She grimaced. ‘Sepultus. Samuel was his real name, his Christian name. Sepultus,’ she said again, with mocking emphasis.
I went to the door she had indicated and threw it open. I had wondered if I might find the Greek Fire apparatus in there, but there was nothing but a jumble of broken chairs, bottles, cracked flasks and, staring up from a corner, a large toad preserved in a vinegar bottle. Barak peered in over my shoulder. I picked up an enormous, curved horn that lay on a cloth. Little pieces had been cut out of it.
‘What in heaven’s name is this?’
Goodwife Gristwood snorted again. ‘A unicorn’s horn, so Samuel said. He’d bring it out to impress people, powder up bits of it in his messes. I’ll be reduced to boiling it for soup if I can’t let some rooms.’
I closed the door and looked around the hall with, its bare boards, its dried-up old rushes in the corner and the big crack in the wall. Goodwife Gristwood followed my gaze. ‘Yes, the house is falling down. This whole street’s built on Thames mud. It’s drying out in this hot weather. Creaks all the time, makes me jump. Maybe the whole place will fall on my head and that’ll be an end to all my problems.’
Barak raised his eyebrows to the ceiling. I coughed. ‘Shall we go into the workshop?’
The bodies had gone but the floor was still covered with blood, its faint tang mixed with the sulphurous stink. Goodwife Gristwood looked at the spray of blood on the wall and went pale.
‘I want to sit down,’ she said.
I felt guilty at having brought her; lifting a chair from the wreckage, I helped her sit. After a minute some colour returned to her face and she looked at the smashed chest. ‘Michael and Samuel bought that last autumn. Heaved it up here. They’d never let me know what was in it.’
I nodded at the empty shelves. ‘Do you know what was kept on those?’
‘Samuel’s powders and chemicals. Sulphur and lime and God knows what. The smells I had to put up with, the noises.’ She nodded at the fireplace. ‘When he was heating potions there I was sometimes afraid he’d blow the house up as high as a monastery church. Whoever killed them took Samuel’s bottles as well, God knows why. This is where all the great knowledge Samuel claimed to have brought him in the end,’ she said wearily. ‘And Michael with him.’ There was a sudden catch in her voice; she swallowed and made her face severe again. I studied her. She was holding in some powerful emotions. Grief? Anger? Fear?
‘Has anything else been taken that you can see?’
‘No. But I came up here as little as I could help.’
‘You did not think much of your brother-in-law’s trade?’
‘Michael and I were happy enough on our own till Samuel suggested we all buy a large house together when the lease ran out on his old workshop. Samuel was all right purifying lime for the gunpowder makers, but when he tried anything more ambitious he’d come unstuck. He was greedy beyond his knowledge, like all alchemists.’ She sighed. ‘A couple of years ago he fancied he’d found a way to strengthen pewter, some formula he’d teased out of one of his old books, but he never managed it and the Pewtermasters’ Guild sued him. And Michael was always so easily led, was sure one day his brother would make their fortune. These last few weeks Michael and Samuel spent half their time up here. They told me they’d found out a marvellous secret.’ She looked at the bloody doorway again. ‘Men’s greed.’
‘Did they ever mention the term Greek Fire?’ I watched her face. She hesitated before replying.
‘Not to me. I tell you, I wasn’t interested in what they did up here.’ She shifted uneasily in her chair.
‘You spoke of experiments, sometimes out in the yard. Did they have an apparatus, a large thing of tanks and pipes? Did you ever see anything like that?’
‘No, sir. I’d have noticed. All they took out to the yard were flasks of liquid and powder. That’s not what the earl’s men have turned my house upside down looking for, is it? I thought it was some papers.’
‘Yes, it was,’ I said mildly. Her eyes had narrowed warily when I mentioned the apparatus. ‘But there was a big metal construction as well. You are sure you know nothing of that?’
‘Nothing, sir, I swear.’ She was lying, I was sure. I nodded and stepped to the fireplace. The stoppered bottle lay where I had left it, but to my surprise the thick liquid on the floorboards seemed to have evaporated; there was nothing left but the barest stain on the floor. I touched it; the floor was quite dry. I hesitated, then picked up the little bottle, still half-full of the stuff.
‘Might you have any idea what this liquid is, madam?’