The Bartholomew Fair Murders

by Leonard Tourney

  Forming a semicircle around Cecil were the Clerk, the Justice, and Cecil’s secretary, John Wynn, a tall, dark man of about thirty with spectacles and notebook. An oil lamp burned smokily on the table so that the features of the tapestry could be dimly perceived. Cecil came to the matter at hand at once.

  “The sergeant here has just finishing apprising us of the night’s adventure—or misadventure, as the case seem to be,” Cecil said. Cecil spoke slowly and with a quick glance at the sergeant.

  “I thought it best to inform Sir Robert of the murders,” the Justice said.

  “And you were well-advised to do so,” Cecil said, keeping his eyes fixed on Matthew. “It’s a crying shame the fellow escaped you, but what’s done is done. We are now on the horns of a

  dilemma. The Queen, God bless her, is resolute in her purpose to visit the fair, despite a recent indisposition that has kept her two days in bed this very week. She has expressly forbidden any elaborate preparations for her visit. She prefers to mingle, as she calls it, with her subjects. To take them by surprise with less than the usual pageantry. Oh, she will be guarded, of course. She will be welcomed by the Lord Mayor and the AL dermen, the Clerk here, and other officials of the fair. These then will conduct her about, after which she returns to my house on the Strand for supper. Now, however, I am told that a murderer is at large in Smithfield, and the sergeant here says that you have implicated the man in an even earlier death in Chelmsford.”

  Matthew said that it was all true and briefly recounted the circumstances of the puppet master’s murder. “Can not the Queen’s visit be prevented until the murderer is taken?” Mat' thew asked at the conclusion of his recital.

  “If you mean by ‘prevented’ cancelled, it can be and certainly will, if wisdom dictates. That cancellation would hardly be pleasing to Her Majesty, whose mind is set on her coming. She is, however, so fearful of assassination these days that the very whisper of danger will bring an end to her plans, but she will hardly be pleased that a murderer remains at large, having been identified by name, or that her anticipated pleasures have been denied her. She is not a woman to brook disappointment. It would all look very bad for the Clerk here; worse for the Jus-tice, who might have captured Stubbs earlier. Also bad for me, I must confess it, for she may determine that I knew of the danger sometime before giving her warning of it. You can see, then, Mr. Stock, what a bind we all are in.”

  Matthew could see indeed, although what his own role in the matter was eluded him. He had no official capacity in Smith-field. He had merely been helping a friend.

  “What is to be done, then, Sir Robert?” asked the Justice, breaking a moment’s awkward silence and wearing a chastened expression.

  Cecil, turning his head upward to the Justice, said, “Very simple, Mr. Justice. The murderer must he taken before Her Majesty’s visit.”

  Matthew thought he saw Justice Baynard wince; certainly Cecil’s words made Grotwell, standing by the door, squirm.

  “We should have called the hue and cry at first,” the Justice said, staring pointedly at the Clerk, who had persuaded him against it.

  “You agreed not to,” returned the Clerk defensively, casting a look of appeal at Cecil. “I’m not responsible for the mainte-nance of order in Smithfield.”

  “Then you should not have stuck your nose into my bush ness,” replied the Justice curtly, “but suffered me to do what I would.”

  Cecil held up a hand to stay this dispute, which threatened to grow hotter. “Peace,” he said, “the both of you. Squabbling about who’s to blame will do no good now. What’s done is done. Blame may fall on all our shoulders later. For the present, let’s see what good may come of our mistakes. I understand our Clerk’s desire to save the fair’s profits and avoid panic. And the Justice’s willingness to comply. Hindsight has proved foresight a fool in this case, but who can know the future? On the other hand, the Queen must be protected, even from the very rumor of trouble.”

  Cecil paused and looked up again at the Justice. “Mr. Justice, you are to instruct the sergeant here to round up all who know Gabriel Stubbs by sight. Make deputies of the lot of them but, save for those who already know of his treachery, inform none of why he must be apprehended. Take the man dead or alive. If you cannot apprehend him, at least you may be able to deter-mine that he has fled and presents therefore no danger. Afflicted as he is with religious madness, who knows what his ultimate design may be? The very sight of Her Majesty may inflame his mind to new treachery, for she has done much of late to rankle the more rigorous sort of Puritan.”

  Baynard said he would do everything that Cecil ordered. He

  turned to Grotwell and declared, “See that Sir Robert’s instruct tions are carried out.”

  Grotwell said he would do it, though it cost him his life.

  “We hope matters won’t press to that extremity,” remarked Cecil dryly.

  Cecil dismissed the Justice, the Clerk, and the sergeant, in-dicating at the same time that Matthew should remain. When the other men had gone, Cecil invited Matthew to sit down in a chair opposite him and began to speak in a more familiar manner. “I can speak with greater candor now, Matthew. It is most important that the Queen follow through with her plan to visit the fair tomorrow. Her visit has been well-advertised, not only among the commons but among the foreign visitors of the City, who will be as curious to glimpse the Queen as are her subjects. She’s old and, it grieves me to say it, infirm.

  “You well know how rumor every day proclaims her imminent death and how such rumors instill in the multitude fears and anxieties of which the Queen’s enemies, here and abroad, may make good use. Now a public demonstration of her vigor would be a great advantage to the public peace and certain diplomatic negotiations now in progress. Seeing her move about in her wonted manner, drinking and eating with her subjects, would inspire confidence that she is Queen still, although aged and worn as nature has disposed. A cancellation at this late date, no matter how justified, would give the opposite impression—that she is in decline; that she is changeful and moody and takes no delight in her own people, keeps not her promises and is two legs and an arm in her grave. No, a cancellation would be most inadvisable. The tale of a murderer of such grotesque sort as this would not be credited. Yet the Queen must not be exposed to danger.”

  Here Cecil paused, took a deep breath. His voice fell to a confidential whisper. “Matthew, my friend, it is twelve of the clock if I marked the last toll of Paul’s correctly. By this same hour of the morning the Queen will leave Whitehall for

  SmitHfield. Before that hour I must say yea or nay to the enter-prise. Help me in good conscience to say yea.”

  Matthew was about to ask just how he was to assist, but Cecil anticipated the question. He raised an open palm to suggest that Matthew do nothing but listen until he was finished. “By that same hour, twelve of the morning, 1 expect you to have unraveled all this.”

  “Unraveled, sir, but—”

  “Nay, hear me out and mark me well. You are not as this Grotwell, a man whose wit is in his brawn and strength in his club. In times past you have served me well, yes, and England too. I have more than once mentioned it to the Queen and were I in position now to reveal to her these matters, she would surely commission you as I am about to do.”

  “What exactly would you have me do, Sir Robert?”

  “Marry, this. I have looked at this pamphlet given me of Justice Baynard.” Here Cecil paused and took the pamphlet that his personal secretary, John Wynn, had been holding the while. “It makes interesting reading, I’ll say that much for it, what little I have had time and energy to peruse at this late hour. The author, Foxworth, is learned. The numerous ex-empla of satanic possession are not without a certain persuasiveness if one’s theological interests run in that direction. But even a good book may prove dangerous in the hands of the wrong person. As thus it is in the present case. Now, as I say, I have perused the pamphlet to catch its drift. You, Matthew, must search out its eddies
and currents, its treacherous backwaters. Sound its depths, paying particular attention to these copious notes in the margin, which the Justice tells me are the very work of Gabriel Stubbs.”

  “They are his work, sir,” Matthew said. “For we found his pen and inkhom in his pack and Francis Crisp the bearward will swear that they are Stubbs’s.”

  “Very well, then,” Cecil went on. “Even a madman works by some method, if we can only find it out. And if there be a method here, study may make it known. I would do the work

  myself, were there not pressing business at court that requires my immediate and constant supervision. So to you I leave this onerous duty, with my prayers for your success. If there is a method to this Stubbs’s madness, find it out. Before noon tomorrow, Matthew, before noon.”

  Cecil frowned, but not at Matthew, at a thought in his mind rather, a deep meditation. Behind him John Wynn stood at attention, his eyelids drooping for the lateness of the hour. “I have read enough of the pamphlet and Stubbs’s comment to discern in him one who reads with a literal mind. If an allegory is employed, he takes it a thing he might encounter rounding a comer. He reckons not symbols, but sees hard matter in mists and vapors, poetic flourishes and parables. Damn him if he wouldn’t trip over a sonnet, if his interest in poetry were as great as his study of the Scriptures. But that’s all one. What is important is that you absorb, somehow, his peculiar notions. Read the book carefully. Where does his thinking lead?”

  “But I’m no scholar, sir—” Matthew protested.

  “All the better for this work,” Cecil answered. “You’ll not be distracted by what’s irrelevant to the present purpose. Mark what kind of Puritan he is, this Stubbs, for some, as you know, are so earnest in their cause that they would make water on Christ’s tomb to show their contempt for relics and would rather tweak the Pope’s nose than find a ready admission to heaven. Oh, they are a strange breed, indeed, and have given Her Majesty much grief. Worse than Catholics, she calls them; and I confess, while I’m no Papist, I must concur in her condemnation.

  “Here, for example, is this Gabriel Stubbs, a simple bear-ward’s helper (and God knows what before), who feels called upon by the Divine Being to pluck down enormities in Smithfield. Well, he’s not the first of his sect to decry Bartholomew pig, scorn cakes and ale, and think himself a judge in Israel. The innocent pleasures of some are the Sodom and Gomorrah of others, eh, Matthew?”

  Cecil’s face darkened again, having been momentarily bright-

  ened perhaps by the thought of the young Puritan assaulting the pig sellers and gingerbread sellers of the fair. “Well, thanks be to God we are not sinners of that sort, but love good food, good wine, and, yes, pray to heaven too.”

  Cecil laughed pleasantly. He handed the pamphlet to Mat' thew. “Justice Baynard’s a wise fellow and the Clerk’s no fool either. They’ll give what help you may need. I have told them of the confidence I place in you and reaffirm that confidence now. Yet twelve hours, Matthew, no more. If the murderer is not taken by then, the Queen’s visit must be stayed—with what repercussions I have already outlined. She does have her heart set on this appearance, thinking it may well be the last Bartholomew Fair of her mortality. God forbid that it should be so, and yet she is mortal like the rest of us. Even queens owe God a death. She has a round'wombed woman’s yearning for the greasy succulence of Bartholomew pig. Don’t disappoint her on that score either.”

  Matthew promised solemnly that he would do all that Cecil had asked. He would try to discern Stubbs’s plan. He would prevent another murder. He would assure the Queen of her bite of pig and her afternoon among her adoring subjects. He pledged fully and honestly himself, but in his heart he asked: How can this be done?

  If Cecil perceived Matthew’s self'doubt, he made no sign. A smile of easy assurance returned to his face and he climbed niim bly out of the chair. John Wynn, hearing his master’s move' ment, now came fully awake.

  “Good'night, Mr. Stock, and Godspeed you. Both to your room and to the solution of this mystery,” Cecil said.

  Matthew shook the great man’s hand and wished him good' night too. Then he went out and John Wynn closed the door behind him. For a moment Matthew stood in the corridor, lost in a maze of thoughts. He had never entered a room occupied by Sir Robert Cecil but he found himself quite undone by the little man’s presence, which filled the area around him, despite his diminutive stature. The power of the man’s intellect, the depth of his devotion to the Queen, and the cunning by which he maintained his place as Elizabeth’s most trusted adviser were evident in every word that passed from his lips. Matthew felt honored that Cecil had so readily taken him into his con-fidence, and yet he felt such a burden of responsibility—both to Cecil and the Queen—that he wondered if he could bear it long enough to travel the twenty yards and flight of stairs to where Joan waited, eager, he was sure, to learn all that had happened in his absence. Surely Cecil expected too much of a simple clothier and constable of a country town. Wasn’t the study of Gabriel Stubbs’s pamphlet the work of a university man, a learned divine? Or at least of someone schooled in the subtleties of codes and ciphers?

  Still groggy from sleep, holding the candle aloft to confirm that it was indeed her husband at the door, Joan greeted Mat-thew with an embrace and kiss.

  “In good time,” she said. “I must have fallen asleep. What hour is it?”

  “Past midnight now.”

  “God save us. What was the business of utmost importance whereof the host spoke?”

  While Matthew made ready for bed, he told Joan in whose company he had been. She was surprised. Cecil here? In Smithfield, at the Hand and Shears? Joan, lying in bed again, her head propped up on the bolster, listened intently. Then she said, “The great Sir Robert Cecil. While I slept!”

  Matthew told her about Cecil’s instructions, how Matthew was to unravel it all, Stubbs’s plot, whatever it was. “If we can anticipate his next move—”

  “The next move of a lunatic?” she said.

  “Sir Robert thinks the man works according to logic. I am to turn scholar, study the pamphlet itself, and ferret out his method. ”

  “Method? A most murderous raving method to stab and dese-crate as Gabriel Stubbs has done,” she said.

  “And babbling of Satan,” he muttered.

  “Of Satan?”

  “The author of the pamphlet, Richard Foxworth, says that Satan adopts many disguises—like a stage player. In these he appears among the wicked and sometimes among the righteous too. In his scribblings in the margins of this same pamphlet, Stubbs wrote of how he had seen Satan in one form or another, many times.”

  “In dreams and visions undoubtedly,” she said.

  He slipped into bed at her side. “In waking, rather. As he walked. The puppet master must have been such a one, at least to Stubbs’s crazed mind.”

  “And Jack Talbot and Simon Plover too?” she asked.

  “So Stubbs may have supposed,” Matthew said.

  Joan had seen the wine seller, alive and well. He had seemed a companionable sort, not a bad-looking man, although his complexion was somewhat mottled and his beard untrimmed. Certainly he was no devil incarnate. Who would be next?

  Matthew jabbed and poked the bolster, shaping it to his liking, shifted his body in the bed until he was comfortable. The chamber was stuffy and overly warm; exhaustion was a blessing, since the mattress left something to be desired too.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “Sleep, that’s what.”

  “Sleep, yes,” she murmured.

  “My feet are sore beyond belief from all that walking,” he said. “I have twelve good hours yet, according to Sir Robert. Twelve hours before the Queen visits the fair or is informed that a maniac is loose and her chief minister and other servants have been unable to apprehend him and provide for her security. Still I am determined to sleep through a quarter of the time. Nothing can be done until morning. I’m much too tired to read now. Let the p
erverse treatise of Foxworth go hang.”

  He rolled over on his side; the bed quivered as his body molded itself into the mattress.

  “We’ll study the work together,” Joan said. She blew out the candle.

  • 174 •

  • 18 •

  By the first shaft of gray light, Joan and Matthew took turns reading from Richard Foxworth’s dreary treatise. From time to time one of them would pause to remark upon a passage of the text, a point of doctrine, or a comment of Stubbs’s, penned into the margin in the young Puritan’s small, crabbed hand. Their examination confirmed Matthew’s earlier impression that Stubbs, if not a trained scholar, was at least that way inclined. Stubbs had totally absorbed the learned divine’s thoughts, ac-cepted unquestioningly his arguments, even gone beyond him in carrying Foxworth’s doctrines to their logical conclusion. And so at the moment—in Joan’s hands now, for her turn had come—she held the creature of two distempered brains, Stubbs’s and his mentor’s, and a single hysterical vision of sa-tanic evil and infiltration into the normal courses of life.

  But here was mind-numbing work indeed, this close study of a document of increasing repulsiveness, and Joan was aware that despite the seriousness of their purpose her husband’s attention had flagged. He was half-listening, and sometimes dozing, for during the night both husband and wife had slept fitfully. Duty had now depressed her husband’s spirits, and he lay sprawled upon the bed, half-dressed, in an attitude of quiet resignation to his failure.