Knaves Templar

by Leonard Tourney

  Four

  THOMAS insisted on walking Matthew to his rooms, then that they stop on the way to view the Great Hall.

  Matthew agreed it was an impressive structure. Its lines were austere and vaguely ecclesiastical, with high-pitched timber roof, tower, buttresses. The entrance was imposing. The whole obviously built at enormous cost—and, of course, far more costly to build now than then. Thomas said: “Edmund Plowden, a distinguished son of our House, supervised its construction. Plowden was Treasurer in those days. A good thirty years ago. After the Church of the Knights, the Great Hall is our most famous monument.”

  As Thomas steered him in, a spacious and stately chamber met Matthew’s eye. It was a good forty feet in breadth, somewhat more in height, and twice forty feet in length. It was lighted by six clerestory windows on each side and one at either end, and above was an open hammer beam ceiling of intricate workmanship. At the far end of the Hall was a richly carved screen, a dais, and upon it a long table running crosswise. The lumber for it, Thomas presently explained, had been grown in Windsor Forest, a gift of the Queen.

  Lengthwise against the walls were more long tables, leaving the center of the huge chamber open, except for a fireplace there, the smoke of which escaped from a lantern in the roof. Upon the floor, rushes had been thickly laid, and above the wainscoting on the walls were somber portraits, heraldic memorials, clumps of holly hung for the season.

  Thomas rattled off dates, names—distinguished members of the House, or their guests, sharers of feasts and theatricals. Matthew grew impatient. The names meant little to him, the dates less. He was not impressed. For all its grandeur, the cavernous Hall was uninviting. It was not his England he viewed—his England of towns with single streets, village greens, neighbors one knew by name. He was impatient to begin his work, to have it done. He had not stayed in London to see the sights.

  The two men left the Hall and crossed a quadrangle to come to another building. It was very long, with ivy-covered walls and arched doorways and windows. “The bulk of our Society have chambers here,” Thomas said.

  Gowned students came and went. To Matthew they all seemed very young, many mere boys with cheeks and complexions made ruddy by raw winds and cold. The students talked and laughed and jostled each other, and Matthew concluded that the deaths of their fellows had made little impact on them.

  The chambers that had been those of the dead young men and were now to be Matthew’s consisted of a sitting room or study and a bedchamber, each with its own fireplace, but very meagerly furnished. Apologetically, Thomas explained that the members of the Inn were responsible for furnishing their own lodgings, and that although some of the Templars lived quite sumptuously, the greater number lived simply, sometimes without servants to attend them.

  Matthew looked around the rooms and felt alienated by them. You don’t belong here, they said. And in his heart he knew they were right. Cold rooms they were, despite the fire that had been laid and was burning; rooms empty even of the spirits of the dead. He shuddered. His attention was drawn to the open beams on the ceiling. He turned to Thomas.

  Thomas said solemnly, “Monk used his bed sheet, which he shredded into strips. He fashioned a sort of rope and then hanged himself with it.”

  “Who found the body?”

  “His servant. A man named Griffin.”

  “Is he about?”

  “Monk’s father took him home with him.”

  “And the words on the wall?”

  Thomas pointed to the wall opposite the windows. There was nothing written there now. The wall had been scrubbed. Matthew remembered the words, Sorrow beyond enduring, Monk had written. But what species of grief had they expressed—an unbearable loss, or guilt at having murdered and maligned a friend?

  Matthew walked over to the window and looked out. The Treasurer had been right. The window provided a good view of the garden. In the distance he could see the Thames and the Temple Stairs. Had Monk looked out and remembered what he had done and been overcome? Maybe he had thought about Litchfield as he kicked the stool from beneath his feet and swung there, his feet dangling inches above the floor. Or maybe Monk had been hoisted up against his will. That was possible too.

  Someone knocked, and Thomas went to answer.

  Matthew was surprised to see it was Keable, the same young man Master Hutton had been disciplining earlier. With him was another student.

  Thomas was quick with introductions. “Gentlemen, may I present Master Matthew Stock of Chelmsford, a worthy gentleman clothier of that town whose son is considering joining our fellowship. And these, Master Stock, are Masters Keable and Wilson.”

  Matthew shook each of his visitors’ hands and studied their faces. The one called Wilson looked to be about twenty. He was very tall and angular, with wispy red hair sticking out beneath his Templar cap, and his chin and nose disfigured with a crop of pimples. He had large ears that stood outright from his head, and the guileless countenance of a curate. His companion, Keable, was indeed endowed with extraordinary personal beauty. His clear blue eyes were striking, his jaw marvelously sculptured; his skin was taut and bronzed. He was of middle height but broad-shouldered, and he carried himself with the easy confidence of one who knows that he is admired by all who see him. The only detriment to his appearance, as far as Matthew could tell, was his expression, which was somewhat proud and disdainful even when he was speaking pleasantly, as now.

  “We heard voices within,” Wilson said, “and came to have a look.”

  “We thought we might have a new neighbor and we wished to make his acquaintance,” Keable added.

  “We didn’t suppose the chamber would be tenanted so soon, given what happened,” Wilson said. He looked from Matthew to his companion, Keable, and then back again.

  “Master Cooke has told me what happened here,” Matthew said, sensing Wilson’s discomfort and suspecting it was superstitious dread that had brought Wilson hither rather than a desire to be hospitable to a newcomer. “Suicide is an awful thing—both for him who commits it and the family who must live with the disgrace of it. Yet I fear no ghosts and will rest easy in the bed yonder.”

  Wilson gave a little laugh, and his ruddy cheeks flushed. “If you can endure the tumult about you, sir. I pray you find these lodgings ... to your liking—and to your son’s as well. ”

  “Master Stock’s son is a quiet, retiring young man,” Thomas said, glancing sideways at Matthew. “Master Stock is unsure of his son’s capacity to endure the rigors of study.”

  Keable made a droll face, and Wilson laughed outright.

  Keable said: “Well, sir, there are in truth rigors to be endured, and such we face at this moment with all the House preparing for the Christmas revels. I doubt any of us will crack a book until Twelfth Night’s past. Between now and then we rehearse our parts.”

  ‘‘These gentlemen are preparing an interlude—a masque, ’’ Thomas explained. “Marry, these masculine forms you see before you will upon the enactment thereof play women’s parts—”

  “Not I,” Keable protested. “I’m a satyr.”

  ‘‘I beg your pardon, Master Keable,” replied Thomas good-humoredly. “But you, Wilson, are a woman, are you not?”

  Wilson flushed again, and admitted that he was. “A besieged virgin,” he said, “afloat in farthingale and decked with rouged cheeks and fine periwigs to excite the lust of their fellow students.”

  “Whose lusts are quite excited enough already,” Keable interjected, and they all laughed. “Will you join us for dinner, Master Stock?”

  “Yes, Master Stock,” said Wilson. “Pray don’t prove a reluctant guest.”

  Matthew had wanted to ask Thomas more questions about Monk and Litchfield, but he knew there was no way to avoid so pressing an invitation. Besides, he thought he might learn something about the murders, and despite his generous breakfast earlier, he was hungry again.

  Theophilus Phipps stuck his head into the Treasurer’s door and blinked, owl-like. “Wit
h your permission, sir, I’ll go to dinner.”

  “Go to dinner, Phipps,” Hutton said, looking up from a book to see that it was his clerk who had spoken and then turning his eyes down to the page again. “Oh, Phipps, one moment.”

  “Sir?”

  “You will make sure that Matthew Stock has all he requires while he resides with us?”

  “Why, he shall be treated in princely fashion,” Phipps said. “A medium-hard bed and file excellent fellowship of us Templars.”

  “He may make inquiries—about the House. If so, he should be answered readily and truthfully. ”

  “Sir?”

  “I mean, Phipps, if he asks to see the Minutes, let him.”

  “The Minutes, Master Hutton?” said Phipps. “Well, he’s a most doting and officious parent indeed to commit to such dull reading, for all there is names, dates, and sums. Most fathers are content if their offspring have no lice or whores in chamber.”

  “Just do what I say, Phipps,” Hutton answered dryly.

  “So I shall, sir.”

  “Get you to dinner, Phipps.”

  “I’m already gone, sir.”

  The Treasurer didn’t care about dinner, although he was, under normal circumstances, a robust feeder, as his generous girth attested. The Chelmsford constable’s visit had upset him—both its purpose and the man himself.

  Hutton set his eyes again to his book. It was a work he had been trying to finish for months, a learned treatise on the Roman law. But as his eyes swept the page, its author’s Latin seemed an unintelligible tongue. Hutton knew his vision was deteriorating, the result of years of reading by dim candlelight. But that did not explain his present difficulty. The truth was that he could not focus his mind. The murders preoccupied him.

  In the face of Stock’s impudent questions, he had tried to . assume an air of control and imperturbability. He had tried to mask his alarm—and his humiliation. For it grieved him that he, a man of learning and authority, who called every Privy Councillor by his first name and dined with the Queen once a quarter, should be required to submit his great problem to a mere country constable.

  Robert Cecil’s recommendation of Stock, however, had brooked no denial. It was not that Hutton had been ordered to engage Stock’s help; it was that he simply had no reasonable grounds other than his own vanity for refusing it. And Hutton knew that Cecil—a man of great power whom Hutton was honored to call a friend—would be insulted if every courtesy was not extended to his special agent.

  Yet if Hutton was to have official help, why could it not have been someone of his own choosing? Hutton would have preferred a man of breeding. In sum, another lawyer, distinguished in his profession and subtle in language and manner. Perhaps a former student of the Temple. Yes, that was it! A man who knew the Temple’s ancient customs and traditions

  and honored them and would revere the reputation of the House even as he revered his own personal honor. Someone who understood the value of discretion—

  The Treasurer shuddered as he thought of the word spreading through London. Murders in the Middle Temple! Already he imagined the veiled glee with which the other Inns would receive the news. The hypocritical professions of horror, the self-righteous congratulation that they themselves were free from such a plague.

  A plague that, if brought to light, would reflect badly on himself, who was not without ambition for higher honor in the realm.

  His book lay open on his lap as he stared out of the window recalling every word of his recent interview with Stock. Had he not been informative, courteous, amiable—all to a fault? Had he given the country constable cause to complain to Cecil that he had been unused? He had not.

  Of course, some of Stock’s questions had been impertinent. That business of Giles’s debts. Was Stock trying to prove his mettle by implying Hutton’s negligence in accepting rumor as fact? But what nonsense! What was so unreasonable about assuming that Giles had debts? Didn’t practically everyone in London?

  He turned his eyes to the page and forced his willful brain to engage the words there. He read a few lines but understood nothing and felt a queer prickly sensation in his legs. The fire on the hearth cracked and smoked, but still Hutton felt a chill. He thought of the dead men—cold now in their graves. He thought of Giles, whom he had known and even liked a little. And he grew even colder and his legs pricklier.

  About five o’clock, Hutton having retired to his privy lodgings, Theophilus Phipps, driven by long-restrained curiosity, put down his pen and, finding himself alone and not likely to be disturbed, slipped into the Treasurer’s office, leaving the door slightly ajar so that he could hear if anyone entered his outer office. Quietly and efficiently he sifted through the clutter on the Treasurer’s desk, contemptuous of the disorder there. It was not long before he found what he

  sought. He had taken note of the seal of the letter when it had arrived several days before, and having remembered it, now thought it not unlikely to have something to do with the unusual privileges that were to be accorded to a mere nobody from Chelmsford.

  He opened the heavy parchment that had been folded so carefully, enjoying as he did the richness of its texture, the fine scent of perfume in the glob of wax that had ensured its privacy.

  Phipps’s eyes moved quickly past the predictably fulsome honorifics of the introduction to come to the letter’s burden: I have been asked by Master Thomas Cooke to write you of Matthew Stock of Chelmsford who in divers times past has done service good and valuable in my name and may be depended on to do the like in any inquiry into the late and most lamentable murders in your Society.

  The letter was signed by Sir Robert Cecil himself.

  Phipps’s hand shook a little as he read the name, and his heart beat at an accelerated rate. He reread the line late and most lamentable murders, and the phrase stuck in his craw.

  He refolded the letter and put it where he had found it, removing all signs of his tampering. He went at once to his own lodgings, and bolting the door behind him, he fed the cat he kept some scraps he had in his pocket, laid a fire, and then sat before it in a kind of trance. The cat came and curled up in his lap and went to sleep, but Phipps didn’t move. Not for a long time. Then suddenly he roused himself, shifted the cat onto the floor, and went to change from his scholar’s gown into a new satin doublet with ruff collar. He perfumed himself and then selected from his wardrobe an expensive hat a courtier might have envied, fur-lined and high-crowned with a brave feather. He looked at himself in a looking glass.

  His nose was a little too straight and assertive for his tastes, and his lips wanted that voluptuous fullness he so much admired in certain of his friends, but it was not at all a bad face, especially his pallor, which Phipps found very becoming and infinitely superior to sunburned complexions.

  Well pleased with his appearance, he donned his best cloak and set forth. A lesser man might have cringed before the prospect of an official investigation of the Templar suicides. Investigations, after all, often went awry. The wrong man was sometimes accused. Then, too, investigations often disclosed a good bit of dirt simply by accident.

  But Theophilus Phipps was undaunted. A plague upon the Chelmsford constable, he thought, and the ponderous tub-of-guts Treasurer, and even the great Cecil himself, whom many scorned as the Queen’s little pygmy.

  Five

  DINNER in the Great Hall was a disappointment to Matthew. The food was Lenten fare, belying all he had told Joan about Templar feasting. He sat, forsaken and miserable, with Wilson and Keable while they wrangled over some abstruse legal question. Even before die two men were finished eating, Matthew excused himself. He had to return to his host’s house in the City to gather his things.

  Joan laughed when she heard about Matthew’s ‘ ‘son. ” But then she looked at him shrewdly and said: “I’faith, husband. I wist not you had a son. By some other wife, I warrant, since I recall no male child of my body.”

  “An offspring of expedience, not nature,” he said. “No
daughters are admitted to study, as reason dictates they should not be. The law is most unwomanly work.”

  “Were it more womanly, I trow, then it would be less work,” Joan said pertly. “And pray do not rest your cause on reason. Saycustom, rather, for I know not why a woman should not be as litigious and full of subtle shifts as any man, if she but put her mind to it. ”

  Matthew laughed and kissed her on the cheek. “Well spoken, Joan. You are a most resolute defender of your sex. I’ll

  give you this, if during my stay in the Temple I find one brain as nimble as yours, I’ll dress myself in woman’s garb and parade before the Inn’s gates with a placard proclaiming woman’s right to study law. Yes, and practice it too.”

  She said she’d hold him to his promise. Then she asked: “But how long will this business keep you? I’ll sorely miss you as my bedfellow. Will not you be cold of nights and long for my hugs and kisses?”

  “Ah, as sailors long for land when they’re three years at sea.”

  “Good Lord, I hope you do not intend to stay that long!”

  “Not so long. And I will miss your hugs and kisses.”

  “And my earnest admonitions that you bundle up when you go abroad in this foul season?”

  “Yes, oh yes.”

  “And my sound counsel when you stand doubtful of your course?”

  “As much as hugs and kisses.”

  “Liar,” she protested, casting upon him a cynical eye.