A Verse to Murder

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘Robbery, and of such a sum! An interesting conceit,’ said Tom. ‘Do you believe it?’

  ‘That Her Majesty granted the pension? Of course. Spenser was her favourite poet.’ Will said. ‘That the Council paid it out in coin? And so swiftly? Less so. I have never heard of such celerity in all my dealings with them.’

  ‘And yet, as you say,’ mused Rosalind, ‘If Spenser was her darling, perhaps she ordered it so.’

  ‘True,’ agreed Tom. ‘And if - for once in his life - Poley speaks the truth, whoever really poured the poison into Spenser’s ear as he slept, removed that purse and is now a rich man - for the moment at least. Though doubly endangered, of course, for even if he has carried out the murder unsuspected, the moment he starts spending Her Majesty’s gold coin, he puts himself at the centre of suspicion once again. Not to mention at the top of every thief and cut-throat’s robbery list, unless he is very careful indeed.’

  ‘Or,’ added Rosalind, ‘unless he is very well protected.’

  Tom sat silent for a moment. Rosalind’s phrase chimed with something in his memory.

  ‘But there was more,’ said Will after a moment. ‘Poley and Parrot spent some time examining with me a possibility in parallel. That whoever lies at the root of this, someone of great power which he wields without much thought, supposed that he could crush Spenser as easily as Rosalind is crushing the fleas from the Marshalsea. But then the Earl of Essex, with his gaudy funeral full of poets and his positioning of the grave next to Chaucer’s somehow changed matters, though it seemed they could not fathom how this was so.’

  ‘But surely it is obvious,’ said Tom. ‘We have been discussing it without assessing the full import of our words.’ He looked at the other two, his eyes shining. ‘And what Kate told me last night makes the whole thing seem clearer still.’

  ‘How so?’ asked Will.

  ‘Consider,’ said Tom. ‘Spenser upsets one of the most powerful men in the land, perhaps with Mother Hubberd, perhaps in some other way. The plot to kill him is thrown together with little more planning but with equal effect to Henry II’s execution of Archbishop Becket.’

  ‘But how would that work?’ queried Rosalind. ‘Are there men so powerful and are the court and the council so corrupt that such things can be done on a whim?’

  ‘Poor Kit Marlowe was murdered on little more than a whim,’ said Will. ‘All the world knows that! And by your evil genius Robert Poley into the bargain!’

  ‘Let us suppose,’ said Tom, ‘that the offended man is Sir Walter Raleigh, The Fox. He stands high in the Queen’s favour but remembers all too well the result of his marriage to Bess Throckmorton.’

  ‘Some time in the Tower then banishment to Dorset,’ explained Will to Rosalind.

  ‘A fate likely to be repeated if he becomes a figure of gossip and of fun!’ said Tom. ‘He would face ruination at the least, if not yet another sojourn in the Tower. Particularly as he sits on the outer limits of those who consider the Infanta of Spain has a strong case to succeed to the throne after Her Majesty dies. One of the few things he has in common with his mortal enemy the Earl of Essex.

  ‘To his bruised pride and dangerous politicking, let us add some other matters. We know him to be ruthless. His execution of so many men at the Siege of Smerwick proves that. Despite his position at court, he is not rich - his adventures in the Americas have brought fame, restoration of Royal favour, but little else - certainly no great fortune. The demands of his position call upon his purse as well as his time and loyalty. His mansion in Sherborne is a costly indulgence.’

  ‘But a safe refuge,’ added Will. ‘Word is that he sent his family and household there after Twelfth Night and the riots on the Strand.’

  ‘So he did,’ nodded Tom, ‘But for him as a skeleton staff, Durham House stands empty.’ Then he pushed on with his argument. ‘His lands in Ireland generate little income while there is a war going on there - but they stand close enough to Spencer’s for a ruthless man to be tempted, especially as there is a chance that the Earl of Essex will bring peace to the province and thereby prosperity to all - and twice the prosperity to a man who can add Spencer’s lands to his own.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Will, ‘I can see how he might be tempted, wounded pride and all. But how would he go about it?’

  ‘With surprising ease,’ answered Tom. ‘He has at his beck and call the School of Night - Forman, Chapman, Thomas Harriot to name but a few, but all godless and desperate men: Forman we have discussed; Chapman is perennially desperate for money to fight his case against John Wolfall, to whom he stands in considerable debt, if for nothing else. So Forman could generate the poison - and probably did, no matter who he was really working for. Chapmen could well have delivered it and would have stolen a purse containing such a sum without a second thought. And Chapman could well have worked to put the blame on some other man - preferably a poet and playwright whose writings were eclipsing his own. You see how well it all might fit together?’

  ‘Except for that one element you have not yet mentioned,’ said Will. ‘The one I descried this morning - the one that appears to have changed everything.’

  ‘Just so,’ said Tom. ‘Let us move on with our trail of logic therefore. Consider this. The task is done - and, perhaps, the purse with £50 taken. The originator of the murder rubs his hands and stands back, task completed, satisfaction achieved. He observes Essex as Earl Marshal and as the poet’s sponsor looking into the matter. Essex warns Forman to be circumspect as to the true cause of death though Will’s accusation is left hanging as insurance should anything go wrong. As it does when Hal falls to his death and their witness is gone, necessitating some quick-thinking. To what end, we know. Meanwhile, Essex declares himself satisfied and arranges the funeral.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’ asked Will and Rosalind almost together. ‘Why would he wink at murder and let it pass?’

  ‘For the same reason that has dictated his every action for weeks and months past,’ said Tom. ‘He is too firmly focussed on his ambition to get to Ireland to risk a full investigation into a murder and robbery slowing him down, distracting his attention, trapping him here in London when he burns to be in Dublin.’

  He looked at the pair of them, took a breath and continued, praying somewhere at the back of his mind that this final step of logical reasoning, based on what his drugged lover had revealed last night, would be worth the price he must inevitably pay.

  ‘But the funeral in itself attracts the notice of the one person in the whole realm more powerful still. Who loves the poet and his poetry more than any other in the entire kingdom. The Fairy Queen herself. She is informed of Essex’s rush to judgement - his business in Ireland keeps him very much under her eye - and the speed with which the dead man is interred. She may not have many spies of her own but she is surrounded by men who have spies in similar numbers those poor Will brought fleas from the Marshalsea. And so, inevitably, she hears a rumour about hemlock distilled into Spenser’s ear.

  ‘So it transpires that things are not settled after all. She does not turn to her Crowner Sir William Danby who looked into Marlowe’s murder with Poley, Frizer and Skeres for he is old and nearing retirement. She turns to the Earl Marshal and orders him to re-open his investigation, to uncover the truth and unmask the plot - and its originator - all before she will permit him to set out for Ireland himself. His nightmare has become fact so his actions go into reverse and all of a sudden, here we are.’

  ‘The Queen,’ said Will. ‘Of course! The Queen. She will have changed everything, for if she believes that it was murder then she will want a murderer unmasked. The man who laid the plan and those that carried it out. And at her command, heads can roll, even if they are affixed to the most powerful and important shoulders in the land!’

  Tom nodded. ‘All four of the men we most suspect must know that, and the guilty man must now get busy to shift the blame elsewhere; to put any other head but his at risk of the headsman’s axe.’


  ‘Which is why,’ concluded Rosalind, ‘the entire game has changed.’

  Chapter 14: The Guts and the Heart’s Desire

  i

  Rosalind hesitated on Billingsgate looking up at Forman’s house. She had never felt like this before. All around her the noisy, malodorous bustle squeezed between the coal market and the fish market on a chilly Monday morning continued but she was hardly conscious of it. She was far too aware of her own body to spend any of her attention on her surroundings. She felt as though she was terrified though she was not - her heart was hammering and her breath was short. Her mouth was dry and her nostrils flared. She would have supposed herself fearful of some appalling monster or event rushing towards her through the crowd, had the truth of the matter not been so overwhelmingly obvious. She had sipped John Gerard’s saffron potion in preparation for Forman’s own concoction and the effects were coming close to overwhelming her.

  The tips of her breasts were so sensitive that even the light linen of her shift sent thrills through her as it moved across them while she panted. And if she was aroused above the waist, that was nothing as to how she felt below. Once or twice with her Will, in that brief time between one bout of love-making and another when completion had simply led to further arousal rather than satisfaction she felt this stimulated. But to experience such a thing on a crowded street part way through a workaday Monday went far beyond any experience she had ever undergone. She took another deep breath, tried to still her fluttering heart, and stepped forward carefully - fearful that the motion of her thighs might bring things to a crisis.

  The shop door was closed but not locked as she discovered when she turned the handle and pushed. The shop inside was empty, the counter untenanted. She hesitated for a heartbeat. Images of flies approaching spiders’ webs and moths fluttering near flames replaced the erotic pictures in her imagination. Perhaps her heart was pounding with more fear and less lust after all. Once again she was torn - Forman had no idea she was here: she could still escape. She took a deep breath to steady herself and then moved forward. She had no sooner reached the counter than the door into the rooms behind it opened and matters were settled for it was too late to escape now.

  Forman emerged, looking over his shoulder as he talked to someone behind him. ‘We no longer conceal, we reveal; but only what we are ordered to reveal; what we are still able to reveal. It is, as I said, a new game…’

  The man he was talking to emerged and Rosalind recognised him from the funeral - it was the bankrupt poet George Chapman. He tapped Forman on the shoulder with a warning finger and the astrologer turned, frowning. Almost immediately, however his expression cleared.

  ‘Ah, George,’ he said. ‘Allow me to introduce Rosalind Fletcher, late of Saffron Walden, who has come to me for spiritual advice.’

  ‘Spiritual advice - from you? said Chapman, his tone one of amusement rather than surprise.

  ‘Indeed,’ chuckled Forman, ‘but guidance from my spirits, rather than my guidance of hers.’

  ‘Well,’ said Chapman, ‘I’ll leave you and Mistress Fletcher to your guidance, spiritual or otherwise. I’m for the Strand as we discussed.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Forman. ‘We’ll meet later.’

  Rosalind, still caught up in the departing skirts of that erotic reverie, watched him leave as though in some kind of a dream. Then she turned to find Forman at the counter immediately behind her, that bottle of dangerous Rhenish standing erect between them.

  ‘Now,’ said Forman, ‘where were we?’

  *

  ‘Alas,’ said Forman, ‘although your details could hardly be clearer, the chart to which they give birth remains obscure.’ He looked down at the birth-chart lying open on the desk in the library beside his bed room and beneath the occult chamber as he slid a conciliatory hand round her waist. The wine bottle stood beside the chart and two goblets stood beside that, all part empty now. The first couple of sips had not helped matters for Rosalind. She had started to slip out of her sensual state with the nervousness she felt at coming into the shop and, further, there was an unexpected distraction of a riddle on the way up here. For the half-open door to the room at the rear of the house above the kitchen that contained the chamber pot and the bath revealed that the room was full of steam. The bath was clearly filled and ready to be used. But, once again, whoever had filled it was absent, as all Forman’s servants seemed to be.

  However, first draught of Forman’s wine had pushed her back into the state which had held her in her grip as she arrived. She was once more so aroused she couldn’t think straight and she certainly had seen no chance as yet to pour the distillate of fly agaric into his. The only thing keeping her safe at the moment, she thought, was the fact that Forman had no idea of the state in which she arrived so he was waiting for his own saffron-enhanced wine to take effect. His hand slipped down to clasp her buttock once again and she returned the pressure with sensuous abandon before she realised what she was doing. She really needed to get a grip on herself, she thought, before Forman got a far more serious grip on her.

  ‘The character revealed is as I described at our last encounter,’ Forman was saying. ‘Secretive, determined, insightful and forward-looking. But the future remains obscure…’

  ‘Oh sir,’ she breathed, maintaining her character as a country innocent by the skin of her teeth. ‘How could that be?’

  ‘In my experience,’ he answered, lifting her glass to her lips so she was forced to take another sip, ‘and my experience is wide…’ he put down her glass and picked up his own, ‘such vagueness comes from one reason only. That you have not yet found your heart’s desire.’

  ‘I have so, sir,’ she protested. ‘I have found my Will!’

  He gave a knowing chuckle. ‘And you do realise, do you not that a will or willy is a love-name for a man’s parts, especially when aroused. Perhaps Master Shakespeare’s is not the will you really desire after all…’

  ‘And is there nothing in all these fine books, sir, that will - that would - guide you further?’ she gestured broadly at the packed shelves and succeeded in knocking the bottle over. The wine splashed onto the floor, missing the chart by inches. Forman tutted and caught it by the neck as Rosalind portrayed slightly tipsy horror at what she had done as effectively as any of Will’s actors. ‘Oh sir! Forgive me I beg! That was so clumsy…’

  ‘Think nothing of it,’ Forman soothed, clearly pleased at the speed with which his adulterate Rhenish was taking effect. ‘Wait here and I will fetch a little more.’

  The minute the door closed behind him Rosalind poured John Gerard’s concoction of fly agaric into his glass then she slapped herself round the face, twice with each hand. Four times in all. Hard.

  ii

  Sir Walter Raleigh was just as tall as Tom and Bonetti had schooled him well. Faced with almost anyone else, the Captain of the Guard would have easily prevailed, despite the fact that he worked within the bounds of Agrippa’s minim beats. His style was fluid, almost as though he were performing an energetic pavane, dancing to the rhythm in his head. His blade reached out from all of Agrippa’s guards, rock-steady, with fearsome speed both in solidly founded thrusts and light-footed, well-balanced lunges.

  Tom stepped back from their final bout, stripped off his gloves and reached for one of the towels beside the ewer of warm water that stood between the piste and the long mirror on the inner wall. Raleigh also mopped his face, sweeping the cloth back over the red curls of his hair where they were darkened almost to mahogany by sweat, watching himself do so in reflection. ‘Truth to tell Sir Walter,’ said Tom. ‘I have little to teach you. Your grasp of Agrippa’s method will stand you in good stead unless you face a true master or a loaded gun.’

  Raleigh gave a grunt of laughter then turned. ‘Even so, I will persist until I have reached mastery myself - the lessons are worthwhile even were I doing nothing other than going through the moves while watching myself in that glass. It is a revelation, sir. Poor Bonetti never thought
of such a thing.’

  Still watching his every move in the huge mirror, Raleigh slid his long blade home, pulled on his outer garments and swung his cloak over his shoulders. ‘Does this hour suit?’

  ‘It does, Sir Walter.’

  ‘Well then I will come at this hour on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays while I am at court and in the country. I will send a man with the fee as agreed and see you the day after tomorrow.’

  The two men crossed to the inner door that led to Tom’s office with its second door out onto landing at the top of the stairs. No sooner had Raleigh thundered down them into Blackfriars than another, lighter footstep came pounding upward. Tom waited, eyebrows raised, for he was expecting Will as his next student and this was definitely not the poet’s footfall. The young man who eventually appeared seemed familiar, but Tom couldn’t place him until he began to speak. ‘Master Musgrave, I have not come for any lessons in the art and science of defence, but on the orders of the Dean himself.’

  ‘Ah, the scholar from the Abbey. I don’t believe we have been introduced.’

  ‘Hugh Bunton, sir. The Dean himself, The Reverend Master Gabriel Goodman, has sent me to seek you out - though your name was raised at my suggestion…’

  ‘To seek me out with what purpose, Master Bunton?’

  At the mention of the Dean of Westminster, Ugo came out of his workroom and joined Tom, all ears.

  ‘Why, so that you can explain the plagues that overcame the Abbey during services yesterday, Master Musgrave,’ continued Hugh Bunton eagerly. ‘The Dean of course thought first of exorcism but I suggested that there might be an earthly explanation rather than a demonic one and were that so, you would be the man to settle matters.’

  ‘You flatter me. And if I fail, there is always exorcism. I see. But the next step should be clear to you Master Bunton. If I am to try and explain these plagues then…’

  ‘…then I must tell you what they are!’