The Butcher Of Smithfield: Chaloner's Third Exploit in Restoration London (Thomas Chaloner Book 3)

by Susanna Gregory

  ‘He cannot mind that much, or he would tell L’Estrange to leave.’

  Leybourn snorted derisive laughter. ‘If he did, it would be his last act on Earth. Oh, I am sure Brome is making a pretty penny from L’Estrange, but he will not be happy about it. Money is not everything, after all. There is principle to consider.’

  ‘You seem to know a lot about the situation.’

  ‘People talk and I am a good listener. Why all these questions, Tom? I know one of L’Estrange’s toadies – a fellow called Newburne – met an untimely end last week, but I hope you have not been charged to investigate his demise.’

  ‘Why should you wish that?’

  ‘Because no one was sorry when he died, and if he was murdered, then there will be a lot of men eager to shake the killer’s hand. You do not want to be embroiled in that sort of thing.’

  Leybourn’s chatter had unsettled Chaloner, and it brought home yet again the fact that the Lord Chancellor was not a good master. Clarendon must have known about L’Estrange’s unpopularity, but had not bothered to mention it. The spy wondered whether his initial suspicion had been correct: that the Earl was deliberately sending him into a dangerous situation to teach him a lesson for ‘abandoning’ him.

  ‘We have not had a dry day since June,’ grumbled Leybourn, glancing at the sky as they left the Rhenish Wine House. ‘Will you walk to the Westminster Stairs with me, to see the river?’

  Chaloner regarded him askance. ‘What for?’

  ‘It is the thing Londoners do these days. We have been near catastrophic flood so often, that we have all taken to gazing at Father Thames in our spare moments, to assess his malevolence.’

  It was not far, and Chaloner and Leybourn were not the only people to stand along the wharf. The tide was going out, and the water was stained muddy brown from the silt that had been washed into it upstream. They watched a skiff struggling against the current, but not even the encouraging cheers from the Westminster Stairs could give the oarsman the strength he needed to reach the pier, and it was not long before he gave up and allowed himself to be swept back towards the City. His fare would be obliged to walk or take a carriage to his final destination.

  Leybourn sniffed at the air. ‘Can you smell cakes? There is a baker’s boy. Would you like some knot biscuits? I shall pay, as Bulteel tells me you are no longer on the Earl’s payroll.’

  Chaloner sincerely hoped Bulteel was wrong. ‘When did he tell you that?’

  ‘When you first disappeared, and he was describing the Earl’s fury that you had accepted a commission from another master. Do you want to borrow a few shillings? You are welcome, but please do not mention it to Mary. She does not approve of me lending money, not even to friends.’

  Chaloner waved away the proffered purse. ‘Mary?’

  Leybourn grinned. ‘My wife. I am the happiest man alive.’

  ‘You are married? Why did you not tell me at once, instead of gibbering on about newsbooks and flooded rivers?’

  ‘I was waiting for the right moment.’ Leybourn’s expression was dreamy. ‘I have been wanting a wife for years, because I like the notion of permanent female companionship. Then, last July, Mary visited my shop, and it was love at first sight – for both of us.’

  Chaloner was delighted for his friend, not least because Leybourn’s idea of charming a lady entailed regaling her with complex scientific formulae, thus giving her an unnerving insight into how she might be expected to spend her evenings as a married woman. Few risked a second encounter, and Chaloner had assumed that Leybourn was one of those men doomed to perpetual bachelorhood. ‘When can I meet her?’

  ‘I had better warn her first,’ said Leybourn mysteriously. ‘But you must promise to be nice.’

  Chaloner regarded him in surprise; his manners were naturally affable, and most people liked him when they first met, even if his work meant they later revised their opinion. ‘I am always nice.’

  ‘On the surface perhaps, but you are often sullen and sharp. However, I do not want you to be so personable that she wishes she was with you instead of me. You can aim for something in between – pleasant, but no playing the Adonis.’

  ‘I shall do my best,’ said Chaloner, somewhat bemused by the instructions. He changed the subject before he felt compelled to ask why Leybourn should be worried about his wife’s fidelity at such an early stage in their relationship. ‘Can you tell me anything more about Newburne?’

  Leybourn sighed. ‘So, the Earl did order you to investigate that particular death. I thought as much when you started to quiz me about L’Estrange and the world of publishing. It is not fair: you are almost certain to get into trouble, given the fact that everyone despised Newburne.’

  ‘Why was he so hated?’

  ‘Partly because of his work for L’Estrange, and partly because he was so dishonest. A dangerous gang called the Hectors controls Smithfield, and he was its legal advisor. Combined, they made him rich – so much so that he was able to buy a fine house on Old Jewry. He was also accused of being a papist, because he never attended church, but then it was discovered that he missed his Sunday devotions because he was too drunk to get out of bed. Have you never heard the injunction, “Arise, Tom Newburne”?’

  ‘Is that what it means? My Earl said it was an obscenity.’

  Leybourn laughed. ‘He really is a prim old fool! Did he tell you that Muddiman bought cucumbers from Covent Garden the day before Newburne died? And here you must bear in mind that Newburne worked for L’Estrange – the man to whom Spymaster Williamson gave Muddiman’s job as newsbook editor. Do not tell me that is not significant!’

  Chaloner was thoughtful. ‘If Muddiman did kill Newburne, then he was careless to let himself be seen buying the murder weapon. Of course, that assumes it was cucumbers that killed Newburne. I know traditional medicine says they can be harmful, but they are not usually considered deadly.’

  ‘Newburne died at the Smithfield Market, while watching the dancing monkeys. Lord! I wish your Earl had given you something else to do. Newburne was loathsome, and only had one friend, as far as I know – a fellow called Heneage Finch. You can ask him what he thinks happened to Newburne. He lives on Ave Maria Lane, by St Paul’s.’

  Chaloner watched him eat the knot biscuits. ‘You are getting fat.’

  Leybourn almost choked. ‘And you are thin – sallow, even. Did they not feed you in France?’

  Chaloner smiled at the transparent attempt to discover where he had been. ‘Not very well.’

  ‘Mary prepares a wonderful caudle of wine, eggs, barley and spices. Unfortunately, that is all she can make, so we are obliged to send to the cook-shop most days, and she does not like housework, either. But we are very happy together, despite her … domestic shortcomings.’

  She sounded singular, and Chaloner’s interest was piqued again. ‘When were you wed?’

  ‘We are not wed, exactly.’ Leybourn sounded defensive. ‘But we live as man and wife, because when you are in love, you do not need the Church to sanction your devotion. You did not marry Metje, although she inhabited your bed most nights.’

  ‘I did not say—’

  ‘And I wager you availed yourselves of plenty of pretty … Danish ladies when you were abroad, too,’ Leybourn went on relentlessly. ‘Hoards of them, and not one escorted to the altar.’

  Chaloner was taken aback by what amounted to an unprovoked attack. ‘Steady, Will,’ he said, ignoring the surveyor’s second attempt to find out where he had been. ‘I am not condemning you.’

  ‘Everyone else is, though,’ said Leybourn sulkily. ‘Well? Tell me about your latest love. I know you have one. I can tell.’

  Chaloner’s brief but passionate attachment to the lovely Isabella – a Spaniard working for the Portuguese – had been blissful, but his false identity had been exposed when he had trapped the duplicitous duke, and he doubted he would ever see her again. It was a pity, and he raised his hand to touch the hat she had given him, with its cunning bowl of steel
.

  ‘Who disapproves of your arrangement?’ he asked, declining to talk about her.

  Leybourn sniffed. ‘Thurloe, my brother and his wife, most of my customers. But I do not care. Mary may not be as pretty as your Metje, but she is mine and she loves me dearly. You never have trouble securing yourself ladies, but it is different for me, and I intend to keep this one.’

  ‘Then I wish you success of it,’ said Chaloner soothingly. He watched Leybourn fling away the last of the biscuits, which were immediately snapped up by stray dogs. ‘And now I should pay my respects to Maylord before more of the day is lost.’

  It began to rain as Chaloner and Leybourn walked from Westminster Stairs to St Margaret’s Church, a heavy, drenching downpour that thundered across the cobblestones and gushed from overflowing gutters and pipes. It enlarged the puddles that already spanned the streets, and Leybourn stepped in one that was knee-deep. Chaloner grabbed his arm to stop him from taking a tumble, although the near-accident did nothing to make the surveyor falter in his detailed description about a new and ‘exciting’ mathematical instrument.

  ‘I would love a Gunter’s Quadrant,’ he concluded wistfully, ‘but it is too expensive for the common man. I offered to borrow one for a few weeks and then write a pamphlet about it – I am well respected in my trade, as you know, and people take my recommendations seriously – but its maker is adamant: no money, no measuring stick. Will you break into his shop and steal it for me?’

  Chaloner was not entirely sure he was joking. ‘He might be suspicious if you suddenly start producing books and publications demonstrating its use.’

  Leybourn nodded thoughtfully. ‘I would have to modify it, pass it off as my own. Incidentally, have you visited St Paul’s Cathedral recently? You do not need to be a surveyor to see it is unsound, and I told the King today that he should close it before it falls down and kills someone. Christopher Wren submitted some brilliant plans for its rebuilding, but the clerics baulk.’

  ‘I would baulk, too,’ said Chaloner, making a dash for St Margaret’s porch as the rain came down even harder. ‘Wren’s design is nasty – like an Italian mausoleum.’

  ‘Rubbish! It is nothing short of brilliant. In fact, if you had any loyalty to your city, you would break into the old cathedral and set it afire. That would put an end to the clergy’s procrastination.’

  Chaloner raised his eyebrows. ‘First, you encourage me to commit burglary and now arson. Do you want me hanged?’

  ‘Not unless you leave me some money in your will. Then I can buy myself a Gunter’s Quadrant.’

  A verger conducted the visitors to the crypt, where Maylord was not the only dead citizen to have been granted refuge under its gloomy arches. A total of three bodies lay there, all neatly packed in wooden boxes, their faces decorously covered with clean white cloths. The verger explained that many houses in Westminster were small, and it was not always possible to have a corpse at home until a funeral could be arranged. It was all right twenty years ago, he sighed, because then you died one day and were in the ground the next. But in these enlightened times, ceremonies were grander and required more time to arrange. A funeral in London was a statement of earthly achievement, and no one wanted to be shoved underground without first showing off all he had accomplished.

  ‘Maylord,’ prompted Chaloner.

  The verger removed one of the cloths. ‘He used to play the organ here when our regular man was indisposed, and he never charged us for it. He was a good soul.’

  ‘Do you know how he died?’ asked Chaloner, gazing at the man who had smiled a lot, even during the dark days of the civil wars. Laughter lines were scored around Maylord’s eyes and mouth, and Chaloner thought it a terrible pity that the world was deprived of his gentle humour.

  ‘Cucumbers,’ replied the verger. ‘Did you not hear? It caused quite a stir.’

  ‘How do you know it was cucumbers?’

  ‘They were on a plate in his room, and he was dead on the floor with a piece in his mouth.’ The verger regarded him suspiciously. ‘You said you were a friend, so how come you do not know?’

  ‘I have been away,’ replied Chaloner truthfully. ‘He wrote two days ago, asking me to visit him.’

  ‘Then it is a shame you did not come sooner,’ said the verger, rather accusingly. ‘You might have been able to help him. You know how he was always happy? Well, these last two weeks he was miserable and bad tempered. He snapped at the choirboys for fidgeting, and he told me to mind my own business when I asked him what was wrong. It was something to do with Court, I imagine. It is an evil place, and Maylord was the only decent one among the lot of them.’

  ‘But you do not know it was Court business for certain?’ pressed Chaloner. The verger shook his head. ‘Did he have any particular friends he might have confided in?’

  ‘He had lots, but the closest was William Smegergill – a Court musician, like him. Do you know Smegergill? He has a ravaged complexion, because of a pox when he was a child.’

  The description was not familiar, but Chaloner made a mental note to track Smegergill down. ‘Did you ever see Maylord with a solicitor called Newburne?’

  The verger was disdainful. ‘Of course not! Maylord had more taste than to associate with the likes of him. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Because they both died from eating cucumbers.’

  ‘Coincidence,’ replied the verger, so promptly that Chaloner knew it was an observation that had been made before. ‘I could cite three other men who have been taken by cucumbers this year alone – namely Valentine Pettis the horse-trader, and a pair of sedan-chairmen. If people will eat cucumbers, then they must bear the consequences.’

  ‘You think they are that dangerous?’ asked Leybourn.

  The verger nodded fervently. ‘Oh, yes! They are green, see, and no good will come of feeding on greenery. Have you finished here? Only I need to wash the nave floor. Mud gets tracked everywhere this weather, and this is the Parliament church, so we like to keep it looking nice.’

  Chaloner stared at Maylord, and was suddenly seized with the absolute conviction that cucumbers were innocent of causing his death. Physicians, he knew, considered cucumber poison to be insidious – its vapours collected in the veins, and any ill effects tended to occur gradually, not the moment the fruit was taken into the mouth. Ergo, either Maylord had suffered the kind of seizure that was relatively common in older people, or someone had done him harm. Moreover, the musician’s recent agitation suggested something was sorely amiss, and it was odd that he should so suddenly die. Why anyone would want to hurt him was beyond Chaloner, and he made a silent oath to find out exactly what had happened, and to ensure that whoever was responsible would pay.

  He nudged Leybourn, and indicated the door with a nod of his head. He wanted to examine Maylord more closely, but he could hardly do it with the verger watching. Ordinarily, he would have bribed the man to look the other way, but sixpence was unlikely to be enough. It took a moment for Leybourn to understand what he wanted, and when he did, he slapped his hand across his mouth.

  ‘I am going to be sick,’ he announced.

  The verger gazed at him in horror. ‘Not down here!’

  ‘Escort me upstairs, then. My friend can finish paying his respects, and you can take me to fresh—’ But the verger did not want a mess, and was already hauling Leybourn away.

  Chaloner waited until he could no longer hear their voices, then inspected the musician’s hands, head and neck, looking for signs that he had been brained, strangled or had fought an attacker. There was nothing. Then he leaned close to Maylord’s mouth and sniffed, but it was an imprecise way to look for poison, and he was not surprised when it told him nothing. He stood back, reluctant to move clothes in a hunt for wounds, because he suspected the verger would not be long and he did not want to be caught doing something sinister. Then he saw an odd discoloration on the face: Maylord’s lips were bruised.

  Gently, he opened the mouth. An incisor was broken, and when he
touched it with his finger, the edge was sharp, suggesting it had happened shortly before death. Further, teeth marks were etched into Maylord’s lower lip. Chaloner had seen such injuries before – when someone had taken a cushion and pressed it hard against a victim’s face. It was an unpleasant way to kill, because it involved several minutes of watching a man’s losing battle for life at extremely close range. The fact that the culprit had then planted evidence to ‘prove’ Maylord had died from eating cucumbers suggested a ruthlessness that made Chaloner even more firmly resolved to see him on the gallows.

  It was still raining when they emerged from the church, Leybourn resting a hand on Chaloner’s shoulder to maintain the pretence of queasiness. Heavy clouds brought an early dusk, and lamps already gleamed in Westminster Hall and the shops around the old clock tower. They set slanting shafts of light gleaming on the wet cobbles, and everywhere people seemed to be in a hurry, wanting to be at home on a night that promised cold and miserable weather.

  ‘Smegergill,’ said Chaloner as they walked. ‘Do you know him?’

  Leybourn shook his head. ‘Thurloe might, though.’

  Chaloner had wanted to visit Thurloe anyway, to tell him he was home, so he and Leybourn walked up King Street, then along The Strand towards Chancery Lane and Lincoln’s Inn. Boys with burning torches offered to light their way, and Leybourn hired one after he skidded and almost fell in some slippery entrails that had been dumped outside a butcher’s shop.

  ‘Are you sure you should be doing this?’ he asked Chaloner as they went. ‘Visiting Thurloe, I mean. He was Spymaster General for Cromwell’s government, and he is still considered a dangerous enemy of the state, despite having been dismissed from all his posts and living in quiet retirement. You do work for the Lord Chancellor, after all.’

  ‘The Earl does not consider Thurloe a threat, and nor does he object to my continued association with him. It would not matter if he did, anyway. He cannot dictate who my friends should be.’