A Verse to Murder

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘But,’ said Will, ‘as we found out a week or so ago, Forman is surrounded by men of poetical disposition who are by no means noted for their taciturnity.’

  ‘Well thought on, Will,’ said Tom. ‘I wonder whether John Weever or George Chapman has shared a good supper and a friendly drink with anyone recently.’

  *

  George Chapman stared across the table at Tom. The poet’s face was an interesting mixture of expressions. Largest amongst them - hardly surprisingly - was suspicion. Chapman was not used to being offered free dinners by relative strangers, especially not men involved in situations which also claimed some of the poet’s time and loyalty in opposition to those of his would-be host. Then there was the amalgam of personal dislike which lay between them, man to man for no particular reason but potent nevertheless. All this combined with the natural arrogance of a man who considers himself a great artist unrivalled in the fields of poetry and classical translation except, perhaps, (grudgingly) by Will Shakespeare or Sir Thomas North, whether his genius has been recognised yet or not. Further, he was an Oxford man confronted by a graduate from the University of Glasgow an institution he reckoned to be incalculably inferior to his own.

  But all of this was more than counterbalanced by the expression on the face of a starving man confronted with a large and fragrant umble pie, and the promise of a haunch of venison from the deer whose umbles - heart, liver and lights - filled the golden crust before him. As the serving woman brought trenchers and horn spoons, Chapman reached for the tall glass of dark yellow Rhenish which Tom had already poured for him. They were seated, aptly enough in the White Hart on Cheapside, though Tom had spent the late afternoon and early evening tracking Chapman to a much less salubrious institution the Black Bitch on Thames Street which seemed to be serving spit-roasted dog and cat not very convincingly disguised as hare and rabbit.

  ‘Surely you saw as much of him as I did towards the end,’ said Chapman. ‘He came to you for lessons in fencing and referred to you again when other problems arose. Was it not you who referred him to your friend John Gerard when his ear was damaged in a brawl?’

  ‘All that is true enough,’ Tom cut into the pie and ladled some of the contents onto Chapman’s trencher, heaping the golden crust beside it. Chapman took a draught of wine, watching the feast being piled higher and higher. He wiped the back of his hand across his watering mouth. His stomach growled like the dog he was going to have for dinner before Tom found him. ‘But I was not with him every hour of the day,’ Tom continued. ‘I supposed him to have spent most of his waking hours waiting in the draughty corridors of White Hall and West Minster, hoping to place his proposals before the Council or, once he had done so, praying for a swift and positive response.’

  ‘And what makes you think otherwise now?’ Chapman took his spoon and started shovelling the contents of the pie into his mouth. He hardly seemed to chew before he swallowed, washing the mouthful down with the contents of his wine glass. Tom filled it again at once.

  ‘Something Simon Forman said,’ he answered.

  Chapman frowned. His spoon hesitated half-way to his mouth, but only for an instant. ‘You have been talking to Simon Forman? I don’t believe it!’ he said indistinctly, spraying a little gravy as he articulated the ‘b’ and the ‘t’.

  ‘He said it not to me but to a friend of mine,’ Tom explained. ‘She was consulting him on another matter.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Chapman, picking up a solid section of piecrust. ‘I see…’ He leered knowingly. ‘A friend…’ he pushed the pastry into his mouth and continued speaking round it. ‘We all know which of your friends most assiduously visits Master Forman!’

  ‘Well,’ said Tom easily, though he had not expected this. For it seemed Chapman had automatically assumed they were discussing Kate rather than Rosalind. As was logical - he should have seen it coming. But, he found himself wondering, was this a path he really wanted to pursue? God alone knew where it might lead - or how dangerous it might become.

  iii

  ‘Indeed,’ said Chapman, airily unaware of Tom’s dilemma, ‘it seems a certain lady is more often at Forman’s than she is anywhere else nowadays.’

  ‘Searching her heart’s desire,’ said Tom, unable to stop himself. He immediately regretted the words - this was the Tom Musgrave who had fed Kate with John Gerard’s fly agaric potion to get information from her at any price. It was not a side of himself that he approved of at all. He considered himself briefly with a good deal of guilt and self-loathing. But here he was, doing the same thing once again.

  Chapman smirked; almost gave a knowing wink, picked up a sizeable portion of steaming deer’s offal piled on a slab of crust, stuffed it in his mouth and reached for his wine glass. ‘It almost makes you wonder, does it not, whether she has in fact discovered her heart’s desire - and found it under Simon Forman’s roof.’ And perhaps in Simon Forman’s bed remained mercifully unsaid, but even the implication was deadly dangerous.

  In the recent past, such a suggestion would have led to a challenge and a swift death for the poet who had impugned the lady’s honour. But Tom had engineered this in more ways than one - by searching for Chapman throughout the late afternoon; by finding Chapman at last, by feeding Chapman, by guiding the conversation along that unexpected byway and, most of all, by plying him with wine laced with fly agaric.

  In vino veritas - in wine the truth, Tom thought; it was not Chapman’s fault if he didn’t like the truth he seemed to be hearing. Seemed to be hearing because of course, Kate’s visits to Forman’s might be, as he had already considered, at Sir Thomas’ behest or on Poley’s orders or even - it now occurred to him - on the orders of the Council. Consider the roles that Poley and Parrot played in the Marshalsea, equivocating confessions out of catholic sympathisers by pretending to be of the Old Religion themselves. Could not Kate be equivocating information out of Forman? But what information? To what purpose? And at whose behest?

  ‘There’s the rub,’ he whispered to himself.

  ‘Don’t be downhearted,’ said Chapman with very evident enjoyment. ‘It has happened to better men that us. Consider Menelaus, his Helen, she of the face that launched a thousand ships, ravished away by another voyager; even Zeus was cuckolded by Hera who bore Hephaestus as a result…’

  *

  ‘Your sympathy would be moving were there any need for it,’ said Tom, keeping his voice level with an effort. ‘But I am here to discuss other matters. You wrote and recited a moving elegy to Edmund Spenser a week ago…’

  ‘A great poet; a dreadful loss…’ Chapman schooled his face into a mournful expression which for Tom simply did not ring true.

  ‘Especially now he’s dead and cannot eclipse you or any of your friends,’ spat Tom, mildly surprised to discover that Chapman had managed to goad him after all.

  The poet drew himself up, trying for an aspect of righteous outrage but he was defeated by the gravy dribbling copiously into his beard and the fact that he was reaching for more pie before the performance was anywhere near complete. He hesitated, spoon in the air and reached for his glass with his free hand.

  ‘You and Forman organised the eulogies,’ said Tom. ‘Under direction from the Earl of Essex I assume, as he was in over-all charge of the funeral.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Chapman nodded, perhaps a little too energetically. His stool rocked and his backside came close to sliding off it. He steadied himself against the table with his spoon hand. The contents of the spoon ran unnoticed over his hand, onto his wrist and into the already grubby lace of his cuffs.

  ‘I had heard,’ continued Tom, ‘that the Earl’s request was particularly apposite because Spenser had been consulting Forman in any case.’

  ‘Once or twice,’ Chapman waved his spoon hand airily. This time the braised offal it had contained landed on the table where it started to congeal.

  ‘Only once or twice?’ said Tom. ‘I had heard that his visits were quite regular - almost as regular as his visits to Whit
e Hall and West Minster.’

  ‘To begin with, perhaps but not so later on.’ Chapman leaned forward conspiratorially. His elbow went into the mess he had dropped on the table-top. ‘Not after the incident and the accident, you see.

  ‘Ah yes, the accident,’ said Tom. ‘The poor apprentice… Hal I think his name was…’

  ‘No! NO! Not the stupid boy! The accidental discovery! The discovery of the secret! Don’t you understand? The secret! If word of that had got out, he would have been ruined. He came so close to it the first time...’

  Chapman’s mouth closed even as his eyes widened. His nostrils flared. Now that his hunger was at least partly assuaged, the look of suspicion returned to his face. A third trencher arrived, this one piled with slices of venison. ‘Water,’ said Chapman to the serving woman. ‘Bring a jug of fresh water.’

  The interrogation was clearly at an end.

  Tom sat back, mind racing. Elements of his investigation were falling into place now but not in a way that he liked. He refused to tie up any more loose ends without checking the truth of what Chapman was saying and of the disturbing conclusions he was beginning to draw from them. In the meantime, he had paid for dinner and he wanted to enjoy it. ‘I read your De Guiana,’ he said. ‘A fine work. Did Sir Walter gain much support for his adventures in the New World through it? More adventurers keen to start new lives in the Roanoke settlement?’

  ‘Less than he had hoped,’ said Chapman grudgingly. ‘And there’s something amiss at Roanoke in any case. But he agrees: it is a fine work.’

  ‘And your translation of Homer. How does that proceed?’

  ‘Well enough.’

  ‘That is where your true immortality will lie, I believe, though I see The Blind Beggar of Alexandria which played so well at The Rose last year is in print at last on Jaggard’s stall at St Paul’s.’

  ‘But not my poetry, you believe?’

  ‘Your work for Sir Walter is as fine as any I have seen in print and I know you have completed Marlowe’s unfinished Hero and Leander to much acclaim. But in my mind your work on Homer towers over even Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch.’

  ‘Which he culled out of the French by Bishop Amyot of Auxerre as I suppose you know. I however, have reached back to the original; as is required to my mind by true scholarship such as Sir Walter truly appreciates…’

  iv

  Tom walked back along Cheapside from the White Hart deep in thought as the night settled down all around him. Chapman’s assumption that Kate was a regular visitor to Billingsgate because Forman had somehow managed to add her to his long list of seductions rankled. Tom could only see three ways of finding the truth of the matter for certain. First, he could ask Kate herself - with or without feeding her fly agaric first. Then he could ask Forman either in person or by rifling his library to search out something such as a journal containing the truth. Thirdly, he could ask whichever spymaster was currently controlling her - Poley or Sir Thomas Walsingham - for the facts as far as they knew them. None of these approaches seemed in any way satisfactory for, with the possible exception of Forman’s journal - if such a thing existed - he could not guarantee that anyone he questioned would actually tell him the truth.

  That was as far as he had got in his deliberations when he was disturbed by a commotion down a darkening side-street. Without thinking, he turned aside and walked towards the melee. As he drew nearer, he could see that a small group of boys had cornered a cat and were doing their best to stone it to death. But the cat wasn’t going down without a fight, a fact that was illuminated by a torch blazing in a sconce above the battlefield. Yowling and screaming defiance, the creature dodged as many stones as it could and hurled itself forward at the skipping, jeering boys. A couple of them had torn stockings and clawed shins, which certainly explained why they were stoning rather than clubbing it. As he drew nearer still, he saw the explanation of the cat’s bravery. In the corner behind it, just visible in the shadows, cowered a kitten. The tiny creature had been lucky to escape injury so far but Tom had little doubt that as soon as its protector - probably its mother - was disposed of the boys would make short work of it.

  Culling the wild cats that infested the city was a popular enough sport, though it ranked below cock-fighting, ratting and dog-fighting in the majority of public houses and, of course, the grand public spectacles of Bull- and Bear-baiting. But tonight at least, Tom was minded to put a stop to this particular cull. ‘You boys!’ he bellowed. ‘Be off with you before I summon the watch!’

  They were young enough to believe that he would bother to carry out such a threat - or that the watch would turn out to save a mere cat if he did so. They took to their heels and Tom strolled over to the objects of their cruelty. The mother was not quite full-grown, he guessed, for she was thin but not scrawny and there were still muscles defined below her sleek black pelt. But she had already suffered many of the hurts she fought to save her kitten from. Her face had been clawed. One eye was missing, as was the ear above it. The remaining ear was tall and pointed; the eye beneath it as green and clear as the ocean. There were scars on her shoulders and flanks - put there, he guessed, by whichever tom-cat had mounted her most recently. The boys’ stones had done further damage to her face and flanks. And one of her forelegs was clearly hurt. As he stooped to look at her more closely, she attacked with all the ferocity of which she was capable, spitting and snarling as she clawed at his boots. He stooped, reached behind her, picked up the kitten by the scruff of its neck then walked away carrying it. The kitten spat and snarled and clawed as fiercely as its mother, but it could only claw the air, for it was facing away from Tom. After half a dozen steps, Tom looked back. The mother cat was limping silently along behind him, vanishing from sight now and again as her totally black shape was consumed by deepening shadows, leaving only that one green eye to gleam like an emerald floating magically six inches up in the air.

  *

  ‘Does she really need a name?’ asked Rosalind. ‘She’s a stray cat. The Lord alone knows what prompted you to bring her and her kitten home…’

  ‘But now that he has,’ interjected Ugo, ‘she’s adopted us. She knows a soft bed when she finds one and she won’t leave it until she’s made to.’

  It was mid morning next day, Tuesday 23rd. Will had already visited The Globe and discovered that rehearsing Henry took second place to thatching the roof - and in any case the copyists had not quite finished yet. So he had retired to his lodging and resumed work on Caesar - though he had vouchsafed to Rosalind that he also had some promising ideas for his new version of Hamlet - which she had taken as a plea to be left alone while he got on with his work.

  Rosalind arrived at Tom’s fencing school not only looking for company but also because Will was due to have a lesson there just before lunch and she planned to watch the lesson then spend the afternoon with him - if he remembered to turn up in the first place. She had become involved in the debate about the cat almost at once.

  The subject of the discussion was curled on an old cloak in the corner with her kitten at her side. A partly-consumed saucer of milk lay in front of them above which that one green eye gleamed, daring anyone except Tom to approach with anything other than food.

  With her mind still full of yesterday’s adventures, Rosalind said, ‘Very well. If she stays you should name her after a demon. Look at her - not one white hair amongst the black; that face; that one-eyed glare. And yet there is something about her, recent motherhood perhaps or the scars of the kitten’s begetting. I think she should be called Astaroth.’

  ‘Astaroth,’ Ugo echoed. ‘You name her for the demon of Lust? Let no-one hear you call her that or it’s the ducking chair, the pricking and the stake or the noose for you! Astaroth is the name of a witch’s familiar if ever I heard one! Dear God in heaven and we’re due to have a Scottish witch-finder as our king when Queen Elizabeth dies!’

  ‘Were I you,’ said a new voice, a virile baritone with a soft West-country burr, ‘
I’d be a sight more careful about discussing the Queen’s death than about naming a cat after a demon!’

  The three humans and Astaroth looked up. Rosalind caught her breath. The man in the doorway who had come upon them almost as soundlessly as the cat could have done was tall, lean, wearing some 47 years as easily as he wore his fashionable clothing and his long rapier. The red curls of his hair and beard were without a trace of grey; his keen brown eyes were edged with the wrinkles that only come from smiling broadly and gazing on far horizons. His cheek bones were high and sharp, his nose long and straight. His full lips were twisted in a slight, ironic grin. Rosalind knew well enough who he was but she had never been this close to him before. Never felt the power of his personality; almost the heat of his presence bringing a blush to her cheeks. She wondered for an instant whether the saffron was still coursing through her veins shortening her breath and moistening her lips even as it dried her throat.

  It was Walter Raleigh.

  v

  ‘I apologise for appearing thus unannounced, Master Musgrave,’ said Raleigh. ‘But I bring our agreement written down and payment for our work so far. I know my next lesson is not until Wednesday but I had an hour to spare and wondered, Master Musgrave, whether you are available…’

  ‘Until Will Shakespeare’s lesson at noon,’ said Tom rising. ‘I am at your service, Sir Walter.’

  The two men strode shoulder to shoulder into Tom’s fencing room. Under Rosalind’s lingering gaze it seemed that they were equally matched - broad shoulders, trim waists, long, muscular limbs. But then her view was blocked as Tom closed the door behind them.

  Both men stripped off their upper garments, piling them on chairs convenient for the purpose, hangers and scabbards on the top. In a matter of moments they were in shirt-sleeves, broad belts supporting galligaskins whose wide turn-ups brushed the tops of tall leather boots. Ugo appeared with a pair of practise foils but Raleigh waved him away. ‘I prefer to practise with my true blade,’ he said. ‘I have always done so. If a master such as this and a pupil such as myself cannot avoid hitting each-other, then at least one of us is in the wrong place.’ He eased his shoulders as he crossed to the chair and slid his rapier out of its scabbard, cutting it through the air as he eased his wrist and forearm, making it hiss and sing.