The Angel in the Glass Page 24

  ‘The boy looks like an angel,’ Thomas had said to Artus Bennart, ‘and therefore he shall be an angel; an angel in glass, naked, beautiful, everlasting, and you shall depict me kneeling at his feet in worship.’

  Privately Artus thought the concept was crude and somewhat vulgar, but Thomas Fairlight, as if aware that what he so fervently desired was not entirely something to be proud of, was prepared to pay well over Artus’s usual fee. Artus set to work straight away, doing as Thomas asked and providing a preliminary sketch to ensure the face was exactly right.

  Artus completed the panel, and Jannie, who had been forced to spend far too many long hours posing naked in a cold barn, was very relieved. The image was beautiful; as beautiful as the very best of Artus Bennart’s work. And, to begin with, it was enough for Thomas Fairlight.

  But very soon the gratification of his eyes was no longer enough. He approached Artus, and Artus allowed him to pay for Jannie’s body. On a terrible night of pain, shame, more pain and, ultimately, horror, Thomas Fairlight, forty-seven years old, respectable and admired man of wealth, husband and father, justice of the peace, seduced beautiful, vulnerable, pitiful, fourteen-year-old Jannie Neep.

  Soon, as is the way of addiction, once or even twice was not enough, and snatched nights merely led to a vastly increased appetite. And then Thomas demanded to buy Jannie from Artus, and, given the size of the purse and thinking about that little house he had in mind back in Rosigny-sur-Seine, Artus agreed. Paulus, horrified at what had happened and what was about to happen, tried to protest, tried to save Jannie. Artus beat him to unconsciousness with a heavy stick and sold Jannie anyway. By the time Paulus recovered Artus was gone, and so was Jannie. Thomas, Paulus later found out, hadn’t dared indulge his passion for the boy right there in his own neighbourhood, and had taken him far away.

  But Thomas’s seduction infected the object of his love, and quite soon Jannie’s beauty turned to ugliness. Thomas, horrified at what he’d done, took him covertly to Plymouth and paid for his passage back to France. Jannie, sick, in great pain, fevered, barely knew what was happening, and violent sea sickness made it all worse. As soon as he had packed him off, Thomas, terrified now, sought out his tubby, kindly, well-loved parish priest, whose name was Martin Oude, to confess his sins and beg for forgiveness. So desperate was he – and also so afraid that his sins would somehow come home to haunt and accuse him – that he gave up the Angel panel into the priest’s keeping, and Martin buried it safely away between the two parcels containing the panels from St Luke’s Little Chapel.

  Jannie disappeared into the filthy slums of the ports along the northern coast of France. And back in Devon, Paulus, in whose world Jannie was the sun, began searching for him. When he couldn’t find him in England, either around the places where they had been together or in Plymouth, he followed him back across the Channel. In slow stages, for periodically he had to work in order to eat, he retraced the route he and Jannie had taken together, back to the small town in the Low Countries where their friendship had begun. The hope that had sustained him all that long way – that he would find Jannie well and happy, having returned to the place where he and Paulus first met – was to be dashed, and it took Paulus many weeks of distress and misery to recover. When he did, and when he had laboured for a further few months to rebuild his strength, he set out once again. He never stopped looking for him, concentrating his search on the ports along the north coast of France, asking questions, hunting in the taverns, the inns and the foul dives that clustered in every port.

  And in the end, long, lonely years later, he learned by sheer chance in St Malo that a destitute vagrant had been begging, pleading with people to give him money because he had to go to Plymouth. A priest had taken pity on him, Paulus discovered, or perhaps he merely wanted to get the dirty, smelly man off his church steps. Jannie had sailed for England.

  Paulus, who had always managed to earn money by virtue of his strong body and his willingness, purchased his passage and went after Jannie. He knew where his friend was going, and he managed to catch him up as he struggled up the track that went up onto the moors.

  Paulus had been talking with barely a break for some time, and all of us could hear that his voice, probably unused to speech, was suffering. Theo said curtly, ‘Wait,’ and went outside. I glanced at Jarman, and we heard the door to Theo’s family quarters open. Soon he returned, bearing a tray on which there were four glasses and a jug of beer. We all drank deeply, for although it had been Paulus doing the talking, listening to his tale was almost as hard.

  ‘So, Jannie came back,’ Theo prompted. Like Jarman and me, I guessed, he was impatient to hear what happened next. ‘And he was planning to visit the Fairlight family at Wrenbeare.’

  Paulus gulped down the last of his beer and nodded. ‘Ja, that is right.’ He drew a deep, shuddering breath. ‘Jannie, poor Jannie, he knows he is dying, and I too, I can see that he is very sick, with the sores on his face and his body, and although I try, I try very hard to make him eat good food and drink good drink, he is not interested and he says, over and over, “Leave me be, Paulus, for I want to be dead.”’

  ‘But he went to Wrenbeare,’ Theo said again. ‘Why? Did he hope to see Sir Thomas and demand some sort of payment from him?’

  Then Paulus raised his head and looked straight at him. From that mild face and those gentle eyes, the sudden hard, critical stare was alarming. ‘Of course not,’ Paulus said. ‘Jannie loathed and feared Thomas Fairlight, and when he found out that he was dead, he rejoiced.’

  ‘Then what did he want?’ Theo thundered.

  Paulus shook his head. He was smiling gently, a very faint expression as if it was only for himself; or, perhaps, for the shade of Jannie Neep. ‘It is maybe hard to understand for you who never saw him as he was in youth, but Jannie was truly beautiful. But now it was no longer so.’ A sob burst from him. ‘To have destroyed that beauty, for this alone I hope Thomas Fairlight burns in hell,’ he said with sudden vehemence. Then, his voice breaking with passionate grief, he cried, ‘There was one thing only that Jannie wanted before he gave himself up to death, and that was to see again how beautiful he had been before Thomas Fairlight ruined him, infected him and broke him. He remembered the Angel panel, and went to Wrenbeare just to ask if he might have a look at it. He knew they wouldn’t recognize him. He went once and they chased him away. He was so desperate that he risked going back again, and that time he managed to get inside. He knew where Thomas Fairlight’s own private room was, for once he had been taken there. He could not find the panel but in the secret place that Thomas had shown him he came across the preliminary drawing that Artus Bennart had done.’

  The sketch, that torn half of a sketch of the beautiful, sorrowful face that Theo had believed to be Christ’s. Not the Saviour grieving for the sins of mankind and for his own impending fate, but poor Jannie Neep, terrified of the sins of one man who he knew would not stop until he had sated his lust on the object that had aroused it.

  ‘And Lady Clemence found him with it in his hands,’ Theo said heavily.

  ‘Ja, ja,’ Paulus agreed, ‘and she thought at first he was just a thief and, although alarmed, for she believed the sketch had been lost long ago, she felt no more than that. Then Jannie began to plead, and told her who he was. “I want to see myself beautiful one last time,” he said.’

  He paused, his face working with the emotion. ‘Jannie, my Jannie, told me that she shrank from him, that fat, ugly old woman with her pale and bulgy eyes and her face like a horse, she pulled away in disgust and horror. She told him with vicious, cruel words that he was hideous, vile, repellent. Then he too became angry and he said that all that had happened to him was because of what Thomas did to him, and that it was Thomas’s fault, not his, that he had been ruined and his golden image destroyed.’

  Yes, I reflected. I could readily see Lady Clemence spitting out so cruelly in her horrified terror as she stared at the ruined wreck that used to be Jannie Neep, her husban
d’s adored angel, inside her own house …

  ‘He came back to me that night and I knew he had failed,’ Paulus said. Tears were running down his face. ‘I told him he was beautiful to me, that I still saw him as I always had done. It did no good.’ He wiped his sleeve across his face. ‘I tried to help him, I had been trying all the time I had been there with him, going out and searching, but I couldn’t find it. I went out again that night,’ he added, his voice breaking as his grief overcame him, ‘for I think to myself, if I can find it, then perhaps it will be enough, and my Jannie will no longer wish only to die.’ His hands went up to cover his face and for a few moments he sobbed bitterly. Then, with a visible effort, he wiped his face and sat up straight. He looked at Theo and nodded, as if to say, I’m ready.

  ‘What were you looking for?’ Theo demanded. I’d been watching his impatience build up while he waited for Paulus to recover himself and I was quite surprised he’d managed not to bellow out the question.

  Paulus stared at him. ‘I did not believe the Angel panel was still at that house,’ he said. ‘As soon as we learn Thomas is dead, and dead for fourteen, fifteen years, I think, but of course they will have hidden it! And so, while I am out finding good food with which to tempt my Jannie, also I hunt, I hunt everywhere, but I go too near the village and I am chased away by a man who shouts and threatens me and calls his dogs.’

  Was that how those pieces of brilliant glass had been uncovered? I had been wondering all this time who had first exposed them to the light of day, assuming it was some burrowing animal …

  ‘I could not help my Jannie,’ Paulus was saying. ‘There was nothing to be done but for me to take him in my arms and hold him while he wept.’ He was staring down at his huge hands lying in his lap, relaxed now as if, with Jannie’s death, their purpose was gone.

  Then, looking up at Theo, he said simply, as if it was obvious, ‘She had broken his heart, that cruel, vicious woman, and then he died. And so I broke hers. I opened up her ribs and I cut it out, and I buried it out on the moors.’

  There was utter silence in the room.

  Then Theo cleared his throat and said, ‘Are you confessing to the murder of Lady Clemence Fairlight?’

  And Paulus Fiske said, ‘Ja.’

  ‘You didn’t think to tell him that his beloved Jannie didn’t die from a broken heart but was suffocated?’ I asked Theo.

  It was some time later. Paulus Fiske was back in the cell and Jarman Hodge had melted away. Theo and I were alone.

  ‘And what purpose would that serve?’ Theo said, and I sensed anger beneath the words that I knew wasn’t directed at me or my question.

  ‘None, perhaps, save that it is the truth,’ I said quietly.

  ‘Truth! Huh!’ Theo muttered.

  I understood. I too was feeling slightly … shabby, I think best described it. Paulus Fiske had done a terrible deed, and Lady Clemence’s murdered body was a violent and horrific image in my head that I knew would take some time to fade, assuming it ever did. But, dear Lord, you could understand why Paulus had done it! Loving Jannie Neep as he had done throughout his long, lonely, sad life, it must have been all but unbearable to have found him again, just at the time he was dying and wanted to satisfy one last, pitiful wish. Only to have his ruination at Thomas Fairlight’s hands thrown back in his face so viciously by a fat, ugly, frightened old woman.

  I said, ‘If you’re worrying about what will happen to him – the arrest, I suppose, the trial, the execution – I don’t think you need to.’

  ‘Why? You planning to spring him from my cell down there and see him on his way back across the sea?’ Theo demanded.

  I shook my head. ‘He’s dying, Theo.’

  Theo turned to stare at me. ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Yes. I’m not sure what’s the matter with him but, from what I saw and was told by him when I examined him earlier, I’d guess it’s some grave and chronic malady of the stomach or the guts, probably caused by a lifetime of too little food with too little goodness in it.’

  ‘I fed him,’ Theo muttered. ‘Elaine’s made sure he’s had good food since he’s been here.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure she has, and also that Paulus will have greatly appreciated the kindness,’ I said gently. ‘But it’s far too late.’

  Theo was rummaging among the papers on his desk and presently he held up the piece of paper we had found on Jannie’s body. ‘If you’re right, then I dare say he’d like to have this,’ he said gruffly.

  ‘Yes. I’m sure he would.’

  He coughed once or twice, then said, ‘How long has he got?’

  ‘Not long.’ I couldn’t be more specific, and in any case I was reluctant to say what I was thinking: with the death of Jannie Neep, Paulus had lost the one person whose presence somewhere in the world made a hard life worth going on with. But it was such a sad thought. ‘We’re speaking in terms of weeks, perhaps even days, rather than months.’

  Theo nodded. He didn’t say anything for quite some time, but then muttered, ‘Under the circumstances, I’d better take my time writing my report.’

  My prediction was right. Paulus Fiske didn’t have weeks, only a handful of days. He was found by the guard who took down his breakfast four days later, lying on the blankets Theo had provided, his face very peaceful.

  In his enormous hands he held the torn page on which Artus Bennart’s skilful hand had drawn Jannie Neep’s beautiful face.

  NINETEEN

  I left Theo at last and rode wearily home. I wanted to sit by my own fireside with good, plain food – although I had no appetite I knew I should eat, for the loss of blood had made my head spin – and a very large mug of beer.

  Celia came into the hall to meet me. She seemed to know without my telling her that I was worn out and had little wish to explain why and, bless her, she simply told me to go into the parlour while she went to ask Sallie to bring food and drink. ‘Then I’ll tell her she can retire for the night,’ she added softly.

  I was slumped over the table, my head resting on my arms, when Sallie brought the loaded tray. She set out bread, cold meats, sweet tarts and a tankard of ale, then, giving Celia a look, swept out again. The sound of the door from the kitchen into Sallie’s room reverberated through the house as she very forcefully closed it. I looked up and met my sister’s eyes and she gave a rueful smile.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ she said. ‘I believe I have offended her, but I rather thought you’d like us to be alone.’

  ‘You thought right,’ I said through bread and cheese. Celia, tactful, wise, left me to my food and my ale and only when I sat back, replete, did she come to the table and sit down beside me. I poured out a mug of ale for her, and she raised it in a silent toast before taking a sip. ‘I am sure you have been into danger,’ she said with a glance at the bandage on my forearm and the dressing on my shoulder, ‘and I am very, very glad to have you safely home.’

  ‘Thank you.’ I drank again and refilled both our mugs. ‘The wounds are not serious,’ I said.

  ‘But, to judge by how pale you were when you came in, they bled a lot,’ she remarked calmly.

  I glanced at her – I’d forgotten how observant she is – but thought it better not to answer.

  Then, trying to play down the drama and the danger, I told her briefly all that had happened since I’d left home the previous day. And, when I’d finished, she said in a horrified whisper, ‘Gabe, she could have killed you!’

  ‘But she didn’t.’ I reached out, took her hand and clasped it, giving it a firm squeeze as if to demonstrate that my injuries had not taken away my strength.

  ‘All right, I believe you!’ she said, removing her hand and wincing.

  She must have had questions she was longing to ask but she kept quiet. We sat there side by side in the gathering darkness. Presently she got up and lit a couple of lamps. ‘I think it’s time for bed,’ she said, putting one down on the table in front of me. ‘I’m tired, and you must be too, even more so.’

&nbs
p; ‘Yes,’ I admitted, ‘I—’

  There was a soft knock on the big oak door. Celia glanced at me. ‘I’ll send whoever it is away,’ she whispered, although nobody standing outside the heavy door could possibly have overheard her even if she had shouted. ‘You’re not fit to tend any patient tonight. You need to sleep, Gabe.’

  I went and put my arm round her. ‘I know. It’s all right, I’ll see who it is and what they want, and do my utmost to get rid of them as soon as I can.’

  I went to the door and opened it.

  Jonathan Carew stood on the step.

  ‘I’m so sorry to disturb you so late, Gabriel,’ he began, just as I was saying, ‘Jonathan! Come in, there’s half a jug of very fine ale in the parlour just asking to be finished off!’

  Celia, who must have seen and taken in Jonathan’s ashen face just as I had since she’d been standing just behind me when I opened the door, said in an admirably ordinary tone, ‘I’ll leave you to have a swift talk to Gabe alone, Jonathan, for I am rather tired and was just on my way to bed.’ She gave me a look that clearly said, As should you be!

  Jonathan apologized again for arriving so late, and she said politely it didn’t matter and not to worry. Then she gave us both a sweet smile and headed for the stairs.

  She disguised her curiosity very well, I had to say that for her. But I would have bet a gold coin that closing her bedroom door and settling down to sleep were the last things on her mind just then.

  ‘I am so sorry to keep you from your bed when I know full well you are injured and need to rest,’ he said as I led him through into the parlour and indicated Celia’s empty chair. I wiped the mug she had used with a clean cloth and poured out ale for Jonathan and me.

  I shrugged, which made the cut in my shoulder give out a sharp stab of pain. ‘I’m all right.’