A Murder of Crows: A Sir Robert Carey Mystery

by P. F. Chisholm

  Dodd had nothing against boats and found himself quite enjoying the crowded river, full of vessels crossing in all directions; a red-sailed Thames lugger headed straight for them at one point causing the men on the larboard side to back water in order to avoid it. Derisive shouts echoed over the water from the larger boat. The water was brown but not too bad-smelling, all things considered. Somerset House had its own well and in any case Dodd was sticking firmly to mild ale because it was good for his kidneys. He saw no need to take the suicidal risk of drinking expensive Thames water which was so full of ill humours and mud, although he was quite happy to eat the salmon from it when he wanted a cheap meal. The standard flapped in the breeze on the water.

  “What are you smiling at, Sergeant?” asked Carey, who seemed to be worried about something. Dodd realised he had indeed been smiling; he must still be a little drunk from the tobacco.

  “Nowt.” Dodd hastily averted his eyes from the thing.

  “Come on, it’s Father’s badge, isn’t it?”

  It had been. Dodd had been wondering, why did the Queen’s Lord Chamberlain, one of the richest and most powerful men in the kingdom, choose as his badge the figure of what looked like a rabid duck?

  Carey stuck his lower lip out. “It’s a Swan Rampant.”

  “Ay?”

  “It’s in honour of my Lady Mother, if you’re interested.”

  “Ay?” Dodd was very interested, but tried hard not to let it show. “Is she still alive then, yer…ah…Lady Mother?”

  “Oh yes,” said Carey, not explaining any more. Dodd wondered where Hunsdon kept her as there was no sign of a wife at Somerset House. Perhaps she was tired: Dodd would have thought she would be after birthing the full Carey brood of eight living children, and possibly more pregnancies depending how many babes she might have lost.

  “So…ah…where is she?” asked Dodd in what he hoped was a tactful voice. After all, there was an official mistress at Hunsdon’s residence. “Prefers the countryside?”

  “You could say that,” answered Carey. “She has no interest in the Court and would have to attend the Queen if she lived in London, so…er…she doesn’t. She was here in ’88 though.”

  “Wise lady,” said Dodd, feeling sorry for her. It could be no easy thing to be married to the likes of lord Baron Hunsdon nor mother to his reckless sons. He pictured the lady in a manor house somewhere, living a dull but respectable life, embroidering linen and doing whatever else ladies did, whilst her husband philandered through the fleshpots of London.

  Carey nodded, still looking worried. Just once he cast a glance over his shoulder where the ship-forest of the Pool of London, on the other side of the Bridge, was disappearing round the bend.

  “I thought I saw…No,” he said to himself, “can’t be.”

  Dodd peered at the bridge himself but the crowded houses gave up no clue and nor did the carrion crows and buzzards squabbling over the new head there. He saw a flight of fourteen crows swoop up and attack the buzzards together, driving them away from the delicacy. He blinked for a moment. Did birds have surnames to back them? Crows all lived together in rookeries, of course, but did they foray out together against other birds like men? It was fascinating. He knew that the proper thing to call such an avian group was a “murder” of crows because of their liking for newborn lambs.

  More of Hunsdon’s liverymen were waiting for them at the Westminster steps. Carey and Dodd were led briskly not into the palace but to a small stone chapel tucked into the side of Westminster Hall, then down into the cool crypt. From the stairs Dodd smelled death, and so did Carey for his nostrils flared.

  A bloated corpse lay on a trestletable between the various tombs and monuments of the crypt. The body was surrounded by candles to burn out the bad airs. They were not doing a good job. Hunsdon stood before the corpse, hands on his sword belt, his Chamberlain’s staff under his arm.

  Carey bowed and so did Dodd. “My lord,” said Carey, “I was hoping that your business at the palace would be more pleasant.”

  Hunsdon scowled at his son. “Eh? What are you talking about?”

  Carey looked annoyed and uncomfortable. “I was hoping you might have been…ah…mentioning my unpaid fee to Her Majesty and…”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Robin,” growled Hunsdon, “she’ll pay it when she’s good and ready and not before. Meanwhile, look at this.”

  Unwillingly, they looked.

  “Besides she’s still in Oxford with the court or possibly heading back by now if she takes one of her notions. Odd this.”

  Hunsdon gestured at the corpse. It was a man wearing a good linen shirt, skin waterlogged and flaking away, eyes and other soft parts already eaten by fish, stomach swollen and pregnant with gas.

  “Who is he?” asked Carey, taking a handkerchief out of his sleeve pocket and holding it to his nose.

  “Nobody knows his name and he’s in my jurisdiction, blast him.”

  Dodd wanted to ask why but didn’t. However Hunsdon swung on him and said, “As Lord Chamberlain to her Majesty I am de officio President of the Board of Greencloth with a remit over any murder done within the Virge of the Court, that is, within two miles of Her Majesy’s sacred person or her palaces. The blighter washed up against the Queen’s own Privy Steps, so he’s my responsibility.”

  With a lurch in his gut, Dodd realised the man had no feet. Carey was approaching the corpse, handkerchief still over his mouth and nose, looking carefully all over it and turning the swollen hands over. Dodd knew Carey had been spending time with Mr. Fenwick the Carlisle undertaker and he seemed to have got a strong stomach from it. The man’s left index finger was missing a top joint.

  Dodd found that the close air in the crypt with its musty smell of the long dead and the gassy fecal stench reeking from the corpse was on the verge of embarassing him. He didn’t have a hanky, so he put his hand over his nose and swallowed hard.

  Carey smiled at him. “Look here, Sergeant,” he said, “see? It’s interesting, isn’t it?” Carey was holding up the flaccid swollen fingers. By the guttering light of the candles Dodd could see they were scarred with burns in a couple of places, but also that there was a clerk’s callus on the middle finger of his right hand. Yet the palms had the calluses you got from using a spade, not a sword.

  He frowned. Yes, it was interesting. What manner of man was it? A gentleman wouldn’t have spade calluses on his palms and a commoner wouldn’t have a clerk’s bump from holding a pen.

  “Ay,” he said, “He wis wearing a ring too.” He pointed gingerly at the mark on the little finger left by a ring.

  Carey carefully lifted the other hand. “No other rings, the same marks though.”

  “And what happened to his feet?” said Hunsdon, watching his son with his head on one side and a look of baffled pride on his face.

  Carey moved to that end, past a pair of knobbly knees, and blinked down at the exposed ankle joints. “It looks like they were torn off after the man was dead,” he said thoughtfully. “Hmm.” He bent closer to look and Dodd peered as well, brought one of the watchlights over.

  The bone seemed to have been ground by something hard leaving little grains of red there. Perhaps flakes of rust?

  “Hm,” said Carey again and went to the head end. “I wonder…”

  To Dodd’s disgust, he took out his poinard and levered open the man’s mouth with it. A trickle of brown came out. Carey placed his gloved hand flat on the man’s chest and pressed. More brown water came out of the mouth.

  “There’s no wound in the body, is there?”

  “Stab wound in the back,” said Hunsdon, now holding a pomander to his nose, “probably to the kidneys.”

  “Ah,” nodded Carey, taking refuge in his hanky again. Dodd was desperately trying not to cough. “I wonder if…”

  At that moment the corpse shifted and farted, as if some horrible wall had been breached. All three of them were at the door in unspoken terror before the air filled with a stench so foul they
were coughing and gagging as they ran up the stairs, leaving the watchcandles flickering blue behind them.

  “Christ,” gasped Hunsdon as they tumbled out into the street with very little dignity, “I hate these cases. Bloody man will have to be embalmed until we can hold an inquest for him.” He gestured irritably at three of his men who were standing around holding a large tarpaulin and after an unhappy pause, they went down into the crypt to cover the corpse up again.

  By unspoken agreement, all three of them went up the street and into a nearby Westminster boozing ken, a wooden hut but very nicely painted hard by the Court gate, with the traditional red lattices. Its battered patriotic sign bore the Tudor Rose, painted over a carving that looked as if it was of a boar or a pig of some kind. The barman knew Hunsdon immediately and was obsequious, bowing him into a private alcove away from the feverishly gaming young courtiers. Their brandies came from a different barrel under the counter and when Dodd gulped it, he wished he hadn’t for it was very much better than the aqua vitae he normally drank when pressed. At least, he thought gloomily, he had held his water and hadn’t vomited, though it had been a close thing when the corpse moved…To be sure it was no more than the gas in it and Dodd had seen it happen before, but in a small space and in the light of the candles…As Carey’s father had said, Christ!

  His heartbeat was settling again. Two more of Hunsdon’s men, Turner and Catchpole, stood around nearby. Now Dodd had to suppress another moment of happy smugness. Normally it would be him standing by walls, watching his betters drinking, bored and waiting for an order from Lowther or Scrope, not sitting down and doing the drinking. He had done the same duty for his wife’s uncle, the Armstrong headman, Kinmont Willie Armstrong, although on those occasions he hadn’t been bored at all because he was waiting for the fight to begin. So this gentlemanning around London was a pleasant change and it worried him that he was getting used to it.

  His face settled back into its normal glum scowl and he sipped more carefully at the aqua vitae so he could actually taste the stuff.

  “Good isn’t it,” said Carey, whose face was not quite so pale now. “It’s a French aqua vitae, made from cider.”

  “Ay?” Dodd was interested. “What’s normal brandy made of then?”

  “Wine usually.”

  “Is that the same as brandywine?”

  “No, that’s wine mixed with brandy and usually some spices and sugar. Very good it is too…”

  Carey caught the potboy’s eye, established that the boozing ken was high-class enough to have brandywine, and a few minutes later Dodd was sipping that as well. Carey hadn’t even asked the price—that was what having a rich father did to you, thought Dodd.

  “I’ve already told the Board to convene tomorrow, damn and blast it,” said Hunsdon, knocking back his own aqua vitae. “God, I hate council meetings.”

  “When exactly was he found?”

  “Low tide, yesterday,” said Hunsdon. “Gave one of the Queen’s favourite chamberers a nasty turn.”

  “So probably carried downriver by the current, not up by the tide.”

  “Probably.”

  “Hm.” Carey was looking thoughtfully into his wine.

  “Any ideas, Robin?”

  Carey smiled cynically. “I think you should procure six witnesses to swear that they saw him going to Heneage’s house in Chelsea and the inquest should find him unlawfully killed by person or persons unknown and…”

  Hunsdon rolled his eyes. “There’s no sign he was one of Heneage’s.”

  Carey shrugged. “And?”

  Hunsdon shook his head. “Come on, what could you see from the corpse?”

  “Not the face of his killer in his eyes,” said Carey. “And I don’t know whether he was a commoner or a clerk or a gentleman. But I do know that the stab to his back didn’t kill him for he was put in the river still breathing since his lungs were full of water. I suspect that what killed him was the weight of iron chains on his feet pulling him to the bottom from the rust flakes on his ankle bones.”

  Dodd nodded at this. “Ay, and when his flesh rotted enough, his feet broke off in the currents and the body could fetch up at the steps.”

  “How long ago was he put in the river?” rumbled Hunsdon.

  “Perhaps ten days, two weeks ago? I don’t know, it’s hard to tell with water.”

  “Any more of Walsingham’s tricks?”

  Carey shook his head. “Nothing that would give us his name, my lord, but I expect that’s why he had only his shirt on—his doublet would give too much away.”

  Dodd sat still, transfixed with a sudden thought. If the man was stripped, why did they leave his shirt on? Modesty? Not very likely. Och God, he thought, I’ll have to go back into that pest pit again.

  Fortified by brandy he leaned forward. “Ay, so what’s under his shirt?”

  Carey frowned and was clearly thinking the same as Dodd. He sighed and stood up. “We’ll have to look.”

  They walked back down the street, took several deep breaths of relatively clean London air, and then went down the stairs and past the guard. The tarpaulin was heavy and the ragged remains of the man’s shirt sticky with…something. Carey pulled it back. Dodd and he stared, looking for anything of interest. Nothing, if you ignored the damage done by fishes, except for a small knife scar on the ribs and a recognisable healed swordslash across the chest.

  They looked at each other and Dodd’s gorge rose. He swallowed hard and held his breath.

  Fearful of causing another corpsely fart, they hefted the man onto his left side very carefully. Dodd brought the flickering candle as close to the man’s back as he could. And there, at last, they found something interesting—little arrow-shaped scratches scattered at random across the water-swollen skin of his back. There were more grouped near the shoulders, as if the dead man had rolled in a bramble patch. Nothing else—the scars were mostly white and old, although a few seemed more recent.

  Neither spoke as they let him down again, saving their breath. They pulled the tarpaulin back and hurried up the stairs.

  Dodd was panting from lack of air and both of them were sweating. His head spun. He had to stop and sit on a wall for a moment because of the memories from when he was very little and still in his skirts: the bodies of people he knew, dead from plague, lying unburied around the village, and what had happened to them.

  “I hope that was worth it,” said Carey. “I wonder what made those scratches. I know I’ve never seen it before but there’s something niggling me about it.”

  “Ay,” croaked Dodd, very ready for more brandywine now, “but he wisnae actually flogged, that’s for sure.”

  Carey nodded, gazing into space intently as if he was trying to read the answer written on the clouds.

  They rejoined Hunsdon at the boozing ken who had got in more brandy for them and mild ale for Dodd.

  “Just some odd little scratches on his back, and a couple of healed cuts” Carey answered his sire’s eyebrows. “They don’t help identify him. No tattoos or birthmarks that I could see, although you could cry the fact that his left index finger is missing its top joint.”

  Hunsdon sighed heavily again and drank. “It’s worth looking at the warrants Mr. Heneage has sworn out over the past month just in case the man’s one of his, but it’s unlikely we’ll match them up. We need a proper identification. I’ll have the town criers in Westminster and the City cry the news, and bills printed up with his description. All I can do, unfortunately.”

  “Meanwhile Mr. Recorder Fleetwood’s bloody nephew refuses point blank to act for me,” said Carey.

  “Damn and blast,” said his father, sounding no more than wearily irritated, certainly not surprised. “I thought that might happen.”

  “Is it no’ possible to proceed then?” Dodd asked mournfully.

  “Of course it is. I’ll ask Cecil what he suggests. Or one of the Bacons…”

  “Perhaps my lord earl of Essex could help?” Carey put in.

&
nbsp; “Possibly. He’s back in her Majesty’s favour again at least,” said Hunsdon and Dodd thought he heard something cautious in his tone.

  “The Bacons won’t deal with a mere case of assault…”

  “They might know someone who will.”

  “He’ll no’ come to trial will he, my lord,” Dodd said. “Heneage, I mean. He’s too important.”

  “Criminal trial? We can make the attempt though I agree, I doubt it. It’s the civil case for damages that I’m interested in.” Hunsdon let out a tight little smile.

  “And will the Queen no’ take his side? Seeing he’s her henchman?”

  “There’s no telling what Her Majesty the Queen my cousin might take it into her head to do.”

  Dodd knew about this. Hunsdon was indeed cousin to the Queen through his mother Mary Boleyn, the sister of the more famous Anne.

  Dodd looked hopeful. “Untouchable, are ye, sir?”

  “Good God, no,” said Hunsdon with a bluff laugh, “nobody’s untouchable. If Heneage could convince the Queen that I’ve turned traitor, I’d go to the block just like anybody else. Quite right too if the bill was foul and I was guilty.”

  That was worrying. If somebody like Hunsdon came down, so would anyone associated with him. Hunsdon slapped Dodd on the back.

  “Don’t look so worried, Sergeant, the Queen’s a lot more difficult to fool than Heneage thinks she is.”

  Dodd nodded.

  They sat in the back of the boat while Hunsdon sat in the front. Carey was looking annoyed, possibly because a boat full of musicians was following the Hunsdon boat, playing for all they were worth. Dodd couldn’t hear a word of what Carey was muttering.

  “Eh sir?” he shouted. Carey tried again but couldn’t whisper loud enough. “What are they following us for?” Dodd wanted to know, wishing he’d brought a crossbow, especially for the viol player.