The Vavasour Macbeth

by Bart Casey

  Advance Praise for The Vavasour Macbeth

  “[The Vavasour Macbeth] re-creates life at the 16th century court of Queen Elizabeth via a 20th century murder mystery.… Casey peppers his imaginative novel with tidbits on the development of writing in the Elizabethan era… Each of the central protagonists is a well-drawn character. And the author’s prose is elegant, with evocative imagery.… An engaging read with a plethora of captivating literary and historical details wrapped in a contemporary whodunit.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  Also by Bart Casey

  The Double Life of Laurence Oliphant

  The Wonder Seekers of Fountaingrove

  (with co-author Gaye LeBaron)

  Anne Vavasour and Sir Henry Lee:

  Discovering a Tudor Love Story (ebook)

  A POST HILL PRESS BOOK

  ISBN: 978-1-64293-131-0

  ISBN (eBook): 978-1-64293-132-7

  The Vavasour Macbeth

  © 2019 by Bart Casey

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover art by Cody Corcoran

  The cover design includes photographs of portraits of Anne Vavasour and Sir Henry Lee, courtesy of The Worshipful Company of Armourers and Brasiers, London.

  This book is a work of historical fiction. All incidents, dialogue, and characters aside from the actual historical figures are products of the author's imagination. While they are based around real people, any incidents or dialogue involving the historical figures are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or commentary. In all other respects, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

  Post Hill Press

  New York • Nashville

  posthillpress.com

  Published in the United States of America

  To Marilyn, Matthew,

  Lauren, and Michael

  NOTE

  Like Shakespeare’s plays, which

  have five acts, the story of

  The Vavasour Macbeth unfolds

  in five parts.

  Each part begins with a short

  visit to the Elizabethan and

  Jacobean world of Anne Vavasour,

  and then moves on to events in

  modern England.

  This is because the destinies

  of Anne Vavasour and her modern

  descendant Margaret Hamilton,

  are closely intertwined.

  Contents

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Prologue

  Yorkshire, 1579. Anne Vavasour was bred for this, and now she was ready. Tomorrow she would leave home to take up her place at the court of Queen Elizabeth, where all successes flowed from Her Majesty’s good graces.

  At sixteen, she was pretty enough, and a decade of dancing, riding, and country living made her shapely and graceful. But that was not what men noticed when they met her. It was her smile that stopped them. It lit up her face, from the point of her chin to the top of her brow, with her eyes sparkling. Then she’d speak with the wit and wisdom of a princess—in Latin, Greek, French, Italian, or even English. And when their eyebeams crossed, she held them in thrall.

  She had practiced all this with the friends and neighbors who visited the house in Wiltshire where she had been tutored from the age of six. Sir Henry and Thomas Knyvet, her uncles, invested in the finest teachers and dancing masters for the family children. Since Thomas was a Groom of the Privy Chamber for Queen Elizabeth, he was well fixed to place his relations at court as they came of age.

  The Knyvets’ prize pupil was Anne, their sister’s daughter, and they groomed her to be a kindred spirit for the Queen. Her curriculum was guided by the precepts of Roger Ascham, who had been a tutor to Princess Elizabeth and Lady Jane Grey. Master Ascham wrote these down in The Schoolmaster, published in 1570, just in time for Anne’s schooling. As a result, she was taught with kindness, not fear, and was encouraged to shape her own ideas. True to plan, Anne became self-confident and assured. She mastered English first, and then the most important old and new foreign languages. She loved poetry as well as philosophy, history, and literature. She also learned embroidery, music, dancing, archery, and hunting.

  In the late autumn of 1579, Anne was packed to travel down to London from her parents’ house in Yorkshire. Everything was arranged for her to become a Gentlewoman of the Bedchamber in the Queen’s

  innermost circle.

  On this, her last evening at home, Anne sewed together a new, blank commonplace book to record her thoughts at court, and looked through the passages she’d written in her old commonplace book during school.

  They were still good words to live by, she thought. But what was to become of her now?

  A.V. Anne Vavasour, her booke.

  Ad maiorum Dei gloriam.

  The pastimes that be fit for comely gentlemen

  Therefore to ride comely, to run fair at the tilt or ring; to play at all weapons, to shoot fair in bow, or surely in gun; to vault lustily, to run, to leap, to wrestle, to swim; to dance comely, to sing, and play on instruments cunningly; to hawk, to hunt; to play at tennis, and all pastimes generally, which be joined with labour, used in open place, and on the day-light, containing either some fit exercise for war, or some pleasant pastime for peace, be not only comely and decent, but also very necessary for a courtly gentleman

  —Master Roger Ascham

  Nec species sua cuique manet, rerumque novatrix

  Ex aliis alias reddit natura figuras

  No living species remains the same,

  New-making nature changes all into new forms

  —Ovid, Metamorphoses, XV:252–53

  Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit

  Perhaps one day it will help to remember even these things

  —Virgil, Aeneid, I:203

  Πριν να εξετάσουμε άλμα

  Look before you leap

  —Aesop, “The Fox and the Goat”

  Herod, the king, in his raging,

  Charged he hath this day,

  His men of might in his owne sight

  All yonge children to slay.

  —Mysterie Playe of Coventry

  On a Maiden-head

  Lost Jewells may be recovered, virginity never.

  That’s lost but once, and once lost, lost for ever.

  —Anonymous

  The sleeping villagers didn’t know their history was about to come alive again. It was Bank Holiday Monday, the last day of August 1992. The ancient church of St. Mary and its adjacent vicarage basked in the early morning sun under a bright blue dome of sky just north of London.

  “It doesn’t seem the kind of day to be mucking about in damp tombs,” Vicar Hamilton said aloud to the picture of his dead wife atop his chest of drawers as he dressed. “But there’s no going ahead without sacrifice. No gain without pain, dear Delia.”

  Delia Howard had married him less than six months after he took up his post as vicar back in 1966. At first, it was something of a scandal. He was the bright young new vicar, and she wa
s the daughter of the local gentry who had lorded over the town for the past five hundred years. But any disapproval vanished as for more than twenty-five years the two of them double-handedly kept the parish vibrant and relevant in an England where most churches were only embarrassing remnants of a medieval fantasy. The youth program flourished, with skiffle bands banging guitars and tambourines to the tunes of Cliff Richard, Tommy Steele, the Beatles, and the Stones. The married-couples ministry kept many local couples together past bumps in the road. And the Al-Anon and Nar-Anon groups countered the new realities with hope.

  With everything that was going on, it was only fair to expect some trouble, and this morning Vicar Hamilton was putting on his old plaid shirt and stained work trousers to face down another challenge.

  Over the last few weeks of summer, the Mothers Morning Out group he started had morphed into a proper child-care program. It was yet another of his quixotic efforts to keep the church front and center for the parish. Now the old church was making a real connection with young families in the town, giving mothers a place to get together and have their tots intermingle. The future of our parish, thought the vicar. Two groups now—about twenty-five babies—and new faces at the Sunday service as well. He had even gotten approval from the bishop to advertise for a program director, and now the CVs were flooding in for interviews with the playschool committee. That would mean even more commotion in the church office.

  Inside the old church, the Lady Chapel was now sectioned off sacrilegiously, with portable red-gray office dividers between the rounded Norman arches. Green linoleum sheets covered the stone floors. Blackboards on wheels lined up in front of the tables and small chairs clustered below the ancient stained-glass windows and wall memorials to eighteenth-century benefactors.

  In front of the altar with the fourteenth-century statue of Our Lady and Baby Jesus—the most famous relic of the church—a brown-cloth Brunswick billiards table was pushed in as a barrier to block the children of the crèche. The beauty and innocence of that stone carving had preserved it even through the rough days of the English Civil War, when New Model Army soldiers smashed ornaments in churches all around the country—but not that one. Now the danger was from the children of the town. And they had just made their first serious assault on the past two days before.

  On the Friday afternoon of the long weekend, something went wrong in the loo next to the tearoom on the old porch of the church. Later the workmen found a disposable nappy had been stuffed into the toilet, which kept it running. And so a steady stream of cold water overflowed unseen and unheard all night, seeping onto the stone floor, under the walls, and down into the burial vaults below.

  By the time Andrew James, the verger who took care of the church, found it Saturday morning, several burial vaults were flooded with water covering the old coffins and remains. Worst off was the largest vault in the nave, which had been sealed since the 1840s. Also wet was the small vault in the Lady Chapel—the final resting place of so-called Lady Anne, an Elizabethan benefactor of the old church and an ancestor of Mrs. Hamilton herself, the vicar’s late wife.

  Now that side of the family had almost died out, thought the vicar. His daughter, Margaret, was the last of that bloodline now, but there was no sign of her settling down yet.

  Well, the flood canceled Lucy Worthington’s Saturday afternoon wedding service—at least for a stormy hour or two. Her father and the best man turned up early at the vicar’s door, red-faced and livid with rage in their gray morning coats. But they calmed down when the vicar came up with Plan B, moving the service to Roman Catholic St. Luke’s just across the green. Father O’Brien was very decent about lending the hall to his pagan Protestant neighbors on such short notice, thought the vicar.

  Actually it worked out quite well, thanks to the Catholics’ new central air-conditioning and the bright light coming through their newer stained glass windows. And Vicar Hamilton probably wouldn’t have gotten the extra two-hundred-pound cheque from Mister Worthington if the bride’s father hadn’t felt guilty about his earlier display in the hall of the vicarage.

  The Catholics were very up-to-date—but the Protestants had the history, and that’s just what the vicar would be dealing

  with today.

  He reached for the silver-topped hairbrush on his dresser and gave three brisk strokes to smooth his yellow-white hair from left to right. Then he let his eyes move across the lace to the other dresser against the bedroom wall there, now holding his wife’s treasures and keepsakes. On the top was a small cluster of her favorite photos of their daughter. There was Margaret around age eight, with her chums in school uniforms collecting donations for Bangladesh, already showing signs of a fierce determination to raise awareness of the wrongs in the world and intervene personally to set things right. What a commotion those young girls had made marching up and down the high street after school and on weekends, he remembered. Then there was a snapshot taken a few years later in her games uniform for field hockey, with one of her signature smiles, in spite of the cuts and gashes on each leg. Next to that, another photo showed her as a young teenager volunteering behind the counter in the Oxfam shop in the village, fighting world poverty. And then there was his wife’s favorite portrait of herself, taken five years ago, standing together with Margaret who was just back from her university year abroad immersing herself in her beloved France. One never knows what moments turn out to be the height of happiness, he thought. But then the kettle whistled and he had to hurry downstairs.

  From the kitchen window over the sink, he could see hoses running out the side door of the church, across the vicarage garden, and down into the drain at the side of the road. There was a steady purring from the petrol-driven pump working away beneath puffs of gray smoke.

  He saw the carefully planned flower beds were in their full glory. Each planting was a different specimen, placed according to its natural height, and blooming at just the right time of the year with its neighbors—Delia’s grand scheme. And the thick turf of the lawn, wet with dew, was bursting with life, now greener than green—emerald really, and soft and deep as a down duvet.

  It was a shame they’d have to dig across the lawn and the beds to put in a drainage line from the troublesome church addition, but they had to prevent another flood from happening if one of the children again stuffed up the toilet. The vicar planned to draw a map showing where each plant sat so they could restore it all later. At least they wouldn’t be digging across the churchyard, disturbing all those graves as well. There were enough spirits stirred up already down in the vaults. And the lawn would grow back, thick as ever by next spring, God willing.

  Seven o’clock. Just time for a quick cup of tea before Verger Andrew and the workmen came back, the vicar thought.

  Well, it was better to have a playschool in the chapel and a tearoom on the porch than no one in the church at all.

  ~

  Ten minutes later, Vicar Hamilton joined Verger Andrew and the village plumber at the side of the pavement where the pump and hoses were hooked up. “Let’s see what’s gone on down there,” said the vicar, ending his words with a sigh. And God preserve the old church’s foundation, he prayed silently to himself.

  They turned off the pump, restoring the morning calm to the fresh air, and walked inside the church, stepping over the hoses.

  The afternoon before, masons had opened up the floor in two parts of the church. First they had freed up several large slabs of Purbeck marble in the nave atop the burial vault extending out from the old thirteenth-century wall of the church. It had been very hard to pry the slabs up from where they had been sealed over a century and a half before, but the workmen finally succeeded in shifting them, and now they were angled widthwise across the narrow opening in the floor.

  The slabs were also part of the ceiling of the vault below. At first, only coal-black water could be seen down there, settling roughly two feet below the opening—so it was impossible to tell just how wide and how deep was the vault. No r
ecord of the room’s measurements remained in the otherwise meticulous church archives—only the dates of interments through the years until its final sealing in 1845, with the notation that it was then full.

  A few hours later, the vicar had leaned over and shone a hand torch around. Then he could see the water was lower by at least four feet and several objects were piercing the surface at different heights and angles.

  Now this morning, the plumber lowered down a miner’s lamp, testing the air and illuminating the damp and debris. All clear. There was only a wet and musty smell—very similar to things that sit in a basement too long—and no whiff of any decay from decomposition, as one might fear. That had all disappeared long ago. The three men angled a ladder down into the space, and when it hit the floor only about five inches of its base was covered by the receding water.

  Finally, Vicar Hamilton could see the chaos of mortality. Dozens of caskets and iron coffins were stacked up in piles of four or five on top of one another. The coffins at the top were newer than the ones below and were covered with fragments of faded purple velvet. They were lined with hundreds of brass studs. Brass or golden coffin handles jutted out, embellished with the heads of cherubim. Centered on the top of one perched a coronet from which the velvet or ermine had disappeared, leaving six silver orbs protruding on long stems from the edges of a crown.

  The coffins below were in worse shape. The wooden end panel of one had fallen off onto the floor, revealing a coal-black leaden shell inside. The lead explained why the other coffins were crushed like accordions: they had been broken by the terrific weight above. Most were sized for adults, but around the edges of the stacks was a circle of small boxes. A few were the repositories of funerary organs from embalming, but most were the doleful remains of infants and small children—sad reminders of high hopes unfulfilled. Here they rested, awaiting the resurrection with their elders.