A Midwinter Murder (An Elizabethan Murder Mystery), page 23
‘And whoever owns a monopoly on an English supply might find his fortune well and truly made,’ whispered Tom, in English.
‘That’s the answer. The answer to almost all of it, as I knew it simply had to be!’ Tom said, after a moment of thoughtful silence, reverting to Spanish as he sprang erect. ‘Sagres, d’ye not see where we are?’
He turned the Spaniard round and they stood shoulder to shoulder, looking away south across the gathering slope that folded down into the valley of the Black Lyne.
‘I see,’ said the Spaniard slowly. ‘I know the shafts run northward to Hermitage Castle itself, but there is nothing of worth within them. All the good ore is down here.’ He paused, looking across at the vibrant Englishman, then asked a little nervously, ‘What is it that you mean to do, Maestro Musgrave?’
‘I mean, Senor, to avenge my brother, rescue my sister and perhaps young Janet too. Then I shall put paid to a nest of turncoats and traitors; and, finally, I shall bury the Barguest into the bargain,’ he said.
‘But how?’ whispered Sagres, simply awed by the scale of the prospect. ‘How under God can you hope to do so much?’
‘Why, Senor,’ he answered with grim exultation, ‘I can do it because I am dead. I can do it because the pair of us, like my brave brother John, have been taken by the Barguest already and lie dead and buried beneath the Waste! Or, lest ye think me mad when I need you to help me, let me be more plain and square with you: I can do it because Black Robert and his murderous confederates believe we are dead and buried. He believes there is no one now living who can interfere with his plans, but he is terribly wrong in that. For I, the Master of Logic, know every detail of what he has done, is doing, and plans to do, so that when I begin to act against him, he will fall helpless into my hands – and mayhap even bring his friend the Earl of Essex with him.’
Twenty-seven: The Dark Designs
The pair of them were waiting in Sir Thomas’s study when he returned from the hunt that night, with Geordie Burn pale but determined at his side. He gaped to see them together at all, let alone so footsore and filthy. He frowned to see that his ledgers and private papers lay open on the table, some pages marked with rude and muddy fingerprints; but such was his surprise that he forbore to comment and heard his nephew out. Then his astonishment simply grew and grew as Tom tersely briefed him on what he had discovered and the actions they all must now take as a matter of the extremest urgency.
He began with the spy. ‘Sir Thomas, can you confirm to me that Hobbie is your spy in Lord Robert’s camp, though he pretends to be a traitor to you and yours?’
Sir Thomas hesitated, then he turned to Geordie. ‘See to your command, Captain Burn. We will be back in Liddesdale before moonrise, if I am any judge – and ye can continue your quest for the Barguest and your lady’s hand then.’
As Geordie left, the Lord of the Waste turned, looking elderly and weary. ‘A good man and a good soldier, but there’s little place for bravery and honour in this black coil. ‘Tis better he remains in ignorance and dreams that Eve might ever come to him, as he has done for half his life.
‘Now, as to Hobbie Noble: it is a dreadful, ungodly thing to demand of any man, but on the Borders there is little choice. I am astounded that you have seen so much so quickly in the matter – you are every bit as uncanny as the Lord Hunsdon inferred in his letters, and as well versed in the black arts of espionage. I see I must be open with you and pray that you are correct and that Lord Robert’s Spaniard there speaks no English.
‘I began to place Hobbie Noble so that he could move in dangerous circles when I helped him release Jock o’ the Side Armstrong from gaol a few years since. I have used him sparingly but he has reported fully. Only now have I been forced to risk him in the very heart of the lion’s den, for as ye see from my ledgers, my income is shrinking daily, and ruin stares me in the face despite the best efforts of my factor – or I supposed I was getting Master Fenwick’s best efforts until Hobbie suggested the man had been seduced away by Black Robert as he seeks my ruin; but ‘tis all moon-shadow and will-o’-the-wisp, nothing a man can lay a hand to. Even now, Hobbie seeks truth enough to go to law; but the case must needs be unanswerable and the groundwork set in sure foundation or Fenwick and his true masters will stand across the Scottish border and laugh at our English courts. On the other hand, my other true servant, your brother the blacksmith had come to me with ores he had been sent – from Hermitage no less – to see if he could tell what they might be; but nothing came of that, for he was dead soon after we talked.’
‘And ye saw no coincidence in that? I see from your face you did; and I suspect you were not alone in that. A wise move to risk Hobbie, therefore, for there is everything to play for here; but he in turn has risked all his careful placing to whisper a warning to me and I am fearful Lord Robert would not let such a slip pass without notice – and, I doubt not, some action. Has Hobbie returned with you?’
‘I have not seen him since the boar broke loose this afternoon.’
‘Let us pre-empt them all and counter their dark designs with immediate action. I will explain what I have discovered to you as we proceed. You should know that I have not been sitting idly awaiting your return, but have usurped your seal and authority to summon reinforcements from Carlisle, for we must return to Liddesdale and Hermitage tonight if Eve, and mayhap Janet, are to survive.’
‘Well, well,’ said Sir Thomas grimly. ‘We will fill the interim with your explanation and then I will judge who’s bound for Carlisle gaol.’
‘Let us begin with John’s death and the lady Eve,’ said Tom decisively. ‘Whatever she told you at your inquest into the matter, the facts are these: Eve knew John believed in the Barguest – and that he shared his superstition with half the Borders – though he believed he had seen it and the rest of them had not. Eve did not believe the Barguest killed John, however, in spite of the apparent evidence furnished by his terrified face and his discovery in the clawed tree at Arthur’s Seat. Her reasoning was simple and based on her own experience, shared with the Lady Ellen: John was clean. Women who have laid men out for burial know that such a thing could not be. Death is a dirty business. Dying of fear releases all the body’s foulness in a flood.’
Tom was not sitting idly as he talked. His hands were busy loading guns and sorting weapons on the little table in Sir Thomas’s study. Sagres, silent and understanding nothing of what was being said, nevertheless followed suit, so that they would all be ready to leave the very instant reinforcements arrived from Carlisle.
‘John was not foul,’ continued Tom grimly. ‘In fact, his clothes were recently washed and fire-dried; but that had been done in haste, for his shirt tail had been singed, as was my own when Lady Ellen caused a blood-fouled shirt to be cleaned and dried. More than one man must have been involved in the doing of it, for not even Eve herself could remove the clothes from John’s frozen body after Hobbie had brought him down to her.
‘No simple death of terror in the face of a fearsome monster, therefore. Instead, in Eve’s eyes and my own, a complex and sinister conspiracy of murder and concealment of murder by many men over several hours at the least – a terrible, calculated and brutal act, compounded and completed with the raising of John’s washed, dressed, still-frozen corpse into the branches of the tree. It was done as you yourself raised up the stag for skinning on St Stephen’s Day; I am certain of that, for the faintest of rope marks were left on his back and at his armpits, and the clawing of the trunk beneath completed their fearsome act. And it was an act: an illusion. Like the ass’s head in my friend Shakespeare’s new play of the midsummer dream.
‘Father Little’s clothing also had been cleaned and dried before he was returned to the scaffold in the church tower at Blackpool Gate – for the same dark reason and with the same desired effect.’
‘But why? If, as you say, it aroused suspicion instead of allaying it, then why?’ Sir Thomas now was restless, pacing the study and looking down into the castle yard. Clearly, thought Tom, his uncle was beginning to see what he had seen, and understand a little of Black Robert’s dark design – keen, he hoped, for the men to arrive from Carlisle so that they could go off up Liddesdale and into the dangerous dungeons of Hermitage again.
‘Because Lord Robert, who lies behind the twisted heart of this whole murderous matter, was willing to run a small risk in order to cover a huge truth,’ Tom explained. Then he demanded, ‘What was it that was washed off the dead men’s clothing?’
‘The foulness of their terrible deaths,’ hazarded Sir Thomas.
‘No.’ Tom paused for a minim beat, as though this were a duel with swords and in form. Then he began to explain slowly, for this was near the very marrow of the matter: ‘What had at all costs to be cleaned away was the mud from Lord Robert’s mine. That is the secret heart of the business here – Lord Robert’s mine, which I will describe in more detail later; but in the meantime, Sagres and I have been there and are lucky indeed to have returned alive. Look at us; we are filthy, soiled with mud and stained with the tell-tale green of the ore. So were John and Father Little. Above everything else, Lord Robert wishes to conceal the fact that he is mining. That is why everyone he cannot trust to keep his secret has to die. That is why he must have decided to rid himself of John even though my brother could not tell him what his strange gold-coloured ore could be. That is why he brought the Barguest back to life in the first place.’
‘To hide a mine?’
‘Indeed. To hide his mine and conceal the fact that he had the Kerrs scouring the countryside looking for other ways into it. Gangs of Kerrs come and go nightly through the Busy Gap past the bastle farm at House-steads, where we first met Janet and Dand – and came close to killing the both of them. They range abroad every night, scouring the Waste, while the weather holds icy but snowless. They leave no tracks on the frozen ground, but will do so when the snow comes and so will perforce leave off their murderous excursions if the matter has not been settled by then. Scores of Kerrs come and go, armed with clubs that have steel hooks driven into them – clawed clubs that can scratch a tree to the heartwood like the claws of a giant dog, up to twelve feet from the earth, if they stand in their stirrups and reach up to the fullest stretch. For while they scour the Waste, so they perpetuate the story that the Barguest is abroad.
‘I had thought, at first, that it was all like my friend Will Shakespeare’s play of the midsummer dream, where men dress up as monsters and bushes may be mistaken for bears; but there is more to the matter than that – much more – and all of it bloodiest and most devilish evil.’
‘You have seen these clubs?’ Sir Thomas’s eyes were narrow, his face pale with horror at the lies Lord Robert was perpetuating. He was almost ready, thought Tom – almost ready to ride.
‘I have seen what they can do,’ Tom continued smoothly. ‘For one of the Kerrs used just such a club on Archie Elliot’s back on Christmas night – the night I thought Geordie Burn had tried to kill me, when really it was his brother Tam, Lord Robert’s captain from Hermitage, riding in secret with Hugh of Stob. The claw-club left three lines parallel in Archie’s flesh and the razor mark of a fourth in the hair beside them. Word of that terrible error was carried up to Hermitage, I would judge by your factor Fenwick; but whoever passed the warning, Archie was murdered the next day by the poison I have just mentioned, and which came close to killing several others of us too.’
‘What poison? How?’
‘By this, I would judge, and in this.’ Tom pulled out of his pouch the apple-sized piece of earth he had found in Janet’s cave, which he had seen ground up in John’s smithy, and which he now knew to be yellow arsenic ore. Beside it he laid the severed glove finger he had found. ‘It was done at the Hunt Mass, and by Fenwick again. I am certain of that this time, for I tested the man last night and saw the guilt within his eyes. And I tested the poison, too, on two dead mice, while de Vaux unknowingly further tested it on a cat.
‘He filled the glove finger with the poison powder and slipped it into his mouth. It is of Spanish leather, like my own, and water-proof, but polished only on the outside and not watertight enough to contain a liquid safely. He used powdered arsenic, therefore – this white powder that Senor Sagres assures me is derived from the other here, and with which all at court powder their faces according to the fashion. He stood beside Archie at communion, and when he seemingly sipped from the holy cup, he emptied the poison in. Archie took the largest dose and died. Eve, Geordie and myself were poisoned too and Father Little, who emptied the cup himself, was poisoned last of all. We were none of us his target — only Archie.
‘But, as Hobbie said in our discussion of the matter, we were hurt incidentally to the main object of the crime. When word got out to Hermitage that Eve was amongst the poisoned, de Vaux himself was despatched to contact and castigate the blundering Fenwick and find out the truth of her health.’
It was at this point in Tom’s explanation that the men from Carlisle arrived; and Sir Thomas, seeing this, was in no mood at all to linger further. The Governor had sent thirty, and the Bewcastle contingent made the number up to fifty. They were all well armed and armoured in their jacks, plates and steel bonnets – sharp but steady, and ready for bloody work. Within moments they were all formed up and cantering purposefully out of the gate again, Geordie at the shoulder of the captain from Carlisle, but Tom, Sir Thomas and Sagres at the head.
‘Unlike us,’ continued Tom as they rode up towards the Waste with Sir Thomas leaning over dangerously, the better to hear him over the muted thunder of the troop behind, ‘Father Little must have suspected something when the poison began to grip him. He was certain that Lord Robert was up to evil, as he told me on the day Lord Robert and I first met, and must have ridden not to Blackpool Gate but right up to Hermitage to confront him, sick as he was; but the end of all his bravery simply served to put him, like John, in the pit of death that stands at the heart of Black Robert’s mine. Like John, he died there, and I can only pray his death was swift and painless, for he was already half-dead with Fenwick’s poison from the desecrated chalice.
‘Then, like John’s had been, Father Little’s frozen corpse was removed, cleaned and put on show as another victim of the Barguest – and that gently and secretly, for it was done while Janet and I slept in the kirk below.’
‘I had shared some of my suspicions with the good father,’ admitted Sir Thomas grimly. ‘Unlike you, I am old enough to remember how the confessional can lighten the heaviest-charged of souls. But if they saw you alone in the kirk as they brought the father’s body there, why did they not take you or kill you?’
‘By this time, my own investigations were the cause of an unexpected effect. They were spreading word of the Barguest ever wider – and convincing even hard-headed men that the beast must actually be real. Suddenly and unexpectedly – and temporarily – therefore, I became useful to Lord Robert, which is why I am alive to tell this black tale now.’
Tom stopped talking for a while as they thundered up over the Waste, sending the frost-mist swirling away under the last of the light to where the will-o’-the-wisps glimmered over the frozen bog-holes there.
‘But what in heaven’s name is the motivation for all this madness and death? A mine full of poison somewhere up ahead in Liddesdale?’ Sir Thomas demanded, his voice aquiver with outrage.
‘Not just in Liddesdale, no. That is the nub of the problem, you see,’ answered Tom, with a broad gesture of his broken hand comprehending all the dangerous beauty around them. ‘The Waste and all the fells between here and Hermitage are a honeycomb of caverns and tunnels, into which Lord Robert is driving his shafts to mine out his arsenic; but his main shaft starts on the east side of the Liddel valley far to the south of Hermitage. It runs east and south from there, reaching right down to the head of the Black Lyne itself, only a mile or so ahead of where we are riding now. Do you not see what this must mean?’
Sir Thomas folded his forehead into a thoughtful frown, but his nephew had not the patience to allow considered rumination. ‘It means that all Black Robert Douglas’s newfound wealth lies under English soil! If you cannot reach north across the border to catch at him for plotting dark ruin against you, no more can he reach south across it to mend his own fast-breaking fortunes. The arsenic that will mend the fortunes of Lord Robert and the Essex faction in the Court cannot belong to a Scottish laird, for it all lies south of the border – in our good Queen’s realm! It belongs to whoever holds title to the Waste at English law; whoever owns the Black Lyne.
‘Lord Robert created the Barguest to frighten all of you off the Waste, and, with John’s body in the great oak, out of the Lyne valley as well, while the Kerrs found out the extent of the problem and he worked out his solution – as he has done now.’
‘What solution?’
‘He knows that the entrances he seeks on English soil are in the valley of the Lyne. He holds the woman that owns the land he covets. He will not let her go. He will keep her and hold the title to the Black Lyne. He sees himself victorious and unopposed now, for he believes that I am dead and he supposes I am the only man outside his control who has begun to suspect the truth. He has only to force Eve into a form of marriage, then he can swiftly widow himself into untold riches. It is his easiest, most certain way.’
Twenty-eight: Liddesdale Ablaze
As Tom reached that point in his reasoning, so the war band left English soil to enter Liddesdale and Scotland. As they did so, like a blessing from on high, a steady, strengthening south-westerly wind sprang up behind to blow them on their way. Over the ford at the valley mouth they went, then up on to the path that led across the precipice itself, in through the sheer-sided throat of the place. Here reason must perforce give place to further preparation. As they followed the track up across the curves of the undulating valley side, so Tom and his uncle agreed their plans for action and passed their orders back. When there was no more to be done, Tom returned to his tale of horror and double-dealing.
