“Looked at you?”
“I was looking at the map when both the Essedene figures became animated.”
“Surely by now you are accustomed to the map’s curious behavior toward you, are you not? In which case this ‘look’ that they gave you must have been something quite different to have you so het up.” He left his desk and came to sit in the chair opposite her, leaning forward, elbows on knees, eager to hear what she had to say.
Hecate squirmed a little, disliking the idea that she might react in a frivolous or female way to anything the map might do. “Yes, it was different. It was disturbing. Threatening.”
“You felt directly threatened yourself?”
“I do not consider myself in any danger from the figures, it’s not that. But … there is something about the timing. I mean to say, they have never behaved in this way before. Why now? Why at the same time as the unexplained events in the crypt?”
“You feel there is a connection?”
“Not one I can logically explain,” she said. “At least, not yet. I intend studying a book of Brother Michael’s recommendation on the subject tomorrow. I was hoping you might be able to furnish me with some information in the meantime.”
Edward got to his feet, rubbing his hands together. “Come, let us see what my own collection will yield,” he said, and together they began to scour the bookshelves for anything that might prove useful.
12
The modest redbrick terraced house that was home to Inspector Winter had as its chief advantage a south-facing garden. Whenever the weather was sufficiently clement, he would step out of the back door of the property and tread the short walk to the potting shed at the far end of the little lawn. He grew vegetables in raised beds and cucumbers in the small greenhouse, but his principal interest lay in flowers, and his favorite of all of these was the auricula. On the north-facing wall of the shed he had constructed an auricula theater. This resembled a set of bookshelves, four in total, each wide enough to accommodate five small terra-cotta pots, which were protected from the worst of the rain by a narrow pitched wooden roof. Here he displayed his very finest auriculas: Black Jack with its dark, velvety petals; flashy Traudl with its orange and yellow bands; the sophisticated pale green of Meadow Treasure; Golden Dawn with its dusting of farina, so hard to achieve and maintain. All his favorites were there, grown from stock some of which his father had handed down to him.
To all the mendacity and violence he was compelled to make sense of in his working life, these delightful flowers offered the perfect antidote. Their simplicity. Their quiet resilience. Their natural beauty. Every Easter he would catch the train to Chester to visit his mother and take with him one of his newest, finest plants. His sister, with her propensity to overwater flowers, was not allowed to tend them. On this morning, as so many, the inspector revisited in his mind the case currently under his auspices, finding the soothing surroundings and benign company of his garden an aid to clarity of thought. As he gently pinched off the spent flowers so that new blooms might take their place, he allowed the facts of the Joe Colwall case to filter through his thoughts. There were, he knew, missing pieces of the puzzle. Why had a previously reliable constable deserted his post and disappeared? Why had Joe shown no signs of any imbalance of the mind before? It irked him that he had not yet succeeded in finding the way forward with the case. And then there was Miss Cavendish and her theories. Should he really give the wild imaginings of a young woman any credence? And yet, there were things which needed explanations and to this point, those explanations appeared only to come from Miss Cavendish. Added to which, she was the daughter of Edward Cavendish, a man whose intelligence and insight he had admired for some time.
He took a small brush and swept away the crumbs of soil he had disturbed during the deadheading process. His plants were thriving under his care, order was maintained. Knowledge, method, application, and attention to detail were what brought about success in his gardening, and these things would, he remained confident, bring about success in his work. He would attend Mrs. Colwall’s funeral and see if any new players presented themselves. Whistling, he returned to the house for his breakfast, putting his hand in his jacket pocket as he did so. His fingers found a small object. He stopped, took it out, and held it up to the light. It was then he recalled finding the tiny seed head of a dark, dried plant. He had come across it in his examination of the crypt floor when it was strewn with debris. A flower in any condition was a curious thing to find in such a place. He went inside, but instead of going to the kitchen, he headed for his study. He quickly located the book he most relied upon for the identification of plants. He turned the pages until he found an illustration that matched. Taking up a magnifying glass, he was able to confirm that this apparently charred remnant had come from the flower of Atropa belladonna, otherwise known as deadly nightshade.
The following day Hecate armed herself with a tin of Cook’s finest Eccles cakes. Reverend Thomas’s fondness for sweet things was a weakness she was, on this occasion, willing to exploit. She arrived early and was waiting for him, coat off, shawl tied in place, fingerless mittens added against the cold as despite the advancing spring, the temperature inside the cathedral showed no sign of rising. As she had expected, the small gift put him in a cooperative frame of mind, so that when she presented him with both the fruit-filled pastries and the finished repair work, he was amenable to allowing her choice of book from the library. If he was curious about her selection he did not show it. She and her father had conducted an extensive search of his own library but had found nothing more than two passing mentions of the Essedenes. The importance of the book Brother Michael had directed her to was now all the greater, for where else could she turn for answers?
Hecate watched Reverend Thomas take a key from the ring he wore at his belt and turn it in the padlock at the end of the shelf. It would be possible to take a book from its position and set it down on the reading desk directly in front of the shelf. However, to free the book of its chains and remove it completely required disengaging it from the system. To do this the lock was undone in the plate at the unit’s end, which released an iron rod. This slender metal pole passed through rings attached to the ends of the chain links which secured the books. The iron links rattled as Hecate helped him slide free the specific ring from the rod. Reverend Thomas climbed the stepladder and slid the book from its place with no small effort, as it was larger and heavier than a weighty family Bible. With great care, he descended the ladder and handed it to Hecate, who felt the familiar scintilla of excitement at holding one of the ancient tomes from the collection. It had a brown, cracked leather binding, devoid of embellishments or gold inlay, and simple, rough-edged pages. She carried it over to the reading shelf beneath the best light and positioned it reverently on the wooden support. She doubted it had been opened for decades, possibly centuries, and the thought moved her. What arcane writing and forgotten wisdom awaited her inside those worn and forgotten covers? She moved a stool so that she could sit at the right height to best examine the book, and when the librarian informed her he would be taking his lunch break, she hardly heard him, for she was already breathing in the familiar smell of old paper, feeling the fragile coarseness of the pages beneath her fingers, enthralled by the words that were now in front of her.
Forgotten Peoples of Mesopotamia and Babylonia was a handwritten work, page after page of meticulous and painstaking manuscripts, mostly text, but with one or two illuminated letters, and some line drawings here and there. It was written, much to Hecate’s relief, in English, albeit of an old and in parts impenetrable version. The date on the frontispiece declared it to have been written in “The Year of Our Lorde 1689.” She turned the pages gently, keeping them flat, knowing that to flex them was to risk damaging the parched material on which the ancient wisdom was inscribed. As she searched through the titles and headings she thought of the hundreds of hours that must have gone into producing such a volume, most likely by a team of monks. It was easy to imagine them hunched over their work, day after day, their backs aching, trying to keep warm in a building that might not have been dissimilar to the one in which she now sat, writing by the light of candle or lamp and what daylight there was. Her eye caught snatches of sentences: “… and the warriors did celebrate theyre victory…” or “… the King banished them that day…” There were lists of those fallen in a battle remembered by no one, and passages praising God for the eventual ending of a pestilence. There were descriptions of tribes who lived in houses on stilts and others who inhabited marshes on boats, harvesting the reeds. At last, Hecate turned a page and a simple ink drawing, the lines faded to brown, sent a shiver of recognition through her. It was not an exact match for the one on the Mappa Mundi, but the subject was unmistakably the same. The Essedenes people were shown kneeling, long knives in hand, slicing up the body of a victim, one of them clearly eating the flesh. Quelling a shudder, Hecate read what was written on the facing page. The language was dense and challenging, but she was familiar with deciphering both Old English and unhelpfully stylized lettering. In her mind she translated the writing into something more modern so that she could more easily understand and memorize it. She muttered this version of it to herself as she read.
“‘The Essedenes were a successful tribe of tall, athletic build who inhabited the area north of the Nile and east of Egypt. At the height of their … powers, their territory encompassed parts of Mesopotamia, Babylon, and … Assyria. They were … seen? no, not that, what is it … known! known for their fierce warriors and hot tempers.’” She paused, not doubting that this was an accurate description, given the sensations she had experienced when the one on the Mappa Mundi had locked gazes with her. She read on, running her finger along each line, the feel of the page against her skin strengthening her connection to every word.
“‘It is said that, among some … fractions? factions … of the people, a belief existed that a … person’s strength could be improved by … cannibalism. Clearly, if what is shown on the Mappa Mundi is accurate. Further … they held that to gain the wisdom of their elders a … similar tactic could be … employed. This led to the practice of … Oh dear Lord … consuming the flesh of their dead parents!’” Hecate felt bile rising and swallowed hard. Cannibalism was a revolting thought; eating one’s deceased mother and father was a thing too horrid to imagine. It moved the notion of eating your own species from the theoretical to the deeply personal. “‘They claimed in their defense against sacrilege that being devoured by their progeny was to be preferred over being left to rot with worms.… Another aspect of their faith had to do … with … reanimating the dead.’” Hearing her gasp again, the griffin fluttered down to sit on the shelf opposite her. She looked up at him, taking a small comfort in the little creature’s company. “Let’s all be glad we don’t live anywhere near the Essedenes, Griffin. It makes one think some of these tribes were lost for good reason.” She bent over the book again. “‘They held services and followed rituals to summon lost warriors … and these they called…’” She carefully turned the page. The writing became blotchy, smudged, and harder to read. There was an illustration taking up most of the page, but it was too worn and damaged to make out. “What did they call them?” she asked, picking up a magnifying glass to study the lettering more closely. “It looks like.… resplendent possibly. Can that be right? No … ‘resurgent’!” She stopped, turning to look back at the Mappa Mundi, boldly focusing her gaze on the images of the Essedenes again. “Resurgent Spirits, raised from the dead, summoned back to life,” she muttered. The thought was dreadful, but it made sense to her. At last she had found a connection between the fearsome figure on the map who had moved and stared into her very soul, and the wild destruction that had taken place in the crypt. Both concerned the dead being used in an unusual and shocking manner. In the Essedenes’ case for cannibalistic rituals, with the spirits breaking out of the crypt, the summoning of the dead. Which led her to another inescapable fact. If what she had just read was connected to the events in the crypt, the dead had not risen of their own volition. They had been called. Someone had been responsible for raising those spirits.
“But who?” she muttered beneath her breath. “And to what end?”
Desperate to learn more from the precious book, she turned back to what was written. The passage continued with many blotches, foxing, and mildew stains on the paper, so that it was impossible to properly make out the next sentence. The remainder of the page was taken up with the ruined illustration. She moved on to the facing page where to her relief the condition of the paper was much better and the words clearer.
“‘By the beginning of that … century … the tribe had … begun?’ no, become, ‘the tribe had become reduced in numbers … so that they were no longer a significant power in the region. In fact, their territory had been lost to the neighboring.… Voyesenes. These people were, by contrast…’ wait. What of the Resurgent Spirits? Surely there is more to say on the matter.” She checked back to where she had left off in case she had missed something. It was then she noticed a tiny tuft of thread in the crease of the book. She examined more closely the pages facing each other. The difference between them in terms of condition and damage now struck her as more noticeable.
“There are pages missing!”
She leaned closer to the book, gently turning to the back to see if any loose leaves had been put there. There were none. Exasperated, she shook her head. The very pages she needed, the ones that could have possibly explained more about the spirits summoned, were gone. Had the Essedenes a reputation for success with this ritual? Could they have found a way to succeed where necromancers for centuries before and after had failed? Hecate knew that she would not, only a few short days before, have asked herself such a question. Now, however, with mounting evidence pointing toward a supernatural occurrence to explain what had taken place beneath the cathedral, it was a question that needed answering.
When Reverend Thomas returned she showed him the gap where the pages should be in the book. Together they tutted and lamented the sad damage. Hecate wondered if the pages could have become loose and slipped from between the covers. He agreed it was worth checking in the boxes in which the books had been moved during recent repairs to the shelving, though he did not hold out much hope. In truth, they both were of the opinion that the leaves could have been missing for centuries.
It was while she was in the process of searching for the lost pages in the remainder of the most probable boxes that John came into the library. She could tell at once that he brought bad news. She got to her feet.
“John, whatever is it?”
“I have just this moment received word from Inspector Winter. There has been an incident … in my parish.”
Reverend Thomas turned to him. “An incident?”
John’s voice was somber. “A retired farm laborer, residing in the village of Mordiford … he has killed his wife.”
“Killed her?” Hecate walked toward her friend, alarmed to see him so shaken.
“In an accident, perhaps?” Reverend Thomas’s suggestion carried with it little conviction.
“I am told not,” John explained. “There is no doubt it was murder.”
Hecate put a hand on John’s arm. “Were they quarrelsome?”
He shook his head. “They were the mildest mannered couple you could hope to meet. Had spent all their married lives in the village, liked by all who knew them. Regular churchgoers. Mrs. Colwall … on occasion she would help with the flowers at St. Mary’s.…” His voice trailed off. Hecate thought she had never seen him so shocked. “In recent years her health had faltered. I knew her husband to be a man of great tenderness and compassion, caring for her without complaint.”
“How … how did she die?” Hecate asked.
“The poor woman was in receipt of terrible violence. Inspector Winter says … Mr. Colwall wielded a hammer, with great force…”
“How dreadful!”
“I wonder,” he said, gathering himself, “Reverend Thomas, could you spare Hecate? I must go and visit the deceased’s sister. I know her only a little as she resides the other side of Worcester. It was her misfortune to arrive for a visit.… It was she who found her sister’s body.”
“Of course.” The librarian did not hesitate.
“You’ll come?” John asked her. “The presence of a woman might offer more comfort.…”
