by Peter Tonkin
Stock still, head swimming, I noticed the cloudy interaction between my breath and the cold draft that was seeping through the gaps in the window’s lead casing. With any luck, whoever it was had decided I’d got lucky and stayed out the previous night. I listened intently for the sound of footsteps carefully negotiating the narrow flight of rickety stairs, of the brief bustle of the street outside and the door banging shut – but there was only a stillness to match my own. It must be someone who knew of my reputation, or lack of it, with the ladies.
‘Master Lovat? Rouse yourself, Master Lovat?’ A nasal voice squeaked through the keyhole. ‘It is I, Nesbitt.’
Nesbitt – chief steward to my aristocratic brother, the perennial ghost at the feast. My shock at the abrupt awakening morphed quickly into a gnawing sense of unease. There was no likelihood that the persistent and dogged Nesbitt would desist, but his visit could only mean some onerous chore for my brother. I tried thinking of an alternative, but my head hurt too much. There was nothing else for it – I opened negotiations.
‘I’m here Nesbitt, what the hell do you want you great clucking Margery-prater? Keep the noise down, can’t you, for pizzle’s sake.’ This time the silence spoke of reproach at my insult. I sighed, dragged my disconnected body to its feet and began inching my way across cold, creaking floorboards.
After fumbling with bolts and lock, I opened the door to reveal a skeletal, serious man, with a closely cropped head of thinning, grey hair. He was a good foot taller than me and had a natural stoop, doubly accentuated by the low-slung ceiling of the attic corridor. This and the black cloak he was wrapped up in reminded me of the popular image of La Mort. All he lacked was a scythe.
‘What do you want?’ I said, glaring at him with as much hostility as a half-naked, unwashed inebriate could manage. The doleful figure in black appeared unmoved.
I took a couple of unsteady paces and flung open the window, acutely aware of the lack of fresh air in the cramped space. Another wave of dizziness washed over me, as I looked down at the wooden roof tiles of the house jake, which jutted out over the river. Below that, the swirling waters of the Thames were fighting their way through the narrow arches that supported the bridge. I momentarily contemplated pitching myself in – the dangerous waters looking far more inviting that anything Nesbitt might have in store for me.
‘Get dressed, Master Lovat.’ Nesbitt’s tone was terse, insistent.
I glanced wearily over my shoulder, the resistance draining out of me. Nesbitt was standing in the doorway as if loath to set foot in the room. ‘You realise with all that noise you’ve been making, you’ll have woken Father Thames himself.’
‘Father Thames is unlikely to be asleep, nor are most Christian souls at this hour.’
‘What hour would that be?’ I said, just about mustering a scornful laugh, knowing that it was hardly likely to be an hour to make me proud.
‘The time, de facto, is half past the hour of one.’ There was no disguising the contempt in Nesbitt’s voice. A chime from the nearby bell of St Magnus-the-Martyr neatly emphasised his point. ‘Sir Robert sent me. He requests that you accompany me. Immediately.’
‘Requests? Ha!’ I staggered back onto the bed and sat with my sore head propped in my hands, the room swirling around me. ‘But where, Sir Apple-Squire? Can’t you see I’m …’
‘There’s a body in the river.’
A momentary pause, while I searched his inscrutable face for more clues.
‘There are always bodies in the river, what does this particular one have to do me?’
‘His Lordship is concerned he might know the man.’
‘I see.’ I said, though I didn’t. ‘And fishing him out is deemed a suitable task for the bastard brother?’
Nesbitt ignored this remark, letting my words hang in the frigid air. Instead, he fetched a bowl of water from the corner of the room and dumped it roughly in front of me, water splashing onto my naked feet. ‘You’d better hurry. We’ve the best part of a league’s journey ahead of us. Tempus neminem manet.’
Defeated, I glared bitterly at a black knot in the floorboards, before reluctantly splashing water onto my face.
The next ten minutes were farcical. Whilst I stumbled around my lodgings collecting various items of strewn clothing, Nesbitt stooped in the frame of the doorway, studying me contemptuously. Occasionally, he would cast his eyes disdainfully around the room. The man’s puritan views were well known in my brother’s household and, judging by the curdled expression on his cadaverous face, the state of my lodgings suggested that it was dissolute young men like myself who were putting his immortal soul in peril.
I found myself blearily following his gaze, as though Nesbitt’s disapproving eye was helping me to see the cramped, angular space for the first time. Clothes strewn about the place, half empty glasses and half cleaned plates scattered with no discernible pattern. I had to admit that it was hardly an advertisement for clean living. The lodging, four floors up on London Bridge did, though, merit a couple of strong points. One was the tremendous panoramic view of the wide river and the teeming city along its banks, which always caused maids to gasp with appreciation, but was wasted on Nesbitt. The second was that, due to its claustrophobic nature, I belonged to that tiny minority of Londoners lucky in the privilege of not having to share their bed. Unless I wanted to, of course.
This latter advantage also meant that, with no one to borrow them, it was a complete mystery as to why I should be missing any of my possessions – chiefly amongst them a pair of new boots. After searching in vain, they failed to materialise. Nesbitt’s impatience reached its limit and he said we should go, regardless. Reluctantly, I pulled on an old pair found under the bed, which had grown stiff with age and sported a number of gaping holes. As an afterthought, I began buckling on my short sword and dagger.
‘You won’t need those where we’re going.’
‘I’ll take them all the same,’ I said, meeting Nesbitt’s gaze evenly, ‘if it’s alright with you?’
As soon as we alighted on the narrow street that ran along the bridge, my face was slapped with a width of cold air. Nesbitt didn’t waste time, striding purposefully towards the southern entrance, I following in his wake, fighting with my cloak which was wrapped too tightly and catching the hilts of my weaponry. We hustled and bustled along the narrow, covered street and under the finery of the newly erected Nonesuch House. Here, a boisterous crowd, following the entertainment afforded by a constable whipping an obstinate beggar across the bridge, and, presumably, back to the charity of his Kentish origins, halted us momentarily. We shuffled with the crowd out into the daylight across the Old Drawbridge, as they cheered and jeered the spectacle, their cries mingling with the shouts of ‘Eastward-Ho’ and ‘Westward-Ho’ floating up from the watermen on the river below.
At Traitor’s Gate, with its silhouettes of beheaded skulls against the bruised sky, my eyes were briefly drawn to a colourful flag hanging directly above the portcullis. It had been taken from one of the Spanish galleons captured during the Armada and placed there so that revellers crossing to the Southwark Fair could either marvel, or simply hurl things, at it. The flag was torn and stained with gunpowder but partly showed the shield and emblem of some proud Spanish captain, who was now most probably residing at the bottom of the English Channel.
Finally free of the revellers, Nesbitt’s mark became clear as a set of treacherous wooden steps, which dropped to the river. A rowing boat was moored alongside the bank, in which sat two oarsmen, whom I instantly recognised from their blue-and-black livery as belonging to my brother’s household. Also in the boat was a scruffy young boy, who Nesbitt introduced dismissively as Pinchkin, explaining cursorily that the boy’s father had discovered the body.
Pinchkin was no older than ten, but already had a worldly-weariness about him. A shock of his fair hair stood up, in what I assumed was a permanent state of perplexity at the injustices and iniquities his pimply young face had already witnessed. He was
dressed in what amounted to little more than rags, making me wince at the sight of him, and was awkwardly perched at the front of the boat shaking involuntarily with cold. As we stepped aboard, he looked relieved that we had finally returned. I offered him my cloak, which, after a moment’s hesitation, he gratefully accepted, and berated the oarsmen for not doing likewise. Once the men had grudgingly pushed off, Pinchkin turned away from us and stared earnestly into the distance as if willing our destination to arrive as quickly as possible.
Now that I was committed it seemed a good time to ascertain more details of our journey.
‘Where is this body, Nesbitt?’
‘Washed up by Rotherhithe marsh.’
‘When?’
‘Some time in the early hours.’
‘And this boy’s father found it? What business did he have on the river?’
‘The boy claims his father is both a fisherman and a member of the Watch. Which particular activity he was engaged in this morning has not been made explicit.’ Nesbitt’s tone made it clear that whatever the father was doing, it was unlikely to help the nation achieve a state of Godliness.
‘No doubt he was fishing for Papist eels?’ I said flippantly. Nesbitt merely grunted but offered nothing further, so I gave up trying to provoke him into conversation and slumped into a morose silence. The cold seeped through the exposed shoulders of my doublet, and into the holes of my boots. I was already regretting my generosity with the cloak.
Once we had cleared a long line of merchantmen, chained in the middle of the river, we drifted towards the left bank, passing the silhouetted Tower, and the sprawling tenements of St Katherine’s hospital. The afternoon light was starting to give way to a brooding dusk, which loomed ahead over the distant hills. As the city began to recede from view, we were left with only the company of other boats, plying their trades up and down the banks. Soon we were clear of most of those too and the only sound was the rhythmic clinking and splashing of the oars. The tide was rushing out and we were making good progress – I said as much to Nesbitt
‘You can be grateful for that,’ he replied matter of factly. ‘Otherwise I’d have awoken you a good deal earlier.’
We had been hugging the Middlesex bank as it curved gently northwards, but now the oarsmen began to strike out into the middle of the flux towards the opposite, low-lying shore. The boy suddenly stiffened and, pointing, cried ‘Over there, sirs’.
I squinted into the distance. There was the shape of what looked like a huddle of men, but what was more arresting was a tall, thin object situated on a spit of land where the river turned southwards. As we pulled nearer, it gradually became clear as a multi-coloured wooden pole, roughly twelve feet high, with a sizeable pair of deer’s antlers fixed at its apex. Other animal bones and skulls were attached up and down its length with ribbons, whose brightly-coloured tails fluttering in the wind were the only things moving in that desolate spot. I glanced at Nesbitt, who had pushed his hood back and was eyeing the spectacle distastefully. The backdrop of the low marshes certainly provided an incongruous setting for this strange feature in the landscape, which had an eerie air of paganism about it.
Our reverie was broken by one of the men walking to meet us.
‘Joseph Pinchkin, Captain of the Rotherhithe Watch, at your service sirs.’ He doffed his flea-bitten cap in our direction and then pulled his son roughly from the boat, giving him a clip round the ear for his trouble. A less inspiring ‘Captain’, one could hardly hope to encounter. ‘If you were pleased to follow me, the parcel is along ‘ere.’
I prepared to disembark, mindful that my old boots had holes in them and thus determined to place my first footstep on dry land. I stood at the front of the boat, waiting for an opportune moment, but just as I thrust forth, a larger than average wave caught the boat, causing it to pitch sharply, and I fell face first into the freezing surf. Momentarily confused and disorientated, I scrabbled about in the mud, the water soaking to my skin, before I felt the wrench on my shoulders as Pinchkin Senior extracted me roughly from the water and heaved me onto the shore. I stood on the bank displaying a comedic mixture of stupefaction and anger, as the men of the Watch gaped at me and barely smothered their sniggering.
Nesbitt, having successfully negotiated his way to dry land, hadn’t time for such niceties. ‘Come now, Lovat. Enough fooling,’ He strode off towards the ‘parcel’ letting me drip on the shore. So much for sympathy.
‘What in a Jesuit’s name is this about, Nesbitt?’ I asked tetchily, as I caught up with him, any lingering feeling of tiredness and drunkenness now thoroughly dispelled. ‘You drag me out here against my will, and don’t even have the decency to tell me why. I’ve had enough of your damn reticence.’ Despite his position in the household, Nesbitt wasn’t a blood relation, which still gave me some sense of superiority. Sensing the newly found edge in my voice, he looked at me coldly but thought better of a rebuke.
‘As I told you, a body in the river, Master.’ I decided to ignore his sarcastic stressing of the word ‘Master’, as he continued meaningfully: ‘There is suspicion of foul play, which is why we are here.’
‘How did this rabble connect the body with Robert?’
‘A posteriori …’ Nesbitt had practised as a lawyer before going into my brother’s service, and had an irritating habit of sprinkling his speech with legal phrases, ‘… they found this seal around the man’s neck.’ Nesbitt produced from somewhere under his cloak a seal attached to a thick, silver chain, which I recognised as sporting my brother’s insignia. ‘One of the men from the village identified it as your brother’s coat of arms and so, reasonably enough, sent word there. Sir Robert requested that you investigate the matter and report back to him forthwith.’
The body was lying at the foot of the colourful column – twisted and inert. The face was badly disfigured and the clothes, although once rich in appearance, were badly torn. A closer inspection of the face showed one eye blankly acknowledging the sky – the other missing, revealing an open socket. All around the swollen, bloated hole, the flesh was cut and bruised and the man’s features were barely recognisable. From the gaping mouth a veiny, swollen tongue protruded, like some ancient creature that had died in its hole.
I knelt down beside the man, drawn closer by a vague feeling of recognition, despite the disfigurement. I yanked the cloak, still grimly clinging to its owner, to one side, and, feeling the heavy, sodden material in my hand, it began to dawn on me. Despite the rough treatment it had suffered, I recognised the cloak with its fine red velvet and rich embroidery. A fresh glance at the shape of the cheekbones, the curve of the hooked nose and the colour of the skin, and I was certain.
The dead man was, in a loose sense, known to me.
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