The Night Wanderer Read online

  And in that dreamy state everything clarified. I knew where I’d seen that strange image before: it was the subject of a painting in Osmund’s workroom. It had been beautifully done, and I could see in my mind’s eye the rich blue of the man’s knee-length robe, the soft pale folds of the woman’s gown and the faint glitter of gold of the single crown on the two heads.

  I think I must have slept for a while.

  I opened my eyes to daylight. And I remembered where I’d heard mention of a pendant.

  Gerda had worn a pendant on a thin silver chain. Jack had found that out when he went back to Margery’s to find out if Gerda had been robbed. The pendant had been missing from her body when she was found, but it hadn’t been worth much – the girl called Madselin had told Jack it looked ancient, and was worn very thin – and nobody had bothered to find out what happened to it.

  Not of any great value, and we’d all forgotten about it. Other people may have had an excuse for that, but I hadn’t. I knew it was important, the moment Jack mentioned it. The question What was on the pendant? had leapt into my mind from somewhere and I should have gone on asking it till I got an answer.

  How on earth, I wondered, did it come to be in Osmund’s cell? Was he – could he have been – one of her clients? But no, he was training to be a priest! Priests are men, said a solemn voice in my head.

  I had to go back to Margery’s. Jack and I had been before and talked to the other girls, but perhaps we hadn’t asked the right questions. I got quietly out from under my blankets, tiptoed across the room and, taking a deep breath, went in to Jack.

  Father Gregory sat beside him, still as a statue save for the fingers on his rosary. He opened his eyes as I came in. He smiled. ‘The patient is sleeping,’ he whispered. ‘He has been restless but he is quiet now.’

  I leaned over Jack. He was deathly pale and very still. I put my hand on his forehead. He was cool. I watched his breathing. Steady, deep. I put my fingers to the pulse beating in his throat. It was fast, but not as rapid as it had been yesterday.

  ‘What have you got there?’ Father Gregory asked. I still held the pendant in my other hand. I held it out to him.

  He studied it for some moments. Then he said, ‘Animus and anima.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ I had tensed.

  ‘The male and female principle,’ he said, still staring at the pendant as if he found it hard to tear his eyes away. Finally he looked up. ‘It is an ancient symbol, representing the union of the two sides of human nature. Don’t ask me any more’ – he held up his hand as if physically to ward me off – ‘for such matters are evil and forbidden, and I must neither speak nor even think about them.’

  His mouth said the words, but I read a different message in his wise old eyes. A message that said, You should go on asking, for it is knowledge, and no knowledge is intrinsically evil.

  I said, ‘Will you sit with Jack a little longer, please?’

  He nodded.

  As I ran along the quay towards Margery’s establishment, I was thinking hard. Animus and anima. It was, I now realized, what I’d seen in the shining stone when Jack and I discovered Morgan and Cat. The words, like symbols, had flashed out at me, but I’d had no time to absorb them. Like far too many other things, they’d gone to the back of my mind and become overshadowed.

  But they weren’t overshadowed now, they were the one thing I couldn’t stop thinking about. If Father Gregory was right, and that strange design represented animus and anima, then it was what we had all been looking for, since it appeared to link Gerda with both Morgan and Osmund: it connected three of the victims.

  But how? Gerda didn’t have a secret workroom, and she wasn’t a magician or a magician’s apprentice. She was a prostitute; her parents were dead, her kin all dispersed and either unable or unwilling to take her in, which was how she ended up at Margery’s.

  I had reached the firmly closed door of the brothel at the end of the quay. From somewhere within, I could hear someone busy at the wash tub; a woman’s sweet voice, raised in song. I went round behind the long building and came to the laundry, where a plump woman with red cheeks and even redder hands was bending over a tub, elbow-deep in soapy water.

  ‘I need to see Margery,’ I said. ‘It’s urgent.’

  ‘Come back later,’ the woman said with a grin. ‘When she’s awake.’

  ‘It’s about Gerda.’

  The name acted like a spell. Instantly the woman stood up, wiped her hands on her apron and led me inside the main building. We went along the passage to where Margery sat up in bed, not asleep but combing out her hair.

  She recognized me, but, before she could speak, I held up the pendant.

  Her eyes widened. ‘Where did you get that?’

  ‘It’s Gerda’s, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. Give it to me!’

  I closed my hand on it. ‘It was found in the cell of the young priest, the Night Wanderer’s fourth victim,’ I said. ‘Did he visit Gerda?’

  ‘A priest?’ She shook her head. ‘No. I’m not saying such a man doesn’t have recourse to girls who do what mine do, but he’d hardly be likely to frequent a well-known place like mine.’ She said that with a small show of pride.

  ‘And you don’t think Gerda saw him without your knowledge?’

  ‘I know all my girls’ clients.’ It was said with utter certainty.

  I clutched the pendant tightly in my hand. ‘Could it – the pendant – have been a gift from one of her clients?’

  Margery shrugged. ‘I suppose so, but it was a poor gift if so. She was worth better.’

  ‘Could she have bought it or’ – I hesitated – ‘stolen it?’

  ‘She didn’t steal it!’ The suggestion made Margery angry. ‘And I don’t believe she bought it. Show me again,’ Margery commanded. I held it out to her. ‘Yes, it’s just how I remember. But look: it’s obviously ancient. The pendant itself is a bit bent, and the etched pattern is blurred with long wear. It was worn thin, see?’ She pointed. ‘I reckon,’ she said slowly, ‘it was some old family thing that had been handed down. Gerda would have treasured it, even though it had no value, because it was all she had to remember her parents and kin by. She was an orphan, you know.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said absently. I was thinking about possibilities: in particular, whether someone in Gerda’s lost family had been connected with magic.

  And quite how I was going to find that out, I had no idea. Return and talk to the girls, once they were up? But I’d done that before, and they’d been able to tell me very little.

  I turned to go. ‘Thank you for your time,’ I said.

  ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘How’s he doing?’

  I shrugged. ‘He’s lasted the night and he isn’t feverish.’

  She met my eyes. Both of us, I’m sure, were thinking the unsaid word: yet. ‘You take good care of him,’ she commanded. ‘Worth saving, that one.’

  I was outside, just joining the track that led back along the quay, when I heard someone behind me. Someone called my name in a sort of whispered shout, and, turning, I saw the skinny blonde girl with rats’ tail hair and greasy skin who had been so scared by the Night Wanderer legends. She still looked terrified, and as she held out her hand to stop me, I saw that she had bitten her nails so harshly that the tops of the fingers bulged out over what was left.

  ‘Hello, Madselin,’ I said.

  ‘Hush!’ she hissed, although I hadn’t spoken loudly. ‘Come over here, where we won’t be seen or overheard.’ She grabbed my sleeve and pulled me over behind a half-ruined boat shed.

  We stood in awkward silence for a while, and I found her wide, frightened gaze disconcerting. Also, I wanted very much to get back to Jack. ‘What do you want with me? I said, perhaps too impatiently, because her lips trembled and tears filled her eyes. ‘Sorry,’ I said quickly. ‘How can I help?’

  She seemed to gather herself together, as if for a tremendous effort, then said, ‘I heard you just now, talking to Margery. I had
to come after you! I should have spoken up before, should have told what I knew, but I was too afraid.’ The tears spilled over her eyelids and ran down her thin cheeks.

  I took her cold hands in mine. ‘What should you have told?’

  ‘I heard them, see!’ she burst out, wringing her thin hands in distress. ‘It was the night before – before she died.’ Madselin swallowed a sob. ‘I was out with – well, never mind who it was, but he likes to do it in the open air when the weather allows and it was mild that night. Anyway, he’d finished his business and was away back to his wife and children, and I was making my way back to Margery’s, and I heard them!’ She looked pop-eyed at me, as if I should have known.

  ‘Who did you hear?’ I asked, fighting my desire to shake her.

  ‘Gerda and him! They were having a row, I reckon, and both of them were angry, yelling at each other. I wasn’t eavesdropping,’ she added hastily, ‘you could hear them a mile off! Anyway, I was quite close, so I stopped and watched, and I saw it all, though I didn’t let them see me.’

  ‘What was the row about?’ I could have asked her who the other person was, but I had a feeling I already knew.

  ‘He was so furious with her! Kept saying again and again how she was really sinful, and how wrong it was in God’s eyes to live the life she did, and how would the lord Jesus feel about her defiling her flesh? He was trying to persuade her to leave Margery’s and move into the little room he was renting as a workroom. It wasn’t much, he told her, and not very comfortable, and he wouldn’t be able to get her much food, but she’d be honest, and she could make her confession to his old priest and do her penance and God would forgive her and receive her back.’

  ‘What did she say to that?’ I asked when Madselin paused for breath.

  ‘She said, not bloody likely!’ Madselin answered with a feeble grin. ‘Then he started going on about how she could help him in his work and be useful to him, only I didn’t understand that bit, when you think what she did and what he was.’ She frowned. ‘But it sounded from his tone as if he really needed her.’

  ‘And she still refused?’ I prompted.

  ‘Oh, yes. Told him he could disapprove all he liked but she was happy at Margery’s, because they were kind to her and they didn’t try to bully her. She said she didn’t mind the old girl – Margery, I mean – and she really liked the other girls, and they were her family now.’

  I thought about that.

  ‘Then he reached forward and stuck his hand down her gown, and I wondered what was going on,’ Madselin continued, ‘but he was just pulling out the pendant she wore, on its chain. I’ve been good to you! I gave you this! he yells at her, shaking it in her face’ – Madselin’s voice rose dramatically – ‘and then she pulls it up over her head and thrusts it at him. You can have it back! she cries. It’s old and it’s nasty, and I hate it!’

  ‘And he took it?’

  Madselin nodded. ‘Yes! She flung it at him and stalked off, and I watched him pick it up. He looked so sad,’ she murmured. ‘I felt sorry for him, even though he’d been unkind to her.’

  ‘And she was killed the following night,’ I said slowly, half to myself. I thought that perhaps, at last, I was starting to understand why.

  The Night Wanderer, it seemed, had believed her to be something she wasn’t; something of vital importance to Osmund’s secret, other life …

  I should have thought more carefully before I spoke, for Madselin was weeping in earnest now, the hands with their poor bitten nails up to her face in a hopeless attempt to hide her distress. ‘I know,’ she sobbed, ‘and I should have said what I’d seen, only I was so frightened! I thought he’d come back and do for me, too, if I spoke up!’

  I put my arms round her and hugged her. ‘I don’t think it would have made any difference,’ I said. ‘And you were scared, like we all were, and nobody is at their best when they’re frightened.’

  She seemed to take comfort from that and her sobs slowly subsided. When she was sufficiently calm, I walked with her the short distance back to Margery’s and saw her safely inside.

  Then I hurried back down the quay.

  I kept hearing Madselin’s voice when she told me what Gerda had said about the other girls: that they were her family now.

  I thought about what I’d first been told about the Night Wanderer’s fourth victim: he was an outsider, new to the town, studious, quiet, kept himself to himself. New to the town … And Gerda, they’d said, wasn’t a local girl but had come to here after the deaths of both parents. She’d been the youngest child, still at home when the older siblings had gone, and none of those siblings could take her in when she was left alone.

  She and Osmund were brother and sister.

  Osmund had frequently been late for the offices and had been known to go down to the river. We knew about his workroom, but going there wasn’t the only reason he absented himself from the priests’ house. He used to slip out to meet his sister.

  He hated what she did for a living but couldn’t supply the necessary support to get her out of it. Perhaps he felt guilty that he couldn’t offer her a home; that her being a whore was at least in part his fault. Who could say?

  He had been trying to persuade her to become his assistant. His adept; his Soror Mystica; his sister in the great work, just as she was in the flesh and in the blood.

  But she was afraid and unwilling. She had been killed, and then, only a few days later, so had he.

  I was almost back at the tavern. I was running now, my satchel bouncing on my hip. Suddenly it felt as if a shock had run through me. I skidded to a halt, put my hand inside my satchel and felt the shining stone, almost too hot to touch.

  The compulsion to look into it was irresistible. I ran to the line of warehouses, slid between two of them and took out the stone.

  I had never known it so urgent. There was no waiting for murky darkness to clear; no patient following of the brilliant green and gold lines that seemed to lead the eye into its mysterious heart. The vision was right there and it felt as if the stone was hammering it into my head.

  It showed me Gerda and Osmund. It showed me Morgan and Cat. Then, in clear detail, it showed me myself and Gurdyman.

  Its message was devastatingly clear, but still it forged on. I saw the four victims throatless, bleeding, lifeless. Then, in an image of total horror, Gurdyman and I lay on the stone floor of the crypt, and we, too, had no throats.

  Nausea rose up and overwhelmed me and I vomited and retched until I could bring up no more. Then, more frightened than I’d ever been in my life, I fled.

  TWENTY

  Hrype sat cross-legged before the small fire he had lit. He had been walking for the greater part of the last two days and nights, if the furious, driven striding on his long legs through wood and field and around marsh and fen could be called walking. He knew, if he was honest with himself, that he was fleeing from the truth, for it was extremely unwelcome and uncomfortably painful.

  Earlier, he had woken from a brief and restless sleep. He had sought shelter in a hay barn, tunnelling into the fragrant hay like the rats and mice who kept him company to lie in the grip of dreams of violence and horrible images. Waking, he had believed he detected the ring of truth in the nightmarish dreams, and, steeling himself, he had found an isolated place and lit his small fire. He had taken his rune stones out of the bag and spread out the cloth on which he always cast them. He was finding it difficult to put himself into the right state for reading their message. Closing his eyes, he forced his mind to detach. To elevate into that strange realm where the spirits waited, and from which, if you were lucky, they might deign to communicate.

  He cast the runes and looked down.

  The first thing he saw made him smile grimly. The powers that ruled his life, it seemed, were intent on showing him aspects of himself he preferred normally to ignore. First there had been Gurdyman, earnest, deeply concerned, brave in his determination to stand firm in the face of Hrype’s increasing anger and m
ake him hear the truth. Now the runes were following where the old man had led, for what Hrype read was the combination of symbols that he suspected meant Jack Chevestrier, and beside them the ones that implied a tearing away of smoke screens; a confrontation with the true nature of something, or someone.

  Slowly Hrype nodded, as if indicating that he accepted the message.

  I have always found it hard to trust Jack Chevestrier, he admitted to himself, because, certain as I have been from the start that Gaspard Picot is involved, in the thefts and perhaps the killings too, I convinced myself that Chevestrier too is crooked and corrupt. Both men work for the sheriff – Gaspard Picot is the wretched man’s own kin – and I allowed that to persuade me.

  But now he accepted that he had been wrong. The stones told him so. Moreover, seeing the truth displayed so clearly before him, he realized that he had allowed his antipathy towards Jack Chevestrier to cloud his vision.

  Hrype dropped his head in his hands. He was ashamed. He was a seeker after the truth. He prided himself on his clarity of vision; his ability to rise above the petty sentiments and emotions of ordinary human beings and courageously stare the truth in the face. In the space of two days, he had been shown to himself for what he was, and the pain was intense.

  He removed his hands and looked down at the runes again, for he had got no further than the first message before being overcome.

  He stared. Rubbed his tired eyes, stared again.

  What he thought he read couldn’t be true; surely not!

  He did something he very rarely did, for the powers that drove the rune messages didn’t like having their word doubted. He gathered them up, held them tightly in his hands, prayed to his gods for help and guidance, shook the stones hard and once more cast them on to the sacred cloth.

  The message was there; and this time it was expressed even more forcibly.

  For a few moments, Hrype couldn’t move. He muttered, ‘I have been blind. Blind!’