyes darting from Dee to Istvan.

The king spoke, his voice a rumble. ‘My sister Anna quickened inside the body of my mother … when she had been dead five years.’

Felix was supposed to be grading assignments in his study at home. Rectangles on the wallpaper suggested where pictures had hung, dents in the old carpet remembered where furniture had stood. He had also conceded the cat, and exactly half their savings. The divorce was leaving him the house but had taken almost everything else. The desk had belonged to his father, when he worked for the War Office, so he had kept it.

He was relieving the tedium of reading essays by researching the markings on the dead girl’s body. He had scanned in each of the individual symbols from the post-mortem photographs, and could examine them separately. It helped to remove the distraction of the face, with its blank gaze. The shapes were separate, and those on the girl’s back, one circle inside another, were different from the ones on the front. About one third of the symbols appeared to be based on the Enochian alphabet, but he couldn’t make them form recognisable words in any language he knew. The differences were subtle, sixty-six distinct characters. He catalogued them into Enochian; degraded Enochian; unknown, possibly cuneiform; and what looked like an early Indian script, maybe Vedic Sanskrit of some sort. Three pictographs – what looked like a sun, a crescent moon and a spiky seven-pointed star – occurred several times. The images were laid out over his desk, some spilling onto the carpet. The house was so quiet, the radiators humming and bubbling into life were distracting. Images of Marianne intruded. Curled up in the armchair beside him, discussing work, falling asleep over a book, playing the baby grand …

Shaking off the memory, he searched through his diary for contacts at the British Museum. He’d last visited in January – or was it February? – to give a lecture on superstition on the Internet. He dialled the number.

‘Can I speak to Dr Martin Mackenzie, please?’

‘Speaking.’ The voice, as un-Scottish as you could imagine, was pure East London.

‘Hello, it’s Felix Guichard here, from Exeter. We met in the spring—’

‘Felix! The modern witchcraft guy, right? What can I do for you?’

Felix leaned back in his chair, looking out of the window at the darkening sky, and the overgrown shrubs. What do people
do
with gardens? Beyond mowing the grass, Felix had left all that to Marianne.

‘I’m helping the police with a case and there are some symbols involved. I believe you have something in the museum that may be similar. A medal.’

‘Ah. We have thousands of medals here. Can you narrow it down?’

‘It was bought by the museum about two years ago, from an auction.’ Felix turned over his notes and the pictures. ‘It was given to John Dee by King Istvan Báthory of Poland, around 1585. My photocopies are very basic; I really need a high-quality, magnified scan.’

He could hear the clicking of fingers on a keyboard. ‘It says here, two medals, bronze, report attached by one Felix Guichard. You authenticated them?’

‘I looked at a batch of papers, mostly notes written by Dee and his assistant, Kelley. I believe they went to a university in the States, but the museum got the medals.’

‘No one else wanted them, probably. The papers will be good for a bit of research money, maybe a couple of doctoral theses. So, how can I help? I can email you our scanned records, they’re pretty good.’

‘That would be great. The other thing is, I need to know the name of the person who sold them.’

There was a long pause at the end of the phone. ‘Strictly speaking, that’s confidential.’

‘I know. But this is an official investigation into a suspicious death. I’m sure the police could get paperwork in order – eventually. Between you and me,’ he paused for effect, ‘the symbols were drawn on the body of a dead teenager. You could be helping in what may turn out to be a murder.’

‘Well, obviously I want to help.’ There was some tapping of keys at Mackenzie’s end. ‘And I suppose you may have had this information, when you did the authentication.’

‘I may well have done. You would only be jogging my memory, I’m sure no one could blame you.’

There was more tapping and clicking. ‘The name of the vendor was a Mrs Margaret Slee, and the cheque was made out to J. Hammond. No address recorded but I have a phone number. Got a pen?’

Felix rang off, and sipped his cooling coffee. He ought to finish marking the essays first. Instead, he dialled the mobile number. After a few rings a woman answered.

‘Yes? What?’ He could hear her shut a door.

‘I believe you may be able to help the police with their investigation. My name is Professor Felix Guichard.’

‘How did you get this number?’

‘It is on the record of some artefacts auctioned two years ago. I’m looking for Mrs Slee or Ms Hammond.’

‘Mrs Slee moved out years ago.’ Her voice was husky, soft.

‘Ms Hammond, then?’

The voice hesitated. ‘What’s this about?’

‘I’m phoning about some medals you and Mrs Slee sold to the British Museum.’

‘What about them? Look, I’m really busy …’ He could hear thumping in the background.

‘I’m investigating the symbols that are inscribed on the medals.’

There was no response from the woman on the end of the phone, but he thought she took a deep breath.

Felix continued. ‘I was hoping we could discuss where you got the items from, and any background information you might have.’

‘Look, I don’t want to be rude, but we don’t want to get involved.’ Her voice was firm. ‘I don’t know anything about them, just a few old things in a box in the attic. I’m sorry, but I have to go …’

Felix started to get annoyed. ‘Ms Hammond, I’m helping with a police investigation into the death of a young girl. I would rather not pass your details on to the officers working the case. I thought if you answered my questions, they wouldn’t need to follow up in person.’