“Is that our coach?” asked Abigail, indicating a large stagecoach just north of the gate with four large horses tethered in front. It turned out that it was.

  Their wooden, enclosed coach had two large, eight-spoked wheels at the back and two smaller ones at the front. Its body was painted functional red and its wheels black. It resembled an enlarged hackney coach.

  There were no windows, only curtains and wooden shutters. Although it looked heavy and ungainly to Abigail, whose first journey by stagecoach this was, it also looked like adventure.

  Inside there was room for six passengers.

  When Abigail stepped up onto the footplate, ushered there by Jacob, she found an old couple already inside, sitting opposite one another. They were arguing.

  She: “Why did you not bring a cushion for me, Humphrey?”

  He (winking at Abigail): “Your derriere, my dear, is padded enough!”

  She (assaulting him with her bag): “How dare you! I…”

  As the looming height of Jacob Standish entered the space, he was impossible not to notice, and the old woman ceased her assault in mid-air. Returning the bag to her lap, she coughed pointedly and wrinkled her nose.

  “Oh dear,” she said, eyeing the dishevelled Jacob. “How unfortunate.”

  The fellow travellers were Humphrey and Millicent Worthington, both in their early sixties. He was jolly and portly, with bushy grey nose-hair that resembled a tiny moustache. He sweated profusely, even though the temperature in the carriage made their breath condense, and was constantly wiping his brow with a lace handkerchief. He wore a velvet waistcoat with a watch chain overtly displayed and a feathered velvet hat, which he declined to take off.

  “Remove your hat, Humphrey!”

  “I will not, Millicent.” Again, he winked at Abigail. “It keeps my head on.”

  Millicent slapped his leg. “Stop winking at that poor girl! She has no interest in you!”

  The long-suffering woman bore an air of faded elegance. Her silver hair was tied in a tight bun, and her delicately lined face tapered towards an upturned nose. Her cold lips were permanently pursed.

  Both wore outfits of style and elegance, if some years out of date.

  As the coach set off on towards Stevenage, where they would lodge that night, Mr Worthington bellowed, “I must tell you about the cloth trade!”

  Though both inquisitors died a little inside, that is precisely what he did.

  Until retiring in 1656, Humphrey told them, he had been a successful cloth merchant. He had risen up the ranks to become Master of the Worshipful Company of Clothworkers, one of the Great 12 Livery Companies of London. These were the most powerful and influential trades companies in the city, holding great sway over daily life and business.

  He went on to explain the art of dyeing, the intricacies of wool grading, and the subtle variations in quality between the coats of different breeds of British sheep. He covered the finishing of cloth and the art of weaving. He detailed the processes of fulling, napping, shearing and pressing.

  “Pray stop, Humphrey,” implored his wife. Having considered Abigail and Jacob distinctly beneath her, she was beginning to feel sorry for them.

  Still he went on. The banquets, the trade deals, the charitable work… It was an exhausting whirlwind of self-congratulation and Abigail wondered whether they would ever be set free. At roughly four miles per hour, she calculated, it would take another day and a half before their coach reached their eventual destination of Brampton. She dearly hoped the Worthingtons were not travelling that far.

  There was no escaping it: Humphrey Worthington, Master of the Worshipful Company of Clothworkers, was king of the coach, and none dared interrupt him.

  Just outside Stevenage, as luck would have it, he was shot by a highwayman.

  The condition of the dirt road had grown worse the further they rode from London, and the coachman had been forced to stop to repair a wheel damaged in a rut. That was when Humphrey’s assailant struck, cantering towards them in a cloak and cocked hat, his face obscured by a white scarf.

  These renegade horseback robbers were a constant threat on the main routes out of London, and particularly on the Great North Road that Abigail and Jacob were following. Men who had fallen on hard times, often soldiers unable to find employment after the last English Civil War ended in 1658, they were desperate and dangerous.

  “Fill the bag!” the highwayman growled, thrusting a flintlock pistol into Mrs Worthington’s face with one hand and a canvas sack into her husband’s lap with the other.

  “Do something, Humphrey!” she shrieked.

  Jacob leapt up, forgetting he was taller than the inside of the cab, smacked his head on the roof, lost his balance, and fell backwards against the door. It flew open, depositing him on the ground outside, where he lay, discombobulated.

  Seizing his opportunity, Humphrey Worthington lunged for the highwayman’s pistol, which discharged, firing a ball of lead harmlessly through the open door opposite. Abigail fancied she felt it disturb the air at the tip of her nose.

  “Now I have you, scoundrel!” cried Worthington, aware that flintlocks carried just the one shot. “You will hang for this!”

  The highwayman dropped his sack, drew a second pistol from his belt, pointed it at the retired cloth merchant, and fired. A burst of flame, a sharp report, a plume of smoke, and the acrid smell of gunpowder - all in an instant - and Worthington fell backwards.

  “Oh my!” gasped his wife.

  The robber’s scarf fell from his face, revealing a frightened lad of no more than 20 years, with a vivid scar that ran from the corner of his mouth to his ear. Panicked, he dropped the pistol, lunged for Worthington’s pocket watch and scarpered.

  At the King’s Arms in Stevenage, servants rushed to carry a groaning Worthington from the carriage, while his flustered wife alternately fussed, wept, and mopped his brow. In truth, it was merely a flesh wound, a grazed shoulder; however, Humphrey Worthington was not one to eschew a grand entrance.

  Finally, after some 30-odd miles of tortuous journeying, the inquisitors were alone together. The sun had set and night was drawing in.

  Abby had never been so far from London in her life. The air smells so different out here, so strangely clean, she thought to herself. When she listened for the familiar city sounds, she heard only the wind in the trees and the cawing of a crow.

  The King’s Arms was an impressively sized coaching inn, catering to many thousands of travellers the year around. Its timber frames, set horizontally, vertically and diagonally, were painted black, and its wattle-and-daub plastering whitewashed. Its windows, in pairs and threes, bore diamond-shaped leading, and the roofs were tiled in red brick.

  Outside hung a large sign depicting King Charles II’s coat of arms. Not long ago, the inn had been called The Cromwell, the innkeeper having wisely rebranded.

  Inside were roaring fireplaces and revelry, smells of roasting meat, hops, pipe smoke and bodily odours. Jacob and Abigail suppered on roast breast of mutton and discussed the case.

  After a couple of ales, his lingering confidence issues surfaced. “I am but a charlatan, Abigail,” Jacob moaned, scratching his head through his periwig. “It was you who uncovered the diary thief, not I. I am unsuited to the task: slow of thought and prone to error. Mr Pepys’s sister’s life may be forfeit if we cannot disprove her witchcraft. The stakes are surely too high.”

  She raised her eyes impatiently. “Mr Standish, ’tis our combined effort that has brought us here. You have a keen eye for detail and you underestimate your intellect. Only if we face this together can we succeed.”

  He glanced at her sceptically.

  Abigail pushed a long strand of red hair behind her ear. “In your absence I’m all but invisible,” she told him firmly. “I can’t do this without you.”

  What choice did he have? “Then I dearly hope I shall not fail you, nor Mr Pepys,” he replied quietly.

  Jacob asked Abigail what she knew of witchcraft, hoping it amounted to more than the snippets he had gleaned from his mentor.

  As a failed naval purser’s apprentice - responsible for supplying a ship’s crew with everything from food to tobacco - who had been cosseted by his father, Jacob knew little of cunning folk and their familiars. (Sir Miles Standish, Surveyor of the Navy, had died only recently in suspicious circumstances; both Jacob and Pepys believed he had been murdered. It was the one mystery Jacob ached to solve, though for now he would give his right arm to solve this one.)

  A keen learner, encouraged by her master and her father before him, Abigail had read Pepys’s copies of King James I’s Daemonologie and Matthew Hopkins’s Discovery of Witches. “I know enough,” she told him. “But in the countryside ’tis different. There, the ways of witchcraft are a way of life. I don’t know what we will encounter in Brampton, but I do know the superstition will be strong.”

  “Do witches frighten you?”

  “Not the witches,” she replied, then looked him purposefully in the eyes and pursed her lips.

  “You have something you wish to tell me?”

  After a brief pause, Abby shook her head. “Perhaps one day.”

  Jacob paid one shilling each for their rooms that night, and they slept soundly. The next day, they would arrive in Brampton.

  The inquisitors dearly hoped the Worthingtons wouldn’t make the trip.

  Chapter three

  To Brampton

  Millicent Worthington collared Abigail and Jacob over breakfast of boiled eggs, accompanied by the mealtime staple, bread. She and Humphrey would not be joining them onward toward Huntingdon, she told them, since he was still recovering from a sore wound and the shock of the attack. The inquisitors feigned disappointment.

  “He asked me to give you this,” Millicent added, handing Jacob a book.

  It was titled Of Dyes and Dyeing: A Detailed Compendium of the Art and Science of Colouring Fabrics, Containing Numerous Recipes for Dyeing Woollens, Silks, Linens, and Cottons, Intended for the Use of Clothworkers, Drapers and All Persons of a Curious Inclination.

  The author: Humphrey Worthington, Master of the Worshipful Company of Clothworkers.

  The onward journey was therefore blissfully undisturbed, though the road surface deteriorated increasingly, causing bumps, thumps and judders.

  Abigail tutored Jacob further in the basics of witchcraft, hoping the increased knowledge would boost his self-belief. When she had finished, he took her hand.

  “I am much obliged to you, Abigail Harcourt,” he told her earnestly. “It seems strange that we knew nothing of one another just two days ago, and now we are inextricably linked.”

  She squeezed his hand. “Actually, there is something… Since we’re to be Master Pepys’s inquisitors…,” Jacob only fleetingly considered pointing out that he alone had been bestowed the title. “I’d be much obliged if you would call me Abby.”

  He recoiled in such surprise that he banged his head on the cab wall behind him, causing his hat to fall off. He retrieved it from the floor, grinning foolishly.

  Abigail laughed. “Mr Standish, you are…”

  Jacob interjected, “Abig… Abby, if I am to address you thus, then it is only right and proper that you address me as Jacob.”

  It was her turn to look startled. “Mr Standish, please, you don’t understand! In my position…”

  But he would hear none of it.

  And so our inquisitors became Abby and Jacob.

  Shortly after midday, the coach stopped in the picturesque town of Biggleswade, some 20 miles shy of their destination. They took dinner at The Old Bell, a modest thatched inn, where Jacob splashed out on freshly hunted pheasant.

  The cook had stuffed the bird with seasonal herbs, onion and apple, and served it sliced with a gravy made from the juices. Accompanying the meat were carrots, parsnips and early autumn squash, as well as the usual bread, handy to soak up the gravy. This, they washed down with the requisite weak ale, the water quality being generally dubious, even outside the city.

  Although Abby, who had never dined on game before, besides the odd scrap covertly ‘rescued’ from a Pepys dinner-party plate, found the meat rather rich, she wolfed it down. “If I may be so bold… Jacob? You’re a man of some means.”

  Jacob spooned a vegetable into his mouth. “Upon my father’s tragic demise, I inherited a not inconsequential annuity, a testament to his foresight and generosity. He also bequeathed to me a well-appointed townhouse on Strand Lane.” He stopped chewing. “He catered amply for my welfare, though I would willingly return it all if it meant his return to this mortal coil.” Finally, with a gulp, he swallowed.

  Sensing his upset, Abby quickly asked, “So you don’t need Master Pepys’s money?”

  “Mr Pepys requested my service and I would never have refused. He and my father were firm friends, and an oath was sworn betwixt them concerning my welfare, on my father’s death bed. Mr Pepys has kindly become my patron and mentor, which I value far more than any wealth.”

  “Is your mother still alive?”

  “She is, and still resides in Standish Hall in…”

  “In Greenwich! I could see it from my quarters when I lived with the Yaxley family! You’re Jacob Standish! One of the Standishes - of Standish Hall!” She slapped her forehead. “And I call myself an inquisitor!”

  Jacob raised a bushy eyebrow and cleared his throat. “Actually… It was not… That is…” He trailed off.

  Abby was still admonishing herself. “Perhaps I didn’t realise because you don’t very much look…”

  “Like a gentleman?” Gazing at her apologetically, the gangly hulk of a man in his dusty, stained attire, looked more like a lost child in that moment.

  After dinner, they returned to the coach to begin the final leg of their journey. The gravity of their imminent task began taking hold and the talk returned to witchcraft.

  Jacob brought up their previous conversation. “When I asked whether you were frightened of witches…”

  “I told you I wasn’t frightened of the witches themselves.”

  “What did you mean?”

  She sighed. He had shared personal information with her; it was only fair that she be open in return. “Remember our previous investigation, concerning the stolen diaries? We were in a wherry on the Thames, being rowed to Isaac Cornfield’s. I told you my father had died in the Clink jail…”

  Jacob nodded.

  She licked her chapped lips. “I didn’t say on whose word he was put there. It was Matthew Hopkins,” she said. “The Witch-finder General.”

  Abby’s printer father, Ambrose, she explained, had distributed pamphlets criticising the 1645 witch trial at the Essex Assizes, advocating reason over hysteria. One had fallen into the hands of Matthew Hopkins, who, outraged, had taken it to his staunchly Puritan ally in Parliament, Sir Tobias Mortimer.

  Mortimer, claiming the pamphlets to be a challenge to Puritan authority and the social order, had used his influence to have Ambrose Harcourt arrested. Charged with seditious libel, Abby’s father had been found guilty by a judiciary which, at that time, was mired in a frenzy of fear concerning witchcraft.

  He was sent to the notorious Clink jail on remand. Mortimer had wanted an example made and again exerted his influence. Given the atrocious conditions inside, Abby’s father was dead within a year, of scurvy.

  “That frenzy of fear was stirred up by Matthew Hopkins. I lost my home and my father, and it all comes back to him,” she said, trembling with emotion. “And soon we face his son.”

  Abigail knew all about the Pepys family history, which she outlined to Jacob. Her master had been visiting Huntingdonshire since childhood. Samuel’s father, whose name was John, was born in neighbouring Cambridgeshire. Pepys Sr moved to London at age fourteen to set up a tailoring business, and sent young Samuel to Huntingdon Grammar School. Via St Paul’s School in London and Magdalene College, Cambridge, the bright young man came to the notice of Lord Henry Fairfax through family connections.

  Fairfax was the Brampton landowner and a powerful figure in the navy, who saw something in Pepys - keen, resilient, bright - and took him under his wing. As Jacob was to Pepys, so Pepys was to Fairfax.

  Pepys went on to work for Fairfax, ultimately leading to his exalted position on the Navy Board. The wealthy landowner also employed Samuel’s uncle, Robert, as a bailiff on his Brampton estate, Ravenscourt Manor.

  When Robert Pepys died in 1661, five years previously, Abby explained, he bequeathed his house in the village to Pepys’s father, John. (There was some contesting of the Will. Not one to lose out on a precious free gift, Samuel, who was acting as executor, successfully fought off the interlopers and took charge of the property.)

  Samuel installed his ageing parents in there, no doubt considering the countryside air preferable to London’s smog, and sent his sister, Paulina, along too, to act as their housekeeper.

  His mother, Margaret, was a butcher’s daughter who gave birth to 11 children, of whom - in an era in which, Abby was keenly aware, fewer than ten per cent died of old age - only four survived. Besides his younger sister Paulina, Samuel also had two younger brothers, Tom and John.

  So he would visit Brampton regularly, to check in on his mother, father and sister, and to visit his mentor, Fairfax. It could not be said that he was close to his sister - he had memorably described her to Abigail as, “not handsome in the face” - yet he clearly felt a duty of responsibility towards her, as the influential elder brother.

  He had spent years unsuccessfully trying to marry her off to men he deemed suitable, discovering to his chagrin that she had a mind of her own.

  Today, however, as the inquisitors approached Brampton, settling down with a reputable gentleman was the least of Paulina’s worries.

  Hearing the sound of the coach wheels running through water, Jacob poked his head out of the coach window. “I see only fields and water, not a single dwelling,” he said.

  Their route should have bypassed Brampton and terminated instead in neighbouring Huntingdon. Since they were his only passengers, the coachman agreed to a minor detour on their behalf - for a gratuity, of course.