Knaves Templar

by Leonard Tourney

  Would fear move him, then? Phipps could give warning. He could tell Braithwaite about Stock. He could point out, with cogent reasons, that Braithwaite’s place on the list of dead men was ominous and that no proffered alliance should be scorned by him under so strange and perilous a circumstance.

  Phipps was resolved. He was not sure the strategy would work, but he had no better in his quiver. He looked around him. Donne still held the audience enraptured. Phipps re-

  alized that there was no time like the present for his interview with Braithwaite. If the man still slept, Phipps would awaken him. If Braithwaite told him to go to Hell, Phipps would wish him the same fate and so give over the enterprise.

  Phipps slipped out of the Hall.

  Matthew had seen Phipps enter the Hall and now observed him leaving. Phipps’s departure struck him as curious, for no other of the lawyers made a move to adjourn while Donne still orated. So what was Phipps’s purpose—a suddenly remembered appointment, a sudden indisposition or need for sleep?

  TTien Matthew remembered poor Braithwaite. Alone in chambers while his callow bedfellow sat squeezed in amid the present company hanging on Donne’s every word. More than eager to follow Phipps, Matthew waited anxiously for Donne to conclude.

  And then he did conclude, and as the applause died away and the Treasurer arose to introduce the next entertainment of the evening (if it was another lecture, Matthew wanted no part of it), Matthew made a hurried exit, maneuvering around tables, stools, and their occupants with the desperate expression of one who has overeaten and must find a closestool or lose his supper in some gentleman’s lap.

  Phipps knocked discreetly, as good manners required, seeing he was alone in the passage and all dark and quiet within the chambers about him. He tried the door and found it unbarred. Pleased, he entered.

  The fire on the hearth gave sufficient light to show him his path, that and familiarity with the chamber itself. He said: “Braithwaite? It is I, Theophilus Phipps.”

  The sound of his own voice in all the silence made him suddenly wary. He approached the bed and found Braithwaite still sleeping—or at least he seemed so, for he made no motion and his eyes were closed, but the bolster upon which his head had rested when he was last seen by Phipps now was at the foot of the bed.

  “Wake up, Braithwaite,” Phipps whispered, and he touched Braithwaite’s hand.

  It was warm, the hand, but Braithwaite was so still, and even by the distant firelight, the face was waxy and somehow fixed in expression. Phipps bent over the body to listen for the beating heart or feel the expulsion of breath that might signify life. But there was neither, and Phipps knew that Braithwaite was dead.

  Freshly dead, for the hand was still warm to the touch. Perhaps within minutes or seconds. He looked down to the misplaced bolster; the bedclothes too were in disarray, as though there had been a struggle for breath. Surely a wound might kill, but in such a fashion?

  The bolster, round and filled with goose feathers—a happy tool of the smotherer.

  The idea settled into his mind and then clutched at his heart in a dreadful realization. He began to back away from the bed, trembling all over, drenched with sweat and perceiving by some sixth sense yet another and hostile presence in the chamber but fearful of confirming it by a search. He felt blindly for the door and stepped into the passage, indifferent to discretion, and hurried to the stair head, descending with a clatter. In good time, he saw the glow of a brace of candles coming up, recognized the form and face of Matthew Stock, and concealed himself in the shadows while Cecil’s spy passed.

  At the stair head Matthew paused to catch his breath and recall which chamber was Braithwaite’s. He had fixed his eyes on the proper door when he saw it open and someone come out. The figure advanced upon him quickly and was too cloaked and muffled to be identified.

  The personage was abreast of Matthew in the narrow passage before he could inquire who he was and what business had taken him to Braithwaite’s room, and in the next second Matthew felt a sudden jab in his thigh, an excruciating penetration.

  He let out a sharp cry, forsaking his hold on the candles to grasp the place of such searing pain. Horrified at the feel of warm blood through the cloth, he felt suddenly sick and sank to the floor in a faint before his ears lost the patter of his assailant’s escape.

  Twelve

  JOAN worried about Nan Warren, as though Nan were her own child and not a total stranger she had known less than a week. Nan had gone back to the Gull, to that nest of swillers and whore-humpers, to fetch what little was hers there. Never to darken its door again, according to her solemn vow. But Joan wondered if Nan would keep her promise. More, would Hodge and the old bawd Mother Franklin suffer it—the loss of their juiciest wench to a clean and godly life?

  On Nan’s behalf, Joan had inquired about employment in the Cooke household.

  “We don’t need another maid, ” Frances Cooke replied apologetically after Joan had sung Nan’s praises as a courageous and loyal woman, beyond worthiness of the place.

  "Yet this Nan seems a treasure if half of what you say is true. Good servants are jewels. I could say something to Priscilla Holmes. She and her husband have taken a new house on the Strand. They’ll require an army of servants. Perhaps this Nan of yours could find a place there. Shall I speak to Priscilla? ”

  Joan urged her to do so. Priscilla Holmes was Frances’s best friend. She, also, was a former Royal Maid. Yes, that would do nicely. Nan was too refined for lesser employment, despite the unsavory past Joan had pledged to conceal.

  Later, in her bedchamber, Joan was overcome by a terrible loneliness. She looked at the bed she had shared with Matthew and thought about him where he now was, no more than two or three miles off but a thousand miles away for her purposes, and then she fell deeper into despondency with a presentiment of danger as well.

  It sickened her, and she stumbled toward the bed and slumped. For a moment she fell into a kind of trance in which her surroundings dissolved into a clammy darkness. She felt something with her in the chamber, a menacing presence. It had neither form nor name but was like a gaping hole, through which sutged a malign despair.

  The despair engulfed her. Blindly she thrust her hands out before her face to ward off the terrible influence. Then, in the next instant, before she could think or pray, the feeling passed.

  It was a while before she was herself again. She sat there on the edge of the bed gasping for breath as though she had run a long distance or been submerged in water. Her heart beat rapidly and the clothing next to her body was damp with sweat. She did not know what the trance had meant, but she did know what it was, for she had had such experiences all her life. She called them glimmerings, and they came unsummoned in the way some others she had known felt a chill in the bone or a tingle at the neck to warn of impending danger.

  But now danger to whom? To herself? Tb Matthew? To Frances and her young husband? Perhaps to Nan Warren?

  Joan was still pondering this question when she heard footsteps outside her door and then a frantic knocking and Frances calling her name. She rushed to open the door and found Frances standing there with a worried look on her face.

  “Something has happened to Matthew,” Joan said before Frances could open her mouth.

  Frances nodded.

  “He’s dead?”

  “Injured, Joan. A messenger is below.”

  ‘‘Oh, God in Heaven.” Joan followed Frances downstairs and saw the bearer of the ill tidings standing with his cap in his hand. He was an old man with white hair. He stood very calmly as though his news were nothing of importance, and Joan could have beaten him for his seeming indifference to her grief.

  “This is Jacob Flowerdewe,” Frances said.

  Jacob began to deliver his message a second time, but Frances stopped him. “That’s enough, Jacob. I’ll tell Mistress Stock all about it on our way.”

  Matthew’s wound was not mortal. That was what Frances assured Joan as the Cookes’ coach
hurried them through the dark streets, although Joan kept fearing the worst. The coincidence of her vision and this woeful news was too perfect to assume otherwise. The dark, overbearing houses seemed to close in around them as they traveled, and the few souls braving the night with raised torches seemed like shades of the dead walking abroad from their graves.

  Later she could hardly remember their arrival at the Gate that a day before had seemed to bar her forever from admission. There was no barring now. She was ushered in quickly, across a desolate, moonlit garden, into a long stone building. Thomas met her, and Master Hutton, and there were several other gentlemen bearing torches. Then she was led upstairs and down a corridor and inside a room where she found Matthew in bed and a stout, bearded man standing beside him.

  “Your husband is doing well,” said the bearded man.

  She looked quickly from his face to Matthew’s. The bearded man kept talking. “The wound was shallow; it injured no vital organs.”

  The man, a physician, she presumed, left the room. She rushed to the bed to embrace her husband.

  “Thank God you’re alive, dear heart,” she said, unable to restrain her tears. She wet his face with her tears, and he kissed her too. His lips were warm, but as she looked more closely into his face, she could see the pain he felt. His normally brown complexion was pale; his eyes were heavy-lidded. “Now, tell me what happened,” she said.

  She was disappointed how little there was to tell, or at least to comprehend—a sudden encounter, a stranger’s random violence, a wound that the physician assured him would heal with time and care. And Braithwaite, Matthew’s best hope for understanding the connection between the murdered Templars, now gone to join his brethren, carrying everything he might have known with him.

  “You followed Phipps from the Hall,” she said. “Could he have been Braithwaite’s murderer and your assailant?” Matthew shook his head. ‘ ‘I don’t think so. I did see Phipps leave, and followed him, but never saw him until he came with the others in response to my cries. As for the villain who struck me, he had just come from outdoors. I could smell the night and damp about him as he passed, nothing of the smoky Hall.”

  “But you saw him come from Braithwaite’s chamber?” “Yes.”

  “And then found the man dead.”

  “Smothered, I suspect.”

  “Merciful Heaven,” she said. “A fine Temple of the law this is where murders and assaults have become commonplace. What did the physician say about Braithwaite?”

  “At first that he would live. Now, that the wound caused his death. He says he has seen stranger outcomes of minor wounds and recited a half dozen cases.”

  “What does Master Hutton believe?”

  “As I—another instance of foul play. ”

  “Oh, Matthew, I do wish we were home again and all well. London is stale—and full of danger. I rue the day I consented to this madness.”

  He asked her what madness she meant.

  “Why, of remaining in London. Of undertaking this dangerous enterprise. Who, even in happy times, is safe in a company of lawyers? Comes a murderer among them and one might as well endure plague time for all the safety he will find.”

  “Well, I can’t abandon my duty now,” he said.

  “And why not?”

  “For one thing, Master Leyland, my physician, has confined me to my bed. More important, I swore to Thomas Cooke and Master Hutton to deliver up the name of the murderer, if not the man himself. Yes, and Sir Robert recommended me in his letter.”

  Joan pondered the intimidating name of Cecil, the Queen’s Principal Secretary, Matthew’s great good friend. Duty, obligation, responsibility. It was useless to debate on these points with die man she married.

  “Then I’ll stay here with you.”

  Matthew laughed. “A fine lot of good you’d do me here.” “So how will you perform your duty, as you call it, from a sickbed?” she askeid, thinking she might have him there. “Are your suspects to stand without whilst you call them in one by one like naughty schoolboys? And what of the murderer? He spared you once; will he be content to spare you a second time?”

  “I shall be well enough off,” Matthew said.

  “Ridiculous, husband. False courage. Be wise instead.” “I doubt he who struck me believes I saw so much of him as to prove a witness. And would I be in less danger were I up and about?”

  “Ah, but what if you’re wrong? What if the murderer thinks you recognized him? What if he returns to serve you as he did Braithwaite?”

  “Master Hutton has seen to that.”

  “How so?”

  He reached beneath his coverlet and pulled out a pistol. She gasped. “Now I will worry. You’ll shoot yourself for sure.”

  “And he’s provided me with a nurse.”

  “Who?”

  “His clerk.”

  “Phipps. Worse still. It is he whom I most suspect.” “All die better,” Matthew said. “I know he is not the murderer, yet if he is otherwise involved—say an accomplice—”

  “Or mastermind, yes, what then?”

  “Then let him come and serve me. I may yet untangle this skein without moving from my bed.”

  Joan took a hard look at the man she married—the strange and perverse creature so different from herself. Or was he thatdifferent? Then she said, “Matthew, you vex me beyond endurance with your stubbornness. Why don’t you listen to reason when she speaks so plainly?”

  “I think it is your love that speaks, not reason.”

  “Can they not speak with one voice?”

  “I won’t scold you for loving me,” he said. “But you are the last person to hoist sail before an enemy. Why commend to me so cowardly a course?”

  “But if you are outmanned and outcannoned too, what then?”

  He didn’t answer her question but shifted the matter. He said Thomas had told him of her own misadventures. Assaulted on the London streets, robbed of her gown. And she recommended to him a course of abject caution!

  She told him the blunt truth of what happened, hoping that Nan’s account of Phipps’s threats would make him think again about remaining at die Middle Temple.

  He listened, but without a sign he was prepared to change his mind. “I owe this Nan Warren more thanks than I can give,” he said. “Though she may be a whore, yet she has a good heart, and is perhaps more sinned against than sinning. Christ excused the woman taken in adultery; we can do no less.”

  Matthew’s words pleased Joan mightily and she could almost forgive his stubbornness. She was grateful he shared her enthusiasm for her new friend, but dismayed when he continued to argue against Phipps’s involvement. “The man lacks the mettle for murder,” he said with that annoying way he had of settling an issue with a simple statement.

  She asked what was being said about the attack on him. Surely the whole house was now alarmed. A murderer at large. Who would feel himself safe?

  ‘ ‘Hutton will give out that gout has driven me to bed. Only he and I and Thomas will know the truth. Thus, Hutton says, will the House be free from infamy and I from suspicion of being other than I seem. Braithwaite’s death will be treated similarly. A consequence of the duel that went awry.”

  “I think your Master Hutton is more concerned for reputation than for safety.”

  “Well, to be fair to the man, he may believe his concerns are not at cross-purposes.”

  They talked a while longer; she examined his wound herself, not content that a stranger should have care of her husband, even if he was a physician. Then she wished him a speedy recovery, kissed and blessed him too, and said it was sheer madness for one to remain in a place he had had so clear an invitation to leave.

  He told her to go home—and to stay there. He would do his duty, and she should do hers.

  Later, as the coach rattled through the streets and Frances slept on her young husband’s shoulder, Joan remained alert, staring out into the night. She felt neither desire nor need for sleep, full as she was of fear
for Matthew and concern how she might circumvent his orders that she remain at home.

  The damned would freeze in hell before she should be so submissive!

  Thirteen

  IN the privacy of his lodgings, his only companion an ill-tempered brindled cat who curled beneath his legs and slept, Theophilus Phipps reflected upon the transparent cunning of old men with power.

  Hutton had told him he was to play nurse to the ailing Matthew Stock. To Phipps’s mind, a servant’s job. Told him— with the straight, sober face of a judge instructing the accused he was to be hanged and when—that, should anyone ask, the Chelmsford clothier was laid up with the gout. Because Stock had brought no servant to see to his needs, Hutton said it was imperative that someone share the man’s chamber, to tuck him in and fill his dish and empty his chamber pot and come when he whistled like a good dog, or so Phipps imagined the loathsome assignment.

  But Phipps knew what was up. The business about gout— did Hutton take him for an absolute fool? Stock had been undone by more than gout. Phipps had glimpsed the blood-soaked bandages and had no doubt that beneath the coverlet of his bed, Stock harbored a torment of the flesh inflicted by brutal steel. The nasty work of Braithwaite’s murderer, Phipps did not doubt for a minute. And now Phipps was to serve as an unwitting bodyguard—his presence a deterrent to further assaults! He was, in sum, to be exposed to the same danger as Stock!

  And yet Phipps had not declined Hutton’s order. How could he, under the circumstances? Being so intimate with Cecil’s spy was a risk, but also an opportunity. An opportunity to detect where danger lay, and where escape, and where the money young Litchfield had spoken of so indiscreetly.

  And thus Phipps had no choice but to accept the assignment, as distastefiil and perilous as it was. For he could not refuse to nurse a man he despised (for his social origins) and feared (for his political connections) without revealing to Hutton just how much he knew and by what devious means he had come upon it. He would only have incriminated himself, and Phipps was hardly about to do that!