A Murder of Crows

by P. F. Chisholm

  “The words that Tregian was babbling are place-names in Cornwall aren’t they?”

  “Yes, they are. None of them are in the tin-mining areas though as far as I know.”

  “Could there be gold there?”

  Enys shrugged. “I…doubt it. They say gold breeds out of tin in some places so perhaps there is. I know there is gold in some places in Cornwall though never very much, not as much as in Wales or Ireland.”

  “Would this metal assayer be able to tell if there was gold?”

  “Oh yes, sir, he could, and he knew how to take the gold out of the ore as well.”

  “Ah hah!” Carey looked pleased with himself.

  “In the meantime, sirs, please excuse me. Sergeant Dodd has touched my conscience, I should not leave all to my sister who has no gossips in London to help her.”

  He rose, finished his beer, bowed to both of them, and walked away. Carey grinned at Dodd.

  “Christ, I thought he’d never go. Now then, let’s take a look at St Paul’s.”

  Expecting Carey to spend the rest of the afternoon parading up and down Paul’s Walk with other overdressed, overbred, underworked Court ninnies, Dodd was surprised and suspicious when Carey went to the Churchwarden’s office instead and asked to see a register of churches in London both old and new. He studied it carefully for so long that Dodd got bored and began peering at the Cathedral treasure chest and wondering if it was full and if it was, would it be hard to get the lid off? It certainly looked securely locked and the iron strapping looked strong as well. Which argued that there was some good plate inside. It didn’t move when he accidentally toed it with his boot.

  They did go into the cathedral, but Carey went to the serving-man’s pillar where the men who wanted work stood about near their notices pinned on the stone arch. He went straight up to the largest of them and asked him a question, only to receive a firm shake of the head. He asked all of them, all seemed to say no, and Carey rejoined Dodd looking irritated.

  “Blast it,” he said, “word’s gone round obviously. None of them want to work for me.”

  Dodd thought it showed there was some sense amongst the servingmen of London.

  “Or at least, none of them want to work for me in Carlisle,” Carey amended, proving that Londoners were idiots.

  Carey was now hurrying out of the main door and heading north across the city. Dodd hurried after him and noted that despite the rebuff of the servingmen, Carey was wearing an expression as smug as a bridegroom. On general principles, he loosened his sword.

  They came to a very small lane not far from London Wall. It was one of the poorer places and was full of houses that seemed to have been patched together from pieces of something larger, some of them still clinging to the foundations made of large granite blocks.

  People were passing up and down the street, and occasionally one of them would turn seemingly on impulse and head down an alleyway. Carey watched for a while and then headed for the alleyway himself. On the corner a crowing cockerel was chalked on the wall.

  Dodd followed him full of forboding. The alleyway seemed to end, but in one corner were steps leading down and a boy sitting there. Carey smiled at him, spoke for a moment, and then beckoned Dodd to go down the steps with him.

  It was a small crypt with an arched ceiling and thick plain pillars. At one end was a table laid with linens and six black candles about the coffin and a large number of people were standing about, talking quietly. In an alcove was a worn chipped figure of a man fighting what looked like a bull—perhaps some Papistical saint? Carey looked about him and took his hat off, so Dodd did the same.

  “I don’t like the looks of this,” Carey said quietly to him. “I was expecting something quieter.”

  Dodd didn’t like it either. He hated being in a place that only had one exit and he certainly was not planning to listen to a Papist mass which would be in solid foreign from start to finish and even more boring than a proper church service. Besides being treason outright. He saw that there was a door in the side of the opposite wall which was some comfort but…

  There were some young men near the front with worryingly holy expressions, praying hard for something. Dodd didn’t like the looks of that either. He threaded through the crowd, some of whom were praying rosaries of all dangerous treasonable things, and squinted at the door. Was it clear? He tested it gently but it didn’t move.

  Shaking his head, he went back up the steps and hurried round the corner to where he calculated the door should come out. It too was down some steps, but when he went to look at it, he realised it had been nailed shut and the nailheads were still shiny.

  Dodd spine froze. Carey was in a stopped earth and so were all the other people. He looked about the street. He couldn’t actually see Heneage’s men but he knew they were there. If they had nailed this exit, probably they wouldn’t be very interested in it, although there would be someone checking it soon to make sure. Somebody must have been following the grey-haired woman when she collected the body.

  He leaned against the wall by the entrance and felt for his pipe, started filling the bowl with fingers that shook slightly. How Carey had found himself a secret Papist requiem mass he wasn’t quite sure, but he was certain that it would be raided once it had properly got going and Carey would be the biggest prize.

  Of course there was one possible option for Dodd. He could simply walk away, head for the Great North Road, and keep going until he got to his own tower where, by God, he would stay.

  He puffed angrily. He wouldn’t do it. Couldn’t do it. Any more than he could have given Heneage the name he had wanted so badly the week before. Damn it, there was something wrong with his brains, that was sure.

  He leaned against the door and looked about him at suspiciously little activity for a London alley and there were no plague-marked houses hereabouts to provide an excuse. Any minute now Heneage or Topcliffe and their human terriers would arrive and go into the stopped earth and…

  Dodd smiled toothily, tapped out his pipe which was a pity because he hadn’t finished it, spat in the bowl to cool it, and put it away in his belt pouch. He looked about casually again; nothing, not even someone visible at a window across the street. Ay well, no help for it then.

  He hammered with his fist on the nailed-shut door in the slow, fear-inspiring way he had seen Lowther use on farmers who hadn’t paid up their blackmail money.

  “Open up,” he roared, imitating a London voice as well as he could. “Open in the name of the Queen.”

  He banged again, roared again, and waited. There was absolute silence inside. As he sauntered around to the front alley again, he saw a couple of men in travelling cloaks, then a group of women talking merrily, then the young men who had been praying, then a mother with children. Everybody was walking as calmly and normally as if they had not just been about to commit treason.

  “What the hell are you doing still here, Dodd,” hissed a voice at his elbow. Dodd turned and saw Carey emerging from amongst the women with a pale and anxious-faced Letty Tregian clinging to his arm. Her brown hair was trailing from under her hat and she seemed to be on the point of collapse. “Heneage and his…”

  “Ay well,” said Dodd. “That were me.”

  Carey’s eyes turned to points of ice. “If that was your idea of a joke…”

  “Nay sir, I saw the escape door had been nailed shut and I thocht I’d get ahead of them a bit.”

  Carey frowned for a moment before his face split in a broad grin. He cupped his hand over Letty’s confiding paw, slowed and backed under an awning so he could turn to look over his shoulder. A large contingent of buff-coated men were heading for the steps down to the crypt, at the back of them Topcliffe with his matt black hair and jerky gestures. Dodd allowed a brief smile at the heart-warming sight before hurrying on in Carey’s wake.

  “They certainly know what to do in a crisis, these Papists,” said Carey as they sat down again in yet another boozing ken where Carey had already calle
d for brandy to restore some colour to Letty’s cheeks. “Never seen anything like it. You banging on the door and shouting the way you did, everybody stops what they’re doing—the priest had just arrived and was setting out his Papist trash on the altar. Next thing, everything on the altar is cleared away, the priest has disappeared, the candles are gone, the altar has turned into a mere table, and the people are nearly gone as well. Nothing but the coffin and a bad smell. Only Letty here was upset and some women were helping her and when I told them I was a son of her mistress, they insisted on bringing us both out amongst them. A most delightful escape.”

  He laughed with the kind of boyish delight that particularly annoyed Dodd. “Best of all I got to see Topcliffe and his men going in to roust out an empty earth. Wonderful.”

  He turned to Letty and smiled at her. “And I managed to fish you out of a muddy puddle that would have been a difficulty even for my redoubtable lady mother. So, my dear, what were you doing in there?”

  Letty started trembling again, cupped her hands around her mouth, and as the tears spilled out of her brown eyes, Carey whipped out a large white hankerchief from his padded sleeve’s pocket and handed it over to her. She buried her face in it, sobbing.

  Carey leaned back, crossed his ankles, lifted one finger to the potboy and ordered more booze by no more than a nod, then sighed tolerantly. Dodd, who was not at all accustomed to maidens who wept so openly and freely, being bred amongst much less delicate women, was staring at Letty with pure horror.

  “It’s all right, Sergeant, no point hurrying her,” said Carey. “Doctor Nunez explained it to me once. Something about a maiden’s womb being not so securely fixed as a woman’s and apt to rise and wander up to her head, causing hysterics, fits of tears and fainting, and so on. They really can’t help it. Best you can do is wait for the storm to pass.”

  For some reason this kindly explanation caused Letty to sob even harder. Dodd considered chancing the theory on a Carlisle damsel one day when she was in a mood and decided that he simply didn’t have the bollocks—and even if he did, he wouldn’t keep them. He was reaching for his pipe again when he stopped and scowled. He had better get used to doing without the London vice as he was certainly not planning to stay there, nor ever come there again.

  “Now then, Letty,” said Carey to the girl as she blew her nose. “How did you know the Mass was happening?”

  “I got a message to say they were saying a mass for my f..f…father’s soul and where it was and if I liked I could come if I brought the message to show. So I did. I didn’t know it was a requiem. Who was it in the coffin? I thought he was…he was…”

  “Show me the message.”

  She handed over a scrap of paper which was neatly written in the Secretary script used by half the clerks in London. It gave clear instructions to reach the place.

  “Who brought you this?”

  “Just Will, you know, Bald Will who everyone says is a poet. He said it had been left with the gatekeeper.”

  “And it was addressed to you?”

  “Yes, to Lettice Tregian, which is what everyone calls me in Cornwall though your mother calls me Letitia which I think is French.”

  “Latin.”

  “Oh. And I just thought it was nice of them to invite me so I went.”

  “But you’re alone. What would my mother…”

  “She said I could. I asked if I could go to church and she said I could.”

  “You didn’t tell her what kind of church? Or why?”

  Letty shook her head. Her eyes filled up with tears again. “Oh what will she say to me?”

  “She’ll say you have horse-clabber for brains, probably,” said Carey, “because you clearly do. Don’t you know how dangerous it is to go to a Papist mass? Never mind the danger to your soul, it’s the danger to you of getting into Topcliffe’s hands and what my mother would have to do to get you out again.”

  Dodd felt this was a bit rich coming from the man who blithely stuck his head in any noose that happened to be handy, but said nothing.

  “But we g…g…go in Cornwall and nothing happens,” sniffled the girl.

  “This isn’t Cornwall,” said Carey, scratching his patch of beard. “Listen, Letty, you must promise me faithfully not to do it again.”

  She nodded vigorously. “I was so frightened.”

  “Rightly so. God’s teeth, I was frightened when Dodd roared out like that.”

  “I saw you half-draw your long thin dagger,” said Letty.

  Carey nodded seriously. “That’s what I do when I’m frightened. It’s lucky I was there at all and I certainly didn’t expect to see you there.”

  “I had to go,” explained Letty, finally making a start on her pork pie with her very pretty little pearl-handled eating knife. “That’s why I came up to London with my Lady Hunsdon, you see. I had to bring Fr. Jackson’s survey with me. My father had a copy and he was going to meet Fr. Jackson and talk about it with him and then talk to…to the lawyers and other people for he said there was some great land piracy afoot in Cornwall and he wouldn’t have it because of what it was doing to the common folk and the tinners.”

  “And what was this land piracy?” asked Carey with a tone of indulgent disbelief. “I’m sure there was nothing wrong going on.”

  “That’s what I said, but he said something about gold and how the Cornish wouldn’t be able to live on their own lands and half of them weren’t even recusants, just foolish. And then off he went, only he sent a message to my Lady Hunsdon saying he was going and she was in such a taking about it when she came back from visiting Mrs. O’Malley in Ireland and sailing the whisky up to Dumfries that we went straight to the Judith and sailed out of Penryn and up the coast. That’s where we caught the Spaniard, you know.”

  “So my mother said,” Carey answered drily. “So Mr. Tregian was part of whatever this was.”

  “And it wasn’t treason, I know it wasn’t. It was just boring old buying and selling of land.”

  “Yes,” said Carey, staring into space. “And what’s in this survey?”

  “I don’t know,” said Letty, rolling big tragic eyes at them, “I haven’t got it. That’s what I went to tell them. I don’t know where it went. I had it when we went to meet my father and then when I…when I…” She clutched the hankerchief and gulped hard. Dodd had to admit that seeing her father’s head on London Bridge must have been a shock to her just as seeing his father dead with an Elliot lance through his chest had been a shock to him. “When I saw my father was dead I…well, I don’t know what happened to it.”

  Dodd had the satisfaction of seeing Carey momentarily lost for words. His mouth opened and then he shut it again.

  “You lost it?”

  “I think so. I can’t find it anywhere. It was in my purse, you see, and something funny happened to my purse because the cord was cut and it was proper safe under my kirtle you know and I didn’t notice nothing and then when I got home I realised it was gone.”

  Dodd and Carey exchanged looks. “Your purse was cut and this survey was in it, yes?”

  Letty nodded brightly. “Yes. I even said to my lady, oh I don’t know where my purse is to, lucky I didn’t have any money in it, and we both laughed, sort of in the middle of crying about my father, you see.”

  Carey sighed again. “What was in the survey?”

  Letty shook her brown curls at him. “Oh sir, you are funny. I can’t read. My dad wouldn’t have my brains roiled up with it, he said it was bad enough he’d had to learn and him not even a priest.”

  Dodd nodded at this wisdom. You couldn’t argue with that, reading was nothing to do with women.

  “That’s a pity,” said Carey, very strangely, “because if you could read there are all sorts of good books I could recommend you to read to help you get away from your Papish superstition…”

  Letty’s brow wrinkled. “I heard the heretics are always abusing their brains with reading, even the Queen herself, poor soul, but luckily I don�
��t need to for Fr. Jackson tells me everything I need to know.”

  Carey shook his head. “Was…er…is he in London too?”

  “Oh yes, my father came up to town to talk to him. Fr. Jackson went a month or two ago. He was very cross about it, said he hated London and was only going because he had to prevent a crime and a scandal and if he didn’t come back I was always to be a good girl and do what my father told me and pray to Our Lady and obey my husband.” Letty beamed at them. “Which I will,” she added in tones of great piety, sounding just like a very self-righteous little girl.

  Neither Carey nor Dodd had the courage to tell Letty what they thought might have happened to Fr. Jackson in case of reopening the floodgates. Dodd was frowning and blinking at the sunlight trying to remember what had happened when they made Lady Hunsdon’s abortive shopping expedition and when exactly Letty’s purse might have been cut. Just after she saw her father’s head and screamed and the horses bolted? Perhaps? Did the cutpurse know what he had or had he perhaps dumped the survey somewhere?

  “Ah,” said Carey gravely, “excellent. Though of course you should pray to God, not Our Lady.”

  Letty shook her curls again with great good humour. “Oh no, I’m only a silly maid so He wouldn’t be interested. Our Lady is much kinder.”

  Carey blinked and then seemed to give up his attempt at theology. “And what can you tell me about Fr. Jackson?”

  That opened another kind of floodgate entirely. Fr. Jackson was, apparently, the most perfect specimen of manhood alive on this sorry world of sinners. He was not only handsome and well-built, he was very very clever and could tell gold-bearing rock from the other kind with his strange waters and his touchstone, and he knew how to build things as well which he had learned in Germany. And then he became a priest for he heard God calling him, which was something that happened to men who were going to be priests, and all he wanted was to be a good priest to the people in Cornwall.