Knaves Templar

by Leonard Tourney

  Praise for Leonard Tourney’s Elizabethan Mysteries

  “Vividly evocative of the era and marvelously readable.”

  People

  “Mr. Tourney seems to have a good understanding of his scenery, and his dialogue has a nice unmannered period feel. He gives us just enough of a sixteenth-century culture to establish the appropriate tone.”

  The New Yorker

  “Tourney is a superb writer, skilled in the richness of the Elizabethan use of language.”

  Tulsa World

  “Superior period mystery—with rich, gritty atmosphere, piquant characterization, and solidly layered plotting.”

  The Kirkus Reviews

  Also by Leonard Tourney

  Published by Ballantine Books:

  OLD SAXON BLOOD

  THE BARTHOLOMEW FAIR MURDERS

  FAMILIAR SPIRITS

  LOW TREASON

  THE PLAYERS’ BOY IS DEAD

  KNAVES TEMPLAR

  Leonard Tourney

  BALLANTINE BOOKS • NEW YORK

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Sale of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book is coverless, it may have been reported to the publisher as ‘ ‘unsold or destroyed’ ’ and neither the author nor the publisher may have received payment for it.

  Copyright © 1991 by Leonard Tourney

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States of America by Bailantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 90-49297

  ISBN 0-345-37335-9

  This edition published by arrangement with St. Martin’s Press, Inc. Manufactured in the United States of America First Bailantine Books Edition* February 1992

  Prologue

  THE old curate dreamed, and in his dream he saw himself laid out in his winding sheet. His visage was stark and marmoreal; his pale white hands reposed prayerfully on his chest, and beside them lay the little silver crucifix and chain his mother had given him when he had been ordained thirty-four years before. From somewhere above, the solemn strokes of the passing bell floated down; the pious murmur of last rites whispered like the sea at a distance. Yet he did not smell the brine of the sea, but the sickly sweetness of putrescent flesh.

  The dream struck terror to his soul and wrenched him from sleep. For a long while he lay in a cold, quicksilver sweat, too struck by the vision to pray, wondering what it had meant, the terrible dream, and fearful of sleeping again lest the vision proceed from mere death to something more awful—judgment, hellfire, eternal torment. Then from far off he heard the complaint of the aggrieved milk cow and the two cantankerous geese, though the weathered shed that housed the beasts stood beyond the stream and the church itself.

  “Cursed fox,” he said aloud, yet half-glad for the distraction. Or worse, a thief. Either way, the curate was not to be deprived of what was his by a lesser creature. He struggled to free himself from his bedclothes, groped in the darkness for his boots, and hastily dressed. He struck a match to his lantern, and all the while the geese honked. He expected a scene of feathery carnage to meet his eyes when he came to the shed. He had dreamed of death. Would he not find it waking?

  An oak cudgel was in his hand before he emerged into the night. The moon was full and looming, and over the churchyard a thin layer of new snow shrouded crypt, monument, and cross, while beyond the iron pickets marking consecrated ground he could see the dark mass of the church where he preached and administered the blessed sacrament on sabbaths.

  He moved quickly for his years. A thirst for vengeance upon fox, wolf, or whatever other lawless scavenger had violated the stillness of the night and threatened to make a meal of what was his, thickened his blood and hardened his spirit. The geese were still fussing when he pushed open the door of the shed and held the lantern high in one hand and the cudgel in the other, demanding to know who or what was there before there was anything to see. His heart raced. His eyes shifted to every comer of the shed, which smelled of hay and ordure and animal fear.

  His appearance silenced the animals, who knew his scent and had no fear of cudgels. Then, between the cow and the geese, their long necks turned toward him inquiringly, he saw the intruder.

  It was no beast. It was a woman. He almost laughed with relief.

  She lay upon her back fork-legged in the foul, matted straw. Between her bare thighs lay a bloody infant, still and curled as though yet in the mother’s womb. He could see the foulness of the straw, blood, womb blood. He could smell it with the other smells. The cord still linked mother and child, but the child was still. The curate knew that it was dead.

  Seeing no danger to himself, he cast the cudgel aside and approached. Yet there was something awful about the vulnerable female form, the dead babe, and the solitude of the untoward birthplace, and perhaps because of those things or because his dream had been fulfilled in part, he approached uneasily, as though there remained more to fear than met the eye.

  He raised the lantern for a better look at his uninvited guest and recognized the woman, although he had not thought to find her in so humble a place or so wretched a condition.

  “You’ve fallen very low, madam,” he said with a mixture of respect for her station and disapproval of her history. ‘‘No marvel your child was bom dead.”

  “He would have lived, had his birthing been otherwise,” said the woman. Her voice was low and husky, the enunciation perfect. As he might have expected in a woman of her breeding. “He was a man-child. He would have lived to avenge his father.”

  The curate wagged his head with disapproval and set the lantern down on fire straw. “He who violates God’s holy ordinances shall by God be destroyed.”

  “Foolish old man,” the woman said. “Were such the case, who would be alive? All have sinned. This poor child did no wrong. Nor was the bill of particulars laid at my feet. As for my husband, even he was innocent, a victim of corrupt lawyers and judges.”

  The curate started to remind her that her husband had been condemned by a jury—honest men and true, whom the curate knew by their first names. Then, recalling his higher duty, he began to pray over the dead infant, for he supposed the child to be innocent enough, save of Adam’s curse.

  “Spare me your prayers, you whited sepulcher.”

  The accusing voice interrupted his thoughts and stung worse than the cold. He opened his eyes and looked at her directly. Even in her present circumstance, it was a striking face, as fair as any in Norwich or its environs, with arched brows and high forehead and, beneath the straight nose that was her father’s endowment, the full, sensuous lips that would have tempted a courtier to an eternity of kissing.

  Her beauty moved him.

  “Let me help you up,” he said.

  “Don’t trouble you
rself. I’ll lie where I am.”

  “Will you? To what end—to come to your grave like this miserable child? Live and repent.”

  “Of what? Loyalty to a husband?”

  “He wasn’t your husband—at least not in the eyes of the law or the Church.”

  “I’ll not quibble with you,” she said in a stronger voice. “You’ve taken my husband and my child, you lawyers and priests. May God’s curse be on you all, vipers and hypocrites.”

  After the curse, she turned her face away from him.

  “At least let me bury your child,” he said softly.

  “In the churchyard? With his grandfather and greatgrandfather and great-great-grandfather from time out of mind?”

  “You know that’s impossible.”

  “Is it?”

  “You know it is. Look, I’ll make a grave for him outside the pickets. I know a place.”

  “I’ll wager you do,” she said. “Where the bastards of the town’s high and mighty are hidden so as not to sully the reputations of their fathers.”

  “It’s a peaceful place, beneath a hawthorn,” he said. “Without monument or epitaph—”

  “The law’s explicit on the matter,” he said.

  “Damn the law,” she said. “Don’t you touch my son,” Then she said, more gently, “If you have any mercy in you, let me and my child stay the night here. My son’s dead, as you can plainly see. No earthly care can trouble him now. As for me, it’s warm enough in the straw. See how the cow has setded herself—and the clamorous geese. Your coming has calmed them, for which I thank you. I pray you let me stay.”

  “But what of the child?”

  “I’ll bury him myself.”

  He thought to ask where, but he did not. He wished he had not heard the alarm of cow and goose. Had not come foolhardy to the shed. Not seen mother and child. He wished for bed and sleep. In the light of the lantern she was looking at him strangely, and somehow her calmer manner filled him with more dread than her blasphemies had done.

  “Where will you go now?”

  “Where no one knows my name—or my history.”

  “Then you must travel far.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you able?”

  “I am. Thank you.”

  He saw her lips part in a half smile, but there was no friendliness in it, no womanly yielding to man or necessity, only a knowledge of something beyond his own knowledge, and that unnerved him too. She hadn’t moved all the while they had talked. She remained in the position she had been in when giving birth, too exhausted to move, he supposed, and now too defiant. Then she said: “There’s yet another thing you might do for me, if you will.”

  He was almost afraid to ask what it was she wanted now.

  ‘‘I want you to witness. ”

  ‘‘Witness—what? ’ ’

  “An oath.”

  “What manner of oath?”

  “Why, an oath to God, sir priest.”

  “Well and good if the oath be godly and faithfully observed.”

  “It will be both, I assure you.”

  “Then speak it.”

  She seemed to draw a long breath before speaking, thinking the oath through, he thought, searching for the particular words. The silence was heavy in the shed, a heavy weight upon him. He was almost relieved when she spoke. “I swear—”

  “Yes?”

  “Before Almighty God ... to avenge my husband’s murder and my child’s. And may I be the instrument thereof. So help me God.”

  The curate shuddered at her words. “You sin in making such an oath,” he said sternly.

  “Then I sin,” she said. Her eyes narrowed and she waved her hand a little, as in a gesture of dismissal—as though she were still a daughter of the gentry and not a fallen woman whose husband had been hanged dead that morning with half of Norwich looking on, the curate among them.

  Despite his detestation of her wicked oath and sins, the curate was tempted to leave her with a blessing. His impulse was not so much a sudden rush of charity as it was a desire to placate, for he feared the half-naked woman in the shed, the woman who had no regard for him or for his God.

  The curate returned to his cottage and his bed but not to sleep. Visions of the defiant woman and her stillborn child haunted him and he tossed restlessly, nor did all his prayers bring relief. At dawn he rose and went out to see how she had passed the night. Opening the door of the shed, he almost expected to see her still there, her legs spread, the dead child nesting in between them, the woman’s eyes burning like coals with her hatred.

  But she was gone. Only the bloody straw remained as a testament to her presence, or to the vengeful oath she had sworn.

  A week later he found where she had buried the little body. Beside a noble monument memorializing the remains of one of Norwich’s most respected families, the earth had been disturbed. The curate wondered at the determination that could have driven the woman to claw frozen earth to make the shallow grave—love, hatred, madness? But he did not disturb the grave. He remembered the woman’s oath and did not want her vengeance to fall upon his own head.

  One

  ALMOST five years to the month after the woman gave birth in the curate’s cow shed, a young man stood a lone vigil on the banks of the Thames, many miles to the south. His name was Edward Litchfield, and as he looked down into the dark, swirling water, he contemplated not the river, but the depths of his own foolishness. For he had been outrageously cozened—cheated, gulled, fleeced. Choose what word you will, it all came to the same mortifying end. And for that reason, the cold and the dark and the terrible solitude of the riverbank all seemed a fitting punishment for his folly.

  He had come to the appointed place as agreed. The Temple Stairs, half past ten of the clock, unarmed, alone—and most particularly the latter. And not by agreement but neglect, without so much as a torch or lantern. And upon what security? The word of a seeming friend, well motivated to turn traitor? The promise of a return of a tithe of what he had lost? Pulling his cloak tightly around him, he remembered it was his birthday. Self-pity momentarily replaced his anger. Regret stung more than the wind. His seventeenth year, it was—by virtue of which he was the youngest of the apprentice lawyers of the honorable and ancient Society of the Middle Temple, chief of England’s Inns of Court.

  He knew his present mission would confer no credit on that ancient institution, nor upon his doting father in Suffolk, who having studied law in the same Society in the first decade of Elizabeth’s reign, had spared no expense that the son of his old age should follow in his footsteps. A modest, churchly youth in Suffolk, Litchfield had turned prodigal in London. He had become a haunter of taverns and cockfights, bearbaitings and theaters. He had spent more time reading lascivious verses than the grave treatises of Perkins or Plow-den, more hours rutting in the stews of Bankside and Southwark than listening to dull lectures upon the grating machinery of the law, which, as one wit had said, was wont to gnaw upon its victims mightily before gobbling them up.

  All this he had done and more, in part from natural depravity, in part from a desire to keep pace with his comrades.

  But now, blasted by an ill wind and worse experience, he was ready to repent. He had concluded that the law was not for him, nor the life of a wastrel. Like the Prodigal of the Scriptures, he had fed too long at the trough of swinishness. Now he was ready to eat humble pie at his father’s beneficent table.

  But repentance would not come easy. The worst would be his father’s insistence that the trick had been as transparent as its depravity. Why had he not seen it?

  Standing by the river, Litchfield thought resentfully of his chamberfellow, Peregrinus Monk. It had been Monk who seduced him to the mischief in the first place. Yes, it had been Monk’s fault entirely. And it had been Monk whom Litchfield had asked for his money back.

  He had suggested to Monk that he might whisper in the ears of certain persons of the Temple just what was going on behind their learned backs, in chambers
and passageways and Hall while the law was being piously intoned. Knights Templar indeed! Was no tKnaves Templar a fitter name for such a crew?

  He remembered how earnestly Monk had begged him to keep their little secret. “Keep faith with us, ” Monk had said. “You’ve sworn an oath.”

  “An oath? A thing writ upon water,” Litchfield had answered. “What I have given freely, I may take again with equal freedom.”

  Litchfield remembered his words, repeating them to himself as he stared into the river’s turbulence.

  It was upon the heels of that thought that he became aware he was no longer alone on the Stairs. His friend appeared at last. Monk, as heavily muffled as Litchfield, raised his arm in greeting and flung a curse into the watery chaos before them.

  Litchfield came at once to the matter. ‘ ‘You’ve brought my money, then? As you promised?”

  “In good time, Edward,” Monk said through the woolen scarf he had wound around his neck so that only his eyes and forehead could be seen. “First a little something ... to strengthen the bargain.”

  “I am already strengthened.”

  “So I see,” Monk answered, drawing a bottle from inside his cloak and handing it to Litchfield. “But no fort can be too strong. Ask any engineer. Here, take it. ’Twill do you good.”

  Litchfield decided there was no harm in taking another drink. He had had many already that night. He took the proffered bottle and pressed it to his lips. A great draft he took; the liquor burned his gullet as it dribbled down. He swallowed hard and coughed. Wiping his mouth on his sleeve, he said: “My money, Peregrinus. No less than you promised.”

  Monk reached into his cloak and pulled out a leather puree. He dangled it before the younger man. “Last chance to change your mind. But say the word and you’re still with us.”

  “My mind’s made up, curse you,” Litchfield replied.

  He heard his own speech slur and thought it was the numbing cold. He reached out for the purse, but Monk pulled it away just as his fingers were about to close around it.