Read Chapter 5: The Cart's Secret

Thomas heard the cart before he saw it. The iron-shod wheels ground against the cobbles of the church path, a low and mournful sound that seemed to belong to no living thing. He pressed himself flat against the yew tree at the graveyard's edge, the rough bark digging into his cheek. The night air was cold, thick with the smell of turned earth and something else—something sweet and foul that clung to the back of the throat. He had smelt it before, in the plague wards of Bristol. He knew it too well to mistake it.

The sexton drove the cart alone. He was a stooped man, thin as a rake, and he did not look left or right. He pulled the horse to a halt near the fresh lime grave he had shown Thomas the night before, but he did not climb down. Instead, he sat there in the dark, waiting, not moving, as if he listened for something.

Thomas held his breath. The sexton's head turned slowly, scanning the graveyard. It was a sly, cautious motion—the gesture of a man who expected to be watched. Thomas felt a chill that had nothing to do with the cold.

The sexton clicked his tongue. The horse moved on.

It did not go to the grave. It skirted the churchyard and turned toward the chapel's eastern wall, where a thicket of brambles grew high and wild. Thomas slipped along the shadow of the lychgate, then dropped behind a headstone as the cart stopped again. The sexton climbed down. He walked to the wall, reached through the brambles, and pulled something heavy and wooden—a door, hidden, disguised by the growth. It swung open on an iron hinge that screamed in the silence.

The sexton returned to the cart. He lifted the shrouded body from the boards with a grunt of effort, slung it over his shoulder, and carried it through the brambles into the open doorway. Thomas counted a long, slow minute. Then he followed.

The crypt was shallow, the stairs narrow and steep. The air inside was close and bitter, thick with quicklime and sickness. Thomas put a hand to the wall to steady himself and descended into a darkness so complete it seemed to press on his eyes. At the bottom, the blackness thinned to the glow of a single tallow candle set in a niche. The sexton had lit it. He was gone.

Thomas moved forward. The crypt was small, a vaulted ceiling of blackened stone, and at its center lay a long trestle table. The corpse the sexton had carried lay atop it, still wrapped. But it was not alone.

Stacked against the far wall, the bodies rose in a terrible pile—some wrapped in linen, others in nothing but their own rotting clothes, arms stiff and reaching, faces fixed in the rictus of the pox. Thomas counted six. Seven. Eight. The swellings were black and ripe on their necks, their groins, their hollowed cheeks. These were not victims of a clean fever. These were plague dead, hidden away, unburied, unlimed, stored like cordwood for some purpose he could not yet name.

He heard a footstep behind him. Then the candle went out.

Thomas spun, his hand already at his belt for the knife he did not carry. He had left his kit with Agnes. He had left his blade. The folly of that struck him like a blow, just before the blow itself came.

Something struck him across the side of the head. A flash of white heat, then the floor of the crypt came up to meet him. He tasted blood, felt the cold stone against his cheek, heard the low breathing of a man who did not speak.

The silence was worse than the beating.

Thomas tried to rise, but his arms had gone weak, the world tilting on its axis. Above him, he saw a shape—broad, massive, a silhouette that blocked what little light spilled from the top of the stairs. The brute did not say a word. He did not grunt. He simply reached down, took hold of Thomas's arm, and dragged him across the stone floor as a farmer might drag a sack of grain.

Thomas's head struck the lower step. Then the second. Then the third.

The night sky wheeled above him, sharp with stars. He saw the sexton's face as it passed overhead—that nervous, fearful glance—and then he saw nothing else.

He woke with his hands bound and his head pounding, the taste of copper on his tongue. He did not know how long he had been under. He was in a small room with a low ceiling, a single barred window letting in gray morning light. He was lying on a straw pallet that stank of old sweat. His boots were gone. His belt was gone.

The door was oak and iron, and it was locked.

He put his hand to the side of his head and found a knot the size of a hen's egg, sticky with dried blood. The chest where they had kept the bodies burned behind his eyes—those faces, those swellings, that unholy archive of the dead. The village burned its plague dead, the council said. The church buried them in lime. No one was to speak of it.

But the bodies in that crypt were not burned. They were not limed. They were waiting.

For what?

Thomas lowered his head against his knees and listened to the sound of his own ragged breathing. The village of Blencarn kept its promises as well as it kept its corpses, he thought.

Which is to say, not at all.