by S. J. Parris
Walsingham frowns.
‘And you delivered this message straight away? To Her Majesty’s private apartments? How did you manage that?’
‘I took up some sweetmeats, sir. Then the guards can’t stop you - you just say the queen’s asked for ‘em, they don’t know otherwise. The girls - Her Majesty’s maids, I mean - they often get messages in and out by us kitchen boys.’ He bites his lip then, looking guilty. ‘I got as far as I could and got one of them to fetch Abigail.’
‘And how did she seem when you gave her the message?’
‘Frightened, sir,’ the boy says, without hesitation. ‘She said she’d come directly, and not to tell anyone else about it.’
‘And this was before the concert began? How long before?’
‘I couldn’t say, sir.’ The boy looks at his frayed shoes. ‘I don’t know how to read the time. Not long, though - there weren’t many people left in the kitchens, I know that. They gived us the night off because she had her supper early, on account of the music. Her Majesty, I mean. And there was already people arriving.’
Walsingham gives me a frank look.
‘I never sent any such message tonight,’ I say, trying not to sound defensive. ‘Will someone tell me what has happened?’
‘They’ve killed her,’ the boy blurts, glaring at me with accusing eyes. ‘And if it wa’n’t you, then it was the other feller, and if it wa’n’t him, then it was the Devil himself!’
I find, when I hear the words spoken aloud, that I had expected this, or something like it; the sense of foreboding that had taken root when I first noticed Abigail’s absence in the queen’s train had been steadily growing in my imagination, but the bluntness of the boy’s outcry still shocks me. So the killer has found his way to Abigail, I think, as my mind fumbles blindly to make sense of the boy’s story, and though the message was not my doing, the circumstance is indisputably my fault.
Leicester stirs unhurriedly from his place by the window, stretching out his long limbs as if this were his cue. He nods to Walsingham and then gestures towards the door with the slightest movement of his head. Walsingham holds up a forefinger, signalling for him to wait.
‘You’ve been very helpful, Jem,’ Walsingham says gently to the boy. ‘I have one more question. Do you think this man waited for you especially to take his message?’
‘Well - yes, sir.’ The boy blinks rapidly, as if he fears another trick. ‘Because of me taking the message before, see? I suppose he must have known, somehow.’
‘What message before?’ Walsingham’s voice is sharp as a blade again.
‘From Lady Abigail to him.’ He points at me. ‘In Fleet Street, sir. I had to wait half a day in the stables with them French boys threatening to knock me down.’ He bares his teeth, as if the memory of it still stings.
‘Thank you. I’d like you to go with the sarjeant now, Jem. We may have some more questions for you. If you can remember any more details about the man with the hat - anything about his voice, his face, his figure, anything at all that might help us - I would be very grateful.’
‘It’s my fault, i’n’t it?’ The boy looks suddenly to Burghley, who has a grandfatherly air that makes him less severe than the others. ‘If I hadn’t taken that message, she wouldn’t ‘a died, would she? I’m to blame - for a shilling!’ He bunches his fist against his mouth and looks as if he might cry. ‘She was always kind, the lady Abigail. Not like some.’
Burghley lays a hand on his shoulder.
‘It’s no one’s fault except the wicked man who killed her. And with your help we shall find him, so he can’t hurt anyone else.’
The boy gives me a last look over his shoulder as the guard leads him away.
When the door is firmly closed, the three members of the Privy Council turn their eyes sternly upon me.
‘Message, Bruno?’ Walsingham folds his arms across his chest.
As succinctly as I can, I outline my dealings with Abigail Morley, from the kitchen boy’s visit to our meeting at the Holbein Gate, when she gave me the bag of Cecily Ashe’s treasures and I first suspected we were being watched, to the discovery Dee and I had made about the perfume and my most recent guess at the significance of the gold ring - which I take from inside my doublet and hand to Walsingham. He turns it over between his fingers, nodding gently, as I continue my story. When I come to the end, they regard me for a moment in silence; I can almost read the separate workings of their minds in their faces.
‘They’ll have to release Edward Bellamy from the Tower.’ Burghley speaks first, squeezing his plump fingers together anxiously.
Walsingham turns on his heel and paces the width of the room, his hands flexing and uncurling. I have never seen him so rattled and working so hard to contain it. Eventually he stops and turns on me with an expression so fierce it startles me.
‘You did not think to pass any of this on to me, Bruno? You appoint yourself this girl’s sole confidant, regardless of the fact that you already suspect the killer has an eye on her? Why did you not come to me immediately?’
‘Your honour, I -‘ I spread my hands out in apology, feeling once again like a schoolboy. ‘I did not want to cause unnecessary panic until I was sure about the perfume bottle. The engraving on the ring I only worked out this evening.’
‘It is my responsibility to judge whether panic is necessary or not. Those objects should have been brought straight to me,’ Walsingham says again, his voice tight.
‘I thought that until I was certain, the fewer people knew of this, the better.’
‘Including me, evidently.’
‘Peace, Francis.’ Burghley extends a hand towards him. ‘The girl said nothing even to Lady Seaton and she would have been too intimidated to approach the Privy Council. She confided more readily in Bruno, and he was sensible to test his theory before coming to us.’ He turns to the rest of us. ‘This serves at least to prove that the killer is familiar with the court and its ways.’ He shakes his head, and his face seems paler. ‘No matter how many extra guards we place around Her Majesty, he knows how to slip right under their noses. Kitchen boys, indeed.’
‘What happened to her? Abigail?’ I hear my own voice falter and there comes a sudden memory of the warmth of Abigail’s breath on my cheek as she whispered the secrets I persuaded her to part with. She had thought I was the one person she could trust; someone knew that, and used the knowledge to kill her.
Walsingham glances at Burghley, then crosses to me and places the flat of his hand between my shoulder blades. ‘Come, Bruno. I want you to see this. We will need every last grain of intuition we possess between us. My lord of Leicester - you had better return to the hall and reassure Her Majesty. She saw the guard enter and she will be anxious enough already, but I think it best the recital is allowed to play out without interruption.’
Leicester gives a terse nod, his handsome face creased in a frown. He turns to me.
‘Your theory, Doctor Bruno, if I have understood correctly,’ he says, his eyes searching my face, ‘is that the first murdered girl, Cecily Ashe, was being set up by her lover as part of a plot to poison the queen, and that this plot is somehow connected to the Guise plans of invasion being cooked up at Salisbury Court?’
‘That is how I read it, my lord.’
‘So she was killed because those who were directing her feared she would betray them?’
‘I believe so.’
‘And Abigail Morley possibly knew enough to identify the lover, or so he thought, therefore he killed her as well?’
Again I nod.
‘Then we have all the suspects right here, within these walls,’ he says, looking around at the two statesmen. ‘Everyone we know is party to this plot of a French and Spanish attack is at court this evening for the concert. The guests were gathered at least three-quarters of an hour before the queen made her entrance - any of them could have had time to slip out unnoticed in the crowd. At this very moment, there could be a man in that hall who quite literally h
as blood on his hands.’
Walsingham looks uneasy; Burghley tuts.
‘What would you have me do, Robert - publicly arrest Henry Howard and the Earl of Arundel, not to mention the French and Spanish ambassadors, before the whole court on suspicion of murder, with barely a shred of evidence?’ Burghley shakes his head. ‘In any case, it is hardly to be supposed that any of them are committing murder with their own hands, even if there is a connection. They’ll have been safely mingling in the hall in full view of three hundred people while some accomplice dispatched that poor girl, you can be sure of it.’
‘It would be expedient if we could get the guests from the hall to their boats and horses without alerting them to any of this,’ Walsingham says, brisk now. ‘I will instruct the guards to move people swiftly along once the recital is finished.’
‘She will want to see Dee,’ Leicester says, looking at Walsingham with an expression I cannot read.
Walsingham closes his eyes for a moment, as if testing the weight of this further complication.
‘So she will.’
‘She has been greatly agitated since his visit yesterday, as we all know. And now, with this -‘ Leicester breaks off, gesturing vaguely towards the door. ‘Well, it seems more than coincidence. Though she will no doubt take it as prophecy.’
‘Good God. Dee’s vision. I had not thought of it until this moment.’ Burghley presses his hands together as if in prayer, his forefingers touching his lips. ‘I suggest John Dee be questioned immediately. And not necessarily by one of his friends,’ he adds with a warning glance at Leicester. In response to my quizzical look, he turns to Walsingham. ‘We should take Bruno now. Time runs at our heels.’
Walsingham nods.
‘Quite so. Even Master Byrd’s motets cannot go on all night.’
Along a series of corridors, past tapestries and torches flaming in wall brackets, he leads me at a trot, with Burghley following, carrying a light. At every corner the guards appear even more numerous than when I arrived, and there is a tension on their faces that adds to the atmosphere of dread that seems to have infected the palace. We pass into a part of the complex that is clearly the domain of servants and tradesmen, the people behind the scenes whose tireless work allows the glorious pageant of state to run smoothly. Here, too, guards are stationed; as they hear our footsteps their hands move immediately to their pikestaffs, but they step back, respectfully lowering their eyes when they see who it is striding so purposefully and stony-faced towards them.
I follow Walsingham across a dimly lit yard, where barrels are stacked in one corner and timber in another; two men are moving a pile of sacks into one of the outbuildings by the light of a small lantern. Still Walsingham has not said a word; I desperately want to ask him about Dee, but the Principal Secretary’s expression is so forbidding I hold my tongue. On the right-hand side of the yard runs a long, two-storey building of red brick with a series of tall chimneys. Here Walsingham slows his pace and pauses by a semi-circular grille built into the wall at ground level, rising to the height of a man’s waist. Through the iron bars that close it off from the yard, I hear the gentle lapping of water below.
‘The palace kitchens,’ Walsingham says, gesturing to the building, his voice low. Bending slightly, I see that this grille is the end of an arched tunnel that runs through the middle of the kitchen building, its other end opening on to the river itself. The daylight has almost seeped from the sky entirely, and the tunnel yields only blackness. This, I suppose, is the kitchen dock. At a respectful distance, a huddle of servants whispers urgently between themselves, keenly watching our arrival. From among them I hear the stifled sound of a woman’s sob. Another guard, leaning against the wall by a small door to the left of this grille, pulls himself quickly to attention as he sees Walsingham approach, then at a nod opens the door for us. Walsingham gestures for Burghley to come forward with the torch. The door opens on to a stone-flagged passageway in the kitchen building, where a faint smell of cooked meat and herbs lingers as if ingrained in the brick walls. Almost immediately there is another door on the right, which Walsingham opens slowly and then turns to me.
‘This is not pleasant, Bruno, particularly as you knew the girl. But I want to know what you make of this murder. I am sorry to ask this of you,’ he adds, in a gentler voice. I nod silently and he reaches out for the torch from Burghley.
We step into what looks like a storeroom, perhaps twelve feet across and twenty feet long, empty except for a stack of wooden crates against the wall and an unmoving figure laid out upon the stone floor, ghostly in a white dress. Walsingham moves forward and crouches beside the body, holding up the torch so that its wavering flames illuminate the pitiful end of Abigail Morley.
The bodice of her dress has been roughly torn down the middle and ripped apart to expose her torso. From her left breast a dagger protrudes, plunged into her flesh almost down to its handle. Straight into her heart, I think; I have a disturbing sensation that I have been here before, that I have already seen this image, as if I had lived through it once in the recent past. As I draw closer and kneel on the floor, I realise that the body and the flagstones around it are soaking wet, matted strands of her red hair spread around her head. Walsingham brings the torch nearer and motions silently for me to look again at her breast. On the right side, opposite the dagger, a mark has been crudely carved into her pale skin: an upright cross with a tail curving to the right, like a lower case ‘h’: the astrological symbol for Saturn. I breathe out carefully, trying to slow the hammering in my chest. In an awful moment of clarity, I understand why the Earl of Leicester spoke of Doctor Dee and something more than coincidence. I have not seen this image before, but I have heard it described, before the event. Abigail has been killed almost exactly according to Dee’s description of Ned Kelley’s latest vision in the stone.
Finally I force myself to look at Abigail’s face. Bleached and tinted orange in the torchlight, I am amazed at how serene she looks for someone who has so recently met a violent death. This in itself strikes me as odd; during my years on the road I saw the corpses of men stabbed with blades and there was no such placid expression, rather a twisting of the features, their death throes written into their final expression.
I gesture for Walsingham to hold the torch up to her face; he does so, both of us kneeling now in the water that has slopped around the body, pooling in the worn dips of the old stones. Abigail’s unseeing eyes are fixed on nothing, but the whites are bloodshot, the left one entirely red. There is bruising around the mouth and nose, but no marks on the neck as there were with Cecily Ashe.
‘She was in the water?’ I ask, my voice coming out as barely a whisper.
‘Tied by the hands to one of the mooring rings at the dock here. One of the kitchen girls found her when she noticed the door to this room had been left open. She says she saw the loading-bay doors open and then something white floating in the water, like a ghost.’ He grimaces.
‘She was meant to be found, then. But from her face she didn’t drown,’ I say, almost to myself. ‘I think she was smothered, then stabbed very precisely after she stopped moving. He must have been waiting and taken her by surprise when she appeared -‘ I break off. When she appeared expecting to meet me.
Walsingham rises stiffly to his feet.
‘He came in here, I think.’ He holds up the torch and I see that on the opposite wall from the door where we entered is a wide set of double doors with a heavy bolt across them. Walsingham beckons to me, then hands me the torch and draws back the bolt, opening the right half of the doors, which swings inwards. I see that they open directly into the arched tunnel running under the building, with two wide stone steps leading to the water. The tunnel is the width of a small barge and its arched roof perhaps ten feet high, clearly built to allow boats carrying supplies to be brought directly from the river to the palace kitchens where they can be unloaded into this room. As the end of the tunnel is blocked by the metal grille, it would be impossible to ga
in access to the palace except through these double doors.
‘This door was open when she was found,’ Walsingham says. ‘So I surmise he came in by boat, the same way he escaped, and she must have opened the door for him herself.’ He rests a hand on the door frame and peers out over the black water softly slapping against the steps in the little channel. ‘She was floating here, right by the dock.’ He points to the water just beneath the step. ‘You’re right - this was meant as another display. If he had not tied the body up she might have sunk or drifted out of the tunnel into the river - he intended for her to be found quickly. Perhaps even while the concert was in progress.’
‘Again the mark of the prophecy - Saturn this time. He wants to leave no doubt that these deaths are connected. And this dagger -‘ I pause again, looking up at Walsingham as another memory surfaces. ‘The doll! Cecily Ashe was found holding a doll with red wool for hair that we assumed was intended as an image of Queen Elizabeth. It was pierced in the heart with a needle.’
‘I remember it well.’ He rubs the back of his hand across his chin. ‘Made like a witch’s poppet. Her Majesty was deeply disturbed by it. And now he has taken to using human dolls. But the intent remains the same, do you not think - to mimic the death of the queen?’
‘As heralded by the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn,’ I muse.
‘I recall Her Majesty pointing out this girl to me once when her ladies were gathered in the Presence Chamber,’ Burghley offers from the doorway. ‘She asked me if I did not think the girl the very likeness of herself in her youth. The comparison amused her. And indeed, when you looked closely, it seemed there was a distinct resemblance, though it was just the red hair, I suppose. Poor child.’
‘And yet …’ I shake my head as I shift my position by the body; my knees are growing numb from the wet stone. As I continue to stare at Abigail’s marble face, I realise that my attention has grown analytical, my reasoning mind has taken over from the emotion I felt at her death a moment earlier. ‘Something is not right here.’
