by Peter Tonkin
***
The inn was spacious enough upstairs, and largely unoccupied. Tom paid extra so that Ben could have his own room, and he therefore slept alone – as did St Just. Apart from the room housing the Churt family – there were other children apart from those who served below – there were three more unoccupied. This was the Portsmouth road, after all; and the Castle might be expected to entertain more than the Lady Margaret on her twice-yearly ventures into the distant depths of Cornwall.
Alone at last, Tom stripped off his doublet and unbuckled his sword. In his shirt and galligaskin trousers he stooped over the bowl of water by his bed and washed. Face free of the grease of his dinner, he sat and removed his boots, considering for a moment whether to summon one of the landlord’s daughters to complete the task for him. Then he washed his hands again and stood, stretching his weary body until all the joints between his long bones cracked and popped.
Then he caught up the saddle-bags he had packed before leaving London and put them on the little table beside the single candle that gave all the light he had, and opened them. Out of the depths of one he took the two deadly little dags the late Will Green had tried to use on St Just. Out of the other he took powder and shot. ‘Your swords and daggers were hardly worth the salvaging, Will Green,’ he said quietly as he worked. ‘But these dags are another matter entirely. Now, once we are armed, we must watch and wait. For poor Ben is not quite quick enough of study yet to keep pace with his master...’
So saying, Tom closed his lips, but his mind ran on, picking his logic out thus: keeping St Just clear of the constable’s investigation would do more than just pile coals of gratitude on his head and would make the risk of stoking up a wish for revenge in him worthwhile. For if kept clear enough of everything arising from the unexpected attack, St Just might well proceed with anything else he had planned to do between here and Castle Cotehel.
Tom had only the vaguest idea at the moment what such a thing might be, but he believed that he had arranged matters this evening so that all he would have to do to learn more of the arrogant puppy’s plans was to watch the man. And wait.
As he always did at this time of his day, he cleared his mind of everything worldly then; and he knelt by his bed in the darkness and prayed – prayed until a balance was struck between the peace he was ever seeking and the wild galloping of the events he was riding to their terrible conclusions.
***
Tom turned over on his bed, alerted by a slight scrape of movement. His eyes were wide already.
A gleam of light. A candle passing outside his bedroom door. No. Not passing. Pausing.
A breathless squeaking, like a secret mouse. The handle turned. The latch rose. The candle entered.
Above the dullish brightness of the rush-light flame shone the plump face of the landlord’s eldest daughter, but the unsteady brightness lent it a kind of glory, and the hair that fell free in gilded ringlets reached down to the shoulders of the simple shift.
The shift was greying and grubby, but Tom had no eyes for it or for the form that it contained. All his gaze was riveted on her face: golden ringlets, deep-blue eyes, turned-up nose and decided chin, each with a little dimple at its tip.
Perhaps, wondered his whirling mind, it was simple coincidence that this girl’s father looked a little like a highwayman after all; for on the sudden his daughter looked very like a countess. He tensed himself to move, but a hissing sound prevented him.
No!’ whispered St Just’s distinctive lisp from further down the corridor, urgently replacing the m’s he could not say with the n’s that he could. ‘Not there, Nargery. Here! Cun to ne here, ny lady...’
Fourteen: The Nag’s Head
Tom spent a restless night. Old Harry’s inn walls were not thick and the lady by no means of a silent disposition, in spite of her resemblance to the Silent Woman and the whispered commands of her lover; but, thought the Master of Logic, in the small hours when stillness settled at last everywhere but in the whirl of his racing mind, surely the man who cut apart the portrait that currently lay in his fencing room – unless Ugo Stell had moved it already – would bring the girl who looked so much like Lady Margaret to cries of terror and agony rather than to those of ecstasy?
And St Just knew her name, calling her Margery familiarly, which spoke of a longer association than a swift liaison just tonight. So: no pain for Mistress Margery then; and no revulsion in her either. For even with the candle cold and his eyes tight shut to boot, St Just’s face remained vivid enough to Tom, as it must to everyone else who saw it. But what did these things mean? Individually, they were hard enough to fathom. Taken together, they represented a knot of truly Gordian complexity.
***
Sleepless in any case, and fired by that immense energy that possessed his body sometimes when his mind was all awhirl, Tom was up with the chambermaids in the predawn dark. He roused Ben well before sunrise and they set off with scarcely more than a crust and a tankard to sustain them. Off they trotted through a chilly, ghostly greyness on the road to Winchester with Tom at once deep in thought. He was still trying to balance the probabilities that the man who lusted after Lady Margaret and had spied upon her and cut her mysterious portrait could also be the terribly disfigured man who desired her so much that he slept with servants who resembled her; but he could see no immediate solution to the conundrum and so he turned his attention to other matters.
‘We have made a good start,’ he said to Ben.
‘Aye.’ Ben was clearly not at his best first thing. Or he was disgruntled by the whirlwind speed of their departure.
‘But there were only the two of us. Captain Quin would find it much more of a challenge to get the Lady Margaret’s entourage upon the road. Even were the Lady herself up betimes and ready, as I suspect would be the case, there would be the others to move, half of them in one place, subject to the Archbishop’s courtesy or My Lord of Farnham’s, while the rest of them were in at least one inn. There would have to be meetings, agreements, people setting forth early; people left behind...’
‘Indeed. A man with any wit about him could come and go at his leisure and yet seem to be one of the group.’
‘You have hit my thoughts aright, Ben. And that’s allowing there may be others, like St Just per exemplum, who have actually arranged to be despatched about some business alone in any case – with or without the distractions of what must already be a more than usually violent passage. And the logic of the whole is rounded out by St Just’s invisibility this morning.’
‘Has he gone, master?’
‘I could find no trace of him, though I did not put the whole of the landlord’s brood to the question. Certainly, his room was empty and his horse is gone.’
‘Then if he has gone, let us hope that he is not alone. I would wish One-Eyed Jack Sleaford well away from our path into the bargain, lest he decide to revenge Will Green that you slew yestere’en.’
‘Marry, well thought on! But truth to tell, Ben, footpads and highwaymen are not noted for their early habits. We are not likely to see this Sleaford unless we accidentally ride over whatever ditch or kennel contains his bed.’
As the light gathered behind them and the low mist boiled away before them, they cantered easily side by side along the road, which led them past Alton and Alresford as they talked.
Tom established swiftly enough that Ben had slept through last night’s liaison like the veriest babe and had no notion at all of St Just’s affair or of its possible implications; but the slumber seemed to have cleared his companion’s mind, for, as he came fully awake it became clear that he had taken strides forward in his attempt at mastering logic in the ways that, until now, had been peculiar to Tom. Their morning’s conversation, covering more than three hours, which measured out another full day’s travelling for Lady Margaret, turned around Robert Poley and his possible interest in the affair.
For it seemed to Tom that if such a man as Poley was taking such an interest in such a matter as the
attempts of a sin-worm to play peeping Tom with Lady Margaret, then there might indeed be wider political significances that were almost impossible to fathom. Ben was quick to catch on to Tom’s thinking, revealing as he did so an unexpected political acuity – and that, thought Tom, even before the extraordinary bricklayer knew that the Countess’s son the Baron had been fathered in a rape by the Earl of Essex himself. It was a truth he had shared with as few people as possible – Poley, Kate, Law, and Will Shakespeare, who had been there when he had revealed the truth of the matter more than a year since after his miraculous escape from the Earl’s black plans at Elfinstone. For it was a truth that put at risk the lives of all who knew it and would continue to do so while the Earl remained above ground.
Over and over the matter they went, through and through what little Tom knew of Poley’s past, associations and likely preoccupations now; round and round and round the Earl of Essex and his equally sinister plans, but never naming His Grace at all, of course.
Yet the more they explored the wilder reaches of probability, where the strands of this great web of possibility and speculation were few and far between, the more Tom felt the urge to share that vital nugget with his suddenly insightful friend. For as it was with Will Shakespeare, so it was with Ben Jonson. Tom felt the Master of Logic within his racing mind raised to a higher plane as they speculated together along all the weary miles to Winchester.
They came into the city at noon, and followed the joyous sound of the bells through the heaving bustle towards the cathedral itself, for it was Good Friday and there were services all day; but Tom at least was not moved by religious prompting. For hard by the cathedral stood the inn owned by Talbot Law, Bailiff to the Bishop of Winchester, and resident of the Clink in Southwark. And that inn, the Nag’s Head, foundation of Talbot’s fortune and of his current standing in the Bishop’s high regard, was run by his wife Bess.
Tom had never been to the place before and had rather imagined that it would be a small establishment crouching under the walls of the cathedral like a dwarf under the protection of a giant. The only thing he had known for certain about the place, other than that Talbot owned it and Bess ran it, was that its cages in the yard out back were the strongest and most reliable prison in the city. Relied upon by everyone from the local Justice to the cathedral court, that gaol had brought the man who built and ran it to His Reverend Lordship’s personal notice; and the rest had been history.
But the place was huge. Three times as big at least as The Harry at Farnham, which had housed them last night, it filled the side of the cathedral square, seemingly half as big as the ancient church itself. Bright young ostlers took their horses at the door and led the tired nags through the arch to the stable yard. A promising tapster greeted the new guests and led them through into the main bar – though it was clear that this was but the largest room of many available on the ground floor alone; and tall though he was, Tom never even considered stooping as he strode through the massive doorway. Then he stopped, head and shoulders above the heaving crowd, struck by a simple possibility that had simply not occurred either to himself, or, seemingly, to the establishment’s absentee landlord: If Lady Margaret’s entourage had stayed in Winchester two nights since, then they must have stayed here with Bess Law.
‘Tom Musgrave! Is it yourself, lad?’ she carolled as he caught her eye across the bustle of her huge establishment. ‘My, you’ve hardly changed at all.’ A moment later he was swept into her considerable embraces and, for all his worldly experience, he felt very much the boy again as he bent his cheek to a smacking kiss and handed over Talbot’s letter.
‘Bess,’ he said, as she released him. ‘But this place is huge. And such a bustle! I had no idea. Talbot – ’
‘Ha! ‘Tis busier than usual, for this week end we have visitors from all over come almost on pilgrimage to the cathedral for the Easter worship. The Old New Year is due within the week. The whole of Winchester fills at this season with everyone south of London that cannot get to Canterbury. The best and the worst of them cheek by jowl here and in the cathedral – and all stations in between.
‘But that scapegrace husband of mine visits only when the moon is blue.’ Her voice was easy and indulgent. ‘Has he many mistresses, or does he just pluck a goose from among the Winchester geese he protects for My Lord Bishop?’
‘No!’ Tom was honestly shocked: Talbot Law was everything he understood of steady faithfulness. He had never seen him look at another woman.
‘Winchester geese is what we call the whores in Southwark that my husband guards as Bishop’s Bailiff,’ Bess explained to Ben. ‘But Tom, tell me, who is this fine figure of a man? Not your apprentice surely, though I see he is armed almost as well as you...’ Her eyes fell roguishly below Ben’s belt and his face turned to brick as he realized she might not be talking simply of his long Toledo blade.
***
‘Aye, Lady Margaret was here two nights since. And she stayed here herself, for a wonder.’ The three of them sat in a private room away from the bustle of the Nag’s Head’s public areas. The table before them was piled with fish in a gluttonously tempting range of states – spitted, roast, baked, boiled, jellied, marinated and raw; in pottages and pies, in stews and on trenchers. The only inedible thing on the board was Bess’s huge chatelaine of keys – for she was mistress of every door in the place, including those of the cages and gyves outside. As she spoke, Bess watched with motherly amusement while young Ben did his best to eat her out of house and home; but it was on Tom she focused her fearsome insight.
‘The Bishop usually entertains Lady Margaret himself, but Easter has fallen badly for that this year. And so she stayed in my best chamber, with that Agnes Danforth, the housekeeper, close by. Which put Captain Polrudden Quin out of sorts, of course. He likes the best for himself and is full of lordly airs – when My Lady is not there to eclipse him. And then, when that stupid Percy Gawdy got into a fight and killed his man, Quin was happy to go off and leave him here locked in my cage at the back! But that’s Captain Polrudden for you: always cheered by another’s misfortune. Left young Doctor Rowley to watch and report.’
‘So you’ve one of Lady Margaret’s servants caged at the back awaiting trial for what? Manslaughter?’
‘Murder. And waiting? No, we do things quicker than that in Winchester! He was tried yesterday and will be punished today.’
‘Hanged?’ asked Ben, awed. ‘You said murder...’
‘Not for certain, no. He’s the son of a vicar, so he claimed benefit of clergy. Cost him something to do so, for his father was a famous martyr – burned at the stake at the Rochester assizes in the last year of the boy Edward’s reign. The child was still in its mother’s womb at the time, but he can still claim benefit now, so they say. The Bishop’s court sat yesterday and that was that.’
‘Benefit of clergy?’ said Ben thoughtfully. But Tom was not to be distracted by legal quibbles.
‘What was the manner of this murder?’ he asked, feeling that here indeed was a most unusually violent passage from Elfinstone to Cotehel, with four dead men clustered around it already.
‘A tavern brawl. A dispute over the reckoning or some such. No more, from what I can see. Not in my tavern, thank the Lord. Gawdy and Rowley both had crept out from under their mistress’s eye down to The Tun. A haunt of thieves and whores, if you ask me; and that’s what they found there – found thieves where they sought whores, like as not. And, Doctor Rowley says, a crooked game: one of the Green brothers – little more than footpads at the best and wanted men over the border in Surrey, so I’m told. Hot words became hasty blows and by all accounts Gawdy was lucky that Lean Green was drunk. And that was that. News of the matter came to Captain Quin. He may have discussed it with Mistress Danforth, for they are as thick as thieves, all Mistress Agnes this and Captain Polrudden that. But I doubt they told Lady Margaret. They moved her on in the morning and none the wiser, leaving the doctor as I say.’
‘If they would not report
to Lady Margaret,’ said Ben quite scandalized, ‘then surely they must tell the young Baron? They are his servants, after all, and owe him allegiance as any knight unto his liege.’
‘Describe these people to me,’ requested Tom, deep in thought, still refusing to be distracted.
‘Ye can meet a brace of them in less than a moment – three if ye want to see Lean Green’s corpse, for it lies in my store-shed awaiting a pauper’s grave.’
‘Aye, but before I do meet them, tell me: the murderer in your cage...’
‘Percy Gawdy, My Lady’s Secretary.’
‘A university man?’
‘Perhaps. Clever enough – and bachelor enough even given his age. But no mention of a Bachelor of Arts. Secretary to great houses before this. Secretary to the previous Lord of Cotehel, I believe – to the Baron Cotehel, whom Talbot says you killed at Elfinstone a brace of years ago. He speaks fondly of Southampton House and knows your friend Will Shakespeare.’
‘Hum,’ said Tom noncommittally. ‘I will weigh the implications of that in due course. And the other man I may meet on the instant?’
‘The young Baron’s tutor, Ezekiel Rowley, Doctor of Philosophy, graduate – as he is fond of pointing out – of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. A steady, reliable man in my opinion, if more thoroughly churched than the vicar’s son. Certainly a man I would be content to leave standing guard over Percy Gawdy until execution of his sentence.’
‘Well,’ said Tom, who clearly found himself with more to weigh in this plethora of information, ‘let us glance briefly at the others. We have met St Just.’
‘Poor lad. Did ye ever see such beauty so terribly defaced? But he was not here with the rest of them this time.’
‘No. He was with us at Farnham, and we have lost sight of him since. But these other two: Agnes Danforth and Polrudden Quin.’
What Bess would have revealed about these two died stillborn on her lips, for no sooner had the names been said than a vigorous, muscular man came in through the doorway unannounced. ‘Mistress Law,’ he said with a forceful, educated accent that told Tom at least that this was Dr Rowley, ‘they’ve come for Percy Gawdy.’
