A Murder of Crows

by P. F. Chisholm

  “It was all a great deal more complicated than you thought. What did you do then?”

  “I lay low. I tried to win some money to take me to the Netherlands but I couldn’t and Heneage was looking for me. Pickering was willing to help.

  “And then?”

  “Heneage arrested Richard Tregian.”

  Silence.

  “Why didn’t you rescue him?”

  “I was sure it was a trap to catch me. And…I didn’t dare. I got drunk.”

  Lady Hunsdon nodded. “You were probably right,” she said. “It doubtless was a trap to take someone they knew to be your friend. Why did Cecil not help?”

  “I tried to see him and talk to him, but I couldn’t get an audience.”

  “I see.”

  “And then came the news that Fr. Jackson would be executed at Tyburn and I wondered how it could possibly be. So I went to observe—and found they had substituted Mr. Tregian. I think you were there too, were you not, Sergeant? With Sir Robert?” Dodd didn’t answer.

  “And then?”

  “I…er…lay low again. I couldn’t understand why they would do that—the poor man was only trying to stop people being fooled by Jackson’s con-trick. I was even more afraid and didn’t dare go back to my sister or my chambers. I tried to get a message to her, but it failed. I was beginning to think I might be safe when Sergeant Dodd saw me at Pickering’s game and knew me.”

  Dodd nodded. Enys had carried it off well.

  One of the ship’s boys came and doffed his cap to Lady Hunsdon. “We’m all ready, my lady,” he said. “Where’s the battle to, then?”

  She smiled at him and beckoned both Dodd and Enys closer. “Gentlemen, I have a mind to break your sister Portia Morgan out of Topcliffe’s clutches and also poor Mr. Briscoe’s wife. I am very certain of the illegality of his whole proceeding from start to finish. Mr. Enys, do you recall where you released Fr. Jackson?” Enys nodded. “Do you still have the key and the password?”

  “The password is likely to be different.”

  Lady Hunsdon grinned roguishly. “I don’t think you’ll be needing the password, really, except for the purposes of confusion. You will accompany Sergeant Dodd and Mr. Janner Trevasker and give them whatever aid and assistance they need.”

  It looked for a moment as if Enys was contemplating refusing to help, but although he hesitated, he then seemed to remember what was likely to happen to his sister—might have been happening at that moment—and his jaw firmed.

  “Madame, I have no sword, I left mine with my sister since she must wear it when she dines in Hall.”

  “I’m sure Captain Trevasker can find you one.” Enys followed the boy down the deck where a motley crew of red-heads and wreckers were arming themselves with long knives, belaying pins. and a few with grenados hanging from their belts. Among them was Mr. Briscoe, looking considerably happier than he had earlier that evening.

  Lady Hunsdon beckoned Dodd to lean in closer. “Mr. Janner Trevasker is Captain Trevasker’s brother and he generally commands our cutting-out expeditions since these are his men. He is very experienced on the sea, less so on land. And so I would value your help.” she said. “I have asked him to accept you as an advisor for I feel you may well have done something like this before.”

  Dodd rubbed his chin. “Ye’ll no’ be commanding us yersen, milady?” he asked, very straight-faced.

  She beamed at him. “Of course, I should love to but alas I’m too old and stout for it and would slow you down to protect me. Like the Queen, I must ask brave young men to do my fighting for me, and very well they do it, too.”

  Dodd found himself bowing as if he were Carey. “It’s an honour, my lady.”

  “Prettily said, Sergeant, my son must be teaching you his naughty ways.”

  “Ay.” Dodd thought that must be the reason. “Ah, is this place a tower or a house?”

  “As I understand it, this is a private house on the south bank quite a long way up river, well past Lambeth Palace. It will take you at least a couple of hours to reach it, even with the tide in your favour. However there may be a tower of some kind. The house is one of several owned by Mr. Heneage and let to Topcliffe for his disgusting pastimes and used by both of them when what they are doing is shadier than usual. I am quite sure Mr. Pickering knows its location as well.”

  “How many men does he have?”

  Lady Hunsdon shook her head. “I have no idea, I’m afraid. It could be only a couple, it could a couple of dozen. You have the two gigs and ten men in each. You are not to use guns if you can avoid it, and you are to try not to kill.”

  Dodd snorted. A full assault on a defended house? No killing? Lady Hunsdon grimaced. “I’m skirting the borders of the law myself—my husband can probably smooth it over, but if it’s a blood-bath…”

  “My lady, why are you doing this for Mr. En…for Portia Morgan and Mrs. Briscoe? They’re not your kin, are they?”

  “Mrs. Briscoe isn’t, but Mr. Briscoe looks a useful man in a fight and he’ll be wanting to rescue his wife. Portia Morgan…well, I knew her family of course though not herself and her brother. She was in my service when she was taken, therefore she is my responsibility for good lordship. And also…” she leaned towards Dodd confidingly, “…I’m fair delighted at the chance to give Heneage a bloody nose for the way he treated my sons.” She sat back again and rapped her cane on the deck. “Something I thought you might enjoy too.”

  Dodd smiled at her. “Ay, my lady. Whit about yer man Cecil?”

  “What about him? I shall offer him my full hospitality, whether he likes it or not, until you come back with the women. We shall discuss many things. Off you go, Sergeant. Please conduct the raid as you see fit.”

  ***

  It was pitch black night as the two gigs slid away from the ship and across the inky Thames. Even with the tide behind them again, they would have to row hard to get past the roaring leaping water at the bridge and into the relatively more peaceful upper part of the Thames. Going with Mr. Trevasker in the lead gig was the heavily bribed Thames waterman who had left his badge behind so as not to be blamed. Dodd took no part in it since he had no skill at boats at all, apart from the occasional fishing expedition in the Solway. They had no lanterns, relying on their nightsight and the fact that so long after sunset there would hardly be many boats ferrying across the river.

  Even the lights in the city were gone out now, and their way only lit by starlight. The moon was at the quarter and not very bright. It was a harvest moon you needed for a good raid, silver-yellow light that turned the world to faery.

  Dodd was sitting wishing very much for his comfy old clothes and jack and helmet. It seemed all wrong to be going into a fight wearing his fancy tight clothes, no smell of oiled leather and steel. At least he had his sword back. Perhaps he should have bought that poinard dagger after all. Briscoe was in the other boat. They had no guns since there was very little point in trying to keep the thing secret if they were going to be firing them—although their opponents might well have guns and would certainly shoot. The worst of guns was the notice they gave with the hissing and light of matches in the dark—and the Judith had no guns with snaphaunce or wheel locks because they hadn’t penetrated to Cornwall yet. Their only real hope was surprise.

  Enys was next to Dodd at the back of the boat and Dodd looked him over cautiously. He kept licking his lips but other than that, seemed steady enough. Still, you never knew with a man until you’d seen him fight and even then, you still never knew. Please God he was better at it than his extraordinary sister.

  Enys claimed to know a small muddy beach where there was a path that led to Topcliffe’s house—it couldn’t be helped but they had to use the path as the house was on a small knoll in the middle of the Lambeth marshes.

  They were at the Bridge, the slender pointed gigs pointing straight into what seemed a vast pile of foam where the tide and the river current came to blows. The White Tower gleamed a little in grey starligh
t. There were some incomprehensible shouts from boat to boat. They slowed, steadied, took aim and then the men started leaning into the stroke while Mr. Trevasker and one of the second mates, Ted Gunn, called the time.

  With the creak of oars in the rollocks and the bellowing of the waters, Dodd found himself ducking down as low as he could to avoid the spray. The turbulence was appalling where incoming tide met the river flow, slow as it was from the summer. For a moment they held, trembling on the foam, the oars moving rhythmically. Even Dodd could tell that if the Cornish weakened or made a mistake in their rowing, the gigs would be turned sideways by the pounding waters and probably turn over and wreck. It was a ridiculous thing to do, as ridiculous as the salmon swimming upstream. Could they do it? Would they all die of drowning? Dodd knew he was holding his breath in fear of the boat sinking.

  The vast wet starlings were moving, passing by as the oars speeded their rhythm. Gradually they seemed almost to climb up a mountain of water, battered one way and the other, under the arches with their echoing roar, under the bracing beams, and then out into the quiet of the broad reach of the Thames where the turbulence was less. Dodd heard the rasping of the men’s breath as they eased their stroke. They had to keep rowing or the current would take them down under the bridge again but they were panting like men who had been in battle—which they had been. Without the tide behind them, the thing would have been impossible, and they still had three miles to go.

  They settled into a steady rhythm after they had caught their breath and Dodd felt guilty for not helping—but this was no time for apprentices at rowing.

  “How far do we go fra the river’s edge to the house?” Dodd asked.

  “Half a mile perhaps,” said Enys. “The path is muddy but passable. It’s narrow though. If they have anyone watching it, they might warn the house and they could lock the place up or even cut some throats.”

  “Ay,” said Dodd, “We need to catch them unawares. Two men to go up the path on the quiet and cut any guards’ throats…”

  Enys coughed meaningfully.

  “Oh ay, ehm…Capture them or something. About five more behind to get into the house and the rest to follow on if there’s trouble. Are there stables?”

  “Yes, at the back. But there was only me and everyone was asleep, so when I got in I just passed as one of them, taking the priest off for more interrogation.”

  “Why did ye kill him, really? It wasnae the coney-catching, was it?”

  Enys said nothing.

  “Hm,” There was something Enys had said earlier that was niggling Dodd. He tried to track down what was worrying him. “Ye had the password, did ye?”

  “Yes. And it worked. I must say, I was surprised.”

  “Cecil gave it ye?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the men slept through?”

  “Well neither Heneage nor Topcliffe was there, but yes…”

  Dodd sniffed. “Ay well then, Cecil’s got a man there and he drugged their beer.”

  Enys was silent and Dodd saw his teeth flash in a rueful grin. “And there was I congratulating myself on how cunning I had been.”

  No, it was still all wrong. It felt wrong. You took on a job to fetch a man out of imprisonment and then straight away you stabbed him in the back and heaved him in the river? It made no sense. Far better and far less effort to just stab him where he was in the prison and leave in a hurry. If that was your intent, of course. Perhaps Enys had intended to rescue him after all. But why had Cecil organised his escape in any case? Why couldn’t Cecil simply ask his father Lord Burghley to order Heneage to release him. From what Carey said, Burghley might have been old, but he was the chief man of the kingdom and the most trusted of all by the Queen…

  Had Cecil ordered the killing then? But why didn’t Enys say so? And if Cecil had ordered it, why did Enys feel he must run? And why use Enys at all instead of whoever it was he had working for him inside the house? Why make it so complicated?

  Dodd stared into the darkness, sucked his teeth, and listened to the steady rhythm of the oars as the powerful Cornishmen shoved the boat upriver against the flow. What was he getting into? Was that where they would have taken the women? How did Lady Hunsdon know for sure? What about Pickering?

  “Did ye know Jackson well?” Dodd asked, fishing for some kind of clue, somewhere.

  “No, I didn’t. Only by correspondance.” Enys’s answer was curt.

  “Ah thocht ye came from a Papist family?”

  “I do. I was in the Netherlands in the Eighties.”

  It was there, just out of reach, somewhere in the darkness. If he’d been paid to kill Jackson, why would he have broken him out of jail first? Had he been paid at all…?

  Dodd stopped breathing for a moment. Enys had certainly been paid in advance—he’d had money to gamble with at Pickering’s game who never allowed any kind of credit. Or…he had been given money at any rate, perhaps with the promise of more. Then he had been given careful instructions and he had followed them and successfully freed his man. And then, while in the boat on the Thames, no doubt heading for the Pool of London to take ship and escape, seemingly on a whim, Enys had put a knife in the back of the man he had just rescued at considerable risk and dumped him over the side with his feet still in chains to weight him down.

  Dodd tried to imagine doing that kind of a job and what might make him put a knife in someone at the end of it. After all, you never really wanted to do it, did you? Killing someone in cold blood like that? No matter how many men you might have killed in battle or a fight or even on somebody else’s instructions, you never wanted to do something like that at such close quarters, especially not in a boat. He might spot what you were doing and certainly would resist, you might fall in or be stabbed yourself. Unconsciously, Dodd shook his head. You wouldn’t do it just because the man had coneycatched a lot of people, though you might disapprove of it. And you certainly wouldn’t do it if the son of the most powerful man in the kingdom had just paid you to help the prisoner escape.

  In Dodd’s mind there was only one reason why he might put a knife in someone he had just rescued like that. He cleared his throat to ask Enys if that was the reason, then paused. All right. The only way the thing would work is if you realised that the man you had just rescued was going to try and kill you. Then it would make sense to put your knife in him first.

  Why? Why would a priest who had just been rescued by Enys on behalf of…probably Cecil, possibly someone else…for what reason might he want to kill his rescuer? Well, they were alone in the boat apart from the boatman who had been well-bribed. One man goes upriver in a boat. A prisoner disappears from a safe-house. One man comes back, gets on a ship, and leaves England using the same name. And one man who knows too much about the scheme ends at the bottom of the Thames with a hole in him.

  But you wouldn’t expect a priest to behave like that, even a Jesuit. Also, how did Enys know for sure? His own voice came to him. “You were from a Papist family.” Fr. Jackson was also a Papist—but what if Enys knew he wasn’t what he claimed? Didn’t all the Papists in a place tend to know each other?

  Once again the backs of Dodd’s legs went cold. Even the sounds of the oars faded to nothing as his mind slewed round to the new idea. Good God. Maybe? Perhaps little Mrs. Briscoe had been right and the corpse really had been her brother Harry Dowling, always in trouble, greedy for money. Perhaps the stern-looking Catholic lady who was not called Mrs. Sophia Merry was also right and the corpse was Fr. Jackson SJ. Perhaps they were the same man? In fact, thinking about what Ellie Briscoe had said of her brother and how he had refused to know her when she saw him in London, perhaps Harry Dowling was more of a coney-catcher than a priest. Perhaps he was working all the time for someone else…Such as Heneage? Or maybe Sir Robert Cecil? And both Harry Dowling and James Enys had been in the Netherlands where Englishmen tended to bunch together in places like Flushing or under the same captains. It was more than likely Enys and Dowling/Jackson had met.
/>   So when he finally saw the man, Enys must have realised Jackson wasn’t a priest at all. In fact, Cecil’s involvement made it almost certain he was someone who had been spying for Cecil’s steadily growing secret service. Cecil’s involvement in helping him escape also suggested that he was someone who was valuable and knew too much to be left in Heneage’s hands for too long. Enys had worked this out quickly because he knew the priest was lying, realised he himself knew too much to be allowed to live, and that the most likely way of getting rid of him was in the middle of a rescue.

  But it had gone wrong for Cecil. Enys had fought in the Netherlands and he had struck first. The so-called Fr. Jackson went into the Thames still breathing and drowned—a nasty death, probably worse than the one Richard Tregian had suffered since Tregian had been hanged until he was dead. And Richard Tregian had died because Heneage assumed he was Cecil’s man, so took him and put him to death publicly as a warning to Cecil. Enys had to lie low with what he had been given as a downpayment and being what he was had tried to gamble it into a nest egg and lost the lot. So he couldn’t even pay his passage out of the country.

  What had he done next? Gone to Cecil? Hardly, the man had tried to have him killed. Gone to…Well, obviously he had gone to Heneage who was the other side of the war he had stumbled into. He had gone to Heneage, spilled everything he knew. Probably he was trying to broker some kind of deal but of course Heneage had realised how that gave him a weapon. The taking of Briscoe’s wife had been a side-game and a tidying up of loose ends in order to take Pickering’s game. Heneage had arrested Portia Morgan to keep James Enys obedient and Portia Morgan would also be the bait that would draw the chivalrous and impulsive Carey into a trap, and alongside him that thorn in Heneage’s side, Sergeant Henry Dodd. Enys was the stone that would kill two birds at once. You could hardly blame Heneage for not resisting the temptation. He had overegged the pudding when he ransacked Pickering’s gaming chamber, but that was his habit as well.