by Anna Castle
Ben sighed, defeated. He left with a promise to return every day with more food and drink. Also to make sure the guards knew this prisoner had important friends.
Tom tucked his provisions beneath the cot and stretched out with his hands behind his head, staring at the mold-mottled laths of the ceiling. The mattress under him was so thin he could feel each individual supporting rope striping his back. He’d had a chance to clean up a bit and change into fresh clothes, but he still felt itchy and sour.
How could his so-called friends leave him in this stinking pest hole? Mr. Bacon was the nephew of the Lord Treasurer, for whom Tom himself had performed vital services. Did that count for nothing? Surely Bacon could petition to have him released if he wanted to.
But no; that would cost him a favor, one he might want for himself someday.
And what about the newly minted Lady Surdeval? Trumpet had been released in minutes and sent home to her aunt in Bishopsgate. No doubt she was there right now, sipping a cool cup of wine while her maidservant massaged her feet. She couldn’t come visit him; it would only make things worse. Tom understood that. But she hadn’t sent so much as a note. He didn’t expect an apology — as well ask the rain to apologize for getting you wet — but she might have sent him a word of sympathy and a basket of fruit.
He listened to shouts and bangs echoing up through the tower from the yard. That racket doubtless went on day and night. Newgate Prison hosted neither torture nor beheadings in the yard, but the cells were far filthier than those in the Tower and were occupied by real criminals, not gentlemen of dubious religion. Some of the men in here wouldn’t hesitate to cut him for one of his bottles of tinto.
Tom swallowed sour bile. After all the hard work he’d done to raise himself into the gentry — all those nights of study to keep his place at Gray’s, all those months in Cambridge, where he’d placed himself in real danger in service to the Crown — he’d been carted through the streets like a common churl and left to rot in this ten-by-ten cell. Had the Clarady luck run out at last?
He opened one of his bottles and slumped at the head of his cot, back against the cold stone wall, staring at the door. He would drink all the wine and then sleep until Ben brought him a fresh supply. Then he’d repeat that cycle until they released him or he turned himself into a drunkard, in which case, he would no longer care.
The cell door opened, admitting a puff of rank air and another prisoner. The guard gave the newcomer a shove and jeered at Tom. “Didn’t think you’d have this palace all to yourself, now did you, Master Clarady?” He swung the door shut and turned the key in the lock.
The newcomer hooked his thumbs into his narrow belt and grinned. Handsome enough in a roguish way, his ginger beard and hair needed trimming, and he’d lost a couple of teeth. His red and yellow doublet and hose bore the marks of several nights in the common hold, splotched and dusted with grimy straw. But his red cloth hat still boasted one wilting feather.
“Jack Coddington.” He took a step forward and held out a hand.
Tom ignored it.
Coddington shrugged and sat on the other cot. He set his hands on his thighs and leaned forward, regarding Tom with lively interest. “People said there was a barrister in the house, so I bribed the guard to let me move up here with you. A pretty piece of silk embroidery I was saving for my belamour.” He made a meal of that last word, ending with his wide lips puckered. Then he shrugged again, the philosopher of life. “Ah, well. The piece was too good for a whore.”
Tom yawned into his palm to signal his total lack of interest in this man’s prattle.
Too subtle, evidently. Coddington only grinned more broadly. “I knew a barrister would get the best of whatever’s to be had, even in this rat trap. Nothing like a legal man for talking people out of or into anything they like. My master’s a barrister, you see. I know the breed.”
Tom was an inner barrister — a student — not qualified to argue cases or do much of anything else, but Ben had emphasized Tom’s membership in Gray’s Inn to the guards, wanting them to know this prisoner had friends in powerful circles.
“Lawyers make the best thieves.” Coddington tapped his temple. “It’s the organizational capabilities, that’s what my master says.” He pronounced the long words with exaggerated care.
Tom grunted and took a long pull on his bottle.
Coddington licked his lips. “People also said the barrister in question was the one that robbed the chapel in that palace on the Strand last week — Surly Vale House, they call it.”
“Surdeval,” Tom said. “I didn’t do it.”
“I believe you.” Coddington’s freckled face took on a crafty look. “As a matter of fact, I’m the one man in Newgate who knows you didn’t.” He waggled his ginger eyebrows, plainly wanting Tom to ask him what he meant.
Tom took another drink to cover his surprise. The only persons who could know with certainty that he was innocent of that crime were the men who had done it themselves. The Clarady luck still held, thanks to a generous God. This bragging fool might spill the whole story, if Tom played him right.
But gently, gently; he didn’t want to appear to be too interested. “The authorities must think I’m an idiot as well as a thief. Who could sell Catholic trinkets in England these days?”
“Oh, you can sell it, if you know how. And where, more to the purpose. That’s where your organizational capabilities come into it.”
“I don’t follow you.” Tom kept his tone level, as if he was barely interested.
Coddington wagged his finger. “See, if I were the judge, I’d know at once you hadn’t burgled no chapel. That’s a specialty job, that is. Takes knowledge.” He tapped his temple. “Those Catholic hideaways are secret and not all of them are worth the gamble. First, you have to know where the rich ones are. That’s where your upright man comes into it. The one with the knowledge.”
“The one with the organizational capabilities.” Tom took another pull from the bottle and passed it across the narrow aisle. “But you’re still saddled with a load of illegal goods. You can’t tell me there are any pawnbrokers in London willing to risk the rack for a golden chalice.”
“Chalice!” Coddington snorted. “A chalice is nothing. And gold’s not the half of it. To loyal Protestants like me and you, that treasure’s just a boatload of metal and shiny stones. But to the Romish tribe, those gewgaws have value far beyond the stuff they’re made of. Sentimental, that’s what they are. My master calls it ‘religious signery’ or some such word.”
“Signification?” Tom asked.
“That’s it! Adds to the profits, you see.” He rubbed his thumb across his fingers. “That’s the second job of your upright man: find the ones what cares and make ’em pay.”
Tom reached under his cot for another bottle and pulled out the cork with his teeth. “Is that what they got you for? Stealing objects of religious signification?” He passed the fresh bottle across the narrow aisle to Coddington with a jerk of his chin, then settled back against the wall, staring at the door — a man with nothing but time to kill.
“Not me.” Coddington mirrored his pose, cradling his bottle against his chest. “I never get caught at work. I go in and out like a cat.” He shot a sidelong glance at Tom. “Nobody hears a thing, and nobody gets hurt. You make a racket, you wake the householder, next thing you know, there’s murder added to the charges and more reason to chase you down. Sloppy planning, that is. That’s what my master always says. In and out like cats, he says. Silent as shadows.”
“Wise policy,” Tom said. It made sense and fit with the little he knew about burglars. They hated conflict like cats hate water. Slide a long hook through the front window while the clerk was in the back of the shop; slip in the back door when everyone rushed out front to watch the diversion your fellow created. Thieves prided themselves on their invisibility.
Besides, Lord Surdeval had not been killed by burglars surprised in the act. They’d have left him on the floor, not tucked hi
m into his bed with his sheet pulled up to his chin.
Tom yawned again. “You must’ve gotten caught doing something. Unless you have an odd taste in lodgings.”
“I’ve been in worse.” Coddington sighed deeply, pitching it to the gallery. “It’s love what does me in. Love, and the jealousy that comes with it. I had a bit of an altercation, you might say, a couple of nights ago, with a whoreson knave who dared to lay a hand on my belamour’s beautiful arse.” He scratched his rumpled hair. “Things got a mite vigorous. But I won’t be here long. My master will pay my bail when he gets back from —” His round face took on that crafty look again. “From somewhere.”
Let him keep his secrets — for a while. Tom could feel Dame Fortune smiling on him again as she gave her wheel another spin. Coddington had either done the chapel burglaries himself or he knew who had. All Tom had to do was keep passing him bottles and pretending he didn’t care. The blattering fool would tell him everything he knew.
CHAPTER TEN
“This one’s for the rack,” Sir Richard Topcliffe said. “He’ll give us the names of every man and woman he’s ever met, never you fear, Mr. Bacon.”
Francis had no argument, not today. He’d realized almost at once this prisoner was a missionary priest. Certain turns of phrase betrayed training at the seminary in Rheims. The priest, named Amias Fenton, had smuggled himself back into England, where he had been passed from one Catholic household to another in the guise of a music master.
No one would hire him for such gentle pursuits now. He’d been wearing the same clothes for weeks, and Francis could smell his sour stink from across the room. Grime streaked his stubbled cheeks and bald pate, and his red-rimmed eyes sank into dark hollows.
As abject as he appeared, Francis could not pity him. The man was utterly recalcitrant. He scoffed at every question and spat at every name they mentioned until Sir Richard slapped him hard across the face. Then Fenton rubbed his reddened cheek with a satisfied sneer, as if he had finally achieved his goal.
Sir Richard remained standing throughout the interrogation. He liked to loom over the prisoners, his hands on his hips and his legs spread wide. Francis, in contrast, shrank into his seat, as far from the hostile pair as possible.
He glanced toward the small table where Benjamin Whitt sat opposite Sir Richard’s clerk, his shoulders hunched against the rising threat of violence in the little room. Francis had brought him to take notes and for moral support. He hated being penned up with Sir Richard, especially when the prisoner of the day rivaled him in viciousness.
“I’ll tell you nothing,” Fenton said. “Don’t you know they train us to stand up to your torture? Besides, I’m safer on your rack than I am in my own bed.”
“What do you mean by that?” Sir Richard demanded.
“I mean I’m better off taking my punishment here. The ones you send home get murdered in their beds.”
“Are you talking about Viscount Surdeval?” Francis asked. “That had nothing to do with this commission. His interview was the merest formality. His loyalty was never in question.”
“Lord Surdeval, yes. And others.” Fenton’s gaze shifted between Francis and Sir Richard and back, another sneer twisting his bruised lips. “You really don’t know, do you? You never bother to check up on the ones you let go.”
“Why should we?” Francis asked. “They are no longer our concern. Their local justices will monitor their church attendance. We trust our conversation here will inspire them to greater compliance.”
Fenton laughed out loud. Sir Richard slapped him again. This time the man spat blood. “Surdeval was the third that I know of, but there could be more.”
“You lie!” Sir Richard raised his hand. Fenton didn’t even flinch. That must have sapped the fun because Sir Richard lowered his hand.
“Three men have been murdered?” Francis traded worried glances with Ben. It had never occurred to them to search for similar deaths. “Who are the other two?”
“The first I know of was Baron Hewick. The next was Mr. Rouncey, the silk merchant.”
“How do you know this?” Francis asked.
“Who cares?” Sir Richard bared his overlarge teeth at the priest. “Why bother asking? You can’t believe anything these lying traitors tell us anyway.”
Francis turned an exasperated look at his co-commissioner. “If we truly believed that, Sir Richard, we’d have no moral grounds for torturing them.”
He pinched the pleats in his left wrist ruff while he absorbed the shocking information. Three peculiar murders of recusant Catholics, all of the better sort, all killed in their sleep while confined to their homes by the Privy Council? If their deaths were related, Francis’s working suppositions about Surdeval’s murder could be thrown out the window. Sir William Gumery would gain nothing from the deaths of an unrelated baron and a silk merchant.
“How do you know about these other deaths?” Francis asked again.
“I heard about Hewick in the Clink.” Fenton bared his teeth at Sir Richard. “We have friends everywhere; you can never stop us. Mr. Rouncey’s widow told me herself the day you picked me up. She had invited me to lodge with her for a few weeks, but when I got there, her house was being confiscated. She lost everything — the price of true faith. Even her prayer book was stolen, a beautiful treasure-bound volume that had been passed down from mother to daughter since your godless queen’s great-grandfather held the throne.”
Francis asked, “Was it taken from her chapel?”
“Along with everything else of value in Caesar’s marketplace,” Fenton said. “Beautiful, sacred, holy spaces, filled with objects bearing the history of true devotion, desecrated by your —”
The rest of his words were drowned out by the booming laughter of Sir Richard, who slapped Francis on the back, nearly knocking him from his seat. “Someone’s doing our work for us, eh, Mr. Bacon? A pity we can’t thank him for his services.”
* * *
“He’s even worse than you described,” Ben said as they left the Tower through the gatehouse. “How can you stand to work with him?”
“Not here,” Francis said. In these walls, the very stones had ears. Besides, he hated attempting to converse while walking in the city. Even a street as wide as Cheapside was fraught with hazards: slatternly housewives throwing night soil into overflowing kennels, dogs and pigs scavenging at just the right height to trip a man. One’s full attention was required.
He turned up Petty Wales. Ben grasped his sleeve to tug him the other way, pointing toward the river. “Wherry.”
Francis shook his arm free and tilted his head toward the city. “Guildhall. Sheriff.”
“Why are we —” Ben hopped aside to avoid being jostled by two gentlemen in black gowns with document cases over their shoulders. Stepping back, Francis felt his heel sink into something unpleasantly soft.
“Walk, then talk,” he said, suiting his actions to the words.
They marched in silence up Tower Street to St. Dunstan-in-the-East. There Francis turned into the churchyard and paused in the shade of a tall oak beside one of the gracefully arched windows. “We must go to the Guildhall —”
“To speak with the sheriff. I understand. If that foul-mouthed priest was telling the truth, Lord Surdeval’s death is not unique.”
“Two others,” Francis said. “Possibly more. It’s horrible to contemplate. I interviewed both of those men myself in the past month.”
“Fenton could be lying. He seems an especially nasty piece of work.”
“Seminary priests often are,” Francis said. “They’re motivated by deep resentments, some bitter sense of separation from the rest of society. Why else would they do what they do?” He watched the shadows of leaves dancing on the gray stone wall for a few moments as he reviewed what he knew of Englishmen trained in Rheims. They went abroad to become ordained as Catholic priests, where they also learned strategies for subverting and undermining the English church when they returned. Without them to fos
ter the dream of a complete counter-Reformation, English Catholics would gradually, gently, and inevitably find their way into the fold of the established church. These missionary priests, of whom there were possibly more than a hundred in England at this very moment, stirred people up, prodding them toward acts of open sedition.
And to what end? Didn’t they all worship the same God? What need had the English of a pope in Rome?
Francis shook his head. “I believe him. He seemed genuinely affronted that we didn’t know about the other victims.”
“We need confirmation,” Ben said.
“The sheriff should be able to provide that. He may be in hot pursuit of this murderer even as we speak.” There was a hopeful thought. Francis hadn’t had time to visit the sheriff on Friday, and then he’d been obliged to spend all of Saturday on business for Gray’s Inn. For all he knew, the proper authorities already had these cases well in hand.
Ben shattered that fragile hope. “If the sheriff knew the murders were connected, why would he arrest Trumpet and Tom?”
“He wouldn’t. Fie. He must not know.” Their eyes met and held. Somehow that link always seemed to double the strength of their mental abilities. “Perhaps the deaths looked notably different,” Francis said. “Fenton connects the victims through the actions of their wives. The sheriff might not consider that aspect, especially if there was nothing overtly religious about the other murders.”
“No crosses on their chest,” Ben said.
“Precisely,” Francis said. “We must review his reports, any interviews with witnesses, or other notes. It’s possible the information is right there in his files and has simply been overlooked.”
“Let’s hope that’s all it is.” Ben gave him a grim look.
Sheriff’s clerks typically spent a year or two at a university and perhaps another two at one of the Inns of Chancery, the lesser legal societies that served pettifoggers and tradesmen’s sons unable to gain admittance to an Inn of Court. They could draw up simple documents and knew which ones went to which court, but their legal knowledge was shallow, and they weren’t paid to be curious. Competent enough for ordinary purposes, they would not have Francis’s ability to discern a pattern in a welter of seemingly unrelated facts. Few did.
