A Verse to Murder

by Peter Tonkin

  Yet.

  *

  She allowed Forman’s hand to take the hand that was holding her purse as her other hand pressed her kerchief to her cheeks. She sobbed, hiccupped and looked up at him with the eyes of a starving puppy.

  ‘Master Shakespeare has better taste than I would have guessed,’ he said, supposing that this complimented her.

  ‘Oh sir! Do you know my Will then sir?’ She took his hand in both of hers, keeping firm hold on the purse for the moment as well as of the kerchief.

  ‘Hardly, my dear,’ his hands closed over both of hers. ‘But I know of him.’

  She gasped, even more wide eyed, wondering whether or not to flutter her eyelashes like a Bankside bawd. ‘He must be famous indeed if someone as important as you knows of him!’ Had she gone too far? she wondered at once, even though she had not fluttered her eyelashes after all. His eyes narrowed with suspicion. He pulled his hands free and sat back, observing her coolly. The purse was clearly no longer at the centre of his thoughts. Nor, for the moment, were the size and disposition of her breasts. Though, for some reason she could not explain to herself, her nipples had come erect beneath the heat of his earlier gaze. He pushed the goblet towards her and waited silently as she took another sip, and then a third, larger than the first two.

  ‘Master Shakespeare and I are both known at court,’ Forman explained more formally as she replaced her glass beside his on the table. ‘Master Shakespeare and his company perform plays, jigs, bergomasks and so-forth for the entertainment of their betters. I map out the future of the country and those who rule it. My acquaintance with the players and therefore of Master Shakespeare is of the slightest.’

  ‘You map out the future…’ breathed Rosalind, keeping her eyes as wide as she could. ‘Can you see it, then? Can you truly see the future, sir? Such a skill would be beyond price!’

  ‘I certainly can!’ he leaned forward once more, reminded about the purse, as she had planned.

  ‘And would you be willing to look into my future, sir? Mine and my Will’s? Though of course we will never rule the country nor ever be remembered after we die.’ She squared her shoulders, thrusting her bosom back into prominence. ‘I know we are people of no account,’ she emphasized, ‘but I have brought a goodly weight in silver coin, sir, and would make it worth your while.’ She opened her hands as though her fingers were petals and there in the heart of the flower lay the little leather bag of coins.

  ‘Worth my while, eh?’ said Forman as he glanced at the purse apparently casually, his experienced eyes no doubt assessing its worth to within a farthing. Then they glanced up again, their gaze stopping well below the level of her own. Were the points of her breasts showing through her shift, bodice and jerkin, she wondered, for they tingled with arousal. ‘And not only your future but also Master Shakespeare’s though neither of you will ever achieve importance, let alone immortality? Why I think that could be arranged. Yes indeed.’ He sat back. His demeanor changed. He became less engaging; more decisive. ‘Let us go upstairs to my library. I have up there everything I need to begin to construct the charts that will predict how life and the occult powers that control it will treat you and Master Shakespeare in the future.’

  He rose and she copied him. Tom’s warnings about the man and his house flashed into her mind, but she pushed them back, even though she had not quite kept her word to Tom. She still carried the dagger but not the snaphaunce pistol. Even so, she thought, if she was going to find out what had happened to Hal, whether Forman had supplied the hemlock, what was the depth of his involvement in Spenser’s death and - perhaps most urgently of all - what was his true relationship with Kate Shelton, she could not afford to be shy or fearful.

  He turned and crossed to the door that led to the corridor and the staircase.

  Feeling a little dizzy, she took a final draught of the wine to steady herself and followed him into the passage outside only to hesitate, horrified. The reassuring noises that sounded like several other people working and gossiping in the house were in fact coming from a cage containing two restless birds.

  She and Forman were absolutely alone after all.

  ii

  Constable Banks, chief of the watch in the Blackfriars ward looked down at Rocco Bonetti’s corpse then up at Tom. There was quite a crowd now but Tom and Raleigh had not moved - and neither had touched the corpse. It was clear from the outset that he was dead. No-one could lose that much blood and survive. Both Tom and Raleigh had been in enough battles to be certain of that. Bonetti had been dead for less than ten minutes before Banks and his men arrived - an arrival that Tom for one found suspiciously swift.

  ‘He challenged you. He attacked you. He started the duello,’ said Banks. Only his tone gave away the fact that these were questions. He was a man of slow speech with a cast in one eye. Tom knew that it would be a mistake to suppose him to be as stupid as he looked. And he also suspected it would be a mistake to suppose him to be absolutely honest.

  ‘Yes,’ said Tom. ‘He said he was passing on a message. I have no idea why or who from.’

  ‘And the message was…’ Banks asked.

  ‘That it was my time to die.’

  ‘Your time to die.’ Banks mulled it over. ‘That sounds like a challenge right enough.’ Then he turned. ‘Sir Walter, did you hear this challenge?’

  ‘No, constable. I arrived part-way through the encounter. I had come for my accustomed lesson with Signior Bonetti, as his assistants will no doubt confirm.’

  ‘That you had a regular lesson, I should guess,’ said the constable. ‘Not that you arrived in time to see the beginning of the fight or, on the other hand, too late to do so. Unless they were standing outside too, of course.’

  ‘Indeed,’ nodded Raleigh. ‘Though they were not. There was no-one else about when I arrived. Except for masters Musgrave and Bonetti.’

  Constable Banks turned to the crowd which was being held back by his watchmen. ‘Did anyone here hear or see the beginning of this matter? The onset of this fight? Did anyone hear the challenge?’

  There was much shaking of heads in reply, even amongst the pale and shaken men that Tom recognized as Bonetti’s assistants.

  Then a new voice called, ‘I heard it! I heard it all. It is precisely as Master Musgrave said.’ They looked up to see Kate Shelton standing in the open window of Tom’s rooms immediately above, with the shadowy figure of Ugo Stell a little way behind her. ‘Signior Bonetti challenged Master Musgrave just as he said and he drew his rapier first!’

  Tom looked back down at Banks and then up at Kate once more. She was describing what had happened precisely enough but he knew she was lying. During that moment of preternatural focus before Bonetti made the first pass, Tom had registered everything nearby, including the fact that the windows to his rooms were shut. There was no way Kate could have heard anything except, perhaps, for the clash of blade upon blade. Had he not seen her at Poley’s secret conference in The Rose tavern last night, he would simply have accepted her lies as a welcome attempt to help him and been grateful that she cared enough to do so. Now, he found that he was suspicious of her motives.

  But the deed was done, the lies were told and their effectiveness could not be denied. He looked back at Bates as the constable shrugged. ‘That’s that, then. We will remove the corpus and hold it until his family or someone concerned claims it otherwise it goes to a pauper’s grave. In the mean time I will report to the Queen’s Crowner, for this death took place so close to Her Majesty it is well beneath The Verge. So you may find yourself summoned to Sir William Danby’s presence, with the lady your witness; and perhaps even you along with them, Sir Walter. But then again, perhaps not: Sir William is a busy man on the verge of retirement and this looks open and shut to me.’

  *

  The watchmen took up Bonetti’s corpse and carried it away, led by Constable Banks and followed by the assistants from the dead master’s school. The crowd began to disperse. Walter Raleigh and Tom exchanged for
mal bows and the Captain of the Queen’s Guard turned to follow the crowd. But then he stopped and turned back. ‘Master Musgrave,’ he said in his deceptively gentle west-country brogue. ‘It occurs to me that I no longer have a master of defence to assist in the perfection of my style. And, further, that of all the men to whom I should refer for his replacement, the man who bested him in a passage of arms would be the wisest choice. Do you have room for another pupil, sir?’

  ‘Of course, Sir Walter. I would be honoured. I warn you, however, we would have to do some work on rebuilding your technique - Agrippa will no longer stand against the more modern methods of Maestro Capo Ferro.’

  ‘As you have just so ably demonstrated,’ Raleigh nodded. ‘Very well, I will send one of my attendants later today and we will come to an arrangement. Good day to you.’

  As Raleigh walked away, Kate arrived at Tom’s shoulder. ‘Perfect!’ she laughed. ‘You have rid yourself of a competitor who was clearly suborned to assassinate you and have already poached his most illustrious student! Poley would be proud of you.’

  ‘No doubt. But the method you find so effective - and I cannot disagree with you, it was - I found too extreme. And of course it robbed us of the chance to discover who it was that suborned him’

  ‘Even though the choice appeared to be kill or be killed?’

  ‘Even then. As we proceed along the passageway towards the heart of this matter, every death is just another door closed against us.’ He would have said more, still vaguely dissatisfied with the fact that she had so easily lied to protect him not to mention last night’s secret meeting and the unguarded comment about her possible involvement with Forman - and, perhaps even Hal’s death - but he stayed silent instead.

  Side by side, they went into the doorway beside the haberdasher’s shop and climbed the stair to his rooms. As she often did when she was here during the day, Kate went through into his teaching room and took a rapier, practicing her technique in front of the long mirror that covered most of the inner wall. At times he wondered whether she did this so that she could revel in her own beauty and grace rather than study and perfect her technique.

  The window at the far end of the long room stood open because that was the one Kate had called down from. Tom, still thoughtful, was about to join her when Ugo caught his eye and jerked his head. Side by side the two men went into Ugo’s work-room. ‘Don’t tell me,’ said Tom. ‘She couldn’t possibly have heard anything Bonetti said.’

  ‘True enough,’ nodded Ugo. ‘And I know that for a fact because I was just behind her looking out of that window when Bonetti stopped you. Though I couldn’t hear what he said either. But that’s not what I wanted to tell you.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Raleigh was there. She knows it and I know it. I heard him say he only arrived part-way through the fight. He lied. He was there right from the beginning. He was watching closely into the bargain, as though he had something important invested in the outcome.’ The Dutch gunsmith’s piercing blue gaze met Tom’s. ‘As was Kate,’ he added,’ watching from the beginning through the closed window. But she was watching him.’

  iii

  Rosalind hesitated at the foot of the stairs looking down the corridor towards the door she guessed must lead into Forman’s kitchen. The cage hanging just this side of the door was the better part of four feet high and well over two feet across. It was a tall cage with a rounded top, circular at the base. Even so it was crowded. Two large grey birds were confined restlessly within it, flapping their wings as best they could and grumbling to each-other in disturbingly human tones. She could well understand how, from a distance and through a shut door she had supposed noises these creatures made to be those of people moving and conversing.

  Rosalind dragged her gaze back and looked up. Forman was eagerly mounting the stairs, as yet unaware of her hesitation. She just had time to make an escape if she turned and ran now, she thought. But that would undo so much. Flight would not only be cowardly, it would rob Tom and herself of a potent chance to discover what was going on behind these mysterious deaths. And that discovery would, she hoped and believed, cause Will to be freed from the Marshalsea and Poley’s toils all the sooner. One moment of womanish weakness would rob them all of incalculable potential rewards of intelligence if of nothing else - and her lover of his freedom. At least, so she told herself, her mental tone scathing.

  She squared her shoulders, looped the laces of her money-bag through her belt and wished once more that she was carrying Ugo’s double-barreled snaphaunce as well as Will’s dagger there. She tucked her kerchief between the buttons of her doublet where they strained to contain her breasts and stepped up onto the bottom stair. Her breath was short and her head span just a little - was it nervousness or something more? The memory of that last long draught of wine seemed to burn in her throat like the fire that comes from ice.

  Forman turned at the stair-head, playing the perfect host. ‘There is a bath room a little further along the corridor,’ he said. ‘It has a chamber pot within should you feel the need.’

  At his words she did begin to feel the need, and hurried up the stairs in consequence. He stepped back to let her rush past, like a bull-fighter in a Spanish Corrida that Poley had once described to her. She reached the little room pulled the door closed behind her and began to search for the chamber pot. She found it behind the hip bath almost invisible in the shadows. As she pulled it out with a gasp of relief, something else came with it. She paid it no attention as her need for relief was almost overwhelming. She grabbed the chamber pot as she pulled her skirts and petticoats out of the way and squatted. Only to discover that with relief came the unsettling suspicion that she was being spied upon. She finished, rose and adjusted her clothing. No longer quite so certain she was being watched, she slid the vessel back behind the bath and the object that had come out with it moved again. She stooped and retrieved it. It was a lock of hair tied with a tiny red ribbon. Frowning, she slipped it into the little leather bag with the silver.

  When Rosalind came out into the corridor again, Forman was standing in the nearest of two doorways leading one behind the other towards a window in the end wall which, she calculated, must overlook Billingsgate. Putting her suspicion that she had been overwatched to one side for the moment, she walked towards him.

  ‘Welcome,’ he said with a smile that looked genuine. ‘This is my library where I work on such things as you would have me prepare for you.’ He stepped back to let her enter but somehow in spite of his apparent gallantry she found that she had to push past him in an unexpectedly intimate manner. Then she was in the room, surrounded by the books. She didn’t bother reading the titles - Tom had described them - but they still seemed to give off a strange and unsettling atmosphere as well as a dusty odour, such as she might have imagined coming from a long-lost tomb. Forman’s proximity seemed suddenly more protective than threatening. When he came closer still she did not pull away.

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘We must begin with the basics. Place and time of birth.’ As he spoke he led her over to a tall table at which they were forced to stand shoulder to shoulder hip to hip and thigh to thigh. He smelt of sweat and dust, not unlike his books, but she found the smell quite pleasant. Nor was she unduly disturbed by the way his limb pressed against hers, seeming to burn through the layers of cloth between them to feel disturbingly like naked skin on skin.

  *

  ‘I was born in Saffron Waldon which is in the county of Essex,’ said Rosalind, remembering just in time to slow her speech and maintain her country accent.

  ‘Location! Excellent! Now, as to date…’

  ‘Well, sir my birthday has always been held on All Saints Day but my mother said as she could never be certain I did not arrive just before midnight on All-hallow-e’en. For she often said as I was growing up that I had more in me of a devil than an angel…’

  ‘A most propitious birth date and hour when the forces of Good and Evil are in perfect balance - but with Goo
d on the wax and Evil on the wane. And as to the year, fair one? The year?’

  ‘Well, I’ve always reckoned as I was born ten year afore Armada Year…’

  ‘Fifteen seventy eight. And you come to me even before your twenty-first birthday. Such sweetness!’

  ‘But you can compose a chart sir, can you not?’

  ‘For a woman born in Saffron Waldon at midnight on the thirty first of October fifteen seventy eight - I certainly can!’ he slipped his hand round her waist and hugged her exuberantly as though his excitement was the most natural thing in the world. And some strange, distant part of herself observed her also responding as though it was the most natural thing in the world. A part of her that silently ordered her to reach for Will’s dagger before things got out of hand. But she made no move at all. Forman’s hand slipped down to her hip; round the back onto her right buttock.

  ‘You see,’ he continued, his voice growing throaty, like the purr of a big cat, ‘now I can fit your birth into my charts and see what stars and signs govern you, your spirit, your character, your destiny and your body. With these charts I can uncover the deepest secrets of your desires.

  Now! shouted that tiny but shrinking part of her. Go for the dagger now!

  ‘Let us see… Your Sun is in Scorpio, and so I’m sure will several of your other governing planets. Scorpio is a secretive, calculating sign; a chess-player always thinking several moves ahead. It is a passionate sign with much power and little control, especially in matters of the flesh. The only sign or planet that might be more powerful in this area is Lilith. Now where is the black moon of Lilith in your chart; Lilith the mistress of even more hidden lusts…’

  Forman’s arm tightened around her waist even as his fingers clawed at the fullness of her buttock. Without apparent effort, almost, it seemed, without thought, he swung her away from the desk and began to guide her towards the door. She followed like a puppet despite that tiny, shrinking voice yelling at her that NOW was the time to draw the dagger.