Joan had moved on a good ten paces when their parting words sank in; she reddened, and considering briefly the compelling logic that if she could not fool a child with her disguise, she could hardly do better with crafty lawyers for whom deception and guile were meat and drink, she gave over her project and returned to Cooke House so profoundly dejected that even Robert’s greeting (“Yes, sir, who would you see here?”) could not remedy it.
Leyland came knocking at Nan’s door within a quarter of an hour after Joan’s departure and her encounter with the young beggars and reported that Joan’s course was set for Cooke House, which meant that she was not bound for the Middle Temple and that he would not have to repeat the performance he had paid the beggars to perform.
“How much did you give them?” she asked.
“A penny each,” said Leyland, relaxing in the chair Joan had occupied before and just beginning to enjoy the fire that burned in the grate.
“Then the twain did well for themselves, for my guess is Stock’s wife was not ungenerous,” Nan said.
“You’re going to a good deal of trouble to get rid of Joan Stock,” Leyland observed, looking up at her curiously.
“I will not be rid of her yet,” Nan said. “Not while her husband plumbs the depths at the Temple. I have her complete confidence now. She will deny me nothing.”
“What if Stock learns too much?”
“Then that will prove fatal for him,” she said.
“And Stock’s wife?”
Leyland smiled and plucked at his thick beard. “Blame could not fall on a more agreeable gentleman than Phipps, for I despise the little effeminate bastard with all my soul.” “Despise him to your heart’s content,” said Nan with a brittle laugh as she removed the last of her clothing and struck a sensual pose that caused her coconspirator to quite forget their plotting. “Theophilus Phipps will serve our purposes well, and quite without his knowing it. I’ll teach him to threaten me.”
“What can she learn outside the Temple walls but her husband’s surmisings and vague rumor? That, my friend, was the point of hiring the beggars—and of you, too, should their pretended recognition of her true sex fail. She’ll avoid the Temple now, except for missions of mercy to her ailing husband, and presently I will persuade her that there is no mystery there at all, for the evidence against Master Phipps is more than conclusive. We will resume our former course, perhaps even more profitably than before.”
Fifteen
IT was morning, Matthew ’s ears told him so. In his chamber at the Middle Temple it was black as midnight, but he could hear the City stirring beyond: crow of cock, bark of dog, wheeze and whinny of horse, and the rattle of cart and the shrill cries of men whose work began before light. There was a terrible throbbing in his thigh where the dagger had struck, and his bladder ached for relief. He had slept like a dead man all the night, but in struggling now to get out of bed to ease himself, he felt as weak as a babe. Straining to see in the darkness, he stumbled against a chair, swore, and woke Phipps, who sat bolt upright in his bed and clamored in a hysterical treble for God to save him from the Devil and bloody murder too until Matthew assured him there was neither Devil nor murderers in the chamber but only Phipps and one gouty clothier of Chelmsford who couldn’t see in the dark. Matthew said he was sorry for having made such a commotion.
“I hardly slept a wink,” Phipps complained peevishly, falling back onto his pillow.
“A hard bed, is it?” Matthew said, trying to sound sympathetic but hoping that the clerk’s discomfort would force his resignation as Matthew’s nurse. He did not like Phipps. His presence was more imposition than help—and would have been so even if Matthew had truly had no more to do than survey the premises on his mythical son’s behalf. On the other hand, Matthew considered, a notorious gossip such as Phipps was not without his usefulness.
Matthew peed like a rainspout into the chamber pot, and feeling a good deal better, despite the wound, he wished the clerk well for what remained of the night and was climbing back in bed when Phipps remarked out of the darkness, “I had the most awful dream.”
‘‘What manner of dream?”
“Horrible. I can’t tell it.”
“Some dreams are best unspoken. Leave them for the night,” Matthew murmured sleepily.
There was no response, and Matthew assumed Phipps had fallen back asleep, for he could hear the clerk snoring softly. Matthew lay awake thinking. He wondered what he was going to do, now that he was a virtual invalid. He had put on a brave face for Joan, pretending the wound was a trifle. Feigning a confidence he didn’t feel. Had Joan seen through the pretense? Didn’t she know him almost too well?
An hour later, light was penetrating the curtains. The beast was full awake and growling. It was London, all right, not Chelmsford with its rural quiet. Phipps awoke. Now in a happier mood, he was an irrepressible conversationalist. His nocturnal melancholy having fled with the shades of night, Phipps spoke freely of the dream that before had been too awftil to speak of. It had been about Braithwaite—Braithwaite dangling from the beam in the chamber, a ghastly corpse, swollen and purple-visaged.
“That was Monk,” Matthew reminded him.
“But Braithwaite in my dream,” Phipps replied defensively. “It was, after all, my dream, not yours.”
Matthew granted the point. Phipps went on to talk about Braithwaite, about whom he had a great many opinions. “A tragedy indeed,” said the clerk. “Poor devil. But such is life. Or death. There he was. One moment in the fullness of manhood. A handsome man by anyone’s account, wouldn’t you say?”
Matthew agreed.
“Then he is pricked. Per accidentum, as his killer would have it, since I cannot believe that Master Keable tells anything but the truth when he declares he meant no mortal mischief. Comes midnight and the man is being measured for his coffin.”
Matthew murmured his agreement, staring up at the thick beam from which Monk had dangled. Phipps continued his gruesome theme as he got out of bed and began to dress, taking infinite pains, or so it seemed to Matthew, with his appearance. Matthew watched and listened, hoping that the clerk’s chatter would find its way to some closed door that, when opened, would reveal the essential link between the victims.
“Master Leyland was certain the wound was not fatal,” Matthew said. “What do you make of that?”
Phipps stopped fussing with his ruff and looked at Matthew blankly, as though the question were quite incomprehensible. “I? Why, marry', I think nothing at all. I am no physician to give opinions,” Phipps said.
“I only meant that the death was very strange. Coming as such a surprise, I mean. You must admit that,” said Matthew.
“Leyland is a physician, not a fortune-teller,” Phipps said, staring into a hand mirror he had pulled from the valise. “Besides, I am of the belief he’s not much of a physician. His principal recommendation is that he lives close at hand to the Temple and will willingly come when beckoned. That argues that he has few patients among the rich. He once set the leg of the Treasurer’s horse—a great favorite of Hutton or the Treasurer would not have made so much of the achievement. Leyland claims to have a medical degree from Bologna, where there’s a famous university, but I don’t believe it.”
“Bologna—that’s in Italy, isn’t it?” said Matthew.
“It is,” said Phipps into the same mirror as before. “Which to my mind is hardly a commendation. It is said that
for an Englishman to travel into Italy guarantees he will come home again debauched—or a Papist. Now, it follows, me-thinks, that actually to study there—to drink up Italian learning along with the water—is to piss out corruption in every way.”
“He might pass for an Italian,” Matthew said, thinking of Leyland’s swarthy complexion and how much it contrasted with Phipps’s, as fair and delicate as a girl’s.
“Ha! Were his name Cappello or DiMarco, his denial of Rome or Padua as a birthplace would not be credited by one Englishman in a hundred.”
“The physician is corrupt then, according to you?”
Phipps walked over to Matthew’s bed and stood looking down at him. He smiled slightly and then bent over as though preparing to share a confidence. “Leyland lives with an aged mother who cooks and cleans and rails at him for being lecherous with his female patients, a charge I can readily believe, for every Italian is a lecher from his birth and would niggle his wet nurse were he equipped by nature at so young age. Leyland seems impervious to his mother’s blandishments, however. Were he not a physician, he would make a tolerable lawyer. For he will speak sooner than hear and receive sooner than pay. But for my mind, the real test of his wit is that he chose to practice medicine rather than law.”
“How so?” asked Matthew, wondering where all this rambling discourse might lead and eager for some crumb of useful information.
“Why, sir,” Phipps laughed, “therein lies the man’s fault—the very proof of his folly. For a physician earns but a few pence for casting one’s urine or bloodletting, but a busy shrewd lawyer, well versed in his art and dedicated to self-promotion, whilst the same must concern himself with his client’s offal and, yea, suck blood too, is well compensated for his labors. Not to mention the higher power his calling may lead to.”
At this, Matthew was tempted to ask the clerk why, if he had so low an opinion of lawyers, he dwelt among them, but Phipps prevented it with a question of his own.
“Will you eat, Master Stock? I’ll have breakfast sent up. ”
“Thank you, Master Phipps.”
“A small favor—the least I can do.”
“Much appreciated,” said Matthew.
“Think nothing of it. After breakfast I'll return to see if you need anything else. A great shame your investigation of the Inn is soured by your. . . gout.”
Phipps made an odd face—something like a smirk, but not so overtly insolent. Then he went out the door in a hurry, as though he had some pressing appointment and had only just remembered it.
Phipps arrived late for breakfast, but spotted Keable at once at the lower table. Keable was sitting alone, apparently in disgrace. Phipps went over to greet them as though nothing had happened.
‘‘What’s the matter? What, bankrupt at last, or a damnable constipation?”
Keable looked up at the clerk with evident hostility. “Spare me your wit, Phipps. Don’t tell me you’ve not heard?”
“Oh, of course, I’ve heard,” Phipps said, sitting down and pretending injury at the very thought he might not have heard. “You mean about Braithwaite. Well, man, so the world goes, doesn’t it? We all owe God a death. Braithwaite’s account was due, and he paid on demand. It’s no great mystery.”
“You speak very lightly of these matters, yet it is not you who are regarded as I am. Look how I sit here. Alone. As though I were a leper. Yet the wound I administered was a scratch.”
Phipps sat down next to Keable and put a fraternal hand on his shoulder. He made a sympathetic face. “It’s that bad, then?” Phipps said, casting his eye around the Hall and noticing, not without a certain secret delight, that he and Keable were being observed by more than one young gentleman still breakfasting.
“They speak of it as manslaughter at least, all the way to Gray’s,” Keable continued bitterly. “By noon all of London will have heard the tale, wrenched it five ways from perpendicular, and a dozen scurvy balladmongers with garlicky
breaths will proclaim a greater massacre here than struck at St. Bartholomew’s Day.”
Smiling, Phipps whispered, “Why, you are in an ugly mood this morning, Keable. But hark. I have words of consolation.”
Keable turned to look at the clerk. He sighed heavily, and for a moment there was a look of hope in his eyes. “I can think of no consolation you could offer, save that the word of Braithwaite’s death is a dream from which I will presently awaken. But if you have any, speak. For my poor head beats to a dozen drummers because of lost sleep. All night I dreamed of Braithwaite’s hoary corpse tugging at me in my sleep and threatening me with death and dismemberment for my unlucky thrust. I swear before God and angels I never meant to kill the man.”
‘‘Don’t whine, Keable. It ill becomes you,” Phipps said.
‘‘As God is my witness!” Keable protested.
‘‘Spare me more oaths,” Phipps said. “ never killed him.”
‘‘What?”
Phipps put his mouth closer to Keable’s ear and shielded his face with his hand. “Braithwaite was mending when we all left him. By rights he should have been up and around this morning, feeding his belly in the Hall. The truth is that he was killed later—smothered with his own pillow by one who had his own reasons for wanting him dead. Not you, Keable, not you.”
Keable looked at Phipps suspiciously. ‘‘How do you know this?”
Phipps told him what he had seen and done the night before, how he had stolen into Braithwaite’s chamber and found him dead, how he had sensed the presence of another in the room—Braithwaite’s murderer doubtless—and then, pretending to be unaware, sneaked off before Matthew Stock came to give the alarm and come near death himself.
‘‘But why did you not give alarm yourself?” Keable asked, obviously still not convinced.
‘‘What! Cry murder when no one was around but the dead man and be thought the murderer myself? Do I appear that big a fool?”
“I heard Matthew Stock was bedridden with gout or some such plague.”
Phipps laughed softly. ‘‘Yes, gout—if that’s your word for Spanish steel.” Phipps told that story too. And Keable, who before had had nothing but contempt for the Treasurer’s clerk, now looked upon the man with something akin to admiration.
Within the hour of Phipps’s departure, Jacob Flowerdewe came in with a cold breakfast and gloomy gossip about Braithwaite’s death and how no one in the Inn could talk of aught else and how Keable was in Coventry for his crime and Master Hutton in a dither about the reputation of the Middle Temple going all to hell and his chance for advancement at court not worth a turd.
Matthew listened to this news, found it a barren field for his purposes, and was greatly relieved when he was alone again, in which state he remained the rest of the morning and afternoon, Phipps apparently forgetting to order up his dinner.
It was near suppertime when he heard another knocking at his door, and when he said ‘‘Who comes?” and the knocker stepped in, he saw it was Joan, a tray of hot food in her hand. A more welcome sight he could not imagine, as hungry and bored as he was and on the point of talking to himself for company.
‘‘Joan! Thank God you’ve come. Phipps has deserted me and I am left to tedious starvation too. Not to mention the great waste of time it is to be flat on my back. ”
Joan asked how he did and fussed over his bedclothes as he gobbled down the food, she having assured him that she ate earlier and well. Robert the groom had escorted her from Cooke House, where she reigned as mistress in the absence of the Cookes. Master Hutton had granted her permission to visit Matthew as frequently as she wished. Joan was also full of news about Nan, how she, as good as her word, had fled the Gull and taken up new lodgings in an apothecary’s shop.
“Good for her,” Matthew commented between mouthfuls.
Matthew listened while Joan confessed what she had planned and how Nan had endeavored to dissuade her from her folly but to no avail, Joan being so strong-willed, she admitted, and then how her guise had been penetrated by two simple urchins, whereupon she had been convinced her womanhood would triumph over male clothes and gave her project over.
They both laughed at the folly of Joan’s attempted impersonation, and then Matthew chided her for even trying it, with many goodly admonitions about women’s proper place, which she for her part endured with unusual patience.
“I met your nurse whilst coming up the stairs,” she said, shifting the matter.
“Phipps?”
“The same.”
“A dainty gentleman of ready tongue,
” Matthew said dryly.
“I can well understand why Nan so hates him. His womanish manner is most offensive. Sincerity oozes from him, yet every smile’s as false as Hell.”
“This morning he was full of talk about Braithwaite but nothing to my purpose except to confirm his own reputation as a gossipmonger and backbiter of the first order. Then, when he left me, he looked at me most strangely and seems not to credit my reason for being bedridden. ”
“He knows you are wounded! See, more evidence of guilty knowledge if not outright complicity,” Joan exclaimed excitedly. “Your observations and Nan’s experience of him point the finger of suspicion even more firmly in his direction.”
“I grant it, and yet he may be something less than conspirator,” Matthew said. “But at the least we can be sure he knows more than he tells. The thing is to worm it from him, which I will make my project when he returns.”
“You are fortunate to have your quarry practically in your bosom,” Joan said. “I pray he’s not dangerous—he doesn’t look so. Oh, Matthew, I wish I were here with you at all hours and not an occasional visitor. You are in the very forest here while I must be content on the verge.”
“Where you are safest, Joan, and I most content to have you, given the circumstances. Go home, now, pass your time with your new pet, Nan. Be content to do the work of charity in redeeming her from her fallen condition, and do leave this man’s work to me. This is my one and only day in bed. I have put my leg to the test several times this afternoon and I’m convinced that Master Leyland, as a good physician will, makes too much of my disability. Come tomorrow I am up and about, my throbbing leg notwithstanding.”
Returning later to Cooke House, Joan went directly to her chamber and prepared for bed. While talking to Matthew, she had been put at ease by her husband’s confidence. Her brief encounter with Phipps on the stairs had also diminished her sense of Matthew’s danger. For as a chief suspect in the murders, he seemed so harmless and effeminate a creature. But now, alone, she found her old fears come creeping back like a stray dog sent packing, and that night she had another dream. She dreamed she was in Nan’s lodgings again, above the apothecary’s. She was alone there and waiting, but not for Nan. In due time a knocking came. When she answered she saw it was a blackamoor with stem visage standing before her. He had drawn his sword and brandished it above his head, and behind him crouched two lions with tawny manes and savage jaws.
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