by Peter Tonkin
Fifteen: Justice
Without a further word the three men followed Bess out into the stable yard. Here a group of officers from the church court were waiting outside the cage door. The cage was a little lean-to, built against the back wall of the inn. It was waterproof and looked windproof as well – much more substantial than was the common run of such structures, thought Tom, betraying an unexpected humanity, an unheard-of consideration for the comfort of the occupants. For the structure itself did not need to be particularly strong. Everyone within it was restrained by heavy gyves of metal fastened at ankle and wrist, then chained to bolts driven into the straw-covered floor.
So it was in this case. The grim-faced murderer sat on a bench and blinked around them as Bess unlocked his chains. At first, all that could be seen of him, indeed, was his eyes, for they were large and strangely luminous, almost seeming to shine amongst the shadows. Secretary he might be – well-educated vicar’s son and confidant to the Earl of Southampton, friend alike to Will Shakespeare and the Earl of Essex – but, observed Tom, here was a frightened man, fighting to stay calm in the face of death.
‘Doctor Rowley, what will they do to me?’ he croaked as the court officials pulled him up. Though slight and youthful-looking, he must be the better part of forty years in age, thought Tom.
‘They have you for murder, Percy. Witnesses gave affidavits and the recorder wrote them down. Murder most foul.’
‘My letters to the Earls?’
‘Can hardly have been delivered yet, let alone answered.’
‘Then I am helpless and friendless here. What will they do to me?’
Tom observed the tutor’s demeanour with interest. After the first dry-throated rasp, his voice had settled, steadied. His conversation with Rowley had an almost disturbing calm about it. There was hardly even a tremble as the second part of the question was addressed to the stolid, silent officers, rather than to Dr Rowley.
The latter, apparently not counted among his friends and helpers, nevertheless went at Gawdy’s shoulder out into the yard, then through the arch and across into the cathedral square. Tom and Ben followed. Tom at least was drawn by the coil that the conversations and what they had left unsaid had started in his brain. Ben, no doubt, with his love of violence, was drawn by baser things.
Lean Green, thought Tom, as he shouldered through the crowd between Bess and Ben, a wanted man across the border. And he himself had killed a Green last night: Will Green, a wanted man across the border in Farnham, Surrey. But the writ of the Surrey justice did not run here in Hampshire, where the Green brothers had thought themselves safe – the Green brothers and, no doubt, their leader, high lawyer, upright man and captain, One-Eyed Jack Sleaford.
The apparitors, or officers, led Gawdy steadily across the square to the platform beside the cathedral upon which stood the parish gallows. There was nothing strange that it should stand here. Beside St Paul’s Cathedral in London stood stocks, pillory, cage, whipping-post and gallows all together; and all of them were rarely untenanted. It was fitting that those about their holy business there should observe the fate of those who had fallen from grace.
From the mid part of the gallows depended a noose that swung gently in the breeze – a breath not of Heaven, mused Tom, but born of the babbling bellow of the crowd. Noon service being done, the square would be alive with all-comers without the promise of public justice. Now it was packed and heaving. ‘Look to your purse,’ said Tom to Ben; ‘and to your back,’ he added, catching sight, out of the very corner of his eye, of a face with an eye-patch.
As gaoler, if not executioner, Bess got best view as of right. She had guarded the souls who came hither; it was fitting she see them despatched. In a voice as dulcet as that which had warned Ben beware, Tom asked Bess, ‘Is there nothing we can do to spare him?’
She shrugged.
‘I killed his brother Will last night on the Downs above Farnham,’ he persisted. ‘And there is no dancing on the trining cheats for me.’
‘Farnham’s a foreign country to us,’ said Bess. ‘There’s no hope for the fiery Percy in what you did over there. But rest you calm, Tom, for I doubt your man Gawdy will dance on the gallows either. There’s no executions allowed in a church court: they have to call for a Justice even to burn a witch. God knows who they had to call for permission to burn his father forty years and some ago.’
Bess, Tom and Ben stopped at the foot of the gallows steps, Tom in the lead, his foot upon the first one. Dr Rowley mounted a pair of them before the apparitors gestured him to stop and led the condemned man upwards. In truth he would hardly have proceeded in any case, for there stood at the top of the steps a fearsome individual. Naked above his black tights and old-fashioned breeches secured by a great thick belt, except for the black mask over his face, the executioner waited for Gawdy.
Still with back straight and head held high, the man stepped up to meet his fate. As the executioner’s hands fastened on him, he turned and looked down at Dr Rowley. His strange eyes were distant, far removed from the horror of this place and predicament. ‘How will you report this, Ezekiel?’ he whispered, ‘to Lord Robert and to Master Lane?’
Tom strained to hear the enigmatic conversation above the bellow of the crowd.
‘I will tell them what I must,’ answered Rowley, also in a frightened whisper. ‘Enough to keep them from suspecting.’
The young man nodded once and the executioner led him to the midst of the platform, just beneath the swinging noose. Here he gave charge of his unresisting arms back to the grim apparitors and turned. He pulled into sight a solid table with a big metal crucible held in a stand upon it. Even in the brightness of the sunny spring midday, the crucible shone bright red.
‘Kneel,’ he said to Gawdy, but the secretary was so confused by this unexpected turn of events that the apparitors had to force him to his knees. ‘Put out your left hand...’ Again, the apparitors moved the unresisting limbs and the executioner fastened the wrist down with a steel gyve.
The Clerk to the Court and recorder of the church court stepped forward then and read the ruling about to be executed here.
‘Percival Gawdy, son of the Reverend Matthew Gawdy, late of Wouldham in the County of Kent, resident of Castle Cotehel in the County of Cornwall, servant to the Baron Cotehel, you are adjudged guilty by the court of My Lord the Bishop of Winchester of the wilful murder of Absalom Green of this parish, known as Lean Green, upon the night of Wednesday, the twenty-second of March in the Year of Grace 1595, being the thirty-seventh year in the reign of our liege lord, Queen Elizabeth, Sovereign of England, Ireland, Wales and France, Defender of the Faith...’
‘Get on with it!’ bellowed a raucous voice, which begat a wave of rough agreement, which drowned out the rest of Her Majesty’s titles and degrees.
When things quietened, the Clerk was finishing the sentence. ‘It is the sentence of this court, therefore, that you be branded upon the ball of your left thumb with the letter “T”, by which sign all men may know that you have wilfully and illicitly taken a life. May God have mercy on your soul.’
In the stunned silence, the executioner pulled a red iron from the glowing crucible and pressed it into Percy Gawdy’s imprisoned hand. The spitting hiss the iron made seemed to trigger a bellow of outrage from some part of the crowd – which was fortunate, perhaps, for Percy, thought Tom, as it drowned the sound wrenched from him by the unexpectedly lively agony. So that Dr Rowley would never need to report them to Lady Margaret – were she in fact the object to whom Gawdy had despatched his apparently final message; but in fact it seemed that Rowley would not be reporting anything in great detail, for at the spitting hiss of the iron on flesh and the smoky stench of braising meat – which Tom could smell even here – the good doctor turned aside and vanished, retching, into the crowd. It was as well, thought Tom, that he was a Doctor of Philosophy and not of Physick.
In fact this thought was Tom’s last clear thought or observation for a while, because a sectio
n of the crowd suddenly broke into near-riot. Clearly either friends of the late Lean Green, or simple bystanders spurred on by frustration at missing out on a hanging, they set out to put matters right in the swiftest and most obvious fashion. As the fainting secretary was pushed staggering down the steps, the front few rows of the crowd nearest the gallows charged forward. Had there been anyone other than Ben, Tom and the redoubtable Bess there to meet them, rough justice would have been dealt out there and then; but as it was, things turned out a little differently.
Bess turned incredibly swiftly, pulling the chain of her chatelaine into her fist. With the huge bunch of metal keys on the end of it, the whole thing looked like a medieval mace in the hands of an English Joan of Arc. The first vicious swing came near to removing a nose, a jaw and an eye, each from a different rioter. The crowd hesitated.
Tom stepped on to the lowest step and gave himself room to snatch out both rapier and long, lean dagger. Ben, slower to liberate his Toledo steel, nevertheless had the wit to grab the nearest likely-looking weapon. It was a hod, but none of them had leisure to appreciate the irony of that. The heavy angle of boards topping a short, stout pole, designed to sit on a man’s shoulder as he carried bricks up and down ladders, made a worthy helpmeet to Bess’s mace, and that was good enough for all of them.
‘Should we stand and wait for help?’ called Bess.
Tom was tempted. He could see a goodly crowd of servants, tapsters and ostlers coming out of the Nag’s Head after their mistress; but he had counted without Ben’s blood-lust.
‘Stand?’ bellowed the apprentice. ‘Never! Attack or die, say I!’ And, as good as his word, off he went. Bess, perforce, went with him.
‘Bring Gawdy,’ called Tom to the apparitors. ‘We will see you safe to the inn.’
For a wonder, they obeyed. Half-carrying Percy, who was curled over the weighty agony of his hand like one of Bess’s best freshwater lobsters, the two apparitors nevertheless flourished their short-swords manfully – and the executioner, armed with a red-hot iron in each mighty fist, closed in behind them.
They were a suddenly considerable force, but still they were all but lost in the maw of the mob. All around, just beyond the circumference of the arc described by Tom’s glittering rapier, the disappointed citizens of Winchester bayed and howled. It was only a matter of time, thought the battle-hardened fencing-master, before someone came up with a pitchfork or a hook, or a scythe.
Before someone caught up a brick or a stone. Or a gun.
Cat-like, walking sideways, narrow-eyed and at battle-pitch, Tom moved. He knew what the men and woman moving beside him were doing almost by instinct. He could feel the will of the mob buffeting over him like a storm as the collection of men and women that made it up blew hot and cold. Did they want to start a slaughter? What revenges would be visited on them if they did? What justice would overtake them? Did they care?
‘Come on, ye coward villains,’ bellowed Ben in a voice that must have echoed in distant Islington, ‘let’s be having you. Do or die!’
‘Get them!’ came a strangulated shriek in answer. ‘Kill them all!’
Tom looked back to the source of the sound and there, upon the empty gallows, stood two figures, with a third on the steps just below them. The screeching voice belonged to the scrawny opponent from the Downs above Farnham last night, brother to the fat corpse behind The Harry, and to the Lean one behind the Nag – last of the brothers Green. At his shoulder, holding on to the noose to steady him as he gestured, stood One-Eyed Jack Sleaford. And on the steps below was the slouch-hatted, cloak-masked stranger Tom had last seen in the doorway of the fired house in Water Lane.
As Tom watched, helpless to do anything other than to force the retreat forward with all his might and main, the first missile sailed in from the back of the crowd to smash into an apparitor’s shoulder with crippling force; and as it did so, the cloaked figure pulled out and levelled the strange and dangerous-looking pistol Tom remembered all too clearly from their first meeting. The distance between them was not so great. Tom knew they were all within the killing range, but even so it seemed that the barrel of the pistol became unnaturally large as it was pointed straight at him. What had Will Shakespeare made the dying Mercutio say in his play of Romeo? As wide as a church door, as deep as a well...
When the shot came, Tom’s whole body flinched and it was an instant before the revelation came that he had not, in fact, been shot. He opened his eyes, thus discovering that he had shut them at the vital instant. The well-deep gun barrel and the masked man holding it were gone. Green the footpad was still there, but he was frozen with shock, looking at One-Eyed Jack Sleaford, who was held erect only because he had wound his arm through the noose to the shoulder. Across the suddenly silent crowd, the sound of the creaking rope came clearly as the highwayman swung slowly, turning until it became clear that he should be called No-Eyed Jack Sleaford – indeed, Half-Head Jack Sleaford.
Disturbingly similarly, suddenly, there on the edge of the crowd below Sleaford, Tom caught a glimpse of St Just. Then he was gone.
While over the sudden stirring of horse-hoofs close at hand came a coldly mocking, disturbingly familiar voice. ‘Can I find you at Elfinstone? Can I catch you at Croydon or Farnham – though the corpses told me I was coming close.
‘But the moment I discovered a riot under the walls of the cathedral in the very heart of Winchester on Good Friday, I knew exactly where you would be...’
Sixteen: Dead Mann’s Message
Tom watched Robert Poley narrow-eyed. He had expressed his thanks on his own behalf and those of the group that would have died, and had seen them shrugged away, even as the smoke from the powder lingered on the air above the stunned crowd.
He had watched as Poley discussed with the City Constable his right summarily to execute citizens engaged in the fomentation of riot, with the power and the authority of the Council and Court of Star Chamber. He had led him into the Nag’s Head and introduced him to Bess.
He had seen him pick at the last Lenten fare of the fish platter – what little had been left by Ben; had seen him watch with distant disapproval the tending of Gawdy’s branded thumb, the cause of the disturbance, by the green-faced Dr Rowley, recently reappeared.
Tom had watched all these things and waited for more. It was no coincidence that the spy-master had followed him – had sought him even at Elfinstone, indeed. As ever, Poley was up to some deep-laid stratagem of his own and Tom was content like a hunter in his hide to watch and wait to find out what it was; but he could not stop his mind from racing into speculation.
If Poley was here, then he had a need that Tom alone could meet. If Poley was passing through, then still, he had a matter he wanted Tom to clear up for him. Tom had left something undone in London or at Elfinstone. In London, most likely. Something undone, unobserved, overlooked. What could he have overlooked? Unless it was something more Poley had uncovered on closer inspection of the corpses Tom had left in his care.
The upper room in the Nag’s Head was private and silent, even though the window stood wide to admit the cooling breezes of the warm afternoon. The cathedral square below was still, swiftly and forcibly calmed by the city authorities – legal and clerical – none of whom wanted the faintest breath of civil disorder to disfigure Good Friday’s celebrations, or to put at risk the rich promise of the Easter Week end. Poley walked stiffly over to the window and looked across at the magnificence of the cathedral. The bells began to chime for afternoon services. He sucked in a great breath of spring-fresh air, in and in until the leather of his jerkin, pistol-belt and sword-swashes creaked. ‘We should be in there, praying for our very souls,’ he said, broodingly, ‘and for Queen, Council and Commonwealth.’
‘We should,’ agreed Tom guardedly.
‘But we do God’s work in other ways. And that of the Queen, the Council and the Commonwealth. I am on my way to Plymouth, so I have not come out of my way in seeking you. They have a Spanish spy in the Plymouth Cl
ink.’
‘Should you not bring him to London, then?’ asked Tom. ‘Introduce him to Rack-master Topcliffe, perhaps? Another swift confession and another hot story for Topcliffe to tell the Queen.’ How swiftly God’s work led men like himself and Poley to sup with the Devil, he thought.
‘That is one of the decisions I must make when I talk to the spy. And it’s not a him. ‘Tis a woman. But in fact she has some services to render before I introduce her to Topcliffe or any of his acolytes.’
A little silence fell within the room. Tom very much did not want to think about what Topcliffe, the Queen’s chief torturer, would do to a woman. The bells sank sonorously to stillness. Distantly on the breeze the carolling of a choir began. Poley closed the window and turned.
‘You saw it,’ he said, apparently changing the subject as swiftly as the flash of a dragonfly’s wing. ‘When you realized why Mann was put into the Fleet river when he could have been left to burn anonymously with the house on Water Lane. You saw, but you did not quite understand the whole.’
‘I saw that he was your eyes in Elfinstone and that his body was a message to you as well as to Lady Margaret.’
‘If you saw that, was there nothing else to see?’
‘That he had a message for you as well as for me – your message gone out of his wallet with mine.’
‘Do you not understand it yet, Tom? He was a secret man...’
‘Ah. Now that I had overlooked. And obviously I was not alone in doing so. If he was a secret man, then he may have been carrying a secret message...’
‘Precisely.’
‘A message you recovered at his post mortem, which I omitted to attend, having gone charging off on my fool’s errand to Elfinstone...’
