The Angel's Mark by S. W. Perry

Author:S. W. Perry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

On a chilly afternoon that same week, Nicholas and Bianca take a bracing stroll along the riverbank towards the Paris Garden. Bianca thinks a brisk walk in the cold might put at least a temporary stop to his infernal edginess.

He’s been like this ever since he sent Timothy across the bridge with the letter. Out on the water the wherries and tilt-boats ply back and forth between the river stairs and the wharves. The passengers huddle in their cloaks.

‘How can you be sure Lord Lumley will help? He may be just like all the others,’ she asks.

‘John Lumley is a man who likes uncovering mysteries,’ Nicholas replies. ‘That’s why he built his library at Nonsuch. That’s why he sent Fulke Vaesy to Italy to study anatomy. From what I know about him, he’s not the sort of man to shut his mind to a proposition without first studying the facts.’

Bianca wonders what Nicholas will do if John Lumley turns him down. She knows his recovery is still incomplete. Whenever they walk along the river like this, she catches him sneaking the occasional melancholy glance across the water. Who is he searching for, when he steals these private glances into the distance? Now she thinks she knows.

There was someone I couldn’t cure – someone very dear to me.

Just for a moment an unexpected jealousy comes over her.

Reaching the Falcon stairs, they see a young lad of about Jacob Monkton’s age fishing from the end of the jetty. He wears a tattered wool jerkin. His hands and face are grubby. He’s probably from one of the Bankside tenements. Nicholas watches him for a while. Then he turns and looks back along the river towards the bridge, scanning the buildings along the southern bank.

‘When did Ned Monkton’s brother go missing?’ he asks suddenly, turning to her.

‘Jacob? A good month before he was found,’ she answers, brushing a curl of hair from over one eye.

‘But I saw his body. He’d only been in the water a couple of days at the most. So where was he in the meantime?’

‘You think Jacob was kept a prisoner somewhere?’

He nods. ‘And perhaps the others, too.’

‘But where?’

‘Remember what Slater, the waterman, said about how the bodies might wash ashore?’

‘So it must be somewhere between here and the Lambeth marshes.’

‘Otherwise the killer would have to risk bringing an eviscerated body some distance to the river, wouldn’t he? He wouldn’t chance that, surely.’

Bianca puts a hand over her mouth, as if to stop her thoughts from escaping. ‘What a horrible thought – poor Jacob in chains, confined like a condemned prisoner.’

‘I didn’t tell you this the day I found him, but Jacob certainly struggled at the end. I saw the wheals on his wrists and ankles. How do you keep a strong young lad like that compliant for a whole month? Or stop him from calling for help?’

‘I could make a potion to take away the power of speech – easily,’ Bianca tells him confidently, though inside her, the image of what Nicholas has just described starts a cold entanglement of terror in her stomach.

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