Do We Not Bleed

by Patricia Finney

  “They were very upset,” said Enys coldly, “and very frightened that her ghost would walk and curse their new playhouse.”

  “Good...”

  “... so they paid for a decent Christian burial for her.”

  Catlin sniffed. He hated all ungodly layabout players, poets and playwrights. Even the old pagan Plato had meant to keep poets out of his Republic and that holy man, John Calvin had had every one of the evil tribe whipped from Geneva for mocking God with their damnable lies and for leading the common folk astray.

  “I would say that of all men in the world, the players are the least likely murderers,” said Enys again, with that glint of humour which Catlin found unsettling. “Since the dead woman on that occasion was French Mary.”

  Catlin shrugged. “A notorious whore,” he said.

  “Certainly, a notorious retired whore who kept an alehouse where she was willing to give players credit, something hardly any other seller of booze in London will do. And she would commute the debts for playhouse tickets too which she sold on, so everyone was pleased. I hope Mr Recorder will...”

  “God’s blood, this is a bad business,” boomed a voice behind them. Both spun and made their bows, Enys a fraction deeper than Maliverny Catlin, as this was the Recorder of London who was in charge of the criminal Courts of London as well as the London Watch and the trained bands.

  His broad florid face was frowning and he was fully dressed, booted and spurred with a soldier’s old buff coat over his fur-trimmed doublet, his swordbelt buckled. He took an old-fashioned velvet cap with a feather in it from the doorkeeper and put it on over his grey hair.

  “Second in a month,” he growled at them, “The whores will be wild with rage. Do you know whose she was?”

  They both shook their heads. Fleetwood led the way to the back of his house where was a stableyard and a small building for his men-at-arms. Nominally they served as Captains and teachers for the London trained bands, but they also did Mr Recorder Fleetwood’s bidding and were unofficially a much younger and more effective Watch for the City than the impending graveyard-dwellers of the official Watch.

  The barracks clattered with activity, candles and torches lit along with a great deal of complaint. Four young men were yawning in the yard, buckling swordbelts and morion straps, while grooms brought indignant horses from their stalls including two for Catlin and Enys.

  Everyone was mounted before Mr Recorder nodded at Maliverny Catlin.

  “Mr Catlin, tell me how you came upon this new outrage?”

  Catlin sat stiffly in the saddle while his horse backed and sidled under him in the annoying way of horses. He admitted to being a trifle distempered of drink so no one would think he had been puking because of plague, and of needing to cut through the alleys from the water steps, so he had stopped in the alley and...

  “I’m afraid I retched at once at the shock,” he said primly. “Although I have seen executions, I have never...”

  “Quite so,” said the Recorder quickly, “Mr Enys?”

  “I had been caught by a flux and was in a similar case to Mr Catlin,” explained Enys smoothly, “although we were not together and not well-acquainted. When I realised from Mr Catlin’s... er... reaction that something was badly wrong in the alley, I lit a candle and looked closer...”

  “Were there tokens?” asked Fleetwood oddly.

  “Of the Plague?”

  “No... So Rumour is not so quick then. You say she was anatomised. How?”

  Enys swallowed. “She had been... opened from above her navel to her... er... her quim. Her entrails had been pulled out and... er... arranged around her. Some inner organs were lying on her thigh...”

  “Oh yes? Which?”

  “Ah... I didn’t recognise them, sir, not being familiar with such things. Only perhaps it looked a little like a sow’s pigbed?”

  “Yes, so, yes,” said Fleetwood, his chin on his chest, “Her womb.”

  Enys paled further, if that was possible, put his hand to his mouth. “Sir?” he asked faintly.

  “Her womb, sir,” said Fleetwood, spurring ahead to go through the narrow gap of Ludgate which was being held open for him by an obsequious old watchman. “Organ of generation,” he shouted back over his shoulder, “It’s why the whores will be upset.”

  Cantering behind, Catlin wondered for a moment if Mr Enys might pass out and fall off his horse. For a moment he bounced painfully in the saddle as if he was a sack of meal, but then he straightened and kicked the horse back to a canter to keep up with the Recorder as he clattered down through the shuttered darkness of Tower Street, where the statutory lanterns had gone out.

  It was the dead of night so deep that not even the bakers were stirring yet to light their ovens. Mr Fleetwood’s men all carried torches and the clatter and thud of the horses’ hooves and the blaze of light must have woken some of the people as their small cavalcade passed. Good, thought Catlin, why should they sleep when he was awake?

  At the small opening between two slumping houses where Catlin and Enys had come out of the Liberties, they all dismounted. The youngest man was left to guard the horses from enterprising beggars and at Fleetwood’s nod, Enys led the rest of them sidling between walls into the darkness.

  To Catlin’s relief as well as disappointment, she was still there. In the light of the torches her dark hair shone and it seemed as if her mouth moved. The eyes, however, said nothing. From the traces, rats had begun their own investigations but run at the arrival of men and lights.

  Fleetwood sighed and took his hat off, his head bowed for a moment. Perhaps he was papistically praying for the whore’s soul, Maliverny wondered? He hoped not. Anyway, the creature was certainly burning in the fires of hell for all eternity now.

  Then the Recorder leaned down and closed the whore’s eyes, turned to the older of the men he had brought and nodded to him. The man took out a notebook and stick of graphite and began to draw the corpse as it lay.

  Fleetwood had them both repeat their stories of the discovery. “Do you know who it is?” he asked.

  “No sir,” said Catlin, far too quickly as he immediately realised.

  “I believe it might be Annie Smith,” said Enys, giving Catlin a hard look.

  Fleetwood nodded. “Known to all as Kettle Annie. I think so too though it’s harder to tell without her clothes. Where are they, by the way?”

  Enys shrugged. There was no sign of them nearby, but two of the young men were sent off to search nearby alleys and one came back with a large bundle of a striped kirtle and secondhand brocade petticoat and a tawny velvet gown that was worn down to the cloth. Kettle Annie had liked to dress fine. Enys bent gingerly down to the body and pointed out something under it – the remnants of her stays and shift lay there, soaked in blood.

  “I think the cutting was done before she was dead,” he said, "for the amount of blood..."

  “Yes,”

  It was clear the shift and stays had been cut, not ripped, with a sharp knife or shears and peeled back as if skinning a kill. Enys touched the edges of the linen. “And yet not in a frenzy,” he added.

  “Clearly not,” said Fleetwood, “Look how carefully he worked. The stomach is still entire, the guts have not been breached. He has taken out the womb but not cut into anything else. I know few butchers that could have done this so neatly, and fewer barber surgeons.”

  “Wasn’t he afraid of discovery?” wondered Enys.

  Catlin pointed to a rough screen of wattle that was tilted innocently against the wall in the wider alley. “If he put that across, nobody would see him.”

  “Wouldn’t they see the light from his lantern? He must have needed light to work so neatly.”

  Nobody answered, but the fact was that in the Liberties if you saw a light behind a screen, you were wise not to pry.

  “Hm,” said Fleetwood, “The thing is... the really interesting thing here, gentlemen, is how did he get her to do it? How did he get Kettle Annie of all people into so narrow
an alley on her own and then kill her.”

  Kettle Annie had been a large strong woman and afraid of no one. It was something of a puzzle although Catlin thought the answer was obvious.

  “He fooled her into it by pretending he was after her trade,” he said.

  “In only her shift and stays?” asked Enys.

  It was a good point. Why would Kettle Annie take her clothes off? – most whores that worked outside the bawdy houses never did, they never needed to. The whores that worked where there were warm fires and curtained beds charged extra for the show and wore linen breeches which they charged even more for shedding. No decent woman ever wore anything under her shift except during her courses.

  This line of thought was making Catlin uncomfortable and he could feel his ears going hot.

  “Did he knock her out and drag her here, then strip her?” asked Fleetwood.

  Nobody said anything but they all thought, Kettle Annie? A woman that size? Enys looked carefully at the back of her head, then shook his own.

  “I think not.” When he laid her head back down again, something caught his eye on the side of it and he touched it with his fingers, rubbed them together, frowned and sniffed.

  “More blood?” asked Fleetwood.

  “No. Hair oil.”

  Fleetwood said, “But the true riddle is how did any man get Kettle Annie to lie down in the dirt in nothing but her shift and stays and then allow him to slash open her belly and rummage around in her innards. Why didn't she fight? There are no cuts on her hands, no bruises on her wrists.”

  “He must have been boltered in blood,” said Enys.

  “Not necessarily,” Catlin told him, “If he was careful with his cutting and did it from behind... I’ve seen it done in the hunting field in such wise that the courtier was not even speckled.”

  “So have I, but that’s for the first cut after the kill, when the humours have stopped.” objected Fleetwood, “You couldn’t undertake this sort of butchery without an apron.”

  “Then perhaps he wore one,” Enys put in.

  Fleetwood sighed, shook his head again and peered over his man at arms’ shoulder at the drawing. “Well done, Gideon, excellent.”

  The man certainly was a good limner. He had made several drawings of the woman : one from above, one from the foot end, one from the head. He had done a delicate drawing of her face as well, as if he was a court painter preparing to make a miniature of a fine lady.

  “All right, lads,” Fleetwood said, beckoning the other two, “Let’s collect her up and take her to St Bride’s crypt ready for the inquest.”

  The other two young men set their faces sternly, rolled their sleeve cuffs up and set about gathering the entrails and putting them back where they came from. Whether from superstition or the normal male disgust at such things, the younger of them used his dagger to prick up the woman’s womb and put that back too. Although it was all higgledy piggledy, thought Catlin who had seen several Papist priests disembowelled, he had never before thought what a miracle it was so orderly to pack so much into the little space of a belly. Surely God was the greatest of Craftsmen?

  The young men shifted Kettle Annie onto the litter they had brought and covered her with a canvas roll from one of the horses.

  It was still deep chilly night and Orion was tilting towards the horizon again. In the distance there was a bang of a door and the sound of someone yawning mightily on Fleet Street, perhaps a baker starting work. It was a tricky matter to squeeze the obdurate length and width of the litter up onto Fleet Street and then along it as quickly as possible before they could go down riverwards again to St Brides in the main part of the old Whitefriars liberty.

  The beggars at Temple Bar at the other end of the street sat up at the torches this time, and squinted with interest at the procession moving away from them. Then they began scratching and making water against headless saint statues on the Bar and rearranging the plasters that kept their sores open.

  “Sir!” called Enys, holding his hat on his head and running past Catlin to keep up with the litter and the looming Recorder of London. “Sir, was it the players themselves found the other one at the new theatre site?”

  “Yes, it was, Mr Enys,” said Fleetwood heavily,”One of them even drew a picture of it for a ballad about her, though he had not Gideon’s skill. There were two or three of them that found her.”

  “Who were they?”

  “Ah... Mr Burbage, Mr Henslowe and young Shakeshaft...”

  “Shakespeare? Bald Will? I thought he was in Oxford?” asked Catlin, who liked to collect intelligence on subversives like players and poets.

  “Him? No, he’s back. I heard Southampton’s taking him on as his house poet.”

  Catlin scowled. They passed by a tavern where a sleepy-eyed woman in her stays and petticoat was standing on the threshold watching. Back up the street at Ludgate they could see the large cart and patient horses of the nightsoil men who were clattering around with buckets, whistling loudly and occasionally dropping turds behind them. The woman had a covered bucket beside her and an irritated expression on her face so perhaps she was waiting for the nightsoil men to rate them about something: however she stared with interest at the litter.

  “That’s never a plague death,” she shouted over her shoulder into the house, “So stop your grizzling. Mr Recorder’s there which he never would if it was plague.”

  They ignored her as officiously as they could, taking a wider lane towards the church door. Gideon had run ahead to wake the Reverend, who turned out to be waiting on the steps of his church for them, still in his nightcap, an old furred dressing gown over his shirt and his bare feet in his pattens. He was shivering in the sharp air.

  “Mr Recorder,” said the churchman, bowing his head slightly.

  “Reverend,” rumbled Fleetwood,”Good of you to meet us. I’m afraid this is a very shocking case and no one is to view the corpse until I have had a barber surgeon examine it myself. You can still lock your crypt, can you not?”

  “Yes sir,” answered the reverend, his eyes gleaming with curiosity. “I shall need to know who it is for the Register.”

  “ Mrs Annie Smith,” said Fleetwood.

  “Kettle Annie?” asked the Reverend, shock on his face. Catlin wondered if he was another of the redoubtable Annie’s band of old suitors and customers. “No? Is it? Lord above, how sad, God rest her.”

  Catlin snorted. Kettle Annie was an obdurate and renowned old whore and that was all there was to it.

  The Reverend took off his nightcap in respect as the lads hefted the litter into his church and down the steps to the crypt. They all followed inside the cold church, colder than the churchyard, pitch dark in the night time with the torchlight catching whitewashed papistical vine leaves and grape bunches and a strange looking face made of leaves looking from the top of a pillar. Catlin averted his eyes from the papistical idolatry. At least they had painted over the old pictures of superstition.

  They heard Fleetwood locking the door and coming back up the stairs, followed by the clopping of the Reverend’s pattens.

  “I’ll keep this,” he rumbled, “Tell Nan not to worry about cleaning the crypt until Mrs Smith’s properly buried.”

  The Reverend smiled faintly. “I’m afraid she rarely does since she finds the steps too much for her old knees. Do you know when the funeral may be?”

  “Not until after the inquest which I will be calling at the Old Bailey tomorrow or the day after, depending on the lists.”

  Fleetwood came over to them. “Sir,” asked Catlin, “Who was the other whore that was found at the theatre?”

  “French Mary the Elder,” said Fleetwood.

  Catlin shuddered. This was getting worse and worse. Neither were young whores, being in their thirties at least, as far as anyone knew. Kettle Annie in particular was senior amongst the London whores, especially in the Whitefriars and especially since the incident of the kettle. Catlin had heard four different tales, each more unlikel
y than the last.

  “Mr Catlin, Mr Enys,” said Fleetwood formally, “Thank you for bringing this to my attention so promptly. You may have saved me a great deal of trouble. I am grateful but I wonder if I may propose something to you gentlemen?”

  Enys’s face was wary, a sentiment Catlin shared.

  “I need this matter investigated,” said Fleetwood, “Would you, Mr Enys, be prepared to assist Mr Catlin in finding out who did it?”

  Catlin stepped forward hurriedly. “Sir, sir... I...”

  “I know, I know, you hardly want to do it,” said Fleetwood patiently, “But I know you served Sir Francis Walsingham for many years as one of his best pursuivants and I am willing to pay forty pounds between the two of you if you can clear the matter up for me.”

  Enys and Catlin stared at each other.

  “Sir, my skill is in finding out Papistry,” said Catlin between his teeth, “And I am not in such need of money...”

  “Are you not?” said Enys with some humour, “You must have a pretty package of confiscated lands then.” He turned to Fleetwood. “I need the money, Mr Recorder, and I’ll do it without Mr Catlin.”

  “No,” said Fleetwood, “I want you both. You, Mr Enys, because you have been asking good questions and you are a man learned in the law, and you Mr Catlin in case there is any matter of treason here.”

  “I fear I am in service to another lord...

  “I’ll talk to his honour,” said Fleetwood, “Or I will when he gets back from Oxford. I think Mr Heneage will not object...”

  “He is no longer my lord,” said Catlin, stiffly.

  “No?” Fleetwood’s bushy eyebrows went up, “Well done. I hear he has lost some favour with the Queen since the trouble at his house on Bankside.” He stuck his thumbs in his sword belt and his eyes narrowed. “I want the two of you and either I’ll pay you twenty pounds each or I’ll take you both up as chief suspects in the murders, whichever you choose.” Fleetwood’s face was hard, though his bluff voice was still quite even.

  There was a shocked silence, Catlin heard Enys swallowing.

  “But... we...” began the lawyer.