The Scar-Crow Men

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE




BLOOD SPATTERED INTO THE FILTHY, URINE-STINKING STRAW scattered across the floor of the Abraham Ward. Will slammed into the stone flags, and before he could dispel the ringing in his skull, he felt fire blaze in his ribs, his thighs, his arms, his chest. Cudgels rained down. Foot after foot lashed out. He felt new agony sear upon old, but the ropes binding his hands behind his back gave him no chance of escape.

Through the haze of pain he could hear a cacophony of shrieks, roars and catcalls, which sounded to him like feeding time at the Queen’s menagerie at the Tower. A crowd of Bedlam’s lost souls turned away from the display of violence, tearing at their greasy hair or pressing their hollow-cheeked faces into their filthy hands, fearing they would be next. The other inmates slumped in blank stupors in their dank cells, but still moaned with each blow struck.

The three burly men surrounding Will paused, hands on knees, breath wheezing into chests that were unused to such concerted exertion. Through one half-closed eye, the battered man could see that his tormentors were little more than cut-throats and rogues, giving up their time drinking cheap ale to take the Keeper’s coin. Hair and beards unkempt, their doublets were worn and stained, the colours faded into muddy browns and greys, their jerkins mottled with the dirt of the street.

‘You dance around me like maids at the maypole,’ Will croaked through split lips, his swollen left cheek distorting his words.

Angered, a heavy-set roisterer with broken veins on his chapped cheeks snarled and stepped in to launch another kick. Will rolled out of the way, and the attacker stumbled off-balance, his scuffed leather shoe swinging in mid-air. Continuing his roll, the spy drove his legs up sharply into the back of the brutish man’s supporting knee. With a surprised cry, the rogue crashed down. Drawing his knees together, Will rammed them against his attacker’s jaw. There was a crack like a snapping branch and the lower part of the man’s face skewed to one side. His agonized howl became a feeble whimper.

‘One down, two to go,’ Will muttered, his body numb from two weeks of beatings.

The remaining two attackers stared in shock for a moment and then assaulted Will with furious blows from their cudgels. One shattered on impact, so great was the force. ‘He is a madman,’ the wiry assailant said as he threw the broken weapon away. ‘Bedlam is the right place for him.’

The spy gave in to the waves of pain, letting his thoughts find solace in the depths of his memory. It was a skill he had learned to master. This time he recalled Kit, and the first time they met, ten years ago on the second day of Christmas. Thick snow had blanketed the rooftops of Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, but the chill had spread deep into the hearts of the students who were being haunted by a series of mysterious events. Faces at windows. Locked doors mysteriously opening. Bodies washed up in the reed beds of the River Cam.

Marlowe had been one of those students, but unlike his peers he had been fearless, demanding answers, and that night he had encouraged two of his terror-stricken friends to follow a trail of inhuman footprints through the snow to the chapel.

‘We do not give in to the dark beyond the fire. We do not give in to fear. We are men,’ the budding playwright had called into the night.

Creeping into the incense-infused chapel, the three had been caught by a light around the altar. Kit had urged his two friends to investigate with him. The candle flames diminished. A low laugh rolled out, almost lost beneath the soughing of the wind. Unable to bear the fear any longer, one of the friends had turned and fled. As he reached the end of the choir, a whistle echoed, and the poor youth’s head flew from his shoulders, rolling across the flags to look up at Marlowe from his feet.

The playwright was transfixed, but his other friend fled too. Kit found him a moment later, stock-still. In the lantern light, he saw with horror that white, fatty rivulets of flesh now ran down the student’s face from beneath the hairline, his features a mess of drooping, unrecognizable skin as if he had melted. To Marlowe, Edmund looked like nothing more than the dripping candle in the lantern.

And that was when the thing that lurked there had revealed itself, pale and churchyard-thin like all its kind, black and blue concentric circles etched on its shaven head. Before it struck, Will burst into the chapel.

He remembered his greeting on that day: ‘My name is William Swyfte and I am in the employ of Her Majesty. Some would call me ratcatcher, but the vermin I destroy are bigger and more malignant than any you would find in the kitchens of Corpus Christi, young student.’

Wielding his rapier, the spy barely held the thing at bay. But he was only biding his time. When the pale attacker lunged through his defences, Will showered it with the contents of one of Dr Dee’s lethal pouches. The thing’s agonized cries rang off the vaulted roof and in a peal of thunder and a burst of darkness it was gone.

Will had come to wonder if this was the same being Carpenter had described in Kit’s lodging house in Bankside. Had the foul creature been stalking Marlowe ever since that night, trying to gain vengeance for what had later transpired? Was that the source of the haunted look that always lay deep in the playwright’s eyes?

It was the start of it, and the end of it. Will had taken Kit from the college and overseen his induction into the spy network. Over weeks, the playwright had learned all the horrors of the Unseelie Court and the demands that would be made of him to combat them.

Through the pain, Will felt a deep blast of regret. Kit had been filled with so much life, so much potential, and the spy had been forced to watch it fade away over the years. All of Marlowe’s miseries were Will’s fault. He had recruited him into the life of spying. He had been responsible for him, for that innocence Will himself had lost, and however much he had tried to protect his friend on their dismal journey through the dark, he had ultimately failed. Kit was dead.

With a crash of the door that made the inmates scurry into the shadowy corners of the ward, the Keeper hurried in. Sweating in the heat of the June day, his glowering gaze briefly took in the fallen rogue and then he growled, ‘Get that bastard back in his cell and make yourselves scarce. He has a visitor.’

Will forced a grin that sent blood running from his lips.

The two men snatched time for a few more kicks as the spy was dragged through the straw back to his dank cell. Hurled against the far wall, he lay where he fell, laughing quietly to himself. The door slammed shut and the shrieking of the inmates reached a crescendo, drowning out the Keeper as he bellowed for silence.

The cool stone floor soothed the fire burning through every fibre of Will’s body. Away from his captors, he accepted the waves of pain and let his thoughts wash on to the dark shores of his mind. He was only half aware when the door was opened once more and the Keeper said gruffly, ‘Call when you want out.’

Will’s eyelids flickered. As his gaze came into focus, he discerned a woman standing near the door, one hand sheltering the flame of a candle. Through his daze he was struck by the vibrant colour of her cloak, the blue of forget-me-nots, which reminded him of the dress Jenny was wearing on the day she disappeared. And then he felt sickened to realize that the colour now reminded him also of the devil that had taken his love’s form. Even his last, pure memory was turning towards death and decay, he thought with bitterness.

The woman’s hood was pulled low so that her face was lost to shadow.

‘Grace,’ the spy croaked. ‘You should not be in this foul place.’ He realized his mistake when the candlelight caught the visitor’s growing smile. He saw a hardness to the shape of the lips that his young friend had never exhibited.

‘The love-sick child was eager to visit the man of her dreams.’ The musical notes of the Gaelic tongue rang in the honeyed voice. ‘But I persuaded her to defer to a woman of experience.’

‘Mistress Penteney,’ Will noted. ‘I have yet to decide if you are an angel or a devil. I have had my fill of the latter.’

‘Lady Shevington actually.’ Throwing back her hood with a flourish, she smiled at Will’s puzzled expression. ‘I apologize for my earlier deceit. I was not yet ready for you to know my true identity.’

‘Viscount Shevington is in Ireland, carrying out the Queen’s business.’

‘Spying, you mean. Let us speak clearly.’ Casting a narrow-eyed glance through the bars in the cell door, the Irish woman satisfied herself they were not being overheard. ‘And I have been called both devil and angel in my time, but today, for you, I am undoubtedly a gift from heaven.’

Levering himself up on one elbow, the battered man struggled to form words through the dried blood on his puffed lips. ‘And I apologize for not receiving you in a better condition. Although at least I am alive.’

‘Not for much longer,’ the woman sighed. ‘The Privy Councillors have been directed to visit you here.’

‘In Bedlam?’

‘Your enemies will not risk you spreading dissent among your benighted countrymen out in the world of sane men, even for one moment. And so, for the first time, the Privy Council come to the accused, to this filthy, godforsaken hole. Why, it would be worth suffering this vile place for a while longer just to see those grey-bearded fools turning up their noses at the grime and the stink and the screams.’

Despite the pain, a wry smile crossed Will’s lips. ‘You have little love for our Queen’s foremost advisers, my lady. Why, that would be considered traitorous in some quarters.’

‘I am no daughter of this country. I do not need to bow my head and pretend.’

‘What? Not even now that you have taken the hand and name of Viscount Shevington?’ the spy said pointedly.

The Irish woman gave a sly smile in response. ‘Ah, yes.’

With shaking arms, Will pushed himself up the cold stone wall until he was in a sitting position. ‘Unless you were not his wife, of course,’ he said in a light tone that continued the game they were playing. ‘Unless, say, Viscount Shevington was dead, lost, perhaps, in one of the bogs of your homeland.’

‘Who knows what may have transpired in the long weeks since I last saw my beloved husband? Certainly, if that were to be true, I would mourn him dearly.’ The Irish woman set the candle down on the floor. ‘As much as I enjoy this banter with so great a hero, Master Swyfte, time is short.’

Tipping his head back so he could study her from beneath his swollen eyelids, Will replied, ‘I have all the time in the world, with only the rats, and my fellow inmates, and my friends with cudgels for company.’

‘Alas, were that so. I have heard the decision of the Privy Council has already been made. You will be judged of sound mind and taken directly from this place to the Tower for execution.’

Will grew serious. ‘You have heard?’

‘I keep my eyes and ears open, Master Swyfte.’

‘To learn that kind of information, you must keep them open in strange places. Bedchambers, perhaps.’

The woman did not flinch.

With the candlelight limning her flowing auburn hair, Will followed the line of the curls, considering their colour for the first time, the pale complexion, the flashing green eyes. ‘I have heard tell of a spy operating in Tyrone,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Some of my fellows who have had the pleasure of working in that green island call her Scarlet Mary. Her blade, they say, is as sharp as her tongue, and she is the equal of any man.’

The woman’s face gave nothing away. ‘I have heard those tales too. I believe she is also known as Red Meg O’Shee. Spies are everywhere, Master Swyfte, but no one is ever the person they appear to be. Surely you must know that by now?’

‘No more games, then,’ he said, dabbing at the blood trickling from his lips. ‘Why are you here?’

‘To offer you aid.’

‘Why? We do not know each other. And by all accounts Red Meg O’Shee would be more likely to slip a dagger between my ribs than reach out a helping hand.’

The Irish woman laughed, a hard and humourless sound. ‘In other times that would indeed be the case. But this plot threatens all. Not just England. My country, and all of Europe, could go down in flames should the Unseelie Court have their way.’

In her warning, Will heard the echo of the taunts whispered by his own private devil in that very cell. A great plan unfolding. The world of men turning towards night.

‘You are the very least of my concerns, Master Swyfte,’ Red Meg continued, ‘but a good man suggested you would make a formidable ally. That you understood the ways of our mutual Enemy better than anyone.’

‘A good man?’

‘The King of France, though not yet crowned as such.’ The Irish woman shrugged. ‘Only a matter of time.’

Will had heard the French monarch had taken many lovers, and from the glint in the Irish woman’s eye the spy guessed she had been one. ‘Henri? Our paths have never crossed,’ he said.

‘Nonetheless he knows of you, Master Swyfte, and the blow you struck against the Unseelie Court. All the crowned heads of Europe have heard of the unprecedented execution of one of the High Family, here, in England, after the failed Spanish invasion.’ She flashed a surprisingly respectful glance at Will. ‘I hear the Unseelie Court hate you, Master Swyfte, and not only for the murder of one of their kind; yes, and fear you too.’

Scarlet Mary prowled around the edge of the small cell, still keeping one eye on the door. Watching her graceful movements, Will tried to reconcile the brutal stories he had heard about the spy with the woman in front of him.

‘But that is a conversation for another time. First we must get you out of this predicament.’ The Irish woman gave an amused laugh seeing his disbelieving reaction to her words.

‘A bribe may have got you into my cell but the Keeper will not be so accommodating, given the importance the Privy Council have placed upon my incarceration,’ the spy replied. ‘Or will you carry me away with the help of your angel wings?’

Red Meg lifted up her skirts, without the slightest embarrassment at revealing the shapely line of her legs. From the inner folds, she produced a woollen pouch.

Pressing one long finger to her lips, she gave a lop-sided smile and said, ‘There is only one way out of Bedlam for you, Master Swyfte. You have to die.’