Page 134 of Troubled Blood

They walked across a cobbled courtyard in silence until Robin came to a sudden halt. Strike, who never enjoyed navigating uneven surfaces with his prosthesis, wasn’t sorry to pause, but he was slightly worried that he was about to be on the receiving end of an outburst.

“Look at that,” Robin said, pointing down at a shining cobblestone.

Strike looked closer and saw, to his surprise, a small cross of St. John engraved upon a small square brick.

“Coincidence,” he said.

They walked on, Robin looking around, forcing herself to take in her surroundings. They passed into a second courtyard, where a school party in hooded raincoats was being addressed by a guide in a medieval jester’s costume.

“Oh wow,” said Robin quietly, looking over her shoulder and then walking backward for a few paces, the better to see the object set high in the wall above the archway. “Look at that!”

Strike did as he was bidden and saw an enormous, ornate, sixteenth-century astronomical clock of blue and gold. The signs of the zodiac were marked on the perimeter, both with the glyphs with which Strike had become unwillingly familiar, and with pictures representing each sign. Robin smiled at Strike’s expression of mingled surprise and annoyance.

“What?” he said, catching her look of amusement.

“You,” she said, turning to walk on. “Furious at the zodiac.”

“If you’d spent three weeks wading through all Talbot’s bollocks, you wouldn’t be keen on the zodiac, either,” said Strike.

He stood back to allow Robin to enter the palace first. Following the map Strike had been given, they headed along a flagged, covered walkway toward the Privy Kitchen Café.

“Well, I think there’s a kind of poetry to astrology,” said Robin, who was consciously trying to keep her mind off Talbot’s old can of film, and her ex-husband. “I’m not saying it works, but there’s a kind of—of symmetry to it, an order…”

Through a door to the right, a small Tudor garden came into view. Brightly colored heraldic beasts stood sentinel over square beds full of sixteenth-century herbs. The sudden appearance of the spotted leopard, the white hart and the red dragon seemed to Robin to cheer her on, asserting the potency and allure of symbol and myth.

“It makes a kind of—not literal sense,” Robin said, as the whimsically strange creatures passed out of sight, “but it’s survived for a reason.”

“Yeah,” said Strike. “People will believe any old shit.”

Slightly to his relief, Robin smiled. They entered the white-walled café, which had small leaded windows and dark oak furniture,

“Find us a discreet table, I’ll get the drinks in. What d’you want, coffee?”

Choosing a deserted side room, Robin sat down at a table beneath one of the leaded windows and glanced through the potted history of the palace they’d received with their tickets. She learned that the Knights of St. John had once owned the land on which the palace stood, which explained the cross on the cobblestone, and that Cardinal Wolsey had given Henry VIII the palace in a futile bid to stave off his own decline in influence. However, when she read that the ghost of nineteen-year-old Catherine Howard was supposed to run, screaming, along the Haunted Gallery, eternally begging her fifty-year-old husband, the King, not to have her beheaded, Robin closed the pamphlet without reading the rest. Strike arrived with the coffees to find her with her arms folded, staring into space.

“Everything all right?”

“Yes,” she said. “Just thinking about star signs.”

“Still?” said Strike, with a slight eye roll.

“Jung says it was man’s first attempt at psychology, did you know that?”

“I didn’t,” said Strike, sitting down opposite her. Robin, as he knew, had been studying psychology at university before she dropped out. “But there’s no excuse to keep using it now we’ve got actual psychology, is there?”

“Folklore and superstition haven’t gone away. They’ll never go away. People need them,” she said, taking a sip of coffee. “I think a purely scientific world would be a cold place. Jung also talked about the collective unconscious, you know. The archetypes lurking in all of us.”

But Strike, whose mother had ensured that he’d spent a large portion of his childhood in a fug of incense, dirt and mysticism, said shortly,

“Yeah, well. I’m Team Rational.”

“People like feeling connected to something bigger,” said Robin, looking up at the rainy sky outside. “I think it makes you feel less lonely. Astrology connects you to the universe, doesn’t it? And to ancient myths and ideas—”

“—and incidentally feeds your ego,” said Strike. “Makes you feel less insignificant. ‘Look how special the universe is telling me I am.’ I don’t buy the idea that I’ve got anything more in common with other people born on November the twenty-third than I think being born in Cornwall makes me a person better than someone born in Manchester.”

“I never said—”

“You might not, but my oldest mate does,” said Strike. “Dave Polworth.”

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