by Peter Tonkin
‘What other shops stand nearby?’
‘None of any note, unless he was bound down Water Lane to buy a pitcher of water. With no money...’
‘And no pitcher, come to that,’ observed Kate dryly.
‘Mayhap he was passing through,’ suggested Grimes, entering into the spirit of the thing. ‘He could get a wherry down at the water steps.’
‘And where would a wherry take a penniless lad? Especially one dressed in such finery?’
‘I know where the wherryman would be likely to tell him to go,’ said Ben.
‘Precisely,’ said Tom.
‘But who’s to say the ruffians that attacked him did not take his purse? He might have been well supplied with angels and all of them gone to Alsatia or Damnation Alley, or Islington...’ Grimes stopped as Ben caught his eye. There were worse places than the brickworks in Islington, nevertheless.
‘No,’ said Tom decisively. ‘His clothing is of ancient design. I see no pockets in it. There would be a purse fastened to his belt were he carrying one, and the loops and thongs that held it would still be obvious, even had the purse itself been cut away.’
‘But then,’ said Kate, ‘on the other hand, who would let a boy out in London bearing nothing but a message, carrying not a penny piece for safety’s sake?’
‘Someone close by who has told him where to come and expects him soon to return. The man that rode up with him from Elfinstone.’
‘Why, then,’ said Ben, ‘we can test your mastery in your logical art. If I have inferred correctly from what you have been saying, you suppose that the boy, like myself, must have been bound hither. Sent from who-knows-where? – this Elfinstone, you aver – but sent to see you. If that is true, then the man that sent him must come hammering on your door as soon as he realizes the boy has not returned as planned.’
‘Good! Wrong, I believe, but good. Well reasoned.’
‘If I have reasoned so well,’ huffed Ben, ‘how is it that I am wrong?’
‘Because you have not included in your reasoning one small but vital element which, to be fair, we have not discussed at length. It is this: the gang of footpads who attacked the boy was led by a man – the man with the foreign dagger, as like as not. A slim, strong, sharp-bladed weapon, of no English manufacture that I have seen. That man immediately reported to another man down in Water Lane. The footpads were employed, therefore, and this was no random attack on an unwary yokel lost in the dangerous city. These footpads sought him out and attacked him because they had been employed to stop the message getting to me. And if they could not stop the message they were employed to stop the messenger – as they have done, and so their leader reported, to their employer, the cloaked and masked stranger with the unusual pistol whom I saw.’
‘Well...’ allowed Ben, still not despairing of his own thesis.
‘It would only be worth stopping the young messenger at such a price if the other man was also stopped – distracted, perhaps, if the boy were to be slowed, but stopped, as the boy has been stopped in such a final manner. Therefore, the next man to come knocking at my door is not likely to be looking for the dead boy, or even for myself.’
‘Who, then?’
‘Why, for the Sergeant of the Watch, here, to report another murder done.’
So saying, Tom turned to the letter once again. Then, seeing that the last of the writing was lost beneath the tide of heart’s blood, he fell back on Ben’s transcription.
‘As my would-be apprentice has observed, the letter is likely for me,’ he began, once more the Master of Logic addressing his apprentice tutorial. ‘The first word, then, may be expanded from "grave" to "Musgrave". And, as I am sure the seal will confirm when we have the leisure to test it all, the last words are the name of the only person in the household of the young Lord Outremer who might call on me for help – to wit, the Lady Margaret, Countess Cotehel, from whom the messenger said he came...’
‘Hell – he said he came from Hell...’ Ben was beginning to understand the power that the Master of Logic could wield when he chose to do so.
‘It is the Lady Margaret who requests my help; and there is no great wonder in that...’
‘Tom rescued her from a terrible fate,’ supplied Kate, her voice carefully neutral. ‘He saved her from rapine when she was scarce more than a girl. He came to rescue her from a mad room in the great house of Wormwood in Jewry where she had been locked because she could no longer speak, after giving birth to the child born of the rape. He saved her when she was ravished away to be hunted to some terrible fate by men who killed all her family except for her son and hoped to steal their inheritance. Finally, he saved that inheritance and revenged her wrongs and left her mistress of one of the richest estates in the land.’
‘And she is elderly and ugly, is she, this heiress from a tale of fairies worthy of Master Shagsberd himself?’ probed Ben.
‘Neither,’ snapped Kate.
‘Scarred by her experiences so that only a blind man would look on her?’
‘Not a mark on her that I have seen.’ Kate’s eye fell on Tom, and it was burning.
Nor I,’ he admitted, and Kate and he both knew that Tom had seen all of the Lady Margaret that there was to see.
‘A drivelling Bedlamite, perhaps, maddened beyond recovery by the horrors that have come so close to her?’
‘Save that she remains forever silent,’ admitted Kate, ‘she is perfect. Perfect in mind and body and fortune.’
‘You have some greatness of spirit,’ Ben assured her, sounding mildly surprised, ‘though you are coloured like the veriest shrew and seem to be compounded of all the shrewish humours.’
‘What...’
‘I speak but of nature, lady. I do not seek to insult you; indeed, I sought to make a compliment, for greatness of spirit is rare in your sex. But you have, you must admit, the reddest of hair and the greenest of eyes – signals both of shrewishness at the very least, and witchcraft, indeed, in some learned authorities...’
‘Let us agree, then,’ said Tom swiftly, ‘that this is indeed a cry for help from a silent woman.’
Even this intervention would hardly have saved Ben’s plump cheeks from Kate’s sharp claws. But then someone started beating on the door downstairs and calling for the Watch.
Four: Dark Waters
‘You found him?’ asked Tom, looking down at the lad who guarded the wherry at the Black Friars steps.
The lad nodded.
Tom looked down into the thick, brown water where the second body bobbed, face-down, half-awash, with scum and detritus piling up on the upriver part of him, as though he had actually been the mudbank he so nearly resembled.
Tom crouched, reaching out to clasp the mooring post that made a little bay with the side of the steps into which the body had washed and where it floated now, amongst the other rubbish discarded into the Thames. From the thrust of the steps here it was possible to see upriver past the out-wash of the Fleet Ditch and the footings of Bridewell.
The colour and odour of the water at his feet told Tom of the tide falling away downstream beyond London Bridge, and of the current here picking up speed and sucking stuff out of the open sewer of the Fleet Ditch that could have lain bottled there for hours; and that was where the body had come from, for the whole north bank was walled upstream, past Arundel House, Somerset House and the Savoy. Water Lane, Strand Lane and Ivy Bridge Lane were the only openings other than the wherry steps, except for the Fleet Ditch, between the Savoy and London Bridge itself.
Only the Fleet lay upstream of here, and it was plain to Tom that the corpse had come downstream, following the north bank to this place. A glance over his shoulder downriver towards the Bridge proved that, for the water was falling swiftly down there, seemingly being bodily sucked into the great waterwheels in its bankside arches. If the body had moved for an instant downstream from the little isthmus of these steps, it must have been swept away into the pounding maelstrom down there.
It must have come from upstream th
en, decided Tom with settled certainty. It must have come recently, for it had gathered so little detritus as yet; and the boy, silent now, seemed to have been quick enough in reporting his discovery.
The Fleet Ditch was the likeliest place for this second corpse to have entered the Thames, therefore, and Tom knew it from all-too-close acquaintance; and he knew that it would be easy enough to check his theory. He looked up past the frowning face of young Ben Jonson and caught Sergeant Grimes’s eye. ‘You can pull him out now, Sergeant,’ he said quietly.
One whiff of the deceased as he came up out of the thick, dark water was enough to confirm the matter of the Fleet Ditch for Tom, for the little river was nothing more than an open sewer these days. Any exposure to the filth that flowed in it left an odour that was as unmistakable as it was disgusting.
A good deal more than that was swiftly settled too: the man’s age – he was of middle years, with greying hair and a neat beard silvering at the jowls; his standing – he was a chamberlain or some such, for he wore a solid suit of well-made clothes and a golden ring cast with his master’s signet, of cats and mice; his origin – the dark cloth was brocaded with a pattern of cats and mice, his buttons were silver nutmegs.
‘Much better suited to this dark cloth than the daffodil-yellow up in your lodgings, master,’ said Ben, his voice uncharacteristically awed.
‘He has attained his respectable darkness by service and seniority,’ observed Tom, reaching down to pull back a flap of imposing over-robe to reveal the dead man’s chest. He, too, wore a message-pouch. Ben reached down towards it but Tom prevented him. ‘It will be empty, Ben. It likely carried the twin of the message in my room; and the man that employed the murderers holds it now, of course.’
‘The same man?’
‘And the same murderers,’ said Tom. ‘The same knife, at least, for look how precisely the throat has been slit. I have seen barber surgeons less neat with their finest razors.’
‘They took his purse,’ observed Ben. ‘Look. It is exactly as you said it would be: the loops are left dangling from his belt. But if they took his purse, and, indeed, his message, why leave his ring?’
‘Time and priorities, perhaps. The message would be first – particularly if their employer wanted to read it – for, as with our boy, there would have been a deal of blood. Then the purse in a twinkling – extra payment for a job well done, as like as not. And then the ring...but you see how advancing age had thickened his knuckles. What went on easily some time ago will not come off so swiftly now. Men in too much of a hurry to linger over the lopping of a finger – even though they had sharp tools to hand; and, perhaps, men who knew that it would be risky to try and sell a ring bearing Lord Outremer’s arms when two of His Lordship’s servants lie dead and a hue and cry may be called.’
‘So, you will call a hue and cry, will you, young Tom?’ came a familiar voice, dryly mocking, but affectionate for all that.
Tom looked up, and there in the middle of the crowd beneath the archway stood an old friend – the very friend of all others that Tom most wanted, but least expected, to see. ‘Hello, old Law,’ he answered, rising. ‘What are you doing over the water and out of your bailiwick?’
Talbot Law, Bailiff to the Bishop of Westminster and principal law officer on the Bishop’s lands south of the river, stood aside to reveal Captain Curberry, his local equivalent. ‘Since the matter of the heads on London Bridge which fell into both our bailiwicks, literally as well as figuratively, you will recall,’ said Talbot, ‘Captain Curberry and I meet regularly. But I return your enquiry with my own. If you are here, where is the trusty Ugo Stell that bears you company at all times?’
‘He has moved down to Bleeke House,’ answered Tom. ‘Still pursuing the fair and fortunate Mistress Van Der Leyden. I do not see him from one week’s end to the next. But it is good news that you come north of the river on occasions...’
‘As today, for instance,’ said Curberry, interrupting the two old friends. ‘What’s amiss here?’
‘Well...’ began Tom.
‘Two men murdered,’ interrupted Ben officiously.
‘Sergeant?’ Curberry swept the interloper aside and turned to his own professional. Grimes folded his face into a slow and thoughtful frown. ‘We-e-ell...’ he began.
Tom caught Talbot Law’s eye. An infinitesimal gesture of the head and the two companions of the Nijmagen campaigns, who had fought across Flanders five years before Ben arrived, and fought other, darker battles since, moved silently, side by side. Down into the wherry they stepped, unnoticed by everyone except Ben. His entry into the little vessel, hard upon their heels and a great deal less subtle than theirs, came near to upsetting the little wherry, and would have called their departure to Curberry’s notice had he not been wrestling with the Gordian Knot of Sergeant Grimes’s slow report.
At Tom’s terse order, the boy began to guide the wherry up against the current and into the mouth of the Fleet. The little river was narrow, its waters shallow and thick. Soon Ben and the boy were pushing the little overladen vessel up the foetid stream by using the oars as poles. Tom crouched in the bow, apparently oblivious to the rancid stench, his eyes busy.
‘You suppose him to have been cast in here?’ asked Talbot at his shoulder, looking up at the low wall to their right that backed a series of gardens overlooked from their left by the towering garrets of Bridewell.
‘Yes,’ said Tom briefly. Then he began to expand upon his reasoning a little, glad to have his old friend securely at his side again. ‘He is unlikely to have been killed in a public place. The footpads that killed the boy outside my school were driven to it by desperation. No swift slice on a busy street and heave over the side of the Fleet Bridge, therefore. No. A swift quietus here, in one of the houses or gardens on our right is much more likely.
But slit throats make swift messes, so on the bank and the wall above it, in the garden and mayhap even in the house where it was done there will be...Ah!’ He pointed. Something gleamed like rubies even in the shadow cast by Bridewell.
Talbot’s hand clapped down on his shoulder. ‘Witchcraft,’ opined the Bishop’s Bailiff almost silently.
Then, at Tom’s command, Ben and the wherry boy guided their cockleshell vessel over to the bright red slick that slithered vividly down from wall-top to mud-slide to water’s edge.
The wherry carried a mooring rope and a grappling hook as well as oars and boat hook, so it was only the work of a moment to secure a passage up over the stinking mud and the low but solid wall above it. Then, with Tom in the lead, the three went hand over hand up beside the trail of blood. Tom topped the wall and looked around a derelict and overgrown plot. Once, he guessed, this had been the herb garden for the cooks and physicians of the Black Friars in whose dissolved Dominican priory he now lived and worked. Many of the buildings from the top of Water Lane up to Lud Gate itself had been part of the religious complex for which the whole area was now named. Many of the buildings were finding new tenancies – as with the building he shared with Aske the Haberdasher. Others, like this one it seemed, were falling into ruin through neglect. Like the garden, the building was unkempt, overgrown, apparently derelict.
With these thoughts in mind, Tom leaped easily over the wall and landed in a fragrant area full of springing rosemary and sage. A bay tree stood a few yards down on his left, and his nose alerted him to the fact that he had landed on a patch of early-flowering garlic; but none of the sensuous beauty around him could tempt him from the path he was following. All through the garden, on stem and blossom, on leaves and the ground beneath them were splattered gouts of blood.
Tom began to follow this trail at once, dimly aware of Talbot and Ben in turn following him. What struck him as he moved through the little wasteland was the speed at which the body must have been carried – dragged here and there, as attested by broken branches and lines through grass and mud made by dragging boot-heels, but carried for the most part, by two men – one on each arm to begin with, then,
later, less handily, one at each end, the one with the legs almost literally rushed off his feet.
Tom thought again of the ring, which a moment or two more work with that razor-edged dagger would have secured. It all bespoke a monstrous haste, he thought again. As he neared the back of the house, therefore, he paused and looked up to try to work out what the murderers might have seen to hurry them along. And he saw at once: the east-facing windows of Bridewell. Even now, figures came and went, some pausing to look out and to wave – prostitutes for the most part, locked away for plying their trade but using the windows to keep their hand in against their release. Thinking of Kate, whom he had first met in Bridewell, half-stripped and ready to be whipped in – disguised as a bawd while she sought to contact a prisoner in the deep dungeons there –Tom smiled and waved back, much to the disgust of Talbot and an unsuspectedly prudish Ben.
Then he turned, thinking further, If the murder was done in a derelict house, then why not leave the body there?
No sooner had the thought come than Talbot at his shoulder gave it words: ‘Why risk dumping the corpse? It could lie in this place undiscovered till Doomsday by the looks of things.’
‘Only time will tell,’ said Tom quietly. ‘Time and a little practice of the Black Arts.’
Behind him, Tom heard Ben suck in his breath with shock at this apparent blasphemy. ‘Fear not, young Ben,’ he said, in much the same tone as Talbot Law used when addressing him; ‘I speak in thieves’ cant – of lock-picking, not Devil-worship.’ So saying, he slid out one of his long Solingen daggers and slid it into the lock in the ancient door against which they were crowding. The lock was of the same vintage as the door itself and that had likely been fashioned when a Plantagenet was king. It yielded now as rapidly and completely as most of the women overlooking their break-in from the windows of Bridewell would have done.
The door led into a low room, wide and brick-floored – a kitchen, judging by the brick-built hearth against the side wall. In the middle of the room stood a plain table with a scattering of utensils, overturned for the most part, and some seats in like condition scattered on the floor – the whole bespeaking a quiet, friendly meal between several friends disturbed by sudden and violent action. Violent, for certain, because the tabletop and floor to the door were covered with dark, dry stains. The room stank of an iron sweetness all too familiar to Tom from the incidents of the heads upon London Bridge.
