Murder on High Holborn (Exploits of Thomas Chaloner)

by Gregory, Susanna

  Chaloner regarded her curiously. ‘You seem very sure that something untoward has happened, yet there is no evidence to say that you are right.’

  ‘Yes there is. You see, poor Ferine had been saying for weeks that something bad would happen to him two days before the Ides of March. Well, it has.’

  Chaloner frowned at the archaic way of referring to the date, and glanced at the clock. ‘I suppose it did become the thirteenth at midnight…’

  ‘Yes, and I saw him alive shortly before twelve, which means he died today – exactly when he predicted a calamity for himself.’

  ‘Predicted how?’ asked Chaloner, bemused.

  ‘He had calculated his own horoscope,’ explained Temperance. ‘And he was quite clear about what he read in the stars. They foretold a “grave misfortune” for him – and you do not get a graver misfortune than death.’

  Solicitously, Chaloner took Temperance’s arm and led her downstairs to wait for Wiseman. She pulled away as they passed the parlour, and went to check that all was well. The parlour was a large chamber with judiciously dimmed lamps and dark red decor. Pipe smoke swirled thickly, mixing with the sweet, sickly perfume he always associated with bordellos. A game was under way between the clients and some of the girls, and it took a far less vivid imagination than his to guess that the manly cheers meant someone was divesting herself of her clothes.

  Several patrons scampered towards Temperance when they saw her at the door, clamouring for her attention like fractious children. She listened to the ribald poem they had composed with every semblance of enjoyment, making Chaloner marvel at her patience. He folded his arms and leaned against the wall to wait for them to finish, and a glance towards the riotous fun at the far end of the room allowed him to recognise five Members of Parliament, three churchmen, four barons, two influential businessmen and an admiral.

  The most boisterous participant was the Duke of Buckingham, the King’s oldest friend and the implacable enemy of Chaloner’s employer. He was a tall, athletic man in his thirties, whose licentious ways had rendered his once-handsome face lined and puffy. He possessed a brilliant intelligence, and might have been an asset to his country if he had given as much care to affairs of state as he did to his pleasures.

  Next to him was Prince Rupert, who had fought valiantly, if somewhat mercurially, in the civil wars. Now in his forties, he was a petulant dandy, displeased with everything and everyone around him. Chaloner was surprised to see him with Buckingham, as it was common knowledge that they detested each other. This was a problem: both were on the Privy Council – the body that advised the King – and as neither could bring himself to agree with the other, meetings tended to be long, bad-tempered and alarmingly lacking in sound counsel.

  ‘Enough!’ Rupert was snapping irritably. ‘It is late, and we should all be in bed.’

  ‘Yes, we should,’ leered Buckingham. ‘Which whore do you—’

  ‘I am going home,’ interrupted Rupert, stalking towards the door and shoving past anyone who stood in his way. Being sober, Chaloner was able to step aside, but others found themselves shunted very roughly.

  ‘Ignore him, Lawson,’ said Buckingham to the stout, barrel-chested fellow whose wine had been knocked from his hand. ‘He has been in a foul mood all day.’

  Lawson was in his fifties, and spurned the current fashion for wigs, allowing his own yellow-grey hair to flow freely over his shoulders. He spoke with the distinctive inflection of the Yorkshireman, and replied to Buckingham’s words with a string of obscenities that had even the jaded Duke’s eyebrows shooting up in astonishment.

  ‘Language, Admiral,’ said another patron mildly. ‘There are ladies present, and you are not at sea now, sir.’

  The speaker was tall and lean, with a face like a wax mask that had been grabbed by the nose while still molten and pulled. He wore a long black coat sewn with silver stars – an exotic garment, even by London standards – and his voice had been soft yet commanding. His hands and neck were adorned with symbols, a permanent marking with ink that Chaloner had never seen in England – and certainly not among the kind of men who frequented the club.

  ‘That blackguard spilled my wine,’ shouted Lawson angrily. ‘Wine should be poured down the throat, not on to the floor.’

  ‘Then let me refill your cup,’ said the stranger, taking the enraged mariner’s arm and thus preventing him from storming after Rupert and demanding satisfaction at dawn.

  The poets finished regaling Temperance with their verses and rushed away to rejoin the undressing game – the club’s patrons tended to be easily bored, and rarely stuck with one activity for very long. She went to stand next to Chaloner, and when she saw who he was watching, she began whispering in his ear.

  ‘Poor Admiral Lawson suffered a terrible tragedy last week. His ship London blew up in the Thames Estuary.’

  ‘Did it?’ Chaloner was doubtful. While warships were certainly packed to the gills with guns, powder and ammunition, they did not usually explode unless under attack.

  ‘It was the talk of the city. Did you not hear?’ Temperance raised her hand. ‘I forgot – you have only just come home. Well, it was a dreadful business, and more than three hundred men were killed. I imagine he came here to put it out of his mind for a few hours.’

  Lawson did not look particularly grief-stricken, and began to regale the gathering with a raunchy song favoured by sailors. It had jaws dropping all over the parlour, and these were men used to a bit of bawdiness.

  ‘Who is the fellow with him?’ asked Chaloner. ‘The one wearing the peculiar coat?’

  ‘Dr Lambe,’ replied Temperance disapprovingly. ‘He is a sorcerer and a physician, and is the newest member of Buckingham’s household.’

  ‘Buckingham’s father had a sorcerer-physician named Dr Lambe,’ recalled Chaloner. ‘He was accused of making his enemies impotent and summoning whirlwinds, although I suspect he had no such skills and was just a trickster. He was murdered forty years ago by an angry mob.’

  ‘This is his son, apparently. He can divine the future, and it is rumoured that his unusually accurate predictions come courtesy of the devil, who helps him with them.’

  ‘He did not predict Ferine’s “grave misfortune”, did he?’ asked Chaloner, thinking that if so, Lambe would probably be arrested if the courtier did transpire to be murdered. It would not be the first time a seer had manipulated events to ensure that a ‘prophecy’ came true.

  ‘Ferine was quite capable of calculating his own horoscope. Indeed, he was better at it than Lambe – he told me only tonight that three black cats had walked in front of him on his way to the club, while a jackdaw had cawed thirteen times from a chimney. He said there were no surer warnings that something dire was going to happen.’

  ‘Then why did he not go home – keep himself safe until the thirteenth was over?’

  Temperance sighed unhappily. ‘I do not know, Tom. And we can hardly ask him now.’

  Chaloner followed her out of the parlour and along a hallway to the private quarters at the back of the house. Near the kitchens was a cosy sitting room where she usually sat to count her nightly takings. It was a testament to her unhappiness that she barely glanced at the heaps of coins on the table. He poured her a cup of wine to steady her nerves but she waved it away and reached for her pipe instead. He studied her as she tamped it with tobacco.

  She was still in her early twenties, but the decadent lifestyle she enjoyed with her clients was taking its toll. She had always been large, but access to extravagant foods had doubled her size, and her complexion had suffered from never seeing the sun. She had once owned luxuriant chestnut hair, but she had shaved it off to wear a wig. Her teeth were tobacco-stained, and too much time listening to the opinions of men like Buckingham and Rupert had turned her acerbic and petty-minded.

  ‘How was Russia?’ she asked as she puffed. ‘I cannot imagine you enjoyed it. It is said to be very desolate – bitterly cold, with filthy streets and superstitious citi
zens.’

  Wryly, Chaloner thought her description applied equally well to London: the weather had been foul since he had returned; every road was a quagmire; and she had just finished telling him about one man who was a sorcerer and another who put faith in black cats and jackdaws. He saw she was waiting for a reply, but good spies did not talk about themselves and he was a master of his trade. He made an innocuous remark about the amount of snow he had seen, then changed the subject by asking whether anything interesting had happened while he had been away, knowing that she, like most people, preferred to talk than to listen anyway.

  ‘Well, we are now officially at war with the Dutch,’ she replied. ‘Hostilities were declared three weeks ago, and both navies are already at sea. We shall win, of course. The butter-eaters cannot defeat our brave seamen.’

  Chaloner disagreed, and thought that fighting the United Provinces was a very bad idea. He had tried very hard, within his limited sphere of influence, to prevent it, but the hawks on the Privy Council had itched to flex their muscles, and so that was that.

  ‘We shall soon have all the best trading routes,’ Temperance went on. ‘Routes that Buckingham says should be ours anyway, because we deserve them.’

  And there was the nub of the matter, thought Chaloner sadly: there was not enough room on the high seas for two powerful maritime nations. It was a war of commerce, not politics.

  ‘Yet I cannot imagine how it will be funded,’ she sighed. ‘Not with taxes – there is already a ridiculously high duty on coal, which means the poor cannot heat their homes or cook. The government would not dare introduce another levy – not unless they want more civil wars.’ But her expression was distant, and before he could comment, she burst out with, ‘Who would want Ferine dead? He had his detractors, but who does not?’

  ‘What detractors?’

  Her expression was unhappy. ‘Those who hated the fact that he had stopped being a Christian and put his faith in superstition instead. He took his horoscopes and omens very seriously.’

  Chaloner was about to ask more but the door opened and Richard Wiseman walked in. The surgeon was a large man in many senses of the word. He was tall, broad and added to his bulk by lifting heavy stones each morning. He wore no colour except red, which served to make him even more imposing, and his character was arrogant, haughty and proud. He was not someone Chaloner would normally have chosen as a friend, but circumstances had thrown them together, and the spy was slowly beginning to appreciate Wiseman’s few but significant virtues – loyalty to those he liked, an ability to keep a secret and a strong sense of justice.

  ‘I understand you have a corpse for me,’ he boomed cheerfully. ‘Good! Lead me to it.’

  Upstairs again, Chaloner sat on a chair that would have cost him a month’s pay, and watched Wiseman examine Ferine. The sounds of dissipated rumpus still emanated from the parlour below, while girlish shrieks and manly guffaws from the bedrooms indicated that business was continuing as usual upstairs as well – so far, at least.

  ‘Well?’ he asked, when Wiseman had finished. ‘I assume his heart gave out?’

  ‘Then you would assume wrong. He has been smothered.’

  Chaloner blinked. ‘I saw no evidence of—’

  ‘Of course not – you are not a surgeon. However, he inhaled two feathers from the pillow that was pressed over his face, there is a cut on the inside of his lip, and his eyes are bloodshot. Ferine was definitely murdered.’

  Chaloner’s duty was clear: he had to send word to Spymaster Williamson, then distance himself from the entire affair. Ferine’s death was not his concern, and the Earl would be aghast if he ever learned that his spy had visited a brothel, regardless of the fact that he had done so to help a friend and not to avail himself of its delights. But years in espionage had imbued Chaloner with a keen sense of curiosity, and his interest was piqued.

  ‘I know the wine flows very freely here, but surely the lady who was with Ferine would have noticed someone shoving a cushion over his face?’

  ‘Snowflake,’ said Wiseman, naming one of Temperance’s more popular employees, a small, vivacious blonde with a sensuous body and world-weary eyes. ‘Shall I fetch her?’

  He returned a few moments later with both the lady in question and Temperance. The two women entered the bedchamber reluctantly, and Snowflake would only explain what had happened after Chaloner had covered Ferine’s body with a sheet.

  ‘He always liked to frolic in nothing but his hat and boots.’ She shrugged at Chaloner’s raised eyebrows. ‘Such antics are not unusual, and we aim to please. Afterwards, I slipped out for a moment, and when I returned, he was lying on the bed … I thought he was asleep.’

  ‘They do nod off on occasion,’ put in Temperance. Her voice was hoarse – she took no pleasure in hearing her suspicions confirmed. ‘Running the nation, managing dioceses or directing large commercial ventures is very tiring, and our guests are often weary.’

  Chaloner thought it best not to comment. ‘Did you see anyone in the hall outside when you left?’ he asked of Snowflake.

  She considered the question carefully, pulling a silken shift more tightly around her slender shoulders. ‘No, it was empty.’ She turned apologetically to Temperance. ‘I was only gone for a minute – just long enough to run down to the kitchens for a jug of wine.’

  Temperance frowned. ‘Wine? But that is why we hire Ann – to fill the decanters between clients. You should not have had to fetch it yourself.’

  ‘Bring Ann up here,’ suggested Wiseman. ‘Then we can ask why she forgot.’

  ‘She is usually very reliable,’ said Snowflake when Temperance had gone. She shuddered. ‘I cannot believe this is happening! Men do die here, of course – we make them feel like youths, and their hearts sometimes cannot take it – but no one has never been murdered before.’

  ‘How did Ferine behave this evening?’ asked Chaloner. ‘Was he nervous? Fearful?’

  ‘Drunk,’ replied Snowflake. ‘Although he did mention the unfavourable horoscope for the thirteenth. After he had finished here, he planned to go home and not stir all day, in the hope that the bad fortune could be averted. He meant to leave before midnight, but we lost track of time. I imagine he did not expect disaster to strike quite so soon.’

  ‘Clearly,’ said Wiseman drily.

  ‘Yet I do not believe he thought he would die,’ Snowflake went on. ‘I think he envisaged losing some money or tripping over a rug.’ She looked sadly at the sheeted body. ‘He was a lovely man, and generous, too. He gave me a dried toad only last week, and said that licking it three times before going to church would bring me good luck.’

  Chaloner winced. ‘And has it?’

  ‘No, not yet – my stepfather’s perfume business still founders, and I have not won at cards.’

  ‘Did you notice anyone watching him with undue interest tonight?’

  ‘Well, he made a dreadful fuss about losing his woodlice. That attracted the “undue interest” of the whole club – guests and staff.’

  ‘His woodlice?’ queried Chaloner warily.

  ‘He liked to keep three of them in a box around his neck, as they are thought to bestow good health on the wearer. The box fell off, and he had us all in an uproar until he found it.’

  The object in question was on the bedside table. Chaloner liberated the creatures through the window, at the same time checking to see whether a killer had entered that way. The catch was so stiff that he was certain it had not been opened in weeks.

  ‘Prince Rupert was not very nice about the commotion,’ Snowflake was saying. ‘He refused to join the hunt, and sat looking sour the whole time.’

  ‘If he let me drill a hole in his skull, these wicked moods would be a thing of the past,’ said Wiseman. ‘And if any man is in need of such a procedure, it is him. The rest of the Privy Council would love me to do it, especially Buckingham. They are all weary of his nasty temper.’

  While he and Snowflake discussed whether Rupert should submit h
imself to such a drastic procedure for the convenience of others, Chaloner examined the hallway. There were plenty of alcoves, and the windows had been fitted with heavy curtains to ensure that no one in the street outside should be able to see in. Scuff marks on the floor suggested that the killer had hidden behind one, waiting until Ferine was alone. Chaloner inspected the area closely, but there were no clues that he could see.

  Eventually, Temperance arrived with a tearful white-haired woman in tow. Ann’s clothes were cheap but clean, and it was clear from her nervous demeanour that she was terrified of losing her job. ‘I did fill the flagon!’ she declared before anyone could speak. ‘I know I did.’

  Temperance began to remonstrate with her, but Chaloner opened an ornate chest and was not surprised to discover a lot of claret-soaked blankets.

  ‘The culprit dumped it here after Ann had been,’ he explained, to the woman’s obviously profound relief. ‘Then he concealed himself behind the curtains in the hall until Snowflake left to fetch more.’

  ‘How did he know that Ferine would want some?’ Wiseman asked doubtfully.

  ‘They all do,’ replied Temperance, pale at the notion that such a determined and resourceful villain should have been in her house. ‘Being with a lady is thirsty work.’

  ‘A fact of which the killer was obviously aware,’ surmised Chaloner, ‘which suggests he is familiar with the club and its ways.’

  ‘My guests are not murderers,’ said Temperance firmly, although her eyes were fearful. Her patrons were powerful men, who would not take kindly to accusations that might be used to ruin them.

  ‘A member of staff then,’ suggested Chaloner. Temperance opened her mouth to disagree, so he hastened to explain. ‘Your club has two doors: the front one, which is guarded by the porter; and the kitchen one, which means passing the cook and his assistants. The only people who can enter this building without exciting attention are patrons and staff.’

  ‘My people are beyond reproach,’ stated Temperance. ‘I chose them myself.’