The King's Bed

by Campbell Barnes, Margaret

  She backed silently towards the door, meaning to run and rouse the neighbours. But just at that moment Malpas’s podgy hand dropped one coin upon another with a sharp click, close beside the bed, and its owner waked. She saw them there in the candlelight and sat up with a startled cry. But the moment she set eyes on her precious gold gleaming in the candlelight, fear turned to fury. While they knelt back in momentary surprise she yelled at them for dirty thieving dogs. One plump knee was already out from beneath the coverlet and she had caught Gladys a smart blow on the cheek before they had recovered their wits. Her courage shamed Tansy. But Malpas sprang at Marsh’s widow, pushing her back against the pillows. She struggled violently but Gladys came to his aid and, feeling their united strength, panic seized her. Looking past them she saw her step-daughter standing just inside the doorway and called to her desperately for help. Tansy might still have slipped away and fetched the neighbours. But, seeing Malpas’s fingers closing about her step-mother’s throat, instinctively she ran forward to try to save her. She saw the fear of murder mount in Rose’s eyes, and then their piteous appeal, and — small love as she had for the woman — she would always be glad that she had answered it. If time should be given her to be glad!

  It was then that Gladys’s quicker wits took charge. “No, take that girl, before she rouses the household,” she ordered, in an urgent callous whisper. “I will see to this one and leave no mark.” And quick as thought she picked up one of Rose’s extravagant silk shifts and thrust it down her throat, stifling her last scream. Held roughly in Malpas’s arms Tansy saw her die. Saw the large body struggle convulsively in the King’s dishevelled bed, and then gradually lie still. Saw the terror in the wide staring eyes, and then their gradual glazing. Never, as long as she lived, would she forget those awful moments.

  “God’s blood, you have killed her!” she heard Malpas say, when the landlady of the Boar breathed no more.

  “What else could we do, once she knew?” scoffed Gladys, with a cool villainy greater than his own.

  And, since she too knew, Tansy supposed that her own hour had come. But it was Gladys’s cunning which saved her, and Dilly running screaming down the stairs giving the alarm. “No, leave her with the corpse,” hissed Gladys. “It is our only chance now people are coming. Everybody knows they hated each other. Hit the interfering fool — but not too hard.”

  Malpas’s fist seemed to crash down on her temple. She staggered across the foot of the bed. Half dazed, she saw them push back the drawer, and pick up the two small sacks. And then they were gone.

  And when people began to run excitedly into the room, and the night watchman from the Guild Hall pushed his way forward with an air of authority, they found Tansy sitting there, weak and frightened, alone with her stepmother’s still warm body.

  14

  The murder of the landlady of the Blue Boar was the biggest local excitement since Bosworth. Coupled with the discovery of the source of her recently acquired wealth, it left all Leicester both horrified and amazed. Crowds hung about in the streets outside, staring up at the best bedroom window with macabre curiosity. Sheriff and doctors passed importantly through the front door to examine the corpse. It was difficult to believe that anyone as vital and exuberant as Rose Marsh was dead. Alive, she had provided a wealth of gossip. Now, at her death, the talk of the whole town centred on who had done this dastardly thing.

  Thanks to the quick wits of the Welsh girl, there was nothing save Tansy’s word to pin the crime on to the guilty pair. Soon after she had poured out her improbable story they were found, apparently sleeping peacefully, in their respective beds, one at the Blue Boar and one at the Golden Crown. Save for a few scattered coins the secret drawer was empty, but although Gladys’s room and even the cellars of the Golden Crown were searched by the Mayor’s orders no sack of gold was found, and their air of amazed innocence seemed strong defence against an accuser who could produce no proof.

  Although the Mayor looked into her honest eyes with pity, it began to seem certain that Tansy herself would be brought to trial.

  The crime was discussed at every street corner and over every meal.

  “The Grumbold girl was cunning enough for anything” the men said. “But she had broken with Malpas. He had turned her out. Is it likely that they would have plotted this theft together?”

  “More likely the Marsh girl picked on two people she had good cause to be jealous of,” suggested some of the women.

  Everyone who knew Tansy personally liked and respected her, and her father had been a popular citizen. But justice must be done, insisted the Mayor, who out of common humanity, had taken her from the scene of the crime into his own house.

  After it had been established by the doctors that Rose Marsh had been suffocated with her own shift, and she had been given decent burial in the same grave as her late husband and his first, less spectacular, wife, a Court of Inquiry was held.

  The questioning went on for days.

  All Dilly could tell the Sheriff and the jury was that she had been wakened by her mistress crying out “like as if she was bein’ murdered”, and she had tried to wake cook who slept like a log. She herself had run down the attic stairs. The door of the best bedroom was a crack open and there was a light in the room, but she had been too scared to look in. So she had run on down the lower flight of the stairs, unbolted the front door and gone out into the street, yelling all the way for help.

  Jod tried to make an alibi for Tansy by saying that she must have been in the stable at that time because afterwards, when the noise had roused him, he had found her pony’s bandages had been changed. But this seemed only to rouse more suspicion because people wanted to know why the murdered woman’s step-daughter had been wandering about at that time of night when she ought to have been in her bed.

  And when the cook was questioned she made matters worse by saying how difficult the dead woman had been to work for.

  More and more witnesses were called.

  It was established that there was no love lost between Tansy and her step-mother. That things had become even more difficult between them since Robert Marsh’s death. Even Tansy’s friends could not deny it.

  Men in the ale room remembered how Rose had called her a slut and made insinuations about her being with one of the soldiers in the hayloft after the battle of Bosworth. Druscilla Gamble recalled how Rose had spoken of her as a coarse, yellow weed, and two people who had happened to be passing the open window at the time remembered hearing the spirited way in which Tansy had repudiated things said about her own mother.

  And then the gossips really came into their own. “Often we heard ’em quarrelling, and most times lately the girl seemed to have learned to give as good as she got. Not as anyone could blame her,” they said. “For ’twas past bearin’ the way that extravagant, sharp-tongued redhead tried to keep her down. An’ true it be — though I do be speakin’ of the dead.”

  Master Jordan had not waited to be asked anything. The first moment he saw the crowd pushing and shoving and exclaiming outside the Boar, and leaned from his window to hear what it was all about, he had hurried round to Brewster, in the fletcher’s workshop. “Leave your arrows and ride hard to London. Tell your master what has happened and entreat him to come as quickly as possible,” he said. And Brewster, who had been a pupil of his, had set off immediately.

  “For whatever comes of it, Tansy will need all her friends at such a time,” Will Jordan said to the priest of St. Nicholas Church. “Tom is an able young man, and has always been like a brother to her. And if he has any sense he will marry her and take her right away out of this horror.”

  Although she was kept under surveillance, he managed to let Tansy know that his messenger had gone, and during the terrible days that followed, she was sustained by the thought that Tom would surely come. Many people went out of their way to be kind to her, and most of the respectable citizens believed in her innocence. Until Hugh Malpas said to the Sheriff, with reason, “You ha
ve searched my inn and the Welsh wench’s room and her father’s house In Swinemarket. Why don’t you search the Blue Boar?” And when this had been done, although no hoard of gold had been discovered, a locked trinket box in Tansy’s bedroom was found to contain three rose nobles and two half angels. Not an impossible amount for an inn-keeper’s daughter to possess, but enough to arouse suspicion. Particularly as business was known to have been bad, and the coins were of an earlier minting and less worn appearance than those now commonly in use.

  And so the guilty pair, who might in those first days have attempted a get-away, deemed it wiser to stay where they were and put up a show of unconcerned innocence. Malpas ran an inn even more packed than usual, and Gladys went to live with her father, where her presence drew unheard-of crowds to watch his indifferent bear-baiting shows in the Swinemarket. Both she and Malpas were confident that a verdict of guilty would be brought against Tansy, whose sudden appearance in Rose Marsh’s bedroom had been the sole cause of their being suspected at all and, it seemed, might well turn out to prove their salvation.

  And in the court-house the questioning went on.

  “Is it true that you did not get on well with the deceased?”

  “Yes. But I tried to obey her.”

  “By the terms of your father’s will the Blue Boar was to become yours if your step-mother married again, or when she died. Is that not so?”

  “Yes.”

  “So I put it to you that you — and you alone — stood to benefit financially by her death?”

  “Yes, I suppose so. But I didn’t think much about it.”

  “And you were alone with her when she died?”

  “No! No! As I keep telling you, they were both there — Master Malpas and Gladys Grumbold. The door was ajar and I went in — ”

  “Why?”

  “I wanted to tell my step-mother something.”

  “After everyone had gone to bed?”

  “It was urgent. I wanted to warn her — ”

  “Warn her about what?”

  “About them.”

  “Then you were not surprised?”

  “About their being in her room, stealing the money — yes. But I had just found out that they were both in the house. That Malpas was in the girl’s bedroom.”

  “And you wanted to get her into trouble,” suggested the sharp-faced attorney whose pockets were being well-lined by the landlord of the Golden Crown. “As your own ostler has already testified, you were prying about the house and yard late that night. And after your young maid ran screaming down the stairs and roused the neighbours, you were found alone with the murdered woman, whereas the two people you accused were found asleep in their beds.”

  Tansy’s defence foundered badly. Who would believe her if she repeated that her pony had whinnied and she had got up and gone to him? How could she explain that she had wanted to convince her step-mother of Hugh Malpas’s presence while he was actually there, or how badly she needed the assurance of a stronger personality to deal with the situation? How explain her own mounting sense of foreboding?

  Her late father’s lawyer, Master Langstaff, came to her assistance. “Perhaps you can explain to us how you came by the gold coins in your trinket box?” he prompted gently.

  Tansy turned to him with swift relief. “Oh, easily. I found them on the floor beside the King’s bed after he and the gentry who stayed with us had left for Bosworth.”

  “And kept them unspent for two years or more?” scoffed the other attorney.

  “A likely story!” sniffed his clerk, shuffling some papers. Tansy remembered that actually they were not the same coins, and hoped they would not question her about that The courtroom was hot and stuffy, and packed with unfriendly faces staring up at her. She began to feel faint and wished that she could sit in some quiet garden and stop answering questions. Her eyes sought Will Jordan, but his kindly presence was blocked from view by the figure of a burly civic guard, just as his efforts to help her had been blotted out by the Judge’s certainty that he must be prejudiced. She longed for the comfort of her father. But if he had lived, this dreadful nightmare situation would never have arisen. Hadn’t 6he told Tom weeks ago that she felt a presentiment that something horrible was going to happen in her home? From the raised platform where she stood, she looked down on the Levantine face of the landlord of the Crown watching her with a kind of smug indifference, and on Gladys, sitting righteously on a bench with her long, lute playing fingers folded calmly in her lap. Those long, clever fingers which she had last seen stuffing swift, silken death down her step-mother’s throat. Tansy’s thoughts began to wander. She was glad — would always be glad — that Rose, with eyes desperately imploring help, had known in her last moments that she, Tansy — the tall, coarse weed — had risked her life in an endeavour to give it. She realized that had she slipped quietly away she would not be standing here in danger of being condemned. For the first time in all that nightmare of tortured days she realized fully that the judge sitting up there might declare her guilty, and that if he should do so she would be put to death publicly as a murderess. And that it would be a far more terrible death than she would have sustained from the fist of Hugh Malpas. Her hand went to her mouth, stifling a scream. Hysteria rose in her. She wished desperately that Tom would come. Common sense told her that he would scarcely have had time. But why didn’t he come? Though he could not yet know the full danger in which she stood, why didn’t he come to help her? He had wanted to marry her. He had always professed to love her …

  “You resented having Gladys Grumbold in the house, did you not?” someone was asking.

  “Yes.” If the question sounded as if it came from a long way off, the dangerous admission was almost inaudible.

  “Did she ever behave badly while in the deceased’s service at the Blue Boar?”

  “No,” admitted Tansy, wearily.

  The courtroom seemed more packed than ever. A surplus of curious people had long since been turned away, and were no doubt waiting out in the street. But now someone was battering open the door again. The burly guard went to prevent him, but somehow he had forced his way in and was pushing his way through the angry crowd already jammed there. Another sweating body to make the air yet more stifling, another face to gaze at her with calculating curiosity, wondering whether she were capable of committing murder or not. Tansy could not see him for the press of people, but at least the half-open door had momentarily let in a breath of God’s clean air and she had caught a glimpse of sunlit street and heard the familiar whinny of a weary horse. Something of the ordinary outside world where carefree, kindly life went on.

  People were turning away from her to look at the intruder, some of them giving vent to angry exclamations as they were inadvertently buffeted by each other’s elbows. The Judge was rapping on his desk for silence. But the man who had caused the momentary confusion was extraordinarily persistent. And suddenly Tansy felt certain that it must be Tom. The haze of faintness began to clear. Her heart was uplifted by hope. She was aware of a resolute young man standing his ground firmly at the back of the courtroom in the face of all opposition. That must have been his horse which she had heard whinnying outside the door. He had ridden as fast as he could from London to Leicester. Dusty and urgent, he had come to help her. The guard shrugged and lowered a detaining arm. The crowd grudgingly made way. For a popular fellow-citizen like Tom they would, of course, thought Tansy.

  But it wasn’t Tom the fletcher. It was Dickon. Dickon, the late King’s bastard, who was learning to be a mason. And in that glad moment she rejoiced not only in his presence, but at the change in him. He was no longer a bewildered, gangling youth, for whom she needed to feel motherly concern, but a purposeful young man. Less tall than Tom, darker and more serious. Someone who had acquired poise by the mastery of a craft, and sensitivity by some extra cause for thoughtfulness. A man whose concern was for her, and who had come at the most awful crisis in her life to take care of her.

  Dickon�
�s eyes searched for her. He seemed to be momentarily unaware of anyone else. Finding her standing suspected and alone, he looked straight at her and smiled. And she knew that in her ordeal she would be alone no more.

  “If you did not steal the money now, but found it two years ago, why were you hoarding it?” persisted the sharp-faced lawyer.

  “For a journey.”

  “Where did you want to go?”

  “To London.” The faint, wavering voice of the accused had miraculously become clear and steady.

  “And why should you want to go to London? Have you relatives there?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Is there perhaps some man there to whom you are betrothed?” asked Master Langstaff, who knew that his late client had hoped it would be Tom Hood.

  But Tansy could not say she was betrothed, nor could she explain, except to her inmost heart, why she had hoped to go to London. A silence of uncertainty hung in the Court, undoing the good impression her new air of confidence had created. And out of that damaging silence the intruding young man spoke. “I am going to marry her,” he said.

  Everyone turned to look at him. His words seemed to put a new complexion on the whole affair. The elderly judge leaned over his desk, cupping an ear with his hand. “And where do you come from, young man?” he asked.

  “From London. And it is true that I intend to take her back there as soon as these people have finished tormenting her.”

  “These gentlemen are but acting in the necessary course of justice,” reprimanded the Judge sternly. “What is your name and occupation?”

  “Richard Broome, apprenticed to the mason Hurland Dale of Old Jewry, and now working on the town house of Sir Walter Moyle,” said Dickon, as if his credentials scarcely mattered. “Do you not see, milord, that she is at the end of her tether? I pray you, let her sit down.”