The Scar-Crow Men

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX




THE CRIMSON CROSS ETCHED ON THE DOOR SEEMED TO GLOW IN the suffocating dark of the mud-baked street. Carpenter shuddered. It spoke to him of the transience of life, of those now mouldering in the earth and of the cold and bloody deaths yet to come. As he approached the cramped, timber-framed house in the shadow of the Tower, he wished he had a God who would offer him respite from the horrors of that life.

‘Hrrm,’ Launceston muttered as he glanced along the row of silent homes, ‘the plague has taken its toll here.’

‘And it will take another two victims if we do not hurry, you beef-witted foot-licker.’ Carpenter tied the cloth tighter across his mouth and nose, but the apple-sweet stink of bodily rot still choked him.

Every door along the street had been marked with the sign of the plague. No candles glowed in any of the windows. No voices drifted out into the night, no husbands and wives arguing, or mothers singing their babies to sleep, or drunken apprentices winding their way home. There was only the warm July wind moaning under the eaves.

Now, Carpenter paused, resting his fingertips on the rough wood but not finding the courage to push it open. Each passing day, he wanted to be out of this morbid business a little more, to start afresh with Alice. He refused to accept that he was ruined for the mundane world, as the Earl insisted. He could still escape the shadows and the lies and the insidious threat of the things that came at midnight.

What you fight holds you in an embrace, Launceston had once said.

‘Let us be done with this so we can all move on with our lives,’ the scar-faced man growled, thrusting open the door.

Inside, the reek of rot was even stronger. Carpenter pressed his hand to his mouth to stop himself gagging. ‘When we find Shipwash I will gut him myself for putting us through this,’ he muttered.

‘What better place to hide?’ the Earl whispered, adding without a hint of irony, ‘No one in their right mind would dare venture into a plague-house.’

‘We left our own wits behind the moment we agreed to spy.’ But Launceston was right. If one of the doxies from the Cross Keys had not seen Shipwash entering the house with bread, they would never have found him.

In the faint moonlight breaking through the dusty windows, Carpenter looked around the small room. It was a meagre place with a hard-packed mud floor and three stools before the empty grate. A bunch of dried lavender hung from the beams.

With a twirl of his finger, the scarred spy directed Launceston towards the stairs. As they crept across the room, a door at the rear of the house banged. Carpenter jumped, half drawing his rapier. The door banged again, and again.

Just the wind.

Careful not to wake the sleeping Shipwash, Launceston tested each step for creaks as he climbed the stairs. The scarred spy could only think how terrified of the Unseelie Court their fellow spy must be that he would risk a gruesome death among the victims of the sickness.

Crossing the room, Carpenter felt moisture fall on to the back of his hand. A droplet gleamed darkly in the moonlight on his pale flesh. Following its trail upwards, he saw a black stain spreading across the plaster between two beams, and more drips waiting to fall.

‘God’s wounds!’ the spy cursed. ‘Get up there, quickly.’

The Earl bounded up the wooden steps with the scarred man clattering at his heels. In the bedroom, they found a hellish scene. Shipwash, flayed to the waist, his eyes missing, lay in a pool of spreading crimson. Runic symbols had been drawn on the walls in some of the poor soul’s blood.

Carpenter slumped against the door jamb. ‘Damn him. If only he had stayed with us.’ His heart sinking, he bowed his head.

Only two more victims.

And then the Unseelie Court would rule over all. England would burn, and the deaths from the plague would seem like nothing compared to the carnage that would follow.

Only two more victims.

And his dreams of a new life with Alice would be destroyed. Somehow, he felt that more acutely.

‘We have to find Pennebrygg, whatever it takes,’ he urged his companion. ‘This must end here.’

Launceston appeared not to be listening. ‘This is a fresh kill.’ His whispery voice was tinged with a queasy glee.

After a moment’s dislocation, the meaning of the Earl’s words became clear. Of course it was fresh. The blood, still dripping.

Carpenter threw himself down the stairs and out through the back of the house into the hot night. The door banging. It had been the devil-masked killer, fleeing the scene of slaughter. He silently cursed himself at the thought of how close they had come to apprehending their prey.

An alley ran along the rear of the houses, filled with piles of rotting debris. The scar-faced man peered into the gloom one way, then the other, but as he had feared, nothing moved.

Returning to the bedroom, a morose Carpenter found the Earl kneeling in the blood next to the flayed corpse, hands dripping. His eyes gleamed with an inner light. ‘There is a mark ’pon his back, as we saw with Gavell in the deadhouse.’

‘Is that not what we expected?’

‘It is. But consider: Marlowe was not slain in this manner. No skin removed, no eyes taken. He died from a simple stab wound to the brain.’ Launceston gave a faint smile of satisfaction. ‘’Twas not the same killer.’

‘You say the playwright’s death was meaningless, as the inquest decided? But his name was upon the list in his lodgings.’

The Earl shook his head slowly. ‘Marlowe is tied too closely to these matters for his passing to be an unhappy accident. But he was not a sacrifice to break down Dee’s magical defences. He died for another reason.’

Carpenter waved a dismissive hand. ‘Why should that trouble us now? We are sipping from the cup of failure, and all is turning dark around us.’

‘Not so.’ Launceston stood, casting one last loving glance at the sticky corpse. ‘In Bedlam, Griffin Devereux told Will that through the nature of the killer we could divine the identity of the man. What is his nature?’ His shoes made a sucking sound as he stepped out of the congealing pool. ‘This night is not wasted, for we have learned something of the man we hunt which may help us in the future. See here.’ He indicated black smudges on the glistening muscle. ‘These same marks lay upon Gavell. They are important in some way I have not yet discovered. But that … that is the killer’s nature.’

The Earl pointed to a bloody cross etched on the cracked plaster of one wall.

‘At the Rose Theatre, he wore the mask of a devil but he took angel’s wings to wear,’ the Earl continued. ‘He is a religious man at heart, perhaps a Catholic hiding among enemies, who feels he has been driven to do the devil’s work for the sake of a greater good. A conflicted man, who does not want to lose sight of his God amid all the slaughter.’

‘How do you know these things?’ Carpenter looked at his companion suspiciously, as if, perhaps, Shipwash had spoken from beyond the vale.

Launceston raised a pale finger to his temple. ‘I understand his mind,’ he whispered, casting another warm look at the bloody remains. ‘This is not the work of a butcher. He treats each victim with love and attention, as a man who understands that he deals with God’s plan.’ Waving one supple arm towards the dripping runic symbols, he added, ‘From those artfully crafted signs we know that he is no yeoman, but a gentleman. One of us.’

‘One of you,’ Carpenter snapped, horrified at the assertion that there was anything linking himself with his tainted colleague. He stared at the symbols for a moment and decided that he could find no argument with what the Earl was saying. ‘When the mask slipped at the Rose, Will said he thought he recognized the face he glimpsed behind it. Could … could our killer be a member of the court?’