The Point of Death (Tom Musgrave Series Book 1)

by Peter Tonkin

  As he looked, so the lady's luck began to change in earnest. The pile of gold that had adorned the boards beneath the shadow of her bosom began to drift with relentless inevitability towards the pale young gentleman called Sam. Master Carter made a great play of sharing everyone else's growing frustration, but his hearty acceptance of his bad luck kept the atmosphere light and the game going.

  At last Tom saw the barnacle. Jack had positioned himself with practised care in a corner out of the lady's sight but where his sharp eyes could see her hand reflected in a pewter mirror, and the cards that Tom and the two courtiers held into the bargain. His signals to Master Carter were subtle but clear enough.

  Tom's eyes sought out la bella Constanza's and they shared a speaking look. The high ivory forehead folded into the slightest of frowns, the olive eyes vanished beneath black velvet curtains of lashes. The next hand seemed to stretch out almost endlessly. At first it looked as though the knave of swords would take the trick, but the knave of money turned up miraculously - then the queen of cups. The pile of coins in the middle of the table became a kind of Scylla or whirlpool, gulping in every piece of gold there. Tom glanced up and down, keeping an eye on the increasingly pallid barnacle reflected in the pewter mirror. His gestures were becoming wilder and more obvious now and good Master Carter was frowning with a combination of confusion and irritation. Tom left his hand face down on the table, offering one last card to be exchanged. He felt the faintest stirring of a toe-point against his instep from the fair dealer opposite and his card arrived face down atop his hand.

  'Benedicite,' crowed Sam the purchase. 'I have it all.' Such was the tension that he glanced across at Paul Carter with a relieved grin.

  'Best show us your cards then, sirrah,' suggested the merchant from Chiddingstone.

  Master Sam laid his hand for all to see. He had all the royal cups running down from the queen past knave to the six. He reached across to pull the pile of gold into his shaking hands. Tom glanced up. The barnacle was gone. The coney was caught. Everyone at the table was in ruins, every scrap of gilt and white money there on the smooth, cool boards.

  'I think not, Master Sam,' he said quietly. Lazily he reached across and used the top card from the pile in front of him to flip the others over. Every club lay revealed, in order from the ace to the eight. 'Or shall I call you Master Purchase, to go with Master Setter here?'

  Both the coney-catchers sprang erect, each of them reaching into the folds of their clothing for a weapon, but Tom's rapier was lying across the table before their rummaging was anywhere near done. 'Go,' he said. 'Collect your Barnacle Jack, and vanish or your next resting place will be in the Clink. 'Tis only ten doors up.' He raised his voice suddenly, his northern drawl lost in courtly imperiousness. 'Tapster, call the Watch.' His voice dropped a little. 'We'll see how the Bishop's Bailiff likes coney-catchers down from Damnation Alley.'

  By the time he had finished this little speech, Tom was talking to vacancy. Indeed the two young courtiers had vanished as well, leaving only Tom and the beautiful card-player, face to face across the table.

  'Another hand, Signorina?' asked Tom, gathering up the winning hand and pushing it back towards her.

  Their eyes met over the pile of silver and gold.

  'You have won all, Signor. I have nothing left to play for but my honour.'

  'All of the trash against that one jewel, then,' he said. 'At any hazard you will.'

  'Well,' she temporised, 'like the failed cheat Master Paul from Chiddingstone ...'

  'Who is likely to be waiting outside in Oliphant Alley with his friends and their filchmen, ready to beat my brains out before I can get to my sword ...'

  'I like the sudden death of Mumchance ...'

  She put the cards in a pile. 'Queen,' she said quietly, 'of denaro.' And split the pack to reveal a deuce.

  Tom smiled and reached across. 'Knave of swords,' he said and split in his turn, holding the card for her to see without looking at it himself. Her eyes went from his face to his card and she smiled. 'Swords it is,' she said. 'Though which is the Master and which is the Knave, alas I cannot tell.'

  Constanza had a room up in the private section of the Elephant up near the eaves. It was spacious enough to accommodate a sizeable bed and an eager pair of lovers, with a window opening at its end to show a gleaming view north across the quicksilver river from the Bridge to the Bridewell. As they looked across at it, they pulled leaves from the pots of basil Constanza kept on her window sill here and chewed them to freshen their breath in the Italian fashion.

  The city was mostly dark, but it glittered beneath the waning moon as though silver­ smiths had been at work alongside the thatchers and the tilers on the roofs. Since he had brought Constanza back from Siena last year, Tom had seen her housed in his own rooms and then in a wider range of accommodation - for she was not such a woman as could ever stay faithful to just one man. Nor was she a woman content to live off a man's earnings when she had abilities that would make her independent of any man, no matter how hotly she burned for him from time to time.

  But Tom was here on business more important than cards or carnality. As he often did, without second thoughts, he came to her for gossip. As they stood at their favourite end of her room, chewing on their salad of fragrant herbs, gazing across the city the thieves' cant called Romeville, centre of the world, he pulled loose the laces of her clothing leisurely, caressing her under layer after layer. And they talked.

  'Bella,' he began, using her love-name as he untied the knots at the back of her bodice, easing her warm ivory shoulders free, 'have you heard of any strangers in town of late?'

  The tone of the question warned her that he meant the sort of strangers she might hear about. 'Gambling men? Or Mediterranean men?' she asked, her voice trembling a little now.

  He pushed the wings of her bodice wide and fell to loosening the catches holding her fashionable skirts under the decorated swell of her farthingale. Her own hands were unloosening the farthingale's fastenings, shaking with desire as they did so. 'Mediterranean men,' he said, easing her out of her skirts and leaving her in her warm, damp, fragrant shift. 'I seek a Master with skills the equal of my own. And, I think, an ambidextrous.'

  She caught her breath; but that could have been revelation, superstition or reaction to his fingers running up the velvet column of her thigh to settle like birds nesting in the shadow bush up there.

  'None from Italy of recent note,' she breathed as his fingers fluttered and settled, playing and pecking like restless chicks. 'Nor France. I have heard of no Greeks, nor Ottomans, nor any new merchants from Jerusalem, from Alexandria, from Aleppo ...' Tom suddenly realised that she was drawing out the list in order to continue the sensation of his caresses at the tops of her thighs. He substituted a lover's pinch for his more gentle ministrations.

  The ravishment of her delicate flesh drew a quiet squeal from her, compound of a tincture of agony and a tun of acquiescence. 'There is a Spaniard lately arrived,' she admitted, twisting free and falling back on to the bed as Tom rose to strip off his black garments.

  'A Spaniard? Hell's teeth. What could a Spaniard do here? Now?'

  'Word is that he is seen at Essex House. A Don fresh from Cadiz, reporting to my Lord of Essex on matters in the Queen's business. Friend to the Don that's there already, Don Perez. Essex you know has quite a Spanish court there. Your man will be one of them, I am certain.'

  That was almost information enough. Almost, but not quite. For Tom lived in a new world now, where information was not merely a pastime or an investment - where it could be a cutting edge and a coffin. Or, rather, a noose in the maw of a plague pit.

  Tom pulled off his shirt and, being but little of the Puritan attitude these days, he slid the smock up Constanza's shuddering length and cast it aside before he began to practise his most powerful assaults in the battles of love - techniques, like those at cards, among other, darker, things, that he had learned at Siena, though not in the school of Maestro C
apo Ferro. Almost coldly he worked on her body, bringing her burning voluptuousness soaring nearer and nearer to climax. At the crest of the wave, he paused, lingering out her desires. 'How do you come to know these things?' he asked her.

  Her eyelids flickered. Her eyes seemed to engulf him, grown huge and dark, as though she had drizzled belladonna in them, as Italian lovers are sometimes said to do. 'I hear it by the way,' she breathed. 'I hear everything that happens in the south. My ears are like seashells. They carry a whisper of their home in their depth, be they never so far away.'

  Chapter Eleven - The Master of the North

  A little before noon next day Tom stepped out of the wherry on to the lowest of the Whitehall Stairs and tossed a groat downwards before turning to run on up. He had been back to his rooms in Blackfriars already to change and was wearing his finest. Black cloth of the Italian cut, Spanish kid boots. Boat-bellied doublet in the fashion of Spanish armour, dagged with slashes puffed with tobacco silk, and black galligaskins of the latest style, loose across his thigh but laced tight at the knee behind the high tops of his beloved boots. His short black cloak was laced with silver and left the hilt of his rapier convenient to his kid­gloved hands. He was out of the very point of fashion only in that he disdained a hat. Even so, he could have passed for any sort of a courtier, up to a man possessed of a title, and would have walked into the Presence Chamber without too much difficulty.

  Except that the Court was not here at Whitehall. It was at Nonesuch, and likely to move again soon. For the Court was where the Queen was. Her own law ran 'under the verge' within thirteen miles of her person in any direction. The power of the throne resided where she did and she could sign state papers at Whitehall, Westminster, Nonesuch, Richmond or Hampton Court. She had even done so from ships she had been visiting: 'from Due Repulse, where this day I have been, Elizabeth R'. The governance of the country in summer followed her from palace to palace.

  Or, most of it did. For messages- messengers - came from all over the kingdom, all over the continent; sometimes even from remoter parts of the world, nowadays. And the palaces at Whitehall and Westminster retained small secretarial staffs to meet such men and redirect them to where the Queen was at the present time, and to oversee any other little routine matters that did not require Her Majesty's direct personal involvement.

  And one such secretarial guide was Walter Collingwood, Secretary to a committee of the Court of Star Chamber, who had added to his other duties that of winding up the last details of the estate of the late Ferdinando Stanley, Earl of Derby, patron of the Burbages' Company, Lord Strange. Lord Strange had died less than two months since and the last of his bequest to his players was keeping the Burbage half of the Rose Company afloat while they sought another patron. But they could only do that if Romeo and Juliet was a great enough success to attract the attention of the distant Court away down in Surrey.

  There was a guard at the top of the steps. 'State your business,' he challenged.

  Tom was well enough prepared for this. 'I come to see the Secretary Collingwood,' he said. 'I have come from the Rose. The theatre.'

  The guard paused for an instant, then he turned and poked his head into a small guard chamber. 'Take this man to Secretary Collingwood,' he said; and a guide appeared like a spirit summoned to take Tom in hand.

  Tom knew something about palaces. Around the Campo in Siena there were fourteen of them not counting the Palazzo Publico. And he had travelled widely in his studies - and in respite from his studies. He had seen most of the major palaces in Italy - the Duomo, the Doge's Palace, the palaces at Rome. Further afield, he had visited Versailles and the Louvre in Paris. He had been to the Alhambra. Whitehall Palace was bigger than any of them. There were twenty-three acres of it, from Whitehall Stairs at Thames'side in the east to the Royal hunting grounds of the Green Park, which ran away westward almost endlessly; from Westminster Abbey in the south to Charing Cross. Like the Louvre, it had public roadways running through it spanned by great gates which doubled as bridges leading from one section to another. Tom had stood on the greatest of these thoroughfares, King Street, to see the Queen on Sundays. He had joined the jostle on Accession Day during his first November back, to see the tilting and the splendour.

  But the maze of rabbit warren passages he walked through now went far beyond any part of the palace he had ever imagined, let alone visited. At last his guide turned into a small, dark antechamber and motioned Tom to wait as he went through into the next room. Standing in the shadowy cell, Tom looked through the next door into a larger, brighter chamber with wide windows looking over the river. Like an actor, he rehearsed in his head what he wanted to say to Secretary Collingwood, for the murder of a man among the players he had supported could damage the reputation of even a deceased patron - and rouse the ire of the rest of the Stanleys, one of the most powerful families - dynasties - in the country.

  Tom's years of travel and study abroad had hardened him in many ways. The quick thinking, decisive, deadly man standing in Secretary Collingwood's antechamber was as far removed from the callow youth of the Flanders battlefield as the Ferrara blade at his side was removed from his great-grandfather's short sword. But even so, there was a stench of such naked power in these corridors that even the new Tom, the deadly blade and icy detective, could not help but rehearse his coded warning again.

  'Come through.'

  Tom moved, sweeping in through the half­ open door, pausing to deliver a careful bow, straightening swiftly to look the Secretary in the face, drawing in his breath as he did so.

  But he was not allowed to deliver his well­ rehearsed message yet.

  'You are late,' snapped Collingwood. 'You have kept matters waiting for a day too long. Have you any idea what it can cost them to be away from Her Majesty's side so long? Come through, man.' The folded, wizened, grey-bearded man twirled even as Tom's mouth opened. In a twinkling he had crossed the room, a-buzz with energy and urgency.

  'Sir Walter, you mistake me.' Tom was not a man to allow misapprehensions such as this to go unchallenged. But Collingwood had crossed to a hanging and, sweeping a curtain of cloth-of-gold aside, he was opening another door secreted behind it. 'Sir Walter.' But Sir Walter was gone through and Tom had no choice other than to follow.

  He found himself in another passage, ill-lit and twisting. Collingwood was dressed like any clerk in a long, dark gown and Tom cast all thoughts of further conversation aside as he hurried forward, fighting to keep the old man in sight.

  As he half ran through the maze of passages on the Secretary's hurrying heels, however, Tom was unable to stop some part of his mind whirling away in wild speculation. He had been mistaken for someone else, that was clear. Someone from the Rose. Now, there were in Southwark alone the Rose and the Little Rose - two taverns side by side. God alone knew how many taverns were named for the Red Rose of York, the White Rose of Lancaster, and the red and white Tudor rose of peace. And yet had he not told the keeper of the water gate 'Rose Theatre'? He was certain that he had. Allowing that, then, he had to assume that there was someone working at the Rose who was also working for Collingwood and whoever Collingwood was taking him to see. Someone who was due to have been here a day since. Someone who had failed to keep his tryst.

  It was most likely to be Morton for two reasons. Firstly because he obviously could not keep even the most urgent appointment now - and was alone among the Rose Company in being unable to do so. Secondly, Tom knew the Company men like brothers - except for Morton. Had any of the others - except, perhaps, the Wardrobe Master or the Gatherer - been in contact with men such as this, Tom would have known it. Except, he admitted grudgingly, switching to his next train of thought, except for Master Henslowe himself. Morton it was, then.

  But who was Morton like to be visiting at Whitehall? Someone who had come down from Nonesuch, from the Queen's very side, to talk to him. And what in God's name was going on, that the murder of a nameless actor was suddenly leading Tom into the company of such a
s stood by Her Majesty's own side?

  But then the time for speculation was abruptly at an end. Secretary Collingwood opened a door and the pair of them tumbled into another chamber. No waiting room or antechamber this, but a Presence Chamber fit for the Queen herself. There were two men seated in the gracious apartment: one at a table in the centre of the room and another, away over in the shadows in the corner, his face hidden.

  'Here's your man, my lord,' said Collingwood, from the depths of a bow. Tom stooped too, for a swift glance around the table had told him all too much.

  Tom had never seen Secretary Collingwood before and would never until now have known him in a crowd. They lived in an age where the faces even of the most powerful were known to but a few. Portraits were painted for state rooms in powerful family houses, not for public gaze. Pictures of the famous were rare and only recently appearing in pamphlets. Her Majesty's countenance was familiar as it had once looked, in profile, from coin and seal. Other than that, common men like Tom would only recognise those they had seen at important occasions in attendance to the Queen, whose offices, arms or liveries they knew. In this pictureless society, it was possible for a full-sized portrait of Henry VIII painted on a wall in the cellars here to make old courtiers shake with fear ten years after his death when they saw it.

  But Tom knew the face of the man at the head of the table well enough. He had seen Henry Carey, nephew to Anne Boleyn and cousin of the Queen, when he had been the Master of Berwick, Warden of the East Marches and Lord of the North. He had seen him as Lord Hunsdon processing out of Somerset house to Church on Sundays. He had seen him as Lord Chamberlain riding beside the Master of the Horse, the Earl of Essex, when Her Majesty rode forth in state. He had kept careful eye upon him, too; for this was the man to whom his uncle Tom Musgrave reported, by messenger twice a month, as though his life depended upon it, the state of the Borders from Gretna to Berwick, from Newcastle to Home Castle.