'I want to sit down,' she said.

I felt guilty at having brought her; lifting a chair from the wreckage, I helped her sit. After a minute some colour returned to her face and she looked at the smashed chest. 'Michael and Samuel bought that last autumn. Heaved it up here. They'd never let me know what was in it.'

I nodded at the empty shelves. 'Do you know what was kept on those?'

'Samuel's powders and chemicals. Sulphur and lime and God knows what. The smells I had to put up with, the noises.' She nodded at the fireplace. 'When he was heating potions there I was sometimes afraid he'd blow the house up as high as a monastery church. Whoever killed them took Samuel's bottles as well, God knows why. This is where all the great knowledge Samuel claimed to have brought him in the end,' she said wearily. 'And Michael with him.' There was a sudden catch in her voice; she swallowed and made her face severe again. I studied her. She was holding in some powerful emotions. Grief? Anger? Fear?

'Has anything else been taken that you can see?'

'No. But I came up here as little as I could help.'

'You did not think much of your brother-in-law's trade?'

'Michael and I were happy enough on our own till Samuel suggested we all buy a large house together when the lease ran out on his old workshop. Samuel was all right purifying lime for the gunpowder makers, but when he tried anything more ambitious he'd come unstuck. He was greedy beyond his knowledge, like all alchemists.' She sighed. 'A couple of years ago he fancied he'd found a way to strengthen pewter, some formula he'd teased out of one of his old books, but he never managed it and the Pewter-masters' Guild sued him. And Michael was always so easily led, was sure one day his brother would make their fortune. These last few weeks Michael and Samuel spent half their time up here. They told me they'd found out a marvellous secret.' She looked at the bloody doorway again. 'Men's greed.'

'Did they ever mention the term Greek Fire?' I watched her face. She hesitated before replying.

'Not to me. I tell you, I wasn't interested in what they did up here.' She shifted uneasily in her chair.

'You spoke of experiments, sometimes out in the yard. Did they have an apparatus, a large thing of tanks and pipes? Did you ever see anything like that?'

'No, sir. I'd have noticed. All they took out to the yard were flasks of liquid and powder. That's not what the earl's men have turned my house upside down looking for, is it? I thought it was some papers.'

'Yes, it was,' I said mildly. Her eyes had narrowed warily when I mentioned the apparatus. 'But there was a big metal construction as well. You are sure you know nothing of that?'

'Nothing, sir, I swear.' She was lying, I was sure. I nodded and stepped to the fireplace. The stoppered bottle lay where I had left it, but to my surprise the thick liquid on the floorboards seemed to have evaporated; there was nothing left but the barest stain on the floor. I touched it; the floor was quite dry. I hesitated, then picked up the little bottle, still half-full of the stuff.

'Might you have any idea what this liquid is, madam?'

'No, I haven't.' Her voice rose. 'Greek Fire, formulae, books, I don't know what any of it means! God's wounds, I don't care either!' Her voice rose to a shout and she covered her face with her hands. I picked up the bottle and wrapped it carefully in my handkerchief, then slipped it into my pocket, suppressing a momentary stab of fear that it might be Greek Fire itself, that it might explode into flames.

Goodwife Gristwood wiped her face and sat looking at the floor. When she spoke again it was in a cold whisper. 'If you want to find who might have told the killers about my husband, you should go to her.'

'Who?'

'His whore.' Barak and I looked at each other in surprise as she continued, her voice like a thin stream of icy water. 'The woman that keeps the brewery told me in March she'd seen Michael in Southwark, going into one of the whorehouses. She enjoyed telling me too.' She looked at me bitterly. 'I asked him and he admitted it. He said he wouldn't go again but I didn't believe him. Some days he'd come home drunk, smelling like a stewhouse, goggle-eyed with sated lust.'

Barak laughed aloud at the words. Goodwife Gristwood rounded on him. 'Shut up! You churl, laughing at a woman's shame!'

'Leave us,' I told him curtly. For a moment I thought he would argue, but he shrugged and left. The goodwife looked up at me, her eyes fierce. 'Michael was besotted with that vile tart. I raged and shouted at him but still he went to her.' She bit her lip hard. 'I'd always been able to manage him before, stop him getting too involved with mad schemes, but then Samuel came and between him and that whore I lost him.' She looked again at the awful spray of blood then stared at me, her eyes fierce. 'I asked him once if his lusts were all he cared about and he said the tart was kind to him and he could talk to her. Well, you talk to her, sir. Bathsheba Green at the Bishop's Hat brothel at Bank End.'

'I see.'

'They do what they like over in Southwark, outside the City's jurisdiction. This side of the river she'd have her cheeks branded, and I'd do it for them.'

Despite her vicious words I felt sorry for Jane Gristwood, alone now with nothing but this big decaying house. I wondered what she had felt for her husband. Something more than the contempt and bitterness she expressed, I was sure. Certainly she would make what trouble she could for the whore.

I looked into her eyes and again had the sense of something held back. I would return when I had found this Bathsheba Green.

'Thank you, Goodwife Gristwood,' I said. I bowed to her.

'Is that all?' She looked relieved.

'For now.'

'Talk to her,' she repeated fiercely. 'Talk to her.'

AS I WALKED DOWNSTAIRS I heard voices from the back regions; a man's murmur then a woman's sudden giggle. 'Barak!' I called sharply. He appeared, sucking an orange. 'Susan gave me this,' he said, tucking the half-eaten fruit away in his codpiece. 'Fresh off the boat.'

'We should go,' I said curtly, leading the way outside. I blinked in the afternoon sun, bright after the gloomy house.

'What did Madam Sour-face have to say?' Barak asked as we untied the horses.

'More without you there baiting her. She told me Michael was seeing a whore. Bathsheba Green, of the Bishop's Hat in Southwark.'

'I know the Bishop's Hat. It's a rough place. I would have thought an Augmentations man could have afforded a better class of nip.' We mounted the horses; I adjusted my cap so some shade might fall on my neck.

'I was asking Susan about the family,' Barak said as we rode away. 'Goodwife Gristwood tried to rule the roost, but her husband and his brother paid little heed, apparently. They were thick as thieves. Both after a quick fortune, she said.'

'Did she know of Michael's dalliance at Southwark?'

'Yes. Said it turned the goodwife bitter. But you could see that, pinched old raven.'

'She's lost her husband, has nothing in the world now except that ruin of a house.'

Barak grunted. 'Apparently Gristwood married her for her money when she was nearly thirty. There was some scandal in her family, Susan didn't know what.'

I turned to look at him. 'Why do you dislike her so?'

He laughed, in a tone as bitter as Jane Gristwood's own. 'She reminds me of my mother, if you must know. The way she was after you for information about the house the moment we were in the door, and her husband lying in his gore upstairs. My ma was like that, married our lodger not a month after my father died. I quit the house then.'

'A poor widow must look to her future.'