Searcher of the Dead Read online

  SEARCHER OF THE DEAD

  A BESS ELLYOTT MYSTERY

  Nancy Herriman

  To Natasha, whose encouragement and support have never flagged, my eternal thanks.

  PROLOGUE

  Michaelmas 1592

  London

  “Tell me his name.”

  The crone had eyes as pale as chips of ice. So pale and clear that the irises nearly faded into the whites. Bess found she could not return the woman’s gaze but instead searched for aught else to stare at. The rush mats upon the tiles of the hall floor. The orange depths of the hearth fire. The herbs Bess had strung to dry, her mortar and pestle at the ready upon the oak table yet forgotten in her distress. The tapestry of a hunting scene, the fleeing stag that always seemed to move when candlelight flickered across the surface. The steps adjacent to the hearth that led to the upstairs chambers, where silence hung as heavy as her thoughts.

  However, she looked but briefly at the body stretched upon the settle where he had taken his final repose. A cushion had tumbled to the floor, and his arm dangled as if to reach for it. The cushion embroidered with birds he had so favored. Because you stitched it, Bess, with those fine long fingers of yours …

  “Martin,” she said, her voice breaking. But the crone would assume the break came of grief, which it did most certain, and not also of fear. “Martin Ellyott. My husband.”

  The woman scratched his name—when had someone of her impoverished circumstance learned the art of writing?—upon a scrap of paper. She had no penknife with her, and the nib of her quill was dull, leaving the markings blunt and large. Her knotted fingers struggled to hold the writing instrument, and as Bess had yet to light a lamp, she squinted in the dimness to see what she wrote. Their surname was misspelled; Bess did not correct her.

  With a groan, the old woman rose from the stool Bess’s servant had brought for her and went to the settle. Bess looked away as she examined him. Heard coals settle on the grate. She wanted to cry, but her eyes had ceased shedding tears and burned from dryness. More tears, she knew, would come later.

  “No pustules upon him,” the woman muttered.

  “It was not plague,” Bess replied. “He had pains in his stomach and nausea. Troubles of the bowels with great purging. Fever,” she added, a hasty afterthought in her attempt to be convincing. “No pustules.”

  The crone nodded, and the edges of the kerchief she’d wrapped around her head slid across her furrowed cheeks. “The bloody flux, then.”

  Bess’s pulse skipped. “Yes.”

  The old woman returned to her paper. Next to Martin’s name she inscribed “bloody flux.” She blew upon the surface and, satisfied the ink had dried, rolled the sheet closed. She tucked the chronicle of deaths into a leather pouch suspended from her woven-tape girdle, alongside her quill and inkhorn. “God rest his soul.”

  “Indeed. God rest his soul.”

  Satisfied Martin’s name would not be added to her count of plague victims and the house and its occupants would not need be boarded up, the old woman departed without further comment. It was done. The searcher of the dead had come and declared Martin—witty, sweet Martin—deceased from the bloody flux. Thus it would be recorded on the bill of mortality forever and ever. Leaving Bess alone to suspect the true cause of his death.

  She stood in the street doorway and watched as the searcher hobbled across the uneven stones of the roadway. Slowly, the old woman progressed in and out of the shadows cast by the jettied floors of neighbors’ houses, the red wand she carried extended to warn all of her passage. Warn all of the dreaded disease that might linger on her person. With a cry, the corner baker’s girl sprang out of the old woman’s path, almost dropping the basket of cheat bread she carried in her arms. The old woman paid her no heed. She skirted a fire burning to chase off plague, the sweet smell of pitch spreading with the smoke, as a mongrel ran alongside, snapping at her heels. Bess watched until the old woman was gone from sight and her heart had finally slowed its pounding and returned to normal.

  Though normal would not ever be the same.

  “Mistress?” Bess’s servant, Joan, had crept up behind her to peer around the doorframe. “What do we now?”

  “Flee.”

  She had no choice now but to bury her dearest Martin alongside their two sweet daughters, sell her goods, and leave London. Escape from the one who had brought death to her house and dread to her heart. Forget her life here, as good as it once had been. Start anew.

  God help me.

  CHAPTER 1

  Wiltshire, 1 year later

  “The child will be well, aye?”

  The woman, taller than Bess by a head, leaned over to observe as Bess tended her daughter’s wounds. The girl, perhaps eight years of age, perhaps nine, had burned herself. According to her mother, the source had been the handle of a brass pot the child had pulled from the fire. Her wound was days old and had festered, forcing Bess to clean away the rot before she washed the burn and dressed it. The bruise upon her left cheek was far fresher.

  She did not cry out as Bess rinsed her damaged hand with a clean linen cloth dipped in rosewater made from the last snow’s melt. The cold to draw out the heat of the burn. Or so Bess prayed. There were moments—after failing to cure her own daughters when they had been stricken with a fatal catarrh, and after watching helplessly as Martin lay dying—that Bess doubted her abilities.

  She pulled in a breath and willed away her uncertainty.

  “What did you use upon the burns?” Bess asked Goodwife Anwicke.

  She smiled at the woman’s daughter, who had deep brown eyes and dirty, hollow cheeks. The girl did not return the smile. Her eyes were shadowed in a way that reminded Bess of her servant, Joan, when Bess had found her living in a London alley, hungry and desperate yet wary as an untamed cat.

  “Sheep’s dung. As my mother taught me.”

  Which explained the muddy color Bess’s cloth was turning as well as the stink arising from the girl’s hand. The child wiggled her bottom, which she had settled upon the three-legged stool her mother had placed by the open door. Aside from a low-burning fire in the hearth, its smoke limply rising up a smoke bay to a hole in the roof, the doorway was the only source of light in the thatched cottage. A rain shower had caused the woman to place shutters in the unglazed windows. Closing off the windows had trapped much of the smoke in the main room, which at least masked the smell of mold and rot, though it made Bess want to cough.

  As it was, there was not much to see—a scattering of pallets and a lone chest, a few stools and a rickety bench thrust against a trestle table set by the hearth, an old spinning wheel. A wood tub, the offending brass pot, a solitary pewter mug resting upon the mantel, awaiting its owner. The plain walls were in need of fresh whitewash. The clay floor, mixed with ox blood and ashes and left to harden when the cottage had been built, was covered in rushes requiring replacement. Beyond the main hall, a cramped room contained farm supplies and a bedstead. Two rooms for this girl, her parents, and three other siblings. A common enough situation among the poorest cottagers of this town. Bess spared a moment’s thought for the other children, questioning where they had gotten themselves to, as the only other one she could account for was a swaddled babe asleep in a cradle near the hearth.

  The injured girl made a noise, a whimper like the sound of a wounded animal, and Bess cupped her hand. “Shh, shh. All will be well.” Bess looked over at her mother. “Sheep’s dung?”

  Goodwife Anwicke harrumphed. “’Twas good enough for my mother.”

  “And my grandmother may have done the same.” Bess had no wish to chastise the woman, who had done the best she could.

  “I knew her. A good woman, she was. A great healer.”

&
nbsp; “You knew my grandmother? I have nearly no memory of her. She died when I was young.” All Bess could remember of the woman whose calling she had followed were her strong, chapped hands and the earthy scent that had clung to her clothing. “I pray I do her memory justice.”

  Goodwife Anwicke eyed her. “And now you are here.”

  “Indeed. All of her grandchildren have returned.”

  “Your mother married a fellow from someplace east.” More scrutiny.

  “Yes, she did. My father taught at Oxford.” Bess’s mother had missed the rolling hills of Wiltshire. Not enough, though, to come back home to this village partway between the valley where the River Avon flowed and the chalk downs where stood ancient henges of stone.

  Bess finished cleaning the girl’s burn and dropped the filthy cloth in the wooden bowl she had brought. “But my brother and sister are here, and now I am here as well.” Far from London. Hopefully far enough.

  “Aye. You are.”

  The child stared down at her palm, the reddened blisters far more visible without an intervening layer of sheep’s dung. Bess considered the girl, whose name she had not learned, and wondered if she was a mute. Wondered if the infirmity explained why Bess had been sent for and not the widow woman who lived near the market cross and also prepared simples. That herbalist might not wish to treat a child bearing such a defect, what many considered a mark of sin. Leaving Goodwife Anwicke to call upon the healer who had come to Wiltshire under a cloud of gossip.

  Ah, Martin, at least I am content here. And learning to find peace and a place within my brother’s household.

  Bess patted the child’s head, her hair covered in a linen biggin, its ties frayed along the edges. Beneath, she suspected, the girl’s hair was likely no more clean than her hand had been. When next Bess returned, she would bring her salve of powdered stavesacre seeds and vinegar to treat the lice that may live there. “Not long now. I am near finished.”

  From a canvas satchel, Bess fetched out a pottery jar, unwrapping the cloth tied over it. Inside was a plaster she had prepared using the crushed leaves of water plantain and the green bark of an elder tree mixed with some oil and honey. If the child had sustained a cut rather than a burn, she would have chosen agrimony to mix with the honey.

  “But the child … she will be well, aye?” Goodwife Anwicke repeated.

  “Yes,” Bess replied, without any of her earlier hesitation. Her patients’ faith in her skills was as much a part of the healing as the plasters and powders she employed. “God willing.”

  Bess gently dressed the wound with a quantity of the plaster and wrapped a length of linen around the girl’s hand, securing it with a knot. “Have you any black soap and honey to apply to her bruise?”

  A sudden quiver convulsed the child. Who had struck her? Her mother? Her father?

  Goodwife Anwicke’s eyes darkened with hidden thoughts. “I can tend her bruise,” she said. “What do I owe?”

  The girl realized Bess had finished and hopped down from the stool. The sole of her right shoe flapping as she walked, she went to attend to the baby, who had begun to mewl in the cradle.

  “You owe me nothing,” Bess said, returning her supplies to her satchel. The goodwife could not afford the groat Bess was sometimes offered for her simples. The amount was a fraction of the sum exacted by the apothecary, who would expect at least five shillings for his remedies. The fee demanded by the local physician did not even bear mention.

  The woman lifted her chin, her pride pricked. “I can pay—”

  “I do not require payment,” she said. “I shall return in two days to see how your daughter fares.”

  “Gramercy, then.” She moved to follow Bess to the roadway.

  “I will see myself off.”

  “God save you, Widow Ellyott.”

  Tossing her woolen cloak over her shoulders, Bess slipped her shoes into the wood-soled leather mules she had left near the threshold and hurried outside. By now, the rain was falling heavily. She dashed across the uneven surface of the highway, her satchel in one hand, her skirts and the black linen safeguard that covered them hoisted in the other. She glanced back at the cottage and caught sight of the silent girl standing at the door, a look of sorrow upon her pinched face.

  * * *

  The Anwickes’ cottage was not far from town, but the slog in the rain seemed an eternity. Bess suspected she looked as mournful as a drenched rat. There were few to notice her misery as she entered the main part of town, she observed thankfully, despite it being market day. The trestle tables that had been placed in the square and before shop fronts had been cleared of their foodstuffs and wares and momentarily left, empty, to line the waterlogged street. Rainwater dripped from thatch and tile. All appeared to have hidden away behind stone and timber and whitewashed mud walls, and the town center was quiet save for splashing rain and the raucous laughter emanating from the Cross Keys, ale and beer ever a comfort on a damp day.

  Hoofbeats sounded behind her, and a traveler trotted by on his way to the inn. He slouched beneath an oiled cloak and dripping hat, a tin spoon tucked into the band. He’d best have his passport; strangers were always viewed with suspicion, and vagrancy was a crime. She had not needed Martin’s death to inform her how dangerously fearful the world had become.

  As she passed the grammar school, the master locked the heavy oak door behind him and nodded at her before he hurried off home, dodging puddles. The schoolboys who normally played and tussled in the street after they had concluded their studies had vanished like the rest of the town, chased inside by the rain. Bess hastened across the market square and turned up the lane across from All Saints, the bells in its sturdy square tower tolling five times to mark the hour. A neighbor’s swine had escaped its cote—the man would be fined for his carelessness—and contentedly snuffled in a midden pile. Another neighbor had left a broken-down cart awaiting repair outside his front door, forcing Bess to splash through the gutter.

  Rounding another bend, she spied her brother’s house—two comfortable stories of stone and timber framing plus a half-story—and increased her pace. Her stockings were soaked, chilling her to the bone. She expected a fire would be roaring in the hearth. In fact, the gleam of light that shone through the hall’s street-facing oriel windows promised as much. Unlike the Anwickes, Bess would be warm and dry and well fed that night, and her slumbers would take place upon a feather mattress topped by a thick, soft blanket.

  The outside chill and damp accompanied Bess past the house’s heavy, oak front door. Inside the passageway, she removed her dripping cloak and hung it from a nearby hook. Likewise, she stepped out of her muddy mules, leaving them near the threshold alongside her satchel.

  To her right, the door to the hall hung open, and she stepped through. Robert, his broad back to her, stood before the massive fireplace. Confusingly, the hall’s large draw-leaf table was yet to be unfolded for supper. Mayhap she and Robert were to eat upstairs in the parlor that evening.

  “I’faith, I am soaked to the bone,” she announced, stripping off her safeguard and rolling it into a bundle. Her brother’s brown-and-white water spaniel, Quail, leaped up from where he had been lounging by the hearth and bounded over to greet her.

  Robert turned abruptly. The crackle of the fire had masked her footfalls upon the rush matting that covered the stone floor. “Bess.”

  The frown on his face halted any further pleasantries on her part. She liked to tease that the pointed beard he wore made him look somber, but at the moment, Robert had no need of a pointed beard to appear grave.

  “What …” It was then she noticed their sister, Dorothie, seated nearby.

  “She is back at last. Can we depart now?” asked Dorothie. Her eyes were red, and she wrung her hands as though she hoped to strangle her fingers.

  “What is amiss, Dorothie?” Bess asked, offering Quail one final pat upon his head.

  “’Tis Fulke.” She sobbed the name of her husband.

  Robert had drawn
a stool over to the chimney, upon which Dorothie sat. The stays of her pair of bodies held her torso erect, though it seemed she would prefer to crumple. Her velvet-trimmed gown was dirty and damp. Strands of her golden-brown hair had escaped her coif. Proof she’d rushed there without care for her appearance, which normally consumed her.

  She sobbed again.

  “What of Fulke?” Bess asked. “Has he taken ill?”

  “He has not returned,” said Dorothie.

  “Fulke left this morning, before sunrise, bound for Devizes on a matter of business,” said Robert, looking over at Dorothie to confirm his account. “He was to return by supper this evening.”

  “But it is not yet too late for that.” Setting down her safeguard for Joan to collect, Bess pulled off her shoes and padded across the hall to warm herself by the fire. Dorothie was ever prone to fussing and fretting. But as much as Bess wished to comfort her sister, she knew Dorothie would not welcome her affection. It had ever been thus between them.

  “Fulke likely was delayed and will return anon,” she added.

  Joan entered through the opening that led to the service rooms, the household keys jangling from her girdle. She brought a pewter cup of malmsey, which she set upon a second stool Robert had dragged over to the chimney. Dorothie grabbed up the drink and gulped it down. Bess glanced at her brother, who gave a shrug.

  “Wish you wine as well, Mistress?” asked Joan, whose light brown eyes conveyed a deeper concern than evidenced by her simple question. “You must be chilled.”

  “With supper, Joan.”

  With a nod, Joan collected Bess’s mules and safeguard and withdrew to the kitchen.

  “I want to find Fulke,” Dorothie said, once she had finished her malmsey. “Now.”

  “We know not that he is lost.” Bess stretched her palms toward the warmth of the fire. Quail came to lie at her feet. “Besides, it is nigh on time for the sun to set, and the weather is too foul to go looking for him. We cannot search in the darkness.”