A Midwinter Murder (An Elizabethan Murder Mystery), page 2
This had been a bitter winter, alternately sodden and frozen in London; but snowless as yet. Such news as had come south in the approach to Yuletide had told of similar – if infinitely icier – conditions to the north. The Borders were frozen solid, but open still. The dangerous pathways so popular with reivers and invaders had been layered with ice but none of them blocked with drifts yet this year. For a country still surrounded by enemies to the south, with King Philip by all accounts busy about another armada to replace the last and finish its work, it was nevertheless well to keep an eye on the dangers to the north. King James in Edinburgh had troubles enough of his own, with his marriage to Anne of Denmark scarce five years old, and the witch trials arising from his near-fatal courtship still distracting him, so that the Borders over which he had little control at the best of times remained a potent source of worry to the Queen and her Council.
In such a situation, the mysterious death of the blacksmith responsible for arming one of the most important garrisons in the western Marches must assume a terrible political significance; and if, as Eve had said, this was but the first proof of a rumoured plague of such deaths, then the overall effect was hard to calculate.
Even taking John’s death alone and discounting rumour altogether, things might well look bad. In such a situation, at such a time of year, the death of such a man in such a terrible manner must have an impact of almost incalculable weight. For who along the icy wastes by Hadrian’s Wall stood to gain most from letting loose the Barguest in the Borders and keeping all the Yuletide revellers from Carlisle, east to Berwick and south to New Castle all locked up fast at home, too fearful to venture out into the hound-haunted dark?
The apparently personal little tragedy that had struck at the Musgraves might well be the signal for anything from a border raid designed to steal a few head of winter cattle to a full invasion designed to set flame to the Catholic tinder from Berwick to Nottingham, Scotland to Sherwood.
‘You will want me to go north, My Lord,’ said Tom.
‘With all speed. To the Lord of the Waste, self-styled.’
‘To the Captain of Bewcastle, at least,’ soothed Tom, giving the uncle after whom he was named the title to which he was due. ‘And with all haste, as you say – and as has been arranged, I have no doubt, by Hobbie Noble and my newly widowed sister – to discover the true fate of my brother, beyond the first report of my uncle’s inquest. That is knowledge which will set many a heart at ease. Not least your own. And Her Majesty’s.’
There came a little silence. Rain blew up-river like a fistful of gravel cast against the glass of the casement. ‘If you can prove there was no hellish work in it – that it was never the Barguest...’ said Lord Henry. ‘Such a creature cannot exist,’ he added after a moment.
‘It is a creature I have feared since childhood, for I learned of it at my mother’s knee.’
‘But such a thing cannot be real, can it?’
‘King James in Scotland is still at work to track down all the witches who held magical black masses to christen cats in graveyards then sailed out on the wild sea in sieves and summoned the devil to drown him when he went a’courting in Denmark – and, indeed, the political enemies at his court, and some others, who employed the witch women to do these things to him. If witches can be employed to summon devils to such work, perhaps they can be employed to call up hell-hounds too – or do it just for evil’s sake. Or perhaps, once in a while Satan’s gates stand wide and things slip out we wot not of.’
‘You believe in this thing – this Barguest?’
‘I believe I have seen it – or something like it – when I was a child. But that is not the same as saying I believe it is out on the Borders now. Nor that it was the Barguest that killed my brother.’
Tom leaned forward over the table, frowning with concentration, suddenly burning with urgency and energy. ‘That is a tale for another time, My Lord. Now tell me exactly what you want me to do in the North.’
Thomas Walsingham interrupted the very last of this conference when he returned with Eve and Hobbie. The three of them waited for a moment as Lord Henry gave his final instructions to Tom. Then he put his seal – and that of the Queen’s Council – on the last of the documents the Lord Chamberlain’s secretary had prepared so rapidly in the interim, which the Master of Defence was to carry up to the Bewcastle Waste.
So that when Tom stood at last and turned, he spoke with the voice of the Lord of the North. ‘Is everything ready?’ he demanded.
‘Ready,’ affirmed Hobbie.
‘We go back the way you came, along the Great North Road,’ said Tom, all decisiveness, as though the spirit of the preoccupied Lord Henry had truly inhabited his youthful body. ‘Meet me at Bishopsgate within the hour, with horses and passes as arranged. A hard ride will get us to Ware by darkfall; and then our journey will truly begin, I think.’
He turned, bowed to Lord Henry and was gone.
A wherry dropped Tom at Blackfriars steps some quarter-hour later and he hurried briskly up towards his lodgings and School of Fencing above Master Robert Aske the Haberdasher’s shop. Here his two closest friends awaited him, all unaware of his dreadful news and the urgent business it had engendered.
Close friends they might be, but both of them had proposed to leave him alone during the next twelve days. Kate Shelton was to be at court, in Sir Thomas Walsingham’s train, dancing attendance on the Queen, hoping to follow in a family tradition and become a lady-in-waiting. What with the hot bloods like de Vaux painting their faces with arsenic to go ruffling and swashbuckling in the trains of the wilder courtiers, like Essex, Southampton and their circles, the Queen got through ladies-in-waiting at an alarming rate – even when Sir Walter Raleigh was away. Kate would have no liberty to continue her passionate affair with Tom until after Twelfth Night.
No more would Ugo Stell, invited for the festivities to Bleeke House, residence of the Van Der Leydens, father and two daughters, hoping to get through their first Yuletide in a foreign country – they were, like Ugo, Dutch – and their first Christmas without Frau Van Der Leyden so tragically murdered six months since during the terrible affair of the heads upon London Bridge itself.
Now a swift leave-taking of sweet Kate was all the shocked and grieving Tom could afford; and Kate, like her sister Audrey, knew well enough what the demands of the political and secret worlds could be, for both of them had worked as spies for Audrey’s affianced lover Thomas Walsingham and his adoptive father the late Sir Francis, unrivalled director of the Queen’s Secret Service for more than twenty years.
Kate, womanlike, went straight to the heart of the matter. ‘This woman, this Eve that has run, in her grief and loss, straight into your manly arms – what is she to you?’
‘An ex-lover of my sallowest years. Not even that, for she was her own woman even then and would never yield to me. She came to me fresh from setting another pair of brothers the one against the other, as I recall, and came near to doing the same with John and me. She is my sister and nothing more, therefore, except, perhaps, a bitter memory come with hard news of a terrible tragedy.’
‘Of a hell-hound the size of a stallion that tears oak trees into shreds.’
‘A monster that I must go and face, Kate, though it break my heart.’
‘‘Tis likely there will be more than the monster to face,’ she said, ‘and more hearts broken than your own. However, let us see what Ugo can supply in the matter of facing monsters...’
Ugo himself, his panniers packed long since and wanting nothing but a convenient moment to ride down to Bleeke House, was happy to take his impatient friend into his workroom. There, as he sorted through his weaponry, he could talk things through at careful length, balancing with his phlegmatic Dutch thoroughness the fiery impatience of Mistress Kate and her all-too-vivid concerns, in the face of Tom’s stunned quiet.
‘A hound as big as a horse, you say? With claws to rip the heartwood of an oak? Wood as hard as copper, if not bronze. Only a weapon as big as a dunderbus would kill such a creature – always supposing the beast were made of flesh and blood and liable to death in the first place. Do you believe in such a creature, Tom?’
He took Tom’s silence as assent and continued with hardly a pause, laying out upon his workbench a range of dags, pistols and handguns as he spoke. ‘Even the most powerful of hand weapons would hardly hurt a creature of that size, unless you could direct the shot straight into some vital part or organ. As with your rapiers, Tom, it is not the size of the wound but the precision of its placing that does the damage.’
‘On the other hand,’ insisted Kate, ‘there are times when size matters. A monstrous creature such as this must take monstrous killing. Have you nothing here that can make a huge wound though the gun itself be small?’
‘A dunderbus fit for milady’s purse?’ mused Ugo. ‘No. Such a weapon will tax future generations. It is beyond my own talent at present.’
‘What is this?’ asked Tom, picking up a strange-looking device that lay half-hidden at the back of the workbench.
‘A failure. A kind of bastard, ill-born. You see that it has four barrels? Although they are short, they are strong. Each will carry a full load and a shot such as the other pistols. I had hoped that I would be able to rotate the whole so that each barrel would click into place up here by the pan and fire individually of the others; but no matter what I do, all the barrels discharge at once. I have even tried a new type of pan and lock – you see the flint here and the striker here so that a spark may fall on the powder instead of a match? All to no avail. It has near broke my wrist more times than I can tell!’
‘But,’ said Tom, cradling the bastard pistol in his long, strong fingers, ‘were a man wishing to fire four shots at once, then this might indeed do some damage. Four shots delivered at the same time near enough to the same spot, vital or not – this would be like to blast a hole the size of my fist, even in something almost as big as a horse.’
‘Are you mad? Only someone fit for Bedlam would trust his life to an engine whose one recommendation is that it refuses to work to its creator’s original design. Here, take this matched pair instead.’
Tom had little time for argument and so he took them – and a goodly supply of the powder, shot and accoutrements that went with them. Then, as Ugo went down to arrange the loan of Master Aske’s horse from here to Bishopsgate, he went through into his own quarters. Unwilling to waste time on changing into better clothes for the travelling, he simply added more layers – mostly of wool and leather – until his girth had swollen like the belly of an old tavern knight. His waist remained lean, however, and, disdaining the new fashion for swashes across his shoulders, he had no difficulty in strapping at each hip one of the matched pair of Solingen swords that were the richest source of his living and the surest protectors of his life.
As he dressed, at his direction, in the face of his unwonted sorrow and depression, Kate lowered herself to the station of the merest housemaid. She packed his panniers, and slid in amongst the lawn and linen the pistols Ugo had given him. That done, she lovingly crossed, across the base of his spine, the two daggers that matched the swords, and settled the weighty leather sack of his purse beside the Ferrara silver basket of his right-hand blade. Over his shoulder at last went the heavy leather satchel in which the orders and observations of the Lord of the North were packed. As he settled this against his short ribs, Tom felt an extra shape, and extra weight within it. Frowning, he pulled the flap back a little, and glanced up, to catch the eyes of his loving but frightened mistress. For there, poking out of the parchments and the seals stood the familiar, ugly butt of the four-barrelled bastard pistol. He caught her to him and kissed her, moved more than he could express.
‘Take care,’ she admonished him, her voice breaking.
‘I will,’ he promised – lying though he did not know it – ‘though I go to chase a tale of froth and fairies. A winter’s tale indeed, told me by my dam and grandam.’
‘Even so,’ she said, prophetically enough.
‘Those can be the most dangerous tales of all.’
He clapped Ugo on the shoulder, again in silence. He swung the heaviest of his cloaks around his shoulders and pulled the widest and most waterproof of his hats on to his head, swung up on to Master Aske’s strong mare and was gone into the steely, sleety afternoon.
Three: The Bishops’ Gate
Bishopsgate was nearly deserted. In the mid-part of the afternoon of Christmas Eve there were few people making their way into London – and fewer still making their way out. Those coming from any distance to visit the city at this particular season were mostly here and within doors. Those simply coming from nearby to stock up at the markets against the festivities were still at Billingsgate, Smith’s Field or on the Cheap; and those still at work were working – for the short days brought fewer hours, not fewer demands.
On the other hand, thought Tom grimly, no one in their right mind was likely to be venturing far away from the city if they could help it – quite the reverse, given the terrible state of the last harvest. Half the country was seemingly on the edge of starvation. The desperate poor were thronging to the city rather than watch each other being famished to death. Going north, particularly, where things were said to be hardest all round, would obviously fit a man for the first big building along the road they were due to travel: Bedlam.
Hobbie and Eve were easy to find in the near-deserted tavern beside St Botolph’s Church immediately without the great stone gate. In the little square made by the inn front and the opening of the Hound’s Ditch, which ran eastward along the outside of the Wall, Tom made swift arrangements to return Master Aske’s mare, then entered the low building to join his travelling companions. He did this quietly, guardedly, made careful in both senses of the word by his sorrow and his suspicions that Eve at least – as ever – was by no means dealing plainly with him here.
Eve’s good sense in travelling dressed as a boy was borne upon Tom at once. It was very much in the character he remembered. Like many another border woman, she was quick and able to take the initiative – the equal of any man in many matters, in fact, if not yet in the eyes of Church or Court; but still, he hardly needed to remind himself, although Eve was his sister, she was still a stranger – had never been anything else, in fact, even when she lay laughing in his arms upon Kielder Heights. He had not looked into those sad, still, disturbingly familiar eyes since he had taken the wits of which he was so proud northward from Carlisle Grammar School to the University at Glasgow, leaving his smitten brother wrapped happily in her toils; and that was more than twelve years since.
Now Eve sat at ease beside Hobbie, the pair of them fortifying themselves against the long hard journey with strong bread and weak ale. The last morsels of the bread still steamed with the hot breath of the pottage in which it had been soaked, and Tom was tempted by his wiser spirit to invest like them in something warm and substantial to cling to the inside of his ribs as his good cloak clung on the outside.
Swift as ever to take the initiative, therefore, Tom called over to the innkeeper, ‘Another brewis here and small beer.’
Then he settled himself across the table from the pair of them and his cool gaze wandered from Eve’s steady regard to Hobbie’s guarded visage.
‘She made me bring her,’ said Hobbie with only half a laugh. ‘Or rather, she made the Lord of the Waste to order me.’
‘She has good reason, no doubt,’ replied Tom. ‘Have you not, my lady?’
Her mouth twisted at that. ‘More than you know, you turncoat scapegrace. More than you can guess at, I’ll be bound.’ Her voice was dismissive, bitter. Had there been even more bad blood between them than he remembered?
‘I doubt that,’ he answered angrily, surprised by the anger, shocked that his grief should come out so. ‘For though I have been absent in body this long while, I have been there in mind and spirit; and it cannot be that things are so different now that I cannot fathom out your dangers and your desperations.’
‘Well then?’ she challenged, again with more anger than he had expected. Her rage and grief struck him deeply, for he felt that they were in part directed at him. Had he been in the Borders instead of at Court, her anger seemed to say, then his brother would have been alive today. This outraged woman would not have been a widow. The Barguest might have been kennelled still in whatever cavern of hell normally housed it.
Her rage compounded his still further, for he felt the truth of what he supposed she thought; and that rage spurred on the Master of Logic, so that the Master added to his own fine wits some of the information Lord Henry had shared in his fears for the North and he made of the whole a mirror to hold up against her memories, thoughts and motivations that reflected the whole as though he had been some faery creature sitting in her secretest heart the while.
‘The whole of the Borders will have been wild with speculation throughout this bitter, bitter Advent if what you said is true. It is the Barguest’s season, and if there was talk of dead men stark with fear...’ He paused and looked at the pair of them. ‘But you’ll likely have paid less mind to it than John did. For John had seen the thing – with me, when he was a lad; and God knows, he was still scared of it when I left. A fear, I trust, he left behind at last.’
Eve’s head nodded, once. ‘Until it caught up with him,’ she whispered.
Tom proceeded from the general to the particular. ‘They’ll have carried him home on a wicket – Hobbie, like as not, and the rest that found him. None will have dared to tell you of the Barguest at first and you’ll have been shaken and stunned with grief. But the look on his face will have led you to question and your questions will have gotten an answer – from Hobbie himself, like as not.’
The pair of them exchanged glances, Eve’s wind-reddened cheek beginning to pale still further. Tom’s brewis arrived, rough bread sopping in a wooden bowl of thin pottage with a horn spoon to eat it with. His small beer was flat and thin – little more than water, save that it was not like to poison him.
