At such times all forget their boundaries
Prologue the First
Tower of Winchester, April 1860: The character and circumstance of Captain Titus Wolfe, revealing his dark secret and his part in the scandal of Prince William’s death
The river has slipped its banks,
Soot appals the poisoned air;
In fog, the elements meet.
At such times all forget their boundaries.
Begin near the end and strip the flesh from the bones; that is the way of the storyteller, and it shall be my way also… in my fashion.
‘Damn this!’ He pulled the scarlet cape around his shoulders. The night was not chill but fog-bound: the air thickened to that quality the locals called ‘pea soup’. It burned his nostrils and he cuffed furiously at his watering eyes. It was impossible to stay clean in the city, especially in this weather.
‘Damn this place.’
He wanted to close the guardroom door quietly, but it jammed against the frame. The beads of moisture clinging to the iron door loop would stain the leather of his gloves, but it could not be helped; he leant back and brought his weight to bear. The wood squealed and slammed home.
He held the lantern at arm’s length. It could not penetrate the dark veil.
‘Come now, Titus,’ he encouraged himself. ‘It is only fog.’ He knew the routine well enough: he should not lose his way.
The Minster bells began announcing the hour and he took heart from a Christian sound on this unchristian of nights.
‘Tonight, and always, God walk with me.’
The Great Bell struck twice as he made for Chapel Gate. He did not look back.
§
Titus. Only his mother and a succession of pretty nurses, each of whom had left in abrupt circumstances, had ever called him thus. His schoolmasters had known him as Master Wolfe, and to his school friends he was ‘Wolfie’, but his father had given him no name: he was always ‘boy’. He sometimes wondered whether any of his bastard half-siblings would have made his father a better son.
Wolfe had been counting his steps; in part to gauge distance, but also to steady his thoughts. Yet the soft crunch of the gravel path had a restful quality, like a ticking clock, and his mind had wandered, however briefly, back to his childhood and unshackled from the present.
‘Please, sir…’ Something tugged his sleeve.
‘Be gone!’
‘Ask only for a light.’
The candlesnatcher held out a stub of tallow.
‘Sir,’ it begged, ‘be kind…’
Skin prickling with loathing, he loosened his sword and showed it the blade. The thing recoiled, dropping the candle.
‘Be gone, I said!’
‘Begging, sir! Ask only for a light. It is so dark…’
‘Enough!’ His sword sent the thing wailing into the night.
Wolfe shuddered and sword outstretched, he turned rapidly, quartering the air on all sides and above. It was a simple charm; the one form of magick he allowed himself. It would protect him, if only for a short while.
Saint Alfred’s loomed from the darkness, and he reached out to caress the cold certainty of the stonework and thanked God. A few yards beyond it a light shone from a window. Wolfe raised the lantern above his head and challenged the Chapel Gate guard.
‘Who speaks for the Tower?’
An iron plate opened in the door and a face peered out.
‘Who asks?’
‘Pengallow! I recognise your voice,’ Wolfe said with forced good humour. ‘Who let you east of the Tamar?’
‘My countrymen said I was not fit to live among them, Captain Wolfe,’ Warder Pengallow replied. ‘Reckoned the English would have me. Captain, I shall want the pass.’
Wolfe grinned. Almost returned to his normal self, he allowed he was not likely to catch out the Cornishman. Pengallow was younger than most of the Tower Ward and sharp-witted. The older men, veterans all, he had found too much at ease, too slothful. They, recognising his voice, might well have forgotten the challenge and invited a charge. Warder Pengallow was not so foolish.
‘Athelstan,’ Wolfe said. ‘Open in the name of the king.’
Bolts scraped. A lock turned. He stepped back to clear the door’s outswing.
‘Quickly, sir. Nice and warm in here: mean to keep it so.’
Wolfe entered. Pengallow shut the door and Warder Thomas saluted. Bald and built like a tree trunk, Thomas was one of the ‘old men’ of The Tower. Wolfe waved him back to his chair beside the fire.
‘Only we and the bed bugs are awake,’ Pengallow said. ‘Coffee, Sir? It’s recent brewed. This fog chills the bones.’
‘Thank you, yes. Filthy weather.’
The damp had dulled his scarlet cloak to rusty red and the marks left by the soot resembled dark fingerprints. Turning to hang it on the door, he found the hook already occupied by a small figurine made of twigs bent and bound together.
‘What’s this?’ he asked.
‘Present from A’Guirre,’ Warder Thomas said.
The twigs had slips of parchment woven through them and Wolfe automatically read one of them before realising it was not Latin, as he first supposed, but another, far stranger language. Resisting the urge to fling the thing on the fire, he contented himself by covering it with his cloak.
‘A Guardian, she called it.’ Pengallow set the coffeepot back on the stove and handed him a cup. ‘She has one at every gatehouse and another at Catherine’s Tower.’
‘She has her ways, we have ours,’ Wolfe said diplomatically. ‘What have you to report?’
‘Nothing, sir. Whatever concerns A’Guirre, it’s not happening here. Perhaps that thing has done its job.’
‘No doubt she will claim so.’ Wolfe drank the coffee, then coughed a lump of phlegm into the fire. ‘Damn, the air is foul tonight.’
‘It’ll be worse in high summer,’ Pengallow said.
‘I cannot imagine it; though I bow to your greater experience.’
‘River brings every turd from Cheriton to the Bishop’s Palace past the walls.’ Pengallow had taken to a chair. ‘Come July gets a bit ripe. The king, God bless him, spends the summer on Wight Island. We, sir, do not.’
‘The night soil men upriver in Alresford call themselves the Royal Postmen,’ Thomas added. ‘On account of them sending messages…’
‘Enough. Their crudities are of no interest to us.’
‘Meant no offence, sir.’
‘Then say what you mean. How long have you served at The Tower?’
‘Seven years, sir.’
‘You don’t wish for anything more active?’
The man sucked in his belly. ‘I’ve done my share, sir.’
‘Eireland?’ Wolfe asked.
‘Three years,’ Thomas said, as though Eireland were no more hazardous than a posting to Folkestone. ‘Before that, I was with Colonel Herrick in Africa, then Flanders, and before that against Old Boney.’
Warder Thomas’s tone bordered on insubordinate, but he should not have pressed the man: it was a respectable service record. The coffee finished, he reclaimed his cloak from the door, taking care nothing had broken off the doll and attached itself to the cloth.
‘Pengallow, you say A’Guirre has these at every gate?
‘So, I understand, sir.’
‘Did she say what it’s for?’
‘No, sir. As you say, ‘she has her ways’.’
§
The guard posts at Catherine’s Gate and City Gate yielded two more of A’Guirre’s dolls but no man able to tell him their purpose. What was worrying the old witch? Wolfe did not like surprises. Nor did he like A’Guirre, but that was another matter. And in God’s teeth why, he asked himself for the tenth time, had he understood the queer writing? It was not Latin, nor anything like Latin, but for a second it had been clear as cogito ergo sum.
He climbed the stair at City Gate. He had still to walk the wall and call on the guard post at Catherine’s Tower. Keeping his mind fully occupied was tiring and, once atop, he leant against the parapet, intending to gather his thoughts. Not one glimmer of light showed through the fog.
Winchester, capital of Anglia, lay in a fork between two valleys, making a natural basin for fog. He imagined this had always been so: the vapours slipping, dripping through the ancient oak woods of the higher valley, sliding over the water meadows, fingering the sedge and bulrush-ridden marshes and pooling above the Itchen’s meandering course. From there the fog slunk downstream to meet the navigation at Blackbridge Wharf, ensnaring the rigging of the barges in its ghostly grasp, muffling the bark of the skipper’s cur, snugging his cat below deck, pearling the cables holding boat to shore and cloaking the footpads in the alleys…
He shivered. The chill had crept under his cloak. He continued his round.
…Having filled the wharves with its damp-fingered grope and filtered along alleys crowded with ten-to-the-room hovels, gin houses trading in stupor and melancholy, and brothels offering five minutes’ joy and years of quicksilvered madness, the fog met a better class of establishment: inns and coffeehouses where gentlemen drank and gossiped, guildhalls where they won and lost their fortunes, church and chapel and Jew house where they prayed, even sanctity proving no—
‘Damn this!’
His thoughts had run away; he had not imagined the city but the city drowning in fog, as he might drown. The otherworld was close tonight. Once he had delighted in the whisperings and bright colours, believing they marked him as special, but Father had beaten God’s reality into him. He had learned to shut out the visions and ignore the voices: or nearly so.
Wolfe walked with the parapet at arm’s length and every few seconds slapped the coping stones, using the pain to focus his thoughts.
He thought well of Warder Pengallow. True, he was a Celt, but at least the Cornish had none of the absurd pride he detested in the Gwaels. He thought rather less of Warder Thomas. Good men though they’d been, many an old soldier came to The Tower to see out their days. And too many had grown slapdash.
What was the doll guarding against?
His hand missed the parapet, upsetting his rhythm and his thoughts.
‘Damn and blast. Damn this fog. Damn this night…’
He flailed an arm at the fog, as though to slice it open, but made no impression. Instead, his anger sucked the foul air into his chest. This fog put a sore in a man’s throat, a cough in his children’s lungs, spoiled his wife’s linen, poisoned the grass and trees and rotted stonework. Everything it touched turned to mourning and God knows what it did to a man’s insides. Leaning over the wall to hawk phlegm, he recalled a man might stand here and spy the sea beyond Hampton on a clear day. No such joy tonight. Only when his breathing steadied did he continue.
Colonel Herrick, another of the ‘Old Men’, would be sound asleep in his quarters below. Wolfe had long ago accepted higher rank was beyond him. His disorder had shown itself too often and he had deservedly acquired a reputation for rashness and impatience. A reputation for bravery, too, though less deserved; a man charging an enemy may only be fleeing a greater foe.