Witchborn Page 6

‘What about your father?’

  ‘No, not going to go looking for him, either. Haven’t seen him for two years or more. And that’s the way he wants it too. Bad enough that I was suckled by a devil, in his eyes, but now, shame upon shame, I’m an actor too. There’s no coming back from that.’ He smiled again, but this time it was thin and bitter, and it didn’t reach his eyes.

  Alyce couldn’t gauge what Solomon wanted her to say, if anything. Maybe she should just laugh at his joke? Her indecision lulled her into silence again.

  ‘Hum,’ said Solomon, not looking at her. ‘You didn’t mention your father at all.’

  That was true. But it was only because she knew virtually nothing about him. She could count the number of times her mother had spoken of him on one hand, and on those occasions always in the vaguest terms. There was never any hint of spite, or longing. He had arrived; they had been in love; he had left before Alyce was born. And since Alyce never knew him, she never missed him.

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ she said, forestalling any further conversation.

  ‘In fact, there were quite a few things you didn’t mention.’

  ‘Who’s giving the inquisition now?’

  ‘I’m not asking any questions. I’m just stating that I think there are things you’re not telling me. That you’re not telling anyone.’

  By now they had reached Bishopsgate. To Alyce it looked very similar to Cripplegate in design – a large, arched portcullis in a square tower, flanked by two taller, thinner towers, each with its own postern gate. There was one difference, though. Illuminated by the last sullen rays of the sunset, a collection of four severed heads on spikes stood as watchmen, looking out over the battlements.

  Alyce stopped and gulped. Solomon grinned.

  ‘Pretty, aren’t they? Criminals. When they first go up, some of the other actors in the company place bets on which head loses its eyes first.’

  Criminals, thought Alyce, and she imagined her own head up there, feeding the birds. Then, as if bringing the daydream to life, she saw a raven circle the gate and come to perch on one of the spikes. It bristled, and then seemed to look straight at her.

  Alyce lowered her eyes and pressed on.

  Once they were free of the shadow of Bishopsgate, the air was immediately fresher. The broad road leading out of London was lined closely with black and white half-timbered houses and their gardens, some of them rather grand, but on either side the landscape was broad and flat and green. Despite the gathering dusk, a handful of gentlemen were still congregating in the fields to practise their archery.

  Alyce recognized the scenery. Bedlam was not far away. Her stomach lurched as she spotted the roof of the Great House.

  ‘Where’s the playhouse, then?’ she asked.

  ‘Further up. Two of them, actually. We can probably hide out there afterwards, if we need to.’

  Alyce nodded. Even if they didn’t need a hiding place, they would still need a roof over their heads. Chances were, the city gates would be closed by the time they were finished. The last of the daylight was an orange, slitted eye glowering on the horizon.

  ‘Why is it all the way out here? Why not inside the city walls where more people can see you put on your plays?’

  ‘Really?’ He stopped in the middle of the road, and looked at her steadily.

  ‘Really what?’

  ‘I just assumed you’d know. I am an outcast, Alyce. An exile. We all are. Players have been expelled from the city for a couple of years now – we can only perform outside the walls, or if we have been invited to private residences. Like the palace.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Bad apples, the lot of us, so we have to be chucked out of the barrel. The Devil’s servants, that’s all players are, corrupting good Christian morals.’ He pointed between Alyce and himself. ‘See, Alyce? We have plenty in common.’

  Then he resumed his loping walk, and it was a few moments before Alyce snapped out of her reverie and ran to catch up.

  They soon saw the bleak, grey buildings of Bedlam hospital huddled on their left-hand side. The infirmary and the tenements were set back from the road behind a high wall and a gatehouse, looking to any casual observer like they had been abandoned – not the faintest light could be seen coming from any of the tiny black windows. But Alyce could feel the hum of crazed, fractured lives imprisoned behind the bars.

  ‘Do you have a plan for getting in?’ asked Solomon.

  ‘Not really,’ confessed Alyce. She squinted. ‘But maybe we won’t need one. Look.’

  Outside Bedlam’s gate, a sleek, black carriage was drawn up, apparently unattended, its horses puffing great clouds of steam into the cold evening air. And the gate itself was wide open.

  Alyce stepped into the shadows beside the wall. ‘We should go in now . . .’ she whispered.

  ‘But what are we going to do? Or say? I thought we were going to talk through some sort of strategy. And don’t you need a disguise or something? You’ll stand out like the Queen herself in that great white sheet you’re wearing.’

  ‘We might not get another chance. The gates aren’t often left open like that.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I’m going in now. You can do what you like.’

  While Solomon silently protested, Alyce crept forward as far as the horses’ noses, keeping her shoulder pressed against the damp stones. Something about that empty carriage made her feel horribly uneasy, as though there were something watching her from within, unseen. The back of her neck prickled, and urged her to keep moving.

  As the last slivers of sunlight disappeared from the rooftops, Alyce slipped through the gate, and into the hospital’s mad labyrinth.

  After her time at The Swan, Alyce found the sight and the smell of Bedlam unbearably sad. It was a hopeless place. The squat, bleak infirmary sat at the centre of a cobbled yard, surrounded by the tenements and, unbelievably, some private residences. The governors’ Great House was on the Bishopsgate side, but looked no more hospitable than the patients’ accommodation. Every building was in desperate need of repair.

  She and Solomon squatted in the dirt and looked at each other, muscles stiffening in the cold. Evening mist had shrouded the world, dampening every sound, but from time to time the peace was rent apart by howling from one of Bedlam’s inmates. It set them both even more on edge than they already were.

  Alyce was suddenly aware of how little she had thought this through. Solomon looked nervous too.

  ‘I always have a dream,’ he hissed, ‘where I walk out on stage and realize I don’t know any of my lines. Where I don’t even know what play it is I’m performing in. This feels like that.’

  Alyce ignored him, and tried to remember the layout of the buildings’ interiors, for any hints as to where the governors might have kept her possessions. She’d seen Master Makepiece go out of the back door of the gatehouse to fetch them, but that meant nothing. He could have gone in any number of directions after that.

  Inside the gatehouse, two men were talking. Or was it three? She couldn’t quite hear. One of the voices sounded weak, and the other speaker kept interrupting him. Sometimes the second voice laughed an odd, humourless laugh that made Alyce’s skin crawl. She turned to Solomon.

  ‘You should go and talk to them.’

  Solomon didn’t even answer. He simply pointed at himself, and his eyes bulged again.

  ‘You’re the actor,’ she whispered. ‘You could pretend you have some questions. Say you have someone you want to admit to the hospital. Ask for a tour. Just keep them occupied while I search for my things.’

  ‘Just because I’m an actor doesn’t mean I can act any part whenever anyone asks for it.’ His voice was loud with agitation.

  ‘Hush!’ She looked at him desperately. ‘Please, Solomon. I can’t be caught here. Not again. Just talk to them for a few minutes. I’ll see you outside when I’ve finished looking.’

  ‘And if they lock the gates?’

  She looked behind her at the wroug
ht-iron bars and her heart skipped several beats. She couldn’t, she wouldn’t end up imprisoned here again. ‘Then I’ll just have to escape the way I did last time. Through the churchyard and over the ditch.’

  Alyce stopped herself, knowing she had said too much.

  ‘Escape?’ said Solomon, the edge of his lips curling. ‘I thought you said they’d let you out?’

  Alyce turned red, and looked back at the door of the gatehouse.

  ‘Very well,’ said Solomon, with mock solemnity. ‘I’ll go and ply my trade, and hope they are easily gulled. On the condition that you tell me the true version of your story. Afterwards.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Alyce with a single short, hot sigh. ‘Just go and give the best performance of your life.’

  Solomon raised himself from his haunches, knees popping. He dusted down his doublet, arranged his ruff, breathed deeply, and went into the gatehouse.

  The two men stopped speaking instantly, and Alyce could almost feel the heat of their annoyance radiating out of the doorway. She heard Solomon clear his throat tentatively, before the louder of the two voices snapped at him.

  ‘What is it, boy?’

  ‘Um. I wondered if I might speak with the master of this fine . . . institution.’

  Alyce skirted the threshold, treading as lightly as if the ground were silk, and passed under the window beyond. Inside, Solomon was hardly warming to his character. In fact, he sounded downright terrified.

  ‘It’s my aunt, you see, she’s not . . . quite right. Um. You look busy, perhaps I should come back.’

  It was so awkward she was tempted to step in and save him. Or throttle him. One of the two.

  Ideally, she would have searched the gatehouse first but since that was impossible, she decided to head for the infirmary. That was where she had been disrobed and shorn when she’d first arrived. Perhaps her clothes had not been moved since then. She left Solomon blabbering, and set off across the yard to where the patients brooded in their darkened cells. There was no moon. All their lunatic thoughts, hopes and fears were concealed by the night.

  The door into the lower ward was not locked, and opened easily. Straight away the rank smell of sickness and decay and unemptied slop buckets curled itself into Alyce’s nose and throat, and she fought to keep her stomach from rising. Somehow, she had endured this air for a month or more – she had sat in her cell while it had pooled around her like warm soup. Now, she felt like she couldn’t take a single breath without being sick.

  She forced her feet forwards. Immediately ahead of her, an aged wooden staircase climbed to the ward above, and a passageway extended to her left, lined with cell doors on either side. The patients rustled in the shadows. She could hear their ragged breathing.

  Her heart leapt when she saw a row of smocks hanging on hooks underneath the stairs, but once her eyes had adjusted to the darkness and she had searched through their folds it became clear that these were the sad garments that the governors gave their patients on arrival, all identically shapeless and uncomfortable. A peal of laughter sounded from somewhere down the passageway, as though mocking her disappointment, then swelled uncontrollably and descended into weeping. The sound was just as pitiable and terrifying now as it had been on the first night she’d been here. Alyce made her way to the floor above, hauling her cold, leaden heart with her.

  The search of the infirmary was fruitless. Upstairs and downstairs, all she found was rows of cells and their inhabitants. Most of them were women, at least those whose ghostly features hovered in the small, square windows of the cell doors. They weren’t raving and muttering, but just looked sad and lost. Alyce wondered how many of them were like her, abandoned in the hospital to be cured of something that nobody – least of all they themselves – really understood.

  The only other room – if it could be called that – was the overflowing cesspit on the ground floor, referred to simply as the ‘Great Vault’. Opening that door just a crack was all that was needed to convince her to escape the infirmary and try elsewhere.

  As she walked back along the passageway, a frail, icy voice suddenly cut through the gloom.

  ‘Is that you?’

  Alyce stiffened.

  ‘It is you, isn’t it?’

  It was coming from one of the cells. Alyce tried to reply, but her lungs were numb from the cold.

  ‘Did you bring my books? Did he give them to you?’ The voice drew a long, fluttering breath. There was a scratching noise too, as though something were being inscribed on stone in one of the cells. ‘So hard to see without them.’

  ‘I don’t – I don’t know what you mean . . .’ said Alyce. She groped through the darkness, unable to pinpoint where the sound was coming from.

  ‘Not the black one. Burn the black one. Cast it in the pit! Black book. Black book. Black book. Black book.’

  The words drifted and swirled through the corridor in fragments. They lapped like waves. Alyce crept from one cell to another, but whenever she thought she had found the source of the voice, it would echo from behind or above her and she would spin on the spot, disorientated. Madness, she remembered from her time here, is infectious.

  ‘Oh.’ The woman in the cell groaned.

  ‘What is it?’ Alyce whispered.

  More scratching.

  ‘Oh my. Why did you bring them here?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Black book. Black book. Black book.’

  Alyce stopped and shivered.

  ‘She’s looking for both of us, you know. I won’t go back. Let me out, and we’ll run away to the woods, the three of us, three country mice. Not him though, no, not him.’

  ‘I’m sorry . . .’ muttered Alyce.

  ‘Please let me out.’

  ‘I–I can’t . . . I don’t have the key.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Please.’

  Alyce frantically searched from one cell to the next but saw only darkness. The echo of their conversation had roused more patients, and the passageway began to fill with their confused chattering.

  ‘They’re here. The dogs are here.’

  Alyce could hear voices outside the door. The only door. It was the men from the gatehouse. She cursed. Solomon, you are useless! You’ve led them straight to me!

  The hinges groaned, and yellow torchlight licked its way across the floor. Alyce backed up, panicking. She’d reached the far end of the passageway. Dead end. If the governors came even halfway down the ward, the torch would reveal her, cowering in the corner. There was only one place to hide, one place where nobody would ever think to look for her.

  Silently, she opened the door to the Great Vault, and slipped inside.

  The hospital’s cesspit looked like it hadn’t been tended to in several decades. Alyce didn’t want to think about how deep the pool of filth was – and however deep it was, it was overflowing, rolling in little peaks and troughs and spilling on to the narrow walkway around the outside. The smell seemed to manhandle her like a physical force, but she managed to shuffle along one side, hugging the wall, her feet occasionally coming to rest in a pool of something soft and wet. She held her breath, and listened.

  ‘Start nearest her cell and work down.’

  ‘Please, sir, these poor souls need rest.’

  ‘These poor souls might have seen what happened to the girl.’

  ‘But they are distracted. They see all sorts of things, most of them pure fantasy. And your friend here . . .’ There was a pause. Alyce pressed her ear against the crack of the door. ‘Your friend will only unsettle them further.’

  ‘They can’t all be as mad as you say. What about the girl herself? You said she was curiously lucid.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘I won’t be taking any chances, Master Makepiece. If there is even one of them who has the faintest recollection of what happened that night, I should very much like to speak with them.’

  Alyce hadn’t realized it was the governor until th
ey actually mentioned his name. His voice sounded different, like he couldn’t pronounce his words properly. She hoped he would speak again, but all she heard was a creak and hollow thumping. They were going up the stairs.

  Once the passageway was quiet again, Alyce pushed open the door. Her lungs were screaming at her. When she was sure the men were directly overhead, she ran for the exit, halting briefly to listen for the woman’s voice, but it was lost in the babble of the other inmates. She slipped through the door, making sure the hinges didn’t protest, and then tumbled out into the yard and scurried back across the cobbles.

  When she arrived back at the gatehouse it was silent. She peered slowly round the door and found Solomon, alone, pacing around in the light of a single candle and wringing his hands.

  ‘Solomon!’ she hissed. ‘What are you doing?’

  He looked up, relieved.

  ‘Thank God, you’re all right! So they didn’t see you?’

  ‘No,’ she said, glancing behind her and stepping into the gatehouse. ‘But they’re still in the infirmary. What happened to your captivating performance?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I tried to stop them! They just ignored me, though. I said that—’ He stopped suddenly and sniffed. ‘Zounds, Alyce, what is that smell?’

  ‘The cesspit, that’s what.’ She lifted the hem of her dress to show off her filthy ankles. ‘I can’t recommend it highly enough as a hiding place.’

  ‘Oh. How vile. Still, at least they didn’t find you. Terrible strange pair, those men. Did you see the—’

  Alyce shook her head and pattered past him. ‘Later, Solomon. We need to search this place before they come back.’

  She didn’t understand why she was being so curt when she was so pleased to see him. What’s wrong with you, you little harpy? She took a candle from the table and went out of the passageway at the back of the gatehouse. Solomon followed without a word.

  The building running alongside the courtyard was long and low and draughty, and three times the struggling candle almost went out completely. Alyce poked her head into each room as she went: a study, a damp wood-store, a larder that reeked of sour milk. Each got colder and smelt worse as she went along.