The Bartholomew Fair Murders

by Leonard Tourney

  Joan found herself shouting too, praising Elizabeth, best of queens, marvel of women. The guard was now at attention and had closed ranks, forming a wall between the royal path and the people who pressed in on all sides.

  The cheering continued. A dozen or so young white-garbed women could now he seen. These were the virgins of Smithfield, the attendants of the Virgin Queen. They moved slowly down the path, strewing flowers. Following them came the Queen herself. The Queen carried a wand in one hand and with the other she waved to her subjects, nodding graciously and drawing thereby an even greater outpouring of devotion.

  Then the procession came to a halt and Joan had full view of Elizabeth. There she stood, like a divinity indeed, hailed on all sides and glorious in crown, wand, and jewels. She was a little taller than Joan had expected but somewhat stooped. Her face was oblong and fair and wrinkled and she wore false red hair. Her nose was a little crooked but not ignoble. The cheering died away. She said, “I thank you, my good people.”

  “Long live Queen Elizabeth!” returned the assembly in uni' son, and hats flew into the air.

  The officials of the fair descended the platform and knelt before her, while the virgins who had accompanied her now spread around the Queen as though she were a great ruby and they her foil.

  Joan recognized Rose among them. She pointed her out to Matthew. “There’s Rose,” she said.

  “So it is,” said Matthew. “It’s a good sign she’s overcome her grief. It’s a shame such a pretty one as she should have become so enamored of a madman. Why, look, she’s the fairest of the lot of them, her swollen lip notwithstanding.”

  Joan agreed. Rose was lovely, dressed finely as she was. And yet she noticed no joy in Rose’s face. The other girls were smiL ing, proud of their distinction, their proximity to greatness. Rose seemed grave. Was she still grieving after all?

  The Queen’s guard had made a wall around her and Joan thought of Stubbs’s plan. To kill the Queen. How, she won' dered now, had the young Puritan ever thought to penetrate that wall of protection, those stout armed men each of whom would sooner lay down his life than see his royal mistress as-saulted?

  Yet Rose had penetrated the wall, stood now within the en^ closure as the very image of innocence and purity. Rose’s beauty had accomplished what her lover’s stratagems had not. Rose. Simple, winsome Rose. Rose who loved the handsome lunatic who had confused the Queen of England and the Queen of Babylon and whose belief in her lover’s crazed dreams and visions must surely have been as strong as her love, indestructa^ ble despite the terrible revelations of his murders. Had it been strong enough to cause her to share not only his delusion but his mission?

  In a split second the scene before her was blotted out and replaced by another fetched from her recent memory. In her mind’s eye she saw again the great chamber of the inn and her husband standing before them, holding Stubbs’s weapon aloft to show the true instrument of death and mutilation. Then Mat' thew had laid it down on the table in front of him, where it had remained through all the startling disclosures that followed as the primary exhibit of the young Puritan’s treachery. For the long anxious hour it had remained inert there in silent witness. Joan remembered it, lying there as her husband had denounced the sergeant for extortion and murder. Then there was the scuf-fie. Grotwell’s futile effort to escape. All eyes were turned to the back of the room. Matthew had left his station, moved quickly to call off Grotwell’s men before they killed him. Brutal men only too happy for this opportunity to do violence with impunity. Grotwell’s subduing and his subsequent confession had distracted them all. All save one. Again Joan saw the table in her mind, saw it as it had appeared just before Matthew had dismissed them all. It had been bare, the tabletop. The dagger was gone! And who had taken thought of its disappearance then, with congratulations in the air like the whir of birds’ wings and great haste to be gone before the Queen should come?

  Besides, was not the weapon’s owner dead, the mystery solved at last?

  Someone, she now realized, had snatched the blade up while all heads were turned, fixed on the beating Grotwell’s men were administering to him with such zeal. That someone had not been so easily distracted, someone for whom the knife remained a relic not of murder but of devotion to a righteous cause. That person had snatched it up and concealed it, borne it from the chamber and kept it still.

  The present scene returned. Joan saw Rose. The girl was moving, inching toward the Queen. Her expression was hard. A face not made for grimaces and glowering was twisted almost beyond recognition by malevolent thoughts not her own.

  In the same instant, while the Clerk of the Fair was between sentences and the tedium of his address of welcome was begin' ning to he evident in the restlessness of the crowd and the wavering of the royal attention, Joan made sense of it all—the missing dagger, the evil design of Gabriel Stubbs, the tragic complicity of innocence. Joan screamed to the full extent of her lungs. She screamed again, aware as she did so that she was either proclaiming herself the maddest woman in England or the savior of her monarch from imminent assassination.

  Every head turned. Her husband, nearly deafened by the blast, stared in wordless astonishment, his mouth agape. The Queen’s guart, uncertain of what this outburst meant, closed around Her Majesty, pointing their halberds toward the officials’ stand to ward off the threatening danger.

  “The girl, it’s the girl!” Joan cried, pointing toward the white-garbed virgins.

  Rose had stopped, momentarily distracted by Joan’s scream. Now she made a sudden move, shoving aside another of the virgins. But the movement was ilbtimed. The guards, fully alerted, noticed the move and intervened, wrestling Rose to the ground. The basket fell and rolled toward Elizabeth’s feet, emptying what remained of its contents—a handful of posies and the unsheathed blade with which Rose Dibble had con-spired to pierce the heart of Babylon’s Queen.

  • Epilogue •

  It was afternoon. The dog days of August were done. Sep-tember had brought the benison of cool rains, one of which was even now tapping against the window with gentle insistency.

  In the Queen’s apartment in Whitehall, for more than an hour they have been conversing, the Queen and her Principal Secretary. Her Majesty was in a merry mood, and Cecil with unerring instinct had matched his own to it. The room filled with her throaty laughter.

  “Why, by the Mass, Robin, this is more diverting than any court gossip you’ve treated me to this twelve months. Pray don’t stop now.”

  Encouraged, Cecil went on, “Well, Your Majesty, this Grot-well—”

  “The murderous sergeant—” She leaned forward in the great chair, frail of body but alert of mind.

  “The very man. This Grotwell, I say, has been tried, con-victed, and hanged. They say he made a good end on the gab lows, confessing all and encouraging the youth present to forswear his example.”

  “As well they might,” she agreed, “if they desire to live, and go to heaven too.”

  “Already he’s the subject of five ballads and as many broadsides. The only shame is that he can’t enjoy his share of the profits. But here is the best part. As it turns out, this same Grotwell was none other than the grandson of the famous Grot-well or Cartwell—a hangman who was himself hanged with two others for robbery of a booth at Bartholomew Fair in your illustrious father’s time. His ancestry was not remembered before his villainy made him notorious.”

  “The grandson of a thief! And him a murderer too. By God . . . that proves blood will tell. There’s a fine sergeant for you! As well have the cat guardian of the milk as entrust a sergeant with such bad blood to keep the peace. I can readily believe the story. But pray, how goes it with this young would-be murderess, Rose Dibble—she who tried to stab me at Bartholomew Fair with half of England there to bear witness to her treachery?”

  “She remains at Newgate. Her trial is yet to come.”

  “Well, hanging is too good for her. She’s totally mad, you know. As mad as this Stubbs, whos
e disciple she was. A mad disciple of a mad sectary fit for a paragraph in the acts and monuments of wickedness. How did she ever think to escape after she’d done it? But perhaps therein lies her madness. Show me one who has no regard for his life and I’ll show you a madman or a great fool—and probably both. You know, Robin, I have lived all my life in fear of death. Fear that I would meet my mother’s end, my head on the block, the cries of scorn ringing in my ears and ushering me to heaven. Yet even as God has granted me so long a life—”

  “And so glorious a reign,” he added.

  “Don’t interrupt! You know I can’t abide it. At night I wake in a cold quicksilver sweat, afraid that beyond the curtains of my bed some merciless ...”

  She was falling into a melancholy. The drizzle at the window seemed less friendly than before. A chill settled in the room, in Cecil’s bones too.

  “Let us not speak of these fears,” he said soothingly, “but pray that God spares us such misfortunes.”

  “I must do something for the clothier and his wife,” she said, changing the subject and at the same instant seeming to return to a happier frame of mind. “What would be an appropriate token of gratitude?”

  “I cannot deny but that they deserve it, Your Highness.”

  “What would you recommend—a gift of land, perhaps? A purse of gold?”

  “Matthew Stock is a great treasure in himself. A man of most genuine goodness of soul and brave resolve. His appearance be-lies his cleverness.”

  “As does yours,” she said, smiling mischievously.

  He laughed, long used to her taunting. Only from her would he have endured such taunting, not only because she was Queen, but because she was herself, Elizabeth Tudor, a woman of indomitable spirit even in the twilight of her mortality. A sadness fell upon him.

  “You praise the husband,” she said. “What of the wife? You men are all the same. You think of goodness and bravery as the sole rights of your sex, forgetting these qualities are also woman’s. Had this clothier’s wife not vented her lungs in Smithfield I might have spilled my blood then and there. And who would you have had to succeed me?” But she did not wait for a response, and he was not eager to give it. The subject was a delicate one to them both.

  “I suppose a knighthood would be too much,” she conjectured, glancing at him out of the comer of her eye.

  “Less deserving men have received one,” he answered.

  “We shall see. I’ll think upon it. What other talents does the man possess?”

  “He has a most marvelous tenor voice. He’s not a bad clothier.”

  “England has clothiers in great number and singers too. Write him in Chelmsford. Invite him to London this coming month. Make sure he brings his wife. What’s her name?”

  “Joan.”

  “Joan, a good solid name. A thoroughly English name. I’ll endure Matthew Stock’s singing for his wife’s company. Between now and then I’ll hit upon a way of rewarding the both of them. And I think I can use their particular talents as well. In a private matter that has caused me much consternation since Michaelmas term.”

  “A private matter? Do let me guess.”

  She chuckled and said, “Don’t bother. You’ll find out soon enough.” She shut her eyes and leaned her head back on the bolster. It was his signal to depart.

  Sir Robert Cecil took his leave, treading silently across the room, the little man who was the greatest man in England because he was principal servant to the greatest woman.