The Cardinal's Court

by Cora Harrison

  ‘Master Gibson arrives back!’ Ramirez’s ears were quicker than mine. He had heard the click of the key in the lock before I felt an icy draught sweep down into the already freezing coldness of the cellar. The man had locked us in and looked at him with fury. I said nothing, though. He was looking bad-tempered and there was no point in starting an argument. No doubt he had suffered the rough edge of the cook’s tongue. He thrust a leather sheaf of different-sized knives at the doctor. There were plenty of them, two or three of each width, and of different lengths. There looked as though there were about a dozen knives, but the sheath was small enough to be held in the left hand.

  Dr Ramirez sorted through them quickly, picked out the largest and handed the sheaf back to the serjeant.

  And, then unhesitatingly, just as butcher would do it, he slashed the man’s chest open.

  There was no blood; I was thankful for that. The flesh had the texture of old meat and was pale in colour.

  All except one small spot, not much bigger than a man’s finger, where there was a dark incision, going deep into the body.

  ‘See, Hugh, he found the heart.’ Ramirez ignored the serjeant. ‘Slipped his knife in between the ribs, to the left side of the sternum.’

  ‘The arrow went in there.’ Richard Gibson peered through the space between us.

  ‘Master Serjeant, if an arrow went in there; the arrow would stay there unless you pulled it out straight away. And if you pulled out a bodkin-tipped arrow, then the wound would be …’ he hesitated for a moment, seeking a word and then said tentatively ‘… would be frayed. But if you did not pull it out straight away, then the muscles would clench it hard and while the body remained stiff, it would certainly not fall out.’

  ‘You’re trying to say that the man was not killed with an arrow.’ Master Gibson gave a short, incredulous laugh.

  ‘A small, small knife, very thin, that killed him. Not like any of those knives here.’ The doctor gave a cursory look through the knives slotted into the sheath. ‘Perhaps not a working knife. A secret weapon. You see them in Europe, in Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Austria … There is one in the hand of a youth in the tapestry in the cardinal’s dining chamber. Our murderer, my good serjeant, plunged a thin, sharp knife into the heart of this dead man. And then,’ Ramirez raised a finger, ‘and then he pull it out again, hide the body behind the tapestry and poke the arrow in the wound.’

  ‘Someone tried to make James Butler appear to be the murderer,’ I said. Hope began to rise. ‘But who hated James enough for that?’ I turned to Ramirez. ‘When do you think that the murder took place?’

  ‘Probably when the hall was empty,’ he said promptly. ‘It makes sense.’

  ‘You made that up between you, didn’t you, while you got rid of me on some excuse. I know perfectly well that James Butler killed Master Pace.’ Gibson was choked with anger.

  ‘How can you possibly know that?’ I took a step nearer to him and looked down at him. ‘Has someone employed you to find James guilty at all costs?’ I could hear the menace in my voice and he heard it, too. He took a step back.

  ‘I’m going for the cardinal’s doctor. He’ll give me his opinion, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he says that you are talking nonsense.’

  ‘He won’t. Not if he has learned his profession.’

  ‘And you have.’ There was a sneer in the king’s serjeant’s voice. ‘In Spain, I suppose.’

  ‘And at Oxford. You can ask the queen about me if you wish.’

  ‘Are we interested in who actually committed this murder, or do you just want to pin it on James Butler at all costs? Because if so, I warn you that you won’t get away with this. I’ll go to the king himself if necessary.’ I allowed a threat to enter my voice.

  The king’s serjeant ignored that. He stared with frustrated fury at the dead man. ‘I know that he was killed with that arrow belonging to your James Butler. I’ll prove it if it’s the last thing that I’ll do.’ He turned on his heel and went back up the steps again.

  ‘And don’t you lock us in here.’ I yelled after him, but it was no good. A minute later the door clicked open, slammed shut and there was there was the ominous scraping sound of the key in the lock. I jumped to my feet with a curse, but it was too late. We were locked in.

  ‘Damn him to death,’ I exploded, but the slightly amused demeanour of Ramirez had its effect on me and I looked back at the corpse on the marble slab. The clouds must have cleared and the moonlight shining through the barred window of the fish house cast a square of striped light on the stone steps leading upwards.

  ‘How long does a body take to stiffen after death?’ I enquired, trying to keep my voice calm and my enquiry to be without any trace of emotion. ‘I hate being shut up,’ I said by way of explanation.

  ‘It’s variable,’ said Ramirez. ‘Sometimes it can be quite quick, but in a rapidly cooling room, it would probably take about twelve to fifteen hours.’

  The pageant had finished at about ten o’clock. The players and audience had then gone into the cardinal’s dining hall for their sugar supper. I had gone on writing, glad of the respite from the thud of the drum, the clash of cymbals and the wail of the flute. But of course there had been other sounds that followed, nothing that disturbed me too much. Voices, hammers demolishing the fake castle, a broom crashing against a stool or bench, a burst of laughter, an exclamation of surprise or pleasure – perhaps someone found an orange or a date to bring back to a sweetheart or to some wide-awake children. I hadn’t minded those noises as I filled in the clauses about divorce, about the children of the marriage, and about the redistribution of the couple’s possessions.

  And then they had all trooped out, still laughing and calling to each other and there had been a short interval of silence. Perhaps Edmund Pace met someone in the empty hall, someone with a knife, a thin knife, a knife like the knife pictured on the Flemish tapestry in the cardinal’s dining chamber. There was, of course, one person, who was there, carefully checking the floor for pieces of leather mâché. Had Susannah left by that stage? It would be worth going to see her again and I smiled a little at my feelings of pleasure at the thought.

  ‘So it was likely that Master Pace was killed after the pageant was over, don’t you think?’

  ‘Most likely,’ agreed the doctor. ‘And there would have been blood. We should go and examine the tapestry in the hall. I would expect a wound like this to spurt blood from the heart.’ Vigorously he rubbed his hands together and then began slapping his sides, alternating his long arms and stamping up and down on the frozen floor.

  ‘Here he comes,’ I said with relief. I was beginning to feel ill with the cold. I jumped up and down a few times and then began practising my backhand. Dr Augustine came in aggressively. He was probably about forty years older than the young Spanish doctor and his expression said that he was not going to put up with any lectures from the younger man.

  ‘Nonsense, nonsense, of course it was an arrow. I examined the body myself as soon as it was found,’ he said emphatically. ‘That wound was conducive to an arrow incision, or at least it was before you carved the poor man up,’ he said looking disdainfully down at the corpse.

  ‘The muscles tighten around the weapon at the moment of entry,’ said Dr Ramirez. ‘The body is still stiff. How could an arrow just fall out? It’s nonsense.’

  ‘Nonsense, indeed,’ snorted Dr Augustine. He turned disdainfully back to the serjeant. ‘There’s nothing here to make me change my diagnosis. The man was shot in the chest with an arrow. You have the arrow. You’ve seen the blood on it. And now I understand, Serjeant, that the young man has fled: a clear admission of guilt.’

  ‘Or lack of faith in justice,’ I said quietly, and they both glared at me.

  ‘I must lock up this place. The body will be buried on Monday, after the coroner has seen it, but until then I can keep it here. I have arranged with the cook and the clerk of the kitchen that supplies of fish can be taken out in my presence, but until
Monday I hold all the keys to this fish store. And I’d better return these.’ The serjeant picked up the knife from the marble slab, cleaned it on a piece of frozen sawdust, replaced it into the sheaf, buckling it onto his own waist and then took the old man’s arm and walked up the steps with him. I followed immediately. My toes and fingers were beginning to feel frostbitten. The two men went towards the lodgings in the clock court, but Dr Ramirez stopped at the door to the gallery steps.

  ‘Let’s take a look at this tapestry,’ he said, and I followed him up. Most of household had gone to bed by now. Eight o’clock was the usual retiring hour in winter months; the wax guttered, unchecked, in wavy trails down the sides of the candles in the six-foot-high candelabra in the passage, although a few yeoman still stood around yawning. I kept my lantern in my hand, as did Ramirez. We would need these.

  The great hall was, as I had expected, in almost total darkness. Only a faint glow came from the dying fire. It was, I noticed with interest, quite cold now that it was empty of people and the small charcoal fires that burned in iron braziers at the sides of the huge room had been carefully extinguished.

  ‘Which tapestry?’ asked Ramirez in a hushed voice.

  I wasn’t sure. There had been something about the arrow going right through the hub of a cart, but there seemed to be carts in both of the tapestries that covered the walls of the great hall.

  ‘Probably that one,’ I said pointing to the one nearest to the small side door. The cook would have been unlikely to have marched out beneath the ceremonial carved archway and through the great double doors at the end of the great hall. He was quite a shy man away from his kitchen. ‘Yes, it’s that one. See, there is a cart wheel near to the flower border there.’

  We went across and I held the edge of the cloth while the doctor examined the hole, right in the centre of the hub. Quite a large hole, I noticed; the threads of the weaving had been torn or cut and the canvas that lined it had been pierced, also.

  ‘Good shooting to send an arrow right through the centre of the hub!’ I said the words sarcastically. By now I was quite convinced, and vastly relieved to be so convinced, that, wherever he had been killed, the instructor of the wards, Master Edmund Pace, had been stabbed through the heart with a knife. And afterwards, when the body was slumped on the floor, the arrow had been put through the heart in order to throw the blame onto James.

  ‘No arrow could go through a tightly woven, lined tapestry like this, and then through a man’s heart,’ I said in a low voice. I was not an expert bowman like James but I was sufficiently experienced with a bow to know that thick heavy carpeting like this, even without the canvas backing, would slow down or stop any arrow.

  ‘Surprising that the servants did not notice the body when they cleaned the room,’ said Dr Ramirez.

  ‘I’d say that they cleaned the place thoroughly last night after the pageant and then just mended the fire and perhaps flicked a duster around this morning,’ I said. It was not surprising that the body had not been noticed by those entering for dinner, as an elaborate buffet, filled with shining cups and plates of silver and gold stood in front of the tapestry and its shadow would have darkened that part of the room. The body might have lain there all day if the cook had not spotted the man’s shoe.

  ‘So it looks as though he were killed after that happened. Perhaps he came in here late in the evening, just as we are doing now and he met his fate, met a man or a boy who had a grudge against him.’

  ‘Fear, anger, greed, jealousy – I remember the ollamh, the professor in our law school, used to tell us to look for these motives when we were trying to think of a motive for a killing. And he used to say that ‘fear’ was the most potent.’

  He said nothing, just looked a question, so I continued reluctantly: ‘I believe that the dead man, Master Pace, was blackmailing at least two of the cardinal’s wards, and possibly others as well. They were giving him money and other things for fear that he might inform the cardinal of their secrets.’ Something occurred to me then and I added, ‘Just the wards, perhaps, but it could be others in the household, what do you think?’

  ‘It could be. Me, I like to keep to facts. Conjecture can be futile.’ He sounded a little impatient, so I switched back to the dead body.

  ‘He wasn’t killed here, was he?’ I asked, keeping my voice low in case one of the yeoman decided to eavesdrop.

  He pursed his lips, perhaps reluctant to commit himself to an opinion, knelt down on the floor and moved eye and nose close to its surface. Then he nodded.

  ‘No, no, no stains of blood, no smell of blood. The man bled, that’s sure. He had a knife wound – we agree it was a knife, don’t we? A sharp, slender knife. But he did not bleed here.’

  ‘And the hole in the tapestry?’ I studied it carefully, noting the way that the threads were not just cut but twisted. The canvas at the back, also. That had a rounded hole in it, not just a slit. ‘Do you know, I do believe that these holes were actually made with an arrow, with the arrow, with the arrow that was found in the man’s chest, what do you think, Ramirez?’

  ‘Could be, I suppose.’ He did not sound too concerned. His interest was more in bodies than in woven wool. The more I thought about it, the more I believed that I was correct in my guess. So the man was murdered, possibly in a different part of the great hall, perhaps by the cooling ashes on the hearth – fire would destroy any traces of blood. And then the body was hidden behind the arras when it had ceased to bleed. There would have been plenty of time. No one was disturbing us here; it would have been the same the night before. Once the Shrove Tuesday pageant was cleared away, once the banquet and the dancing had finished and all had gone to their beds, there could have been a secret meeting here in the great hall. Blackmailer could have confronted victim. It made sense that both would have stood by the fire. The hall cooled down rapidly when emptied of people for an hour or so. The blackmailer made an exorbitant demand. The victim pulled out a slim, sharp knife and plunged it into his heart.

  And then when the blood had been cleaned – some soot and kindling rubbed into marks and then burned – another plan occurred to the killer – and here I was uncertain. James had said that he had lost an arrow one day firing at a duck that flew over the moat. Could it have been picked up with the intention of restoring it, placed in a pouch? It seemed strange that it had not been restored. But if it had been forgotten, then it could have been remembered suddenly when a dead man was lying in front of the killer.

  But why try to implicate James in the murder?

  Unless, of course, the murderer was driven to his first crime by fear, by blackmail, and the second, the conviction of an innocent young man, the death perhaps by hanging, drawing and quartering, by jealousy. If James were to be convicted of the murder of Master Pace in the presence of the king, then he would be sentenced to that terrible death. And it would mean that he could never marry Sir Thomas Boleyn’s daughter.

  And so there would be no obstacle in the way of another young man, already deeply in love with the charming Lady Anne.

  8

  I waited outside the chapel after Mass next morning in the hope of meeting Ramirez again. The queen, of course, was the first to leave. She swept down the steps on her way back to her rooms, but stopped to smile graciously at me and to invite me to come to see her in an hour’s time, after she had broken her fast. I scanned the troop of household officers and ladies-in-waiting who followed her. The younger ones, perhaps less used to the queen’s piety, looked cold and sleepy. Anne Boleyn yawned widely as she passed me and her sister pinched her arm admonishingly. Mary Boleyn, according to the cardinal, had been in the service of Queen Katherine since 1519 and would know all the queen’s regulations and preferences. Her younger sister, though, did not accept the reproof meekly, but angrily threw off the admonishing hand and muttered something. I saw the queen look around and frown, but Anne seemed to take no notice. She just tossed her head, turned around to whisper in Bessie Blount’s ear and gave me a co
ntemptuous glance from her bold bright eyes. There was no sign of my new friend Dr Ramirez. Like myself he had probably slept in after the late night on the previous evening.

  ‘The cardinal busy this morning?’ I asked George when the procession had gone on its stately way.

  ‘Gone,’ said George with a sigh. ‘Poor man. A message came for him early this morning. He has to attend the king at Richmond. He was in his barge by dawn.’

  I had a momentary alarm, but then thought it over. It was unlikely that news about James would cause the king to send for Cardinal Wolsey so early in the morning. The death of the instructor of the wards would be of very small consequence to the King of England.

  ‘France!’ said George, his kind face reading my anxiety. ‘Toujours La France! It’s always an anxiety. His Grace, our cardinal, is always at the treaty table.’

  ‘Of course.’ I nodded.

  All the ladies of the court looked more cheerful and warmer when I arrived punctually in the queen’s rooms. Like myself, they would have had some bread and wine and warmed their chilly toes by the fire in their bedroom. Dinner would be in less than an hour and then the afternoon would be filled with amusements for them. They made a pretty picture, sitting gracefully on large cushions or on stools, the gold threads on their gowns glinting in the candlelight, while they stitched industriously at small pieces of embroidery, holding the cloth stretched over a small circular frame and keeping their eyes down. Even the queen herself stitched an intricate design on to the cuff of a man’s shirt with black thread.

  ‘Your Grace!’ I bowed deeply. She had a small brown monkey wearing a harness, sitting on the floor beside her, tied to her chair. She saw me looking at it, bent down and then stroked its little head and it looked up at her with large astonished eyes. I wondered if it was a baby substitute for her and felt very sorry. The cardinal had told me about the death of her children and I remembered hearing, when I was a young lawyer, the Earl of Donegal, straight from London, telling a story about a six-week-old son who had suddenly and unexpectedly died. I didn’t like the monkey much, with its almost human-like face, and wondered why she did not have a dog instead. Still, I had to say something. It was expected of courtiers, and I needed the queen’s approval.