Death by Disputation (A Francis Bacon Mystery Book 2)

by Anna Castle

  They climbed the stairs to the first floor and entered cautiously, faces hidden while they scuffled into the center of the room. Trumpet turned full around to make sure none of the students had happened to stay behind. The chamber was empty.

  “I’ll start with Tom’s desk,” Trumpet said. “You scout around the others.”

  “For what do I search, my lady?”

  “Don’t ‘my lady’ me here. Call me — don’t call me anything. We’re looking for a stack of letters. Paper, folded square, about like so.” She gestured width and thickness with both hands.

  She wanted a quick look at Mr. Bacon’s letters, if she could find them, to find out what Tom had learned or surmised about the death of Bartholomew Leeds and the rebellious zealots who had stolen his wits and his character. She didn’t care about the rest apart from keeping her bargain with Marlowe, but she wanted those last two items restored in full.

  “If I were a spy,” Catalina said, “I would not keep letters.”

  “You would if they’d been written by Francis Bacon.” The man could write with breathtaking clarity when he wanted to, but he could also be as opaque as a block of wood, especially when the topic was something he disliked having to put in writing. Still, his letters were likely to contain useful information that Tom might keep handy. “You can’t read anyway, Catalina. Who would send you letters?”

  “They would send them to me to hide or to bring to you. I would keep your letters very safe, my —” She stopped herself with a tsk.

  Trumpet saw the defensive pride in Catalina’s eyes and recognized the feeling. She didn’t accept her limitations either. “I’d better teach you to read, if you’re going to be handling my letters. We’ll start tonight.”

  “Yes, my lady. Thank you, my lady.” Catalina’s dark eyes shone. She gestured at the desks placed in each corner of the room. “How will you know which one is that of your Tom?”

  “I’ll know.” Trumpet turned full circle again, slowly, noting every detail. This chamber was much like the ones at Gray’s, only bigger and shabbier. It had the same smell though, of ink, wood smoke, and dirty stockings. The smell of studious boys. She loved it.

  The windows were adequate, letting in light from both the front and the back. Trumpet noticed two servants spreading sheets to dry in the field behind the college and spared a moment to wonder if they had been there on the morning Leeds was hanged. Had Tom talked to them? She should question them herself when she got the chance.

  She returned to her survey of the chamber. The smell might remind her of Gray’s, but the students in this college lived like monks. Not a scrap of decoration anywhere. Tom and Ben’s chambers at Gray’s had been filled with colorful oddments: a lute, a fiddle, bows and arrows, hats of all descriptions, the bright banners Tom collected, Ben’s broadsides plastered on the walls. She’d helped them pack it all up last January since Ben was moving into her uncle’s rooms to help her maintain her disguise for two more terms.

  Those terms had ended and so had her one precious year as a scholar. Those last few months with Ben had been the sanest, most peaceful, most focused time of her life. No distractions, no confusions. She’d studied the law day and night, guided by two superlative tutors. Good, hard work, then simple relaxation in the evening, lounging by the fire with a mug of spiced ale and a cold pie. Ben was the ideal chambermate. He gave her privacy when she needed it, discreetly ignoring the special arrangements she’d made with the laundress to cope with her monthlies, but had always been ready to deflect the prying eye of any Graysian who came too close.

  She sighed. She doubted she would ever again have so agreeable a cohabitant as Benjamin Whitt. But this was no time for mooning about the past. She had to make tangible progress toward identifying Leeds’s murderer before Marlowe would lift a finger to help her.

  Finding Tom’s desk was no trick; she walked straight to the one closest to the fire that also had a good view of the yard. And sure enough, there was Tom’s writing desk, the one with the carved border of waves and ships, a bold anchor in the center of the lid. She frowned at the enormous Geneva Bible and the stack of biblical commentaries neatly placed beside it. Both the subject matter and the neatness were contrary to her Tom. Her spirits rose as she found a well-worn copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight at the bottom of the stack.

  Tom’s favorite. She’d never read it, but she knew the gist. One of the things all boys knew — except for Alan Trumpington. She’d begun studying Latin with single-minded determination on the day she decided to learn the law — the day after her mother died of sadness — but she’d had no time for the lesser literatures. She countered questions in that area by tossing them right back, pretending to be bored with such childish amusements. “Who cares about old Sir Gawain?” she’d scoffed. Tom had defended his hero at length with such passion she could write a book about the knight herself.

  Sir Gawain was a good Christian man, as were all the knights of the Round Table, but finding this book on his desk hinted that her old Tom was still in there somewhere, underneath the new layers of extreme religiosity.

  Trumpet sat on Tom’s stool and gazed at his belongings, missing him with a powerful ache. She blinked away tears — she never cried — and concentrated on her task. Where did he keep his letters? She reached for the quill in its stand and growled in frustration. She felt like a dwarf; his stool was too low for her. She hopped up and leafed quickly through everything on the surface, including the stack of commonplace books. She wished she could take those and read them at her leisure. They might tell the whole story of Tom’s descent into zealotry. But commonplace books were personal, not private. His tutors could demand to look at them at any time to monitor his progress in his studies.

  She replaced them with regret, then opened every drawer in the writing desk, including the secret one accessed through a hidden panel at the back. She looked under the desk and all around it, examining the edges of the floor and the space above as well.

  “Nothing.” She turned to watch Catalina performing a similar search around the other desks. There was no need to examine the other boys’ books and papers.

  The gypsy lifted her arms in an elaborate shrug. “He would not hide his letter in another man’s desk. Too unsafe.”

  “I agree. Let’s try upstairs.”

  “We should make the beds, no?”

  “You make them while I search.”

  They gathered their skirts above their knees and climbed the ladder-like stair to the upper story. This narrow room was even plainer than the one below. The furnishings had obviously been chosen for durability, not style. Most of the floor space was taken up with sturdy beds hung with dull red curtains of the coarsest wool. The rushes looked weeks old, but at least they weren’t hopping with fleas. The small windows up here weren’t even glazed. If you wanted light, you suffered the wind. If you wanted to shut out the cold, you sat in the dark.

  No wonder the Puritans’ message appealed so strongly to university men. They made a virtue of plainness. Why not, if it was all you had?

  Catalina began whipping back bed curtains and flinging blankets about. Trumpet spotted Tom’s large chest and deduced that the bed in front of it must be his. She confirmed her hypothesis by smelling the pillows. The one on the left was a stranger; the one on the right was Tom. He had a salty, woodsy smell by nature and used a tonic with marigold in his hair.

  She raised the pillow to her face and inhaled deeply. She noticed Catalina watching her with those knowing black eyes and tossed her head. Let her think what she wanted; she was only a servant. Trumpet plumped the pillow and put it back.

  She went to the trunk, knelt in front, and opened it, getting another waft of Essence of Tom. His mother had taught him to put tansy and lavender in his chests. She spread her kerchief atop the rushes and carefully lifted things out, setting them in ordered rows so she could replace them again as they had been.

  His fine linen shirts with their richly embroidered collars and cuffs we
re way down at the bottom, as if he’d tried to hide them from himself. She also found more tattered romances, satin slippers, and the green velvet cap that made his eyes shine like sapphires hidden under a layer of canvas. Above that were the plain shirts and brown stockings she’d seen him wearing here.

  She found no letters except a few from his mother. She read the direction on the outer fold but didn’t open them. She couldn’t bring herself to go that far. She replaced everything carefully, got to her feet, closed the lid with a thump, and sat on it. “Still nothing. Maybe you’re right. Maybe he burned them all.”

  “Maybe so, my la —” Catalina worked efficiently down the row of beds, lifting the edges of the thin mattresses to check the undersides for packets of paper, then shaking the sheets and blankets out over the top. She wasn’t particularly neat, but no one would notice, and if they did, they’d blame the real bed-makers. Trumpet had paid them enough to tolerate a few curt remarks.

  “They must be somewhere,” Trumpet said. “He would want proof he wasn’t acting on his own, if anyone questioned him. And proof that he’d followed Bacon’s instructions if that were necessary. He’d keep the most important ones until the job was done. But where?”

  She tried to put herself in Tom’s shoes. What would he do with letters from his spymaster?

  She got up, flopped onto her belly beside the bed, and wriggled underneath. Blowing cobwebs from her face, she squiggled around, inspecting the ropes supporting the mattress and looking for tears in the mattress itself.

  Nothing.

  She wriggled back out and let Catalina dust her fore and aft. Then she climbed up on the bed and felt around the frame and the headboard.

  Nothing again.

  She stood between the bed and the chest with her hands on her hips and turned slowly in a circle, looking up and down. This was the last bed in the row, only a few feet from the end wall. The top of that wall wasn’t very well plastered; she saw a breach filled with messy twigs way up where it met the thatching of the roof.

  Trumpet smiled. Tom was taller than average. That high corner would appeal to him as a hiding place.

  “Come here, Catalina.” She walked to the corner and pointed at the floor. “Bend over and let me stand on your back.”

  The gypsy looked down at the spot and up at the ill-plastered wall above it and smiled. “I see it! Very clever.” She supplied her back as a platform without complaint. She’d been part of a company of actors, after all; she must have performed such tricks on a daily basis in the town squares of Italy.

  Trumpet clambered up, using the wall for balance. Standing on her toes, she could reach up under the wattles. She felt about, hoping not to catch a spider. Then she felt crisp edges. “Ha!” She pulled out a packet of papers and hopped down. “Got ‘em.”

  Catalina straightened up. “Shall we take them?”

  “No, we can’t risk his noticing they’re gone. I’ll read through them as fast as I can. Go stand by the front window and keep watch. Listen for the bells. We must leave when the clock strikes the three-quarter hour.”

  “Yes, my lady.”

  Trumpet took the letters and tucked herself into Tom’s bed. Catalina pursed her lips at the sight. “You should marry the handsome Tom, my lady, not the fat banker.”

  “I can’t, not yet. My father would kill him and I do not mean figuratively.” She half turned to tug the pillow into place behind her back so she could sit up. “Not even with his father’s money as a sweetener. He’s a nobody. Besides, I need a title of my own. People listen to you if you have a title, even if you’re a woman. My father is an earl and my son will be an earl, but if I want to be a countess, I have to marry another cursed earl. There aren’t many to choose from, especially since I need one who is very rich and very old. Or very sick. A wealthy dowager countess, that’s what I want to be. Then I can marry Tom.”

  “If he hasn’t married another woman.”

  “I’ll just have to make sure that doesn’t happen,” Trumpet snapped. “Now let me read.”

  He must have been burning most of the letters or hiding the rest elsewhere because this stack wasn’t big enough to include a letter a day for four months. She untied the twine holding the packet together, set the fat stack on her lap, and started opening them, careful to keep them in order. The one on top was dated last week. Perhaps these were only the most recent ones. Or the most important ones?

  Unfolding each sheet, she scanned it quickly, running her finger down the page. Then she refolded it and stacked it in order on her right. She’d learned to read fast at Gray’s and was well familiar with Bacon’s handwriting.

  Some letters had to do with Tom’s studies, but most contained explanations of various aspects of nonconformist doctrines and practices. The letters were revealing even at speed, both of Tom’s struggle to sustain his complex role and of Bacon’s firm guidance leavened with patient support. She liked them both the better for this glimpse into their strangely crafted partnership. Too bad she could never say so to either of them.

  The chapel bell tolled the half hour. Trumpet didn’t bother to look up. If anyone were coming, Catalina would alert her. She set the last three letters on her left and returned to the three before those. One of them had two pages; she hadn’t noticed in her haste. The second page was a long postscript, reminding Tom of questions that remained open concerning the murder.

  “This is it!” She read the postscript again, murmuring the words under her breath to memorize them. “The drugged wine, the knot, Dr. Eggerley’s safflower and blanchet, above all, the bursar’s desk. You must get inside that desk, Tom. Break it open if necessary.”

  She refolded the letter, assembled the packet, and retied the twine. She slid out of the bed and smoothed the covers more or less into place. “Ready.”

  Catalina bent again with her hands on her knees and Trumpet climbed up to replace the packet. When she hopped down, she said, “We must take the bursar’s desk. I’ll send it to Mr. Bacon straightaway with a note to Ben to share whatever they learn with me. With luck, we’ll have something specific for Marlowe in a few days.”

  “Which man is bursar?”

  “Thorpe,” Trumpet said. “That oily one that follows Dr. Eggerley everywhere. His desk will be the one in the middle.”

  They climbed down the ladder and stood together, gazing down at a large, solidly constructed writing desk. “It’s bigger than I expected,” Trumpet said, daunted. “We’ll have to carry it together. I’ll wrap it up.” She took off her kerchief.

  “Oh, no, my lady. He is too heavy. And how can we hide so big a thing?” Catalina gave her that sly smile that usually meant she had a better idea. She plucked two long pins from the thick coil of her hair. “Is it not better just to open him up?”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Steadfast met Tom in the courtyard at Common Schools. “Where were you, Tom?” His tone held an accusation. “You weren’t in the divinity lecture.”

  Tom had the perfect answer ready — the truth. “I decided to attend the lecture in civil law. Thorpe suggested it.” He laughed at the disbelief on Steadfast’s face. “My uncle did too. It’s dry as dust but useful.” Now inspiration struck him like a splash of fresh water. “If I ever find myself on the Continent for some reason —”

  Steadfast smiled through his teeth, taking his meaning. Radical nonconformists fled to Protestant strongholds in the Netherlands whenever they overstepped the bounds placed around them by English authorities. There was a regular traffic of religious persons and books across the German Sea.

  Tom echoed the grim smile. “If I have to make a living over there someday, it wouldn’t hurt to know something of their law so I can support my wife, if I have a wife.”

  “That’s not a bad idea.” Steadfast stroked his chin. “Perhaps I should learn a little civil law while I have the chance.”

  “I think you should.”

  “Speaking of wives,” Steadfast said, “my sister wants to talk to you. You’ll
find her in the barn this afternoon. You needn’t stop at the house to greet my parents. My father is away this week, visiting a preacher in Essex.”

  Tom smiled blandly and let his gaze wander to the passersby on the High Street. So the parson was away from home, was he? That would explain the lack of response to the incident in the Round Church. The others were waiting for Parson Wingfield to come back before deciding what to do. Did that mean he was the leader after all?

  ***

  Tom walked into the big barn that stood across the yard from the Wingfield house. He heard scraping noises and followed them to the back room, where he found Abstinence sweeping out the animals’ stalls.

  She was filthy, streaked with dust and striped with bits of straw, but still beautiful — more beautiful. Tendrils of golden hair escaped from a long braid and curled around her neck. Her sweat-soaked bodice clung to her lush body, the shape emphasized by the lines of her apron. She had hitched her skirt clear of the floor, tucking the excess into her waistband. He could see her ankles, wrapped in thin wool stockings. Tom suspected there was nothing under the thin woolen skirt but her damask legs and her maiden’s treasure.

  She looked up when he came in and stopped sweeping. She stood with the broom in one hand, running the other over her disheveled braid in a vain attempt to tuck in some loose strands. When she lifted one lock from her neck, Tom saw an ugly bruise darkening the line of her jaw.

  Three long steps and his hand gently cupped her chin. “Who did this to you?”

  “Hester.”

  “Who’s Hester?” he demanded.

  “Our cow.” Abstinence smirked at him. “I was too clumsy the other day and received a correction. Which I deserved. Then she kicked over a bucket of milk, which is why I’m on stable duty all week. Skill is required, you know, even for women’s work.”