The Silent Murder (Master of Defence Book 4)

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘Is he dead then?’ asked Kate quietly, emerging from the practice room at last, with everything in place except for the points that bound her sleeves to her shoulders – which Tom would tie for her, when time and opportunity allowed.

  Tom nodded in reply. Distracted a little by her potent presence, he fell to unfastening the laces of the boy’s doublet and, beneath that, those of his shirt. Only that distraction, he later thought, could explain why he did this first, without removing the message pouch that lay loosely clasped and tightly strapped across both; but so it chanced – and that made a great deal of difference in the end.

  The skin of the dead boy’s throat was as pale as that of his face, and so indeed was that of his breast as Tom uncovered it. Even the bruises born of the footpads’ clubs were pallid, ghostly. The flesh of his torso was soft, cool and as hairless as a maid’s, and yet, where it gathered into a valley between the firm hills of muscle, the white cup of the flesh contained the first hint of the truth. For there at last, oozing sluggishly along the valley, was a red finger of blood. Abruptly, it seemed, the lawn of the open shirt was bright and soaking with it. Tom’s hands jerked up and Kate gasped.

  ‘What’s amiss?’ demanded the rich, echoing voice as the apprentice returned with his Toledo sword.

  ‘A dead man bleeding,’ said Tom.

  ‘That’s none so strange. In Flanders I saw – ’

  ‘Blood from a bloodless boy,’ persisted Tom, his voice made almost dreamy by the depth of his concentration. As he spoke, at last he reached for the message-pouch under the dead hands. He unbuckled it with growing urgency and lifted it easily free, though the white fingers retained their grip upon it briefly. All the witnesses gasped, caught between shock and sickness, for the leather pouch itself seemed to be bleeding. Certainly it left a thick, hot trail across the bedding and the floor besides until Tom put it into the empty ewer he kept near his bed for washing when he had bought water from the tradesmen down Water Lane.

  Gently, Tom returned to the still body, whose chest was now awash, the daffodil brocade darkened to the colour of Seville oranges. He parted the slack arms, and folded back the edges of cloth. There, just above the dead boy’s heart, where the message-pouch had been so tightly buckled, gaped the tiny mouth of a stab-wound. ‘The killing stroke,’ said Tom, his voice grown rusty on the sudden. ‘Through the wallet, through the message and through his very heart, so I would judge. A lean, long blade, as sharp as sin and almost as strong as death. The match to your steel of Toledo, master bricklayer.’ The suspicion he felt gave an edge to his voice and a suddenly confrontational power to his words – a combination that begat an instant response in kind.

  ‘I am no bricklayer, you coxcomb! I am a scholar bound for Cambridge!’ The resonant voice cracked with boyish outrage, the square face flushed brick-red with indignation. The round eyes rolled wrathfully beneath low, frowning brows.

  ‘That’s true at least. You are no bricklayer, for you’d need to be several years older than you are to be out of your apprenticeship and a master of the trade. Apprentice bricklayer, by your dress and build and hands. Still, you speak like a Cambridge man – or an actor, come to that. You’ve been a soldier – not too long since, I’d guess – and you’ve knowledge enough of the classics for a scholar; but unless you’ve come to sell the sword you won in battle there in Flanders, you’ll not be a gentleman scholar. A poor scholar, perhaps, like my friend Robert Poley.’

  ‘You insult me beyond bearing! How dare you...’

  ‘I tell the truth and less of it than I could tell, were I not engaged in more important matters – and obliged to you for your quick thinking and bravery in the matter so far. Stop huffing, boy. Tell us your name and your business. And stop waving that good sword around my ears or I shall kill you where you stand.’

  ‘He will,’ said Kate equably, when the bricklayer’s rolling eye alighted on her. ‘And you called him a coxcomb, so not even the Sergeant of the Watch would stir to save you.’

  Not even Captain Curberry himself,’ confirmed Grimes, grimly amused. ‘Whose close acquaintance you’ll be likely to make unless you keep that temper of yours in check. If you survive this afternoon, of course.’

  ‘Make up your mind,’ said Tom, his voice suddenly icy as he stood to face his opponent over the corpse-laden bed. ‘My bed’s already ruined and big enough to bear a bricklayer’s apprentice as well as this dead messenger. Now would be the best of times for me. I’ll be getting a cleaner in any case. And the Searcher. And a Crowner at the least, I’d judge.’

  Their angry guest hesitated – hesitated, then capitulated. ‘My name is Ben Jonson,’ he began. ‘My father was a cleric, and I’m as well born as any here.’

  ‘Except for the lady, perhaps,’ insinuated Tom, his voice still icy.

  ‘Ah,’ said Ben. ‘Except for the lady, perhaps, as you say. I was sent hither from The Theatre hard by Finsbury Fields by a fellow called Shagsberd or some such, the scribbler of a trifling thing of fairies and confusion in love not a patch on Plautus from whom it was stolen in the first place, then mangled out of recognition...’

  ‘So you went to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ prompted Tom, ‘and managed to talk with Will Shakespeare, who sent you here to me. To sell the sword – or to be instructed in its use, I’d say...’

  He sat again and fell to further contemplation of the murdered messenger as young Ben Jonson explained his fortunes, his misfortunes and his mission this afternoon.

  Every now and then Tom would look up and steer the voluble young man’s narrative back on to its course with a tiny touch of his genius like Drake’s own hand on the tiller of the Golden Hind.

  ‘Your father died before you were born and left your mother destitute, you say. So she came to London – to Islington. Perhaps...’

  ‘Ha! The brick-kilns of Islington. You persist with that – ’

  ‘It is in your arms and shoulders, Ben; and especially in your hands. You worked with bricks this very day before you strolled into Finsbury Fields with your Toledo sword and wandered – not by chance – through the door of The Theatre for the play. Your stepfather is a master bricklayer and you will do anything but follow the path he has mapped out for you. That much at least is clear.’

  ‘My first escape was into scholarship. Camden himself...’ Ben Jonson began to embroider on the earliest manifestations of his childish genius and how they had enabled his mother to bring him to the great scholar and headmaster’s personal notice.

  ‘You were at Westminster School? No wonder you know your classics and have an eye to go to Cambridge,’ prompted Tom after a while.

  ‘But when the junior scholarship ran out, no more could be found to carry me thither and so...’ Ben’s misfortunes began to be enumerated – the natural testing of great genius in the Classical, Stoical manner.

  ‘The brick-kilns – until you escaped again...’ Tom’s eyes met Kate’s, crinkling in a smile of almost paternal understanding of the young man’s self-absorption.

  ‘To Flanders. I joined the army. A gentleman volunteer. I learned much of soldiering. I killed my man. In single combat, hand to hand...’ An epic description of the bout – worthy indeed of Achilles pursuing the fleeing Hector and closing to his death.

  ‘A Spaniard, and a rich one, whom you stripped of armour and of sword, all of which you have sold except for that,’ concluded Tom. ‘And so we are come full circle. You believe you have enough to start at least at Cambridge. One way or another the sword will secure you. Either your purse, if you will sell it; or your safety, and again your purse, if you will learn to use it well enough.’

  ‘Even in Islington, the fame of this froth at The Theatre is bruited abroad. Like the trash about Romeo – no true tragedy at all to my mind; it is the swordplay that dazzles. In among the leaden tropes of Titania and the sad mock-humour of Bottom and the rest, the swordplay is all that is fit to stand. And then I heard that it was you who taught the wooden actors how to fence...’
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br />   ‘It cost you a penny to watch it, Ben. It’ll cost you a mint more than that to learn it. It will cost you more to become a master of defence here than it will to become a master of the arts at Cambridge, boy. Did Will Shakespeare not warn you of that?’

  ‘Hardly! What, to discuss money with a stranger, the merest acquaintance?’

  Tom forbore to mention the far more intimate details Ben had just shared with two more mere acquaintances and the City Watch. ‘The nub, Ben. The pith. The moment. Are you come to market or are you come for mastery?’

  ‘I have come,’ said Ben Jonson, pompously enough for Cicero addressing the Senate of Ancient Rome in the days before Mark Antony had him killed, ‘to offer you my service in return for tutelage.’

  Winded with simple surprise, Tom paused.

  Providentially he avoided Kate’s eye now, for hysterics would have made an enemy of a potential friend and ally. ‘Indeed?’ he ventured at last. ‘My apprentice in what art, mystery or mastery?’

  ‘Well...’ Now it was Ben’s turn to hesitate. ‘I had assumed in the Art and Science of Defence. I come well prepared...’

  ‘He has his own sword,’ observed Grimes, still surprising Tom with his dry but potent wit.

  ‘And it’s the equal of your own,’ added Kate, a little gustily.

  But Tom, confronted by a recently murdered corpse, chose to take the matter a little more seriously than they. ‘I have seen what you can do with the sword you have brought,’ he said gently, ‘and I know what I can teach you if I choose to accept your offer of servitude. But I have other skills that are called upon at moments such as this. Come over here, therefore, and let us see if your wits are as sharp as your Toledo blade and as ready to study in Lord Burghley’s university at Cambridge as you suppose them to be.’

  As Tom spoke – and Ben obeyed – he turned away from the bed with its ghastly occupant and crossed to the ewer on which he had placed the messenger’s wallet. Because of the strength and weight of the straps attached to it, the wallet itself had been sitting high above the bowl. Out through the hole that had been clutched to the dying heart had trickled the last of the life’s blood pumped so strangely into it. The wallet was flat again, containing only one or so messages. As Ben and the rest, for that matter – crowded nearer, Tom opened the silver buckle and lifted the black flap wide.

  In went his fingers – steadily enough, all things considered – and out came the message like a mess of crushed blackcurrants between them. At first it seemed no more than a sodden little parcel, stabbed through the middle and soaking in blood.

  ‘A dead letter, in God’s truth,’ whispered Ben, simply awe-struck.

  ‘A letter indeed,’ agreed Tom. ‘A letter that, I believe, has cost the life of the boy who bore it. A letter of such import that cold, calculated murder has been done to stop it reaching its destination. A letter, therefore, of deadly pitch and moment, bearing within it life and death at the very least. But a letter from whom? And to whom? A letter saying what?’

  Three: The Silent Cry

  As Tom carried the dripping bundle across the room, his eyes and tongue were busy. ‘Ben! Take the ewer off the table so that I may put this down. It is parchment, but so damaged it is like to disintegrate before much longer.’ Tom laid the message on the little table and carried the whole thing over to the window where the light was brightest. He worked swiftly, for it was obvious to him that the blood was soaking into the parchment rapidly. A missive, from whomever to whomever, would be folded and refolded into the package he was studying. If he was swift – and only if he was swift – he might be able to open the sopping parchment and see what had been written upon it before the messenger’s blood obscured it all.

  The little tabletop was of ancient oak, close-grained and nearly impenetrable. Even as Tom automatically noticed this fact, so the next step became obvious to him. He lifted the sopping letter once more.

  ‘Kate, I will lift the package one last time. Put some cloth beneath it, if you please something that will soak away the blood. The cloth beside the fire...’

  Kate spread the thick cloth Tom used as a towel on the table and he put the letter gently down upon it. Immediately he began to unfold it, spreading out the parchment and trying to keep uppermost the side that had been written upon.

  Leaf by leaf he lifted the parchment back, flattening each fold and spreading out the whole like a crushed poppy. No sooner had he done this than he saw that there was a narrow column through the middle of the whole that remained untouched at the last. Here, and here alone, the writing remained clear. On all other sides the neat, firm hand ran away into the darkening thickness impenetrably, becoming utterly indecipherable on the instant. The last section of clarity seemed to have survived because of the way in which the parchment had been folded and, as Tom spread the letter out, so it formed a little ridge. ‘Ben, your sword,’ Tom called and Ben brought it with commendable promptness. Tom slid the fine Toledo blade up beneath the pale ridge, supporting it as the thick blood ran away.

  Tom stooped over the pale column with its endangered, spidery marks, his eyes busy.

  ‘I have a tablet here,’ said Ben at his shoulder. ‘Tell me what you see and I will set it down, so if the original is lost...’

  Tom could see the following, and this is what he told to Ben, who wrote it down as he had promised:

  grave

  o-one e

  erwatc

  nger. A

  ife, whi

  ood in

  nd men

  ound he

  een care

  e. I ha

  variou

  ansfer t

  w Year

  ies pas

  my deat

  n I may

  ed offic

  that yo

  opeful

  nd take

  of Elfin

  Help me

  Argare

  ess Cot

  ‘ “Help me”,’ said Tom again, the first words spoken after he had dictated to Ben what he could make out along the rapidly darkening ridge of parchment. Ben’s thought had been a good one. For no sooner had Tom repeated the only words in all the message that stood clear and unequivocal, than the fiery essences within the youthful liquor, cooling though they were, sped on up according to their nature and the little ridge was consumed with all the rest.

  ‘“Help me”,’ he repeated, his voice little more than a whisper as his mind sped away into the most abstruse of contemplation. He picked up the half-melted seal and looked at it in the strong afternoon light. “Help me”...’

  ‘Help who?’ asked Grimes.

  ‘And how?’ demanded Ben. ‘As you said, Master, we do not know who sent this cry for help. Or where they sent it from. We do not know for whom it was destined. Or where he is. And we have not the least idea what help is needed or must be offered.’

  ‘I am not your master yet, Ben. And even were I so, it is not my mastery of logic that you seek to learn. But it is logic that can aid us now, and it is here where I can prove my true mastery. For I do know the answers to all the questions that you have just posed.’

  ‘Ha!’ laughed Ben derisively, clearly believing Tom’s boast to be empty, and his reputation overstated after all.

  ‘Sergeant Grimes,’ said Kate immediately, ‘perhaps you had best withdraw. I would hate to see you take down the Master of Logic for witchcraft. For witchcraft’ – she swung on Ben, with a martial glint to her eye and a challenging edge to her voice – ‘witchcraft will it seem to those denser spirits close at hand who have never seen the Master of Logic at work.’

  ‘A thousand thanks, my love,’ said Tom, amused. ‘And you, Ben, keep your wits honed to see if you can follow where my logic leads, though it is not the logic of Aristotle, nor his Organon, so it may seem a trifle new-fangled to you and relatively worthless – like the plays of Will Shakespeare, for instance, when compared with those of Plautus, Aristophanes and Sophocles. But he fills The Theatre day after da
y; and I get the job done.’

  ‘Well,’ blustered Ben, ‘now that you mention it...’

  But the Master of Logic was in full flow now and Cicero himself could hardly have wedged in a word. ‘I knew before the boy died where he had come from, for there is only one livery in England comprising cats and mice, with silver nutmegs cast as buttons.

  ‘Who is he, therefore? He is a liveried servant come from Lord Outremer, or someone within His Lordship’s household; and that is the more likely, for My Lord is yet but a boy.

  ‘Whence has he come? From the country, by the manufacture of his footwear, and by horse, judging from the mud spattered on his fine white leggings. From Elfinstone, Lord Outremer’s castle in Kent, therefore – and that swiftly, because he has had neither inclination nor leisure to change out of his livery clothing. And he did not ride alone, for see, the right side of his clothing is more stained with mire than the left. Another rode beside him to guide and protect him, may-hap, almost to the last.’

  ‘But whither was he bound?’

  Tom stood up at that and looked around them. ‘Ben, where else in Black Friars might you have been visiting when you came to call this afternoon?’

  ‘The haberdashery below,’ answered Ben readily enough, adapting to the Socratic method familiar from his schooling at Westminster of teaching through question and answer.

  ‘A happy thought,’ admitted Tom. ‘Except, you see, that the boy carries nothing but his message-wallet. He is fully dressed in the uniform of his lord and master and wants no fripperies or fancies – which he cannot buy in any case. Not Aske’s the Haberdasher’s then. Where else?’