[Master Mercurius 03] - Dishonour and Obey

by Graham Brack

  More importantly, I would have to live in The Hague, which was altogether too close to William for my liking. I would be drawn into all those things I had hoped never to have to trouble myself with again; exactly those matters I had been thinking about only a few minutes earlier. My life would no longer be my own.

  I had to come up with an alternative quickly. ‘Wouldn’t you rather have an English chaplain?’ I asked.

  ‘The Bishop of London would not come,’ she answered. ‘He has too much to do here. And if my husband is not a member of the Church of England, surely it is my wifely duty to worship alongside him in his church?’

  ‘Ah. Yes,’ I stammered. ‘Certainly. A wife should worship with her husband.’

  Have you ever had that feeling that you were digging a hole and that all your attempts to stop were causing you to dig deeper?

  Suddenly, inspiration struck.

  ‘And in due time,’ I continued, ‘that is undoubtedly the best answer. But the services will be in Dutch, and it will take some little time for even as gifted a lady as yourself to master our language. In the meantime, you should have the consolations of religion provided by a man of your own nation.’

  Mary considered this for a moment. I knew that she was thinking hard, because she chewed her lip. ‘Yes,’ she said eventually, ‘I can see that. Perhaps I should ask the Bishop to recommend someone for the moment, and we can look at this again when I have learned Dutch.’

  By which time, I thought, I shall have returned to Leiden; or possibly entered a monastery. Either way, I shall be nowhere near The Hague.

  A door opened and a young girl ambled in. It took no introduction to realise that this must be the Princess Anne, given the resemblance to her older sister.

  Lady Villiers tried to usher her away, but Anne resisted. Whatever was going on in our room was obviously much more interesting than anything else she could be doing.

  ‘Who’s this?’ she demanded, pointing at me.

  ‘Don’t point!’ barked her sister. ‘And especially not at Master Mercurius.’

  ‘Mercurius? That’s a funny name.’

  ‘It’s a Dutch name,’ Mary explained. ‘He’s Dutch.’

  I did not feel it appropriate to point out that it was actually a Roman name. It was also the original name of Pope John II, who was the first Pope to adopt a new name upon his election. No, nobody seems to find that as interesting as I do.

  ‘What’s he doing here?’ Anne asked.

  ‘He has been sent by our cousin William to see if I am a suitable wife. If arrangements can be made, I will be married to William.’

  ‘You? Married? You’re not old enough.’

  ‘I’m very nearly fifteen. Plenty of princesses are married long before my age. Aunt Mary was only nine when she married William’s father.’

  Anne considered this for a moment. ‘Has William got any brothers?’

  ‘Why?’ asked Mary.

  ‘Well, then I could marry one and go on living with you.’

  Mary looked to me for the answer.

  ‘No, I’m afraid not. His father died when he was born,’ I said.

  ‘That’s a shame,’ said Anne, then, feeling that conversation was exhausted, she announced, ‘I’m going now,’ and left us.

  Conducting an assessment of the Princess before marriage was daunting enough, but coupled with an investigation into the murder of a Dutchman on English soil, it was quite exhausting. Having been given only ten days to complete my investigation, I felt I could not take any time to sit and read in my chamber. I had to be doing something at every moment, or I would feel like an idler.

  ‘I wouldn’t worry too much,’ said Van Langenburg when I met him to report on my visit to Richmond. ‘The ten days is unimportant.’

  ‘But we are being told we will be leaving then.’

  ‘And not a minute too soon in my eyes. But even if you have not laid the blame at anyone’s door, Charles will simply find a scapegoat and hang him.’

  ‘Isn’t that unjust?’ I protested.

  ‘Oh, the fellow will be destined to hang anyway. Charles will tell him that if he confesses to the killing of Wevers his widow will get a few shillings, maybe even a pound, and his body won’t be anatomised. That’s quite an attractive offer for a man under sentence of death. Over here, the usual thing is to cut your head off and divide you into quarters for display on the city gates. That’s if they don’t disembowel you alive first.’

  Now, I am not an expert in these matters, but I could see that avoiding a public disembowelling had its attractions, especially if your wife was going to get some silver into the bargain, but I was less clear about the quartering thing. ‘If you’re hanged and beheaded, I don’t think you’d be too worried what happened next,’ I suggested.

  ‘Ah, but the common notion is that at the resurrection of the dead you will need a body, and if the body has been broken into parts, you cannot be resurrected,’ Van Langenburg explained.

  You would not expect me to have no view on this, and I do. It is piffle.

  It is true that when Our Lord was raised He returned with a physical body and proved it by allowing people to touch him. It is also true that the Epistle to the Philippians says that Jesus will “transform the body of our humble state into conformity with the body of His glory” which strongly suggests a physical body. And in the nineteenth chapter of the book of Job we read “I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last He will take His stand on the earth. Even after my skin is destroyed, yet from my flesh I shall see God.” I could multiply quotations, but I think I have made my point. However, a God who can do this is not going to be hampered by the body being in pieces; and if one or two parts are missing, I am sure that He can supply some new ones.

  However, I did not say this to Van Langenburg, confining myself to less theological observations. ‘There is such a thing as truth,’ I said, ‘and I think we owe it to mijnheer Wevers to make every effort to identify his killer.’

  ‘Oh, indeed! I would not suggest otherwise,’ Van Langenburg hastened to assure me. ‘I meant only that if God does not vouchsafe us an answer, we ought not to despair.’

  I felt a little shamefaced at this. I had not thought to bring God into this enquiry because, quite frankly, His previous record when it came to helping me with my investigations was not what one might have hoped. I had done a deal of praying over previous cases without getting any obvious response; but it could not be denied that an omniscient Being would be a great assistant if I could just get Him to share His knowledge. ‘I will redouble my prayers,’ I announced.

  ‘And I mine,’ Van Langenburg added. ‘Meanwhile, Bouwman is to return to The Hague to tell the Stadhouder all that has transpired. I have given him a report to carry, and King Charles has offered four soldiers to guard him on his journey. If there is anything you wish him to do for you, make haste, because he sails on the evening tide.’

  I thanked Van Langenburg and retired to my chamber to write my report. The first draft was succinct but perhaps lacked courtly expression: “She’ll do.”

  After a lot of thought and a flask of excellent French wine — how did they get that? — I was able to expand on this terse assessment to assure William that the Princess was comely, intelligent (in her own way), properly brought up and hygienic. This last was important because Dutchwomen have rather higher standards of cleanliness than most, and William would not want a wife who excited adverse comment at Court.

  Now here is a strange thing — and I admit I digress again. Whenever I visit a Dutch home, it is very likely that the woman of the house will apologise for its shockingly untidy state as she admits me, even though everything is clean and the floor is well-swept. This admission of inadequacy will not prevent the same woman tutting over another woman’s efforts, of course, and the greatest tutting is done by those lordly women who have never lifted a broom in their lives but have servants to do it all for them.

  To return to the point, I was trying to think of a t
actful way to tell William that his wife-to-be was now half a foot taller than him, so he might want to buy some high-heeled shoes for the wedding when I noticed Bouwman crossing the courtyard beneath me on his way to the carriage that was to take him (and his heavily-armed escort) to the ship. I quickly signed my letter and ran down the stairs with a view to giving him the missive, asking him to seal it himself when convenient.

  As I sprinted across the courtyard towards him, I was perturbed when the escort suddenly jumped from the carriage and aimed their muskets at me. Fortunately, Bouwman had the presence of mind to yell that I was a friend, whereupon they reluctantly agreed not to shoot me. Having said that, I was over twenty paces away so they might well have missed anyway.

  ‘Thank you,’ I gasped as I regained my breath. ‘My death would have been rather inconvenient at the moment. I have so much to do.’

  ‘It would also have annoyed King Charles,’ Bouwman commented, ‘especially since it would have been his own men who did it.’

  ‘I suppose it might be regarded as an unfortunate lapse in standards of hospitality,’ I agreed. ‘I have written a brief report for the Stadhouder. No doubt you will brief him about poor Wevers.’

  ‘The less there is committed to paper, the better,’ whispered Bouwman. ‘I do not know whom to trust here.’

  ‘You may trust me,’ I said.

  ‘I wasn’t worried about you,’ said Bouwman, and he clapped me on the arm and mounted the carriage. He was gone before I thought to ask him the obvious question.

  If not me, then just who was he worried about?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  At intervals, I become acutely aware of my limitations. I never wanted to investigate crimes. I have had no training in it, and it has occasionally crossed my mind that it would be prudent to foul up the occasional case so that people would stop asking me. The difficulty with that approach is that I owe it to the victims to give my best efforts, and that nobody asks me anyway. Usually they tell me I have to do it.

  I had noticed that even though I was not one of his subjects, King Charles was taking it for granted that he was entitled to order me about, and I had no doubt that if I had protested the Stadhouder would have told me to stop whining and get on with it. Although William would have denied it fiercely, he was very much his uncle’s nephew and they were more alike than he was prepared to believe, and certainly more alike than anyone was prepared to tell him to his face. Both believed that their interests and those of their country exactly coincided, and therefore any patriotic man should exert himself to meet his ruler’s demands because only a traitor would not; and since anyone with a brain knew what happened to traitors, Charles and William usually got their way. They certainly did with me. The fact that I believe in life after death doesn’t mean that I want to be proved right anytime soon.

  And, let it be said, the funny thing is that having lived to be over eighty, my desire to hang around a while yet is not one whit diminished.

  Anyway, as Bouwman left I decided the best thing I could do was to find a chapel and do some praying. This is not decrying my own intellect. I found that as I marshalled my thoughts for prayer, quite often the mere act of doing so tidied up some loose ends and helped me to see what my next act should be. Of course, I would not have been much of a priest if I had not hoped that one of the saints would whisper something useful in my ear while I was on my knees, and I did a lot of petitioning to St Jude, the patron saint of desperate causes. He was certainly in the forefront of my mind as I climbed the stairs from the courtyard and asked one of the guards how to find the chapel. It turned out that he thought he knew, but he was wrong, and in no time I was at the front door of the palace.

  I could see the imposing abbey in the distance, but that was too grand and busy for my purpose. However, I could see a smaller church close by that looked as if it might afford some peace and privacy, so I took myself off down the road and settled myself on a pew to think.

  I did not fall asleep. Not for more than a few moments, anyway. But whether awake or asleep, something popped into my head. I said earlier that I do not believe in coincidence, so if somebody changes a routine on a day when an event happens, I ask myself whether there is a connection and, if so, what it could be; and the germ of an idea was forming in my brain.

  To test it out, I needed to go for a walk, and I needed to do it at once. I said a quick prayer of self-commendation, asking God to keep me safe, then stepped outside. It was already late afternoon, and since I did not choose to perambulate London’s streets in the dark, I had to step out quickly.

  The first task was to remember the way to St Martin-in-the-Fields. This was less troublesome than is usually the case when I have to rely on my sense of direction. Standing beside it, I turned to face the river. I could see a street leading in that direction, but before following it I mentally marked the nearby inns and taverns. There were a couple to my right and another across the street a little to the left of the church. London was full of places to get drunk, so it was not impossible that there were others that I could not see, but I reasoned that Wevers would have seen what I saw, so if he had wanted to escape Morley this was where he would have gone to do so.

  I walked down the street towards the river. It was bustling with carts making their way to a patch of land on the outskirts of town called the Haymarket. The city needed large amounts of hay for its horses, and the poor quality of the roads outside its gates meant that many farmers preferred to deliver their hay by barge, only using carts for the last part of the journey; and the nearest part of the river was in front of me, just outside the walls of the Whitehall Palace precincts. So far as I could see there were no gates on that side of the Palace grounds, the nearest one being at the top of Whitehall leading into Scotland Yard.

  So here was a pretty puzzle. As I had expected, Wevers had stuck to a well-populated route on his way to the Savoy. He would never have entered the alley by choice, and it was unlikely that he had been stabbed there because the act of pushing him into the alley would have put him on his guard and given him precious seconds to draw his dagger. Even if he had not had time to use it, it was inconceivable that he would not have drawn it had he felt threatened.

  And yet … there was probably no busier part of London, but nobody had reported seeing anything. I had to assume that the constables who gathered there on the night of the stabbing had done their job of questioning bystanders diligently, so either there was an enormous conspiracy or somehow the assassin had managed to sneak up on Wevers without arousing suspicion, and even more remarkably to do so from the front, and had then manoeuvred the body into the alleyway without anyone spotting them in the act, before finally making their escape covered in blood, again along one of the busiest streets of the city.

  I had a strong impulse to get myself a large goblet of wine.

  The King’s penchant for keeping irregular hours meant that the kitchens in the Palace never slept and you could get something to eat at almost any hour, so although dinner had ended when I arrived in my chamber, the servants were just about to start serving supper. So far as I could tell, supper was almost indistinguishable from dinner. You just had to drink faster to keep up with the food.

  I sat at the table. Vlisser was eating at the far end, but he was already surrounded by company, as the rich often are, and I did not feel the need for companionship while I was thinking. I was slowly chewing a hunk of bread when I became aware that someone had slipped into a place beside me.

  Since the somebody in question was wearing a dress of dusky pink silk, it was either a woman or the Duke of Orleans, and as I was fairly certain no state visit was in progress that ruled him out.

  We had not been introduced, but a quick glance told me that this was a member of the royal family. It was not so much a physical similarity, though that could be seen, but something about the way she looked at me that reminded me forcefully of Charles.

  I made to rise to my feet, but she put her hand on my arm to press me back
down.

  ‘Nay, sir,’ she said, ‘I did not mean to disturb your meal. Pray continue.’

  I offered to pour her some wine.

  ‘Thank you, but I have had my fill. You looked lonely sitting there, and I thought it inhospitable to allow a visitor to our shores to dine alone.’

  ‘You are very thoughtful, madame,’ I said. ‘I do not believe we have been introduced. I am Master Mercurius of the University of Leiden.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’m Charlotte.’

  ‘Charlotte…?’

  ‘Oh, you want a surname. That’s a bit complicated. It keeps changing, you see. I started as Killigrew, or sometimes Boyle, then I became FitzRoy, then Howard, and now I’m Paston. My father-in-law is the Earl of Yarmouth. It’s all terribly complicated. And just a little bit dull.’ She giggled rather fetchingly. ‘Oh, don’t worry!’ she said. ‘I’m not going to seduce you. My husband wouldn’t like it.’

  I looked around the room. ‘Which gentleman is he?’

  ‘He isn’t here. He’s gone to look after his estates in Norfolk. I prefer to stay here. At least London isn’t flat.’

  ‘My country is very flat, madame. I am quite used to it.’

  ‘Well, lucky you. I’m glad to say I’m not flat, don’t you think?’

  If this was the standard mode of conversation with clergymen in England, there was more need for reform than I had believed. I suddenly felt rather warm.

  ‘Dear me, you’re blushing. My father said you were very strait-laced.’

  ‘Do I know your father?’

  Her eyes opened in mock horror. ‘Which part of “FitzRoy” didn’t you understand?’

  I am a dullard sometimes, and the cogs of my mind turned very slowly for a moment or two. ‘Oh!’ I said.

  ‘Oh indeed. I’m one of the King’s Acknowledged Bastards.’ She pronounced the name as if it were some kind of exclusive club.