CHAPTER VIII
For the next three weeks they explored the surrounding Peaklands, heedless of the rain that continued to fall in grey sheets. Mal had thought their previous investigations thorough, but Sandy pressed on much further this time, pointing out that distances in the dreamlands could be deceptive. Soon they had exhausted every valley within a winter day’s ride and were having to stay overnight in unfamiliar villages, but still they found nothing.
“We must have missed it,” Mal said, one freezing cold day as they circled north towards Matlock. “Surely the devourers would never have strayed so far as Rushdale if they’d escaped around here.”
Sandy sighed, his breath clouding the air. “You’re probably right. Let’s have dinner at the next inn and then head for home.”
They followed an icy, rutted path down the hillside into a small village, no more than a huddle of cottages about a grey stone church. An ale-stake outside one of the houses drew Mal’s eye, and he dismounted stiffly.
“A drink will warm us up, even if there’s no food to be had,” he said, leading his horse towards the church gate since there was no stable or even a hitching-post to be seen.
The alehouse was busy, there being little to do in the fields on these bitter winter days. The villagers fell silent as Mal entered, and exchanged glances and muttered curses as Sandy followed behind him. Mal ignored them; he was used to such receptions by now. Instead he bestowed his most charming smile upon the alewife, plied her with silver and soon took possession of two seats near the small fireplace, two jacks of very tolerable porter and a plate of bread and pickled onions.
“You’re a long way from home, gentlemen,” their hostess said, wiping her hands on her apron. “Up from Derby, are yer?”
“Yes,” Mal said quickly, before Sandy could betray their purpose. “Looking for an old friend who used to live in these parts, name of Frogmore.”
It was the first name that came to mind, but that didn’t matter. It did the trick.
“No Frogmores round here, sir. Only gentlemen of your station hereabouts were the Shawes, but they’ve been gone these twenty year or more.”
“Shawe?” Where had he heard that name before? “Oh, so they didn’t sell their house to Frogmore after they left?”
The alewife gave a short laugh. “Not likely, sir. Shawe House is cursed. That’s why they left. No one’s lived there since.”
“Cursed?”
“Haunted by vengeful spirits. Or demons. Old man Shawe was murdered in his bed; slashed to ribbons, they say.”
“Could have been a wronged woman with a kitchen knife,” Mal said, forcing a laugh.
No one else seemed to find his quip amusing. Mal turned his attention back to his dinner, and as soon as both their plates were empty they went back out into the cold.
“Demons, eh?” Mal said as they rode away from the tavern. “Where have we heard that before? Still, sounds like we’re on the right track at last.”
Mal stopped at the last house in the village and asked directions of a grubby-faced child of indeterminate sex, who ran indoors without a reply. A few moments later an old man came out.
“Shawe House, yer say? Well, ye’re on the right road. Carry on about a mile and a half and yer’ll come to a pair o’ gates on yer left. Shawe House is at the end o’ the lane – or what’s left on it.”
The directions were simple enough, and within half an hour they found themselves riding along an overgrown track between a double row of chestnut trees. After about a quarter of a mile the track opened out into what was probably once an entrance courtyard paved with brick, now turned to a copse of leafless sycamore undergrown with the frost-blackened remnants of last summer’s nettles. Beyond stood the house itself: all sagging roof timbers, crumbling brick and empty windows.
They dismounted and tied their horses to one of the sturdier saplings. Mal drew his rapier; if Sandy was right, the devourers had come from here originally, and who knew but that more could have escaped through the reopened wound in the dreamlands? It should be safe enough in daylight, but the sun was sinking and they did not have much time. He waved Sandy behind him and approached the entrance to the manorhouse.
The front door had fallen in and its remnants rotted in the damp upland climate. Within, broken bricks and roof-tiles covered the floor in a thick layer, and a damp, mushroomy smell filled the air. Mal cast about him, all senses alert, but saw no sign of devourers.
They explored the rest of the manorhouse, but found only rot and destruction giving way to nature.
“Shawe,” Mal muttered under his breath. “I know that name. John Shawe? Robert Shawe? Richard? William? Thomas?”
He ran through all the names he could think of, until–
“Matthew Shawe.” That was it. Northumberland’s protégé, friend of the astronomer Thomas Harriot. He beckoned Sandy over. “I know the son of the man who owned this house.”
“You’re sure?”
“He would have been but a child when the place was abandoned, but yes, I would wager good money on it. He is an alchemist; a pursuit he picked up from his father, perhaps?”
“Our people have knowledge far beyond that of Christian scholars. Though how alchemy relates to what happened in the dreamlands…” Sandy looked thoughtful. “There should be traces here.”
“Can you not feel them?”
“I can try.”
“Do it. I’ll keep watch, just in case.”
Sandy crouched in the rubble with his back against one of the crumbling walls and closed his eyes. Long minutes passed, and eventually Sandy’s eyes began to move under their lids. He was dreaming. Mal waited impatiently, half an eye on the sun sinking behind the far wall. They had to leave soon, or–
A sharp intake of breath made him whirl, blade at the ready. Sandy was staring up at him.
“It’s close. I felt…” He pointed towards the rear of the building. “There.”
Mal held out a hand and hauled his brother to his feet, and they made their way quickly through the ruins. At the far end of a group of outbuildings stood one that had remained surprisingly intact.
“Of course,” Mal said. “They would have kept it away from the main house. Too much risk of fire.”
He heaved open the damp-swollen door. The dank air smelt faintly of charcoal and something else, bitter and metallic, but nothing could be seen within. Mal took out his flint and tinder, and improvised a torch from a piece of scrap timber that was drier than the rest. Holding his rapier in a middle guard to defend against an attack from any quarter, he advanced slowly over the threshold.
The building was a workshop of some kind, with thick walls and a hearth at the far end, and wooden shelving along each long wall. Most of the shelves had collapsed, leaving heaps of broken glass and earthenware at their feet, held together by a sticky mass that sprouted clumps of pale fungi. A table in the centre of the workshop had also collapsed in on itself. Mal crunched across the floor to the fireplace, and noted the oven-like structure to one side, its bronze door crusted with verdigris. Sandy stooped and picked something out of the rubble.
“Look at this.” He held it out to Mal.
Torchlight glinted on a glass rod with vivid blue crystals fused to one end.
“Alchemy indeed,” Mal said softly.
“But to what end?” Sandy replied. “Alchemy has many uses, but it cannot affect the dreamlands.”
“Iron can. It cuts off our souls from that place, after all.”
“You think they were searching for a way around that?”
“Perhaps,” Mal said. “That could explain how the devourers got through. Though if the alchemist succeeded, why didn’t Selby use his magic to escape, or at least call upon his friends for aid?”
“Maybe he did and they failed to get there in time. Or perhaps Shawe is still searching.”
Mal wrapped the glass rod in his handkerchief and stowed it inside his doublet.
“Whatever happened, I need to get back to London and find out more.”
Before Mal could make preparations to leave Rushdale, snow fell again, sealing them in for the best part of a month. The delay irked him, but he forced himself to at least appear cheerful, for his wife’s sake as well as Kit’s. The boy was growing fast, and revelled in the combined attention of his father and uncle. He clearly preferred the latter, but so far that was the only sign that the soul within him was Kiiren’s. Mal had been worried that Kit might start babbling in Vinlandic or the ancient skrayling tongue before he learned English, and frighten the servants into thinking him a changeling, but Sandy assured him that it would be some years before Kiiren’s memories started to assert themselves.
“It won’t take as long as it did with me, thank goodness,” Sandy said one afternoon, as they sat by the fire watching Kit and Susanna playing peekaboo over the back of a dining chair. “His soul is strong, and his death was less horrible than ours.”
“It was horrible enough,” Mal said, trying to banish the image of Kiiren screaming as the devourer tore out his guts.
“But we were there with him, at the end. That makes a big difference.”
“If you say so.”
It was hard to reconcile this merry child with the solemn ambassador he had known. There were times he almost forgot that Kit was not his own son, so natural did he seem with his adoptive mother. He wondered how deeply Coby would mourn – how they both would – when Kit grew up and left them, as he must do eventually. For all Grey’s congratulations, they did not truly have a son and heir, not yet. Mal only hoped he had managed to get her with child this winter. She had not said anything so far, but perhaps she would not want to tell him until she was certain herself, and such things took time. Or so he had been led to believe. That was women’s business, and he had only the haziest of ideas how things went once the man’s part was done.
Thoughts of his wife sent him in search of her. With this break in the weather he had no more excuses to delay his journey south, and good reason to go. Food supplies were running low, and every ounce of flour and cheese and bacon had to be accounted for if they were not to starve before spring. The sooner he left, the sooner he would cease to be a burden on the household.
He found her in the kitchen, supervising the cooking of supper. Coby wiped her hands on her apron and left the cook to finish making the pastry.
“Can I help you, my lord?”
He smiled; ever the model of a dutiful wife in the servants’ presence. If only they knew what mischief the two of them had wrought together in the past! He led her through the servants’ hall and into the dining parlour, where they would not be overheard.
“I’m leaving tomorrow,” he told her. “The road is as clear as it’s likely to get this side of Easter, and it’s bound to be fairer going once I get out of the Peaklands.”
“Must you?” She slid her arms about his waist and laid her head upon his chest. “It feels like only a moment since you arrived.”
“You know I have to,” he replied, embracing her.
She looked up at him, her grey eyes bright with unshed tears. “Then we shall come with you. Kit’s old enough now that no one is likely to question the exact month of his birth.”
“I have to be sure it’s safe first. Our enemies could still be waiting for me.”
“But you’ll write, won’t you? I shan’t sleep for worrying that you’ve been arrested, or worse.”
“I promise,” Mal said, and sealed the vow with a kiss. “And I’ll send for you all as soon as I can. Better in Southwark under the eye of the skraylings, than a week’s ride away.”
The journey back to London took rather longer than a week, on roads thick with mud and slush and pocked with holes big enough to swallow horse and rider both. When Mal finally saw the smoke of the capital rising above the trees, relief threatened to overwhelm caution, and it took all his willpower not to urge Hector into a canter down the last stretch towards Bishopsgate.
Getting into the city was not the immediate problem, he reassured himself. Even if his description had been circulated after the Marshalsea incident, surely after six months the guards would have forgotten it? In any case, he was so bedaubed with mud that even his friends might not recognise him. No matter; there were plenty of bath-houses in Bankside where he might steam away the filth from his skin and the chill from his bones.
He guided Hector through traffic that rapidly thickened as it was funnelled into the suburb that lay outside the walls, past taverns and shops and the forbidding bulk of Bedlam. This close to the gate, he felt less certain of anonymity. He had travelled through here often when Sandy was locked up in the hospital, and long-serving guards might just remember his face, even if it took a while to attach a name to it. He pulled his cap down lower and slumped in his saddle, trying to look inconsequential but not furtive.
“You there!”
Mal’s heart twisted against his ribs for a second, but he willed himself not to give any outward sign of alarm. A glance from under the brim of his hat revealed that the object of the gatekeepers’ attention was a merchant whose wagon was scoring deep ruts in the mud.
“Got something extra in there, have you?” one of the men asked, lifting the canvas sheet lashed over a stack of barrels.
“Have you seen the shitty state of these cobbles?” the merchant replied, brandishing his hat. “It’s a wonder I haven’t lost a wheel. What do I pay my tolls for, if the parish doesn’t maintain the road?”
“Then you won’t mind paying double to help fund the next work crew, will you, sir?”
Mal left them to their arguing and slipped past, tossing a coin into the toll-collector’s box. One line of defences breached; now there was just the rest of the city between himself and the relative safety of Southwark.