Silent Court

by M. J. Trow

  ‘Let’s just say I have business overseas.’

  ‘Overseas?’ Johns frowned. He didn’t like the sound of that. ‘Can you be more specific?’

  Marlowe shook his head.

  ‘How long will you be gone?’

  ‘I shan’t be gone,’ Marlowe said and watched confusion cloud the older man’s face. ‘In fact –’ he hauled his saddle bags on to his shoulder – ‘I was just on my way to see you. Parker and Colwell have a purse to spend in the Buttery in my name. As far as the records show, it will look as if I have never left Cambridge. That just leaves you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘You and Dr Lyler,’ Marlowe said. ‘I have lectures with no one else until the end of the Lenten Term. Lyler, saving your colleague’s professionalism, won’t notice if I’m there or not. Colwell and Parker will string him along with more excuses than you’ve had college suppers. Which just leaves you . . .’

  Johns held up his hand. ‘Kit, I will not be party to subterfuge. If you are not there to say “adsum” at my lectures, I am bound to say so. You will not get your Master’s degree.’

  Marlowe looked levelly at the man, one of the very few he would trust with his life. ‘So be it.’ He shrugged.

  ‘Can you at least tell me . . .’ John’s voice rose.

  Marlowe spun back to him, already halfway through the door. ‘Are you a patriot, Professor Johns?’ he asked. ‘Do you love your Queen?’

  Johns was nonplussed. In all their discussions in the Schools, in Rhetoric and Dialectic, Marlowe had never asked him that or anything like it. Johns was only thirty-five, yet the world he knew was spinning away from him already. He knew suddenly how Doctor Norgate felt every day, with something that yesterday seemed as fixed as the firmament flying off the surface of his world. He opened his mouth but nothing came out.

  ‘Let’s just say –’ Marlowe’s voice was softer now – ‘I am away on the Queen’s business. Let that be enough. And, Michael, let it also be enough that you are the only person in this world who knows that, apart from the one who sends me.’

  He clapped a fond hand to his teacher’s shoulder and brushed past him to the stairway and the outside world. Johns watched from the window as Marlowe strode away into the closing light of the cold November afternoon. He saw him greet his old King’s scholar friends, Parker and Colwell, drab beside him in their college grey as sparrows are to a flashing magpie. He hugged each one in turn and was gone, under the archway, out of the Court, his footsteps echoing into silence.

  FOUR

  Nathaniel Hawkins wasn’t happy with any of this. ‘Sort it out,’ Trumpy Joe had said to him as if it were leading a bullock to pasture. But this was murder and Nathaniel Hawkins was out of his depth.

  He looked at Jabez Hazel, his fellow Constable of the Watch, trudging through the Trumpington mud alongside him, their breath smouldering on the air like the smoke at stubble-burning time. The mud had a crisp top to it, ice which wouldn’t carry a duck, and it gave a crackle to their steps that reminded them that winter was well and truly here.

  ‘Didn’t he say where he was going, Jabe?’ he asked.

  Hazel shook his head. ‘Not a word, Nat,’ the younger man grunted. ‘But he was making for the north.’

  Hawkins shook his head. ‘It’s not like Joe,’ he muttered, listening to his staff clatter on the frozen ruts at the edge of the road, where the ice was harder and unyielding. ‘Going off like that. Maybe we should ask Allys.’

  ‘We will,’ Hazel told him. ‘But we’ve got a job to do first. Is that it? Left of the road?’

  The smoke drifted up from the chimney of a cottage, old thatch dark and damp in the grey of the afternoon. A cart with an ox in the harness stood sentinel outside and a knot of villagers stood whispering in a huddle. The priest of Trumpington saw the constables and crossed to them.

  ‘Master Hawkins, Master Hazel.’ The man nodded to each. ‘Has Constable Fludd sent you?’

  ‘He has, Vicar,’ Hawkins told him, ‘in a manner of speaking.’

  Both men had pulled off their caps in the priest’s presence and stood a little sheepishly. They’d seen death before, even violent death with its blood and its suddenness. A knife flashing in anger outside in the street after men had been drinking all night, a cudgel against a skull too thin to withstand the blow; the usual free-for-all at the Stourbridge Fair; these they understood. But clandestine murder left them uneasy and without Fludd they were rudderless.

  ‘I rather hoped that the Constable would after all come in person.’ Henry Mildmay was scanning the road that led from the town but it was deserted at that time of day.

  ‘He was called away, sir,’ Hazel volunteered, ‘sudden, like. Left it to us.’

  Mildmay’s raised eyebrow said it all. He’d baptized Jabez Hazel and laid his father and mother in the little churchyard where Gammer Harris would soon lie. But now she lay in the dark little hovel she’d called home, unwashed and unblessed. The priest pushed past the villagers who nodded at the constables, and leaned on the low door. He felt his feet dip into the greasy mud at the entrance and steadied himself against the beam. There had been no fresh straw on this floor for weeks and the room was acrid with smoke. There were just the two rooms, the one in which the three men now stood, with its single table and two chairs, and another off to the left, where a solitary candle now guttered and a low crooning seemed to drift with the fire smoke.

  ‘Who’s there?’ the priest called, frowning. That was no Christian hymn he heard and it frightened him. The low wail stopped and Mildmay pushed the door back.

  Nathaniel Hawkins caught his breath and Jabez Hazel, for all he swore to himself that he wouldn’t, turned aside to heave his dinner all over the floor. There was that sickly smell of death, of blood, of the end of all things, and Hawkins and Mildmay found themselves staring down at a body on the bed. It was that body that held Hawkins’ gaze. It was naked, glistening with warm water and there were blood-soaked cloths around it, like a baby in swaddling bands. Hawkins couldn’t look directly at the head, because the head had been hacked down the centre. A mass of black blood and grey brains and white bone disfigured the features of the woman who had once been Gammer Harris.

  But it wasn’t the dead woman that Henry Mildmay watched. He was scowling at the shadowy figure in the corner, ‘Mother Moleseed?’ he said. ‘Is that you?’

  A crone of indefinable years hobbled into the half light, tugging on her cap. ‘Your worship, Reverend Mildmay,’ she lisped.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ the vicar wanted to know.

  ‘Preparing the dead, sir. You know that. I lays ’em out, sir, as I have for many a long year. And my mammy before me.’

  ‘What were you singing?’ Mildmay asked her.

  ‘Just an old tune, sir,’ she said, mopping the blood where it had seeped on to the headboard.

  ‘There are tunes for the dead,’ Mildmay reminded her, ‘God’s tunes. My tunes. I shall do the singing for Ann Harris when the time comes.’

  Jabez Hazel had come into the room again, but how long he’d be able to stay was anybody’s guess.

  ‘Take her out, Jabe,’ Hawkins whispered. ‘Mistress Moleseed, is it? Take her outside. The vicar and I will cope in here.’

  ‘But I have my work.’ Mother Moleseed’s reedy voice rose higher as she attempted to stand her ground. ‘It’s not right to leave a woman like that . . . not in front of men.’

  ‘We all came naked into the world, mother,’ Mildmay reminded her, ‘and it is how, one day, we’ll stand before the Lord.’

  Hazel took the woman by the arm. He knew Mother Moleseed. He’d known her since he was a boy, bouncing on the hay cart at harvest time and scrumping apples from the squire’s orchard. She’d caught him once and put the evil eye on him, or so he’d thought. He hadn’t slept for a week and was careful to say his paternoster with more than usual fervour for a while.

  ‘I know you, sonny . . .’ she peered up at him with a toothless grimace and his heart
sank.

  Nathaniel Hawkins had watched Joseph Fludd do this, the two of them alone with the dead. He hadn’t known what Fludd was doing, so he knew even less what to do now. ‘Everything you see, Nat,’ Fludd had told him. ‘Say it out loud. It will help you remember at the coroner’s court.’

  ‘Her head’s been cleaved,’ he heard himself say as Mildmay wandered the room, muttering his prayers for the dead, closing his eyes and making the sign of the cross. ‘But with what? Axe? Billhook? Sword?’

  Nathaniel Hawkins knew what an axe could do. He’d watched Joe Fludd many a long day, hacking his way through oak and elm to fashion his carpentry for the great and good of Cambridge. He’d watched the bark bite and the chips fly and listened to the thud as the iron blade hit home. He knew what a billhook could do too. Old Jem Harris was a hedger, he used one of those all his life – and he had two fingers less on his left hand to prove it. But a sword? Hawkins had never owned a sword. If he saved all his life to buy one, he’d be in his box before he could; the box Joe Fludd would make for him one day. Could a sword do this? A broadsword might. Or one of those hand-and-a-halfs he’d heard the Germans carried. But who would old Gammer Harris know who owned a sword?

  Hawkins looked up at the priest. He was still busy sending the old woman to her Maker, praying for her soul, interceding. Hawkins would have to do the hard work himself. ‘Was she found like this?’ he asked aloud. Mildmay didn’t answer and Gammer Harris didn’t either. He rummaged at the foot of the bed to find the dead woman’s clothes. Her shift was covered with dark blood. Her shawl was folded on top of her pinafore; both were stiff and dark with drying and clotted blood. Hawkins unpacked the neat parcel that Mother Moleseed had made of the thin, worn fabric. Inside, the blood was brighter red, still sticky and wet; Gammer Harris had lost almost all of her lifeblood to whatever weapon had cloven her head in two. He barely recognized her cap because what was once white was a ripped shred of crimson, the ties stiff with blood.

  So the woman was fully clothed when she died. Mother Moleseed must have stripped the corpse as she laid the woman out with all that keening and nonsense. Hawkins wanted nothing to do with that. That was the vicar’s job. He looked at the pillow and the headboard, all of it dark and bloody. Whoever had killed Gammer Harris had hit her as she stood by the bed, or perhaps as she sat on it.

  He could do no more for the woman in that room and he left the priest muttering over her and made for the fresh air. ‘Where’s Jem Harris?’ he asked the knot of neighbours. ‘Does he know of this?’

  ‘In the Lammas Field,’ someone told him. ‘He’s been sent for.’

  ‘And what about the Egyptians?’ Hawkins asked, ‘Has anybody seen them?’

  The tent had gone up in lightning time, even for the accomplished Egyptian camp-builders. No one had to give an order, everything just seemed to happen by itself. The teeming children – eight in all but sometimes seeming like eighty as they swarmed around the onlookers, dipping in the odd pocket here and there to keep their hands in – had disappeared to a quiet wagon. The tale of the child crushed to death by a falling tent pole was true enough. It hadn’t happened to a child in this troupe, or to any child known to anyone there. It had probably not even happened to a child in this cold and frosty land, but that it had happened to a child somewhere, somewhen there was no doubt at all and so they instinctively kept out of the way. As the tent rose, to the rhythmic cries of the men, the women started the cooking fire and the bread making. The next thing that would happen, they all knew, was that the locals from Reach and Burwell would come skulking round, not making eye contact, not even being civil. The person you hate the most is the one who knows where the bodies are buried and ten minutes in a smoky tent with Balthasar Gerard was enough for him to know the innermost turnings in your very soul.

  The camp was a tiny huddle of civilization in the vast unforgiving sweep of the lonely fens but within easy reach for superstitious country folk who needed their ten minutes with Balthasar. Since the caravan had passed through the town, people had been quietly falling into step behind and so by the time their camp was complete, with the single domed living tent in the middle, the smaller ones for cooking and for Balthasar’s secret work around it, the crowd was considerable, although thinly spread around the perimeter, no one wanting to catch the eye of anyone else. Hern got his tumblers together; townsfolk who were after a potion or a reading could justify their presence there if they were watching a show. The men called the children out of the wagon. They could all tumble almost as soon as they could walk and with their ribbon-covered clothes looked like tattered butterflies spinning through the air as the two strongest men threw the children from side to side of the area they used in lieu of a stage. Boys and girls, curled into tight balls, flew so fast the colours merged and the crowd soon grew, pollarders, hedgers and shepherds, lured away to the tune of the pipes and the thump of the drum. And if some of them melted off from the edges at a gentle touch on the arm from one of the women, it was a secret no one had to share.

  The group of Egyptians that had got the Mayor in such a fury was small as such troupes went, with just eight children, five men and three women. No one as they watched them pass could tell which man and which woman each child belonged to and this gave extra weight to the rumour that they stole children as they passed through each town. Nothing could be further from the truth. Although the children were loved and cared for each one could only be another mouth to feed until they could earn their keep and even Egyptian children were not adept at picking pockets until they were at least five. Why steal a child when their own came along so easily? The women belonged to everyone and to no one except themselves. The children obeyed the men and ruled the women; some had forgotten who their mother was and their father was anyone’s guess.

  Balthasar waited patiently in his tent, for the first of the people to slip in between the coloured canvasses which hung in the doorway. There was no light in the tent except a single candle, burning in the centre of the table. The candle was made of black wax, not for any other reason than that it made the petitioning townsfolk feel they were getting their money’s worth. Balthasar was an adept at reading people, their present certainly, if not their future, and he knew that it was all about giving value for money. The candle was part of the table top after many years of use. When the wick of the current one finally gave out, the next was placed on top of the shapeless corpses of its predecessors until a slick pile of black wax had formed, looking as if it had powers all on its own.

  Balthasar half closed his eyes and waited for the soft flap of the canvas. Through his slitted lids, he saw that a woman had crept in, a shawl pulled low over her forehead and tight around her shoulders. This was to be expected – the evening was very cold – but she was wearing clothes to hide in, not just for decoration, vanity or warmth. He reached out to show her into her seat and managed to get a fragment of her shawl between his fingers for a second or two. Thick wool, not worn thin by years, so there was at least enough money in this woman’s household, and more likely money to spare. Her hands grasping the edges of the cloth were smooth and white, so she had at least one servant in her house. Balthasar sniffed. There was a soft warm smell of roses, powdered in frankincense which filled his little tent every time she moved. She was going up the social scale with every second which passed. This one would be easy; she either wanted to be with child or wanted not to be with child. A few simple questions and he would have a gold piece in his palm, or he was not Balthasar Gerard.

  He did not break the silence; that was not his way. He preferred to let his petitioners start the conversation. This gave him another opportunity to find things out. How they spoke to him, how they addressed him would give him more clues as to their social standing. A tremor in the voice, a clearing of the throat would also tell him much.

  ‘Sir, what must I do?’ she said. ‘I expected you would ask questions of me, or make a pronouncement, perhaps.’

  Her voice was low and clear, well
spoken, but she had called him ‘Sir’ which he had not expected. She knew someone who had been to him already, perhaps here, perhaps in Cambridge, as it was often his custom to ask questions or make a sudden remark if the petitioner did not speak.

  ‘What is the purpose of your visit, Madam?’ he asked. ‘I can make no pronouncement until you speak to me.’

  ‘I have heard that you . . .’ She paused, finding the next bit difficult. ‘. . . I have heard that you can foretell the future.’

  ‘The future shifts, Madam,’ he said carefully. ‘I do my poor best to see beyond the veil.’ He had learned not to promise too much. Men – and women – who had parted with a coin were often remorseful later. This was not like buying a loaf of bread. They had little to show for their expenditure after a visit to Balthasar and waiting to see if his auguries would come true was not much to get for a groat.

  ‘My life is a burden to me,’ she said, leaning forward towards the candle. ‘If you can see no change, then . . .’

  He looked up at her and saw in the faint light that she had a bruise down one cheek and an eye swollen and black in its socket. He gasped and reached for her hand. It was as cold as ice and the pulse at her wrist was racing and thready. ‘Who did this to you?’ he asked. ‘I feel that it is your husband,’ he rapidly added. If he couldn’t tell that, he was not much of a soothsayer.

  ‘I have no husband,’ she said.

  ‘I feel that this comes from a man who loves you, who you love,’ Balthasar floundered on. This must be a father, or a lover perhaps, but why would such a lovely woman not be married?

  She sat back and put the shawl back over her head. ‘I can see that I was mistaken,’ she said, acidly. ‘I was desperate and my maid told me you could see the future. You told her that she would meet a tall, dark man and that she would live happily ever after with many fine sons to make her old age comfortable.’