People had tittered uneasily, and Webb had taken the opportunity to haul Silence away before she could say anything else. Bristol had not smiled, though, and Webb knew he was angry. The merchant stopped for a moment, to shake water out of his hat; under the thin soles of his expensive shoes the road felt gritty with wet soot and ashes. Yet perhaps all was not lost. He had already lent Bristol several hundred pounds through a broker, so they were not exactly strangers to each other. He would call on the Earl the following morning, to apologise for Silence’s comments, and at the same time offer to lend him more – at a rate of interest that would be irresistible. Gold would speak louder than the insults of imprudent wives, and Bristol was sure to overlook the matter. He and Webb would be friends yet.
Webb took a series of shortcuts – he had been born in the slums known as the Fleet Rookery, and knew the city like the back of his hand – and emerged near Ludgate. His fine shoes rubbed his soaked feet, and he began to swear aloud, waking the beggars who were asleep under the Fleet bridge. His knees ached, too, as they often did in wet weather – a legacy of his years in the city’s dank runnels. He thought about Silence, and wondered whether she was angry with him because of Bristol’s remarks. Was that why she had failed to send the carriage back to African House to collect him?
He reached The Strand, limping heavily now, and heard the bells of St Martin-in-the-Fields announce six o’clock; they had been wrong ever since a new-fangled chiming mechanism had been installed three months before. He heaved a sigh of relief when he recognised mighty Somerset House and its fabulous clusters of chimneys. The newly styled ‘Webb Hall’ was next door.
Suddenly, a figure loomed out of the darkness ahead and began to stride towards him. Although he could not have said why, Webb knew, with every fibre of his being, that the man meant him harm. With a sick, lurching fear, he glanced at the alley that led to the river. Should he try to make a run for it? But his ruined knees ached viciously, and he knew he could not move fast enough to escape a younger, more fleet-footed man. He fumbled for his purse.
‘Five shillings,’ he said unsteadily. ‘I do not have any more. Take it and be gone.’
The fellow did not reply. Then Webb heard a sound behind him, and whipped around to see that a second man had been hiding in the shadows. And were there others, too? Webb screwed up his eyes, desperately peering into the blackness, but he could not tell. There was a blur of movement, and the merchant felt a searing pain in his chest. He dropped heavily to all fours, not knowing whether the agony in his ribs or to his jarred, swollen knees was the greater. He was still undecided when he died.
The killer handed his rapier to his companion to hold, while he knelt to feel for a life-beat. Then a dog started to bark, and the men quickly melted away into the darkness before the animal’s frenzied yaps raised the alarm. There was no time to snatch Webb’s bulging purse or to investigate the fine rings clustered on his fat fingers.
The mongrel was not the only witness to the crime. A figure swathed in a heavy cloak watched the entire episode, then stood rubbing his chin thoughtfully. There was little he could have done to prevent the murder of Matthew Webb, but that did not mean it was going to be quietly forgotten. Someone would pay for the blood that stained The Strand.
Chapter 1
Westminster, late May 1663
Hailstones as large as pigeons’ eggs pelted the royal procession as it trooped down King Street from the palace at White Hall, and any semblance of dignity was lost in the ensuing scramble for shelter. Horses pranced and bucked at the sudden commotion, and the Earl of Bristol was not the only courtier to take a tumble in the chaos when the cavalcade reached Westminster Abbey. His retainers dashed forward to drag him upright, but not before his red, ermine-fringed cloak was irretrievably stained with the dung and filth from the road. His bitter enemy, the Earl of Clarendon, allowed himself a small, spiteful smirk before tossing the reins of his own mount to a waiting servant and hurrying up the steps to the abbey’s great west door. Clarendon’s massive new periwig, made from the hair of a golden-maned Southwark prostitute, had been expensive, and he did not want it ruined by the weather – not even when it was to gloat at the gratifying sight of his rival wallowing in muck.
A handful of flustered trumpeters did their best to produce a regal fanfare when King Charles leapt from his saddle, but His Majesty was disgracefully late, and most of the musicians had grown tired of waiting and had wandered off. They came running when they heard the clatter of hoofs, but too late to do their duty. Meanwhile, it had been raining hard all morning and water had seeped inside the instruments of those who had remained, so all that emerged was a series of strangled gurgles. One youngster had had the foresight to keep his horn dry under his hat and proudly stepped forward to prove it, but in his eagerness, he forgot what he had been told to play, and graced the royal ears with a lively rendition of a popular alehouse song. The King shot him a startled glance, and Thomas Chaloner, who had been assigned ‘security duties’ for the day and was in disguise as a raker – a street-sweeper – struggled not to laugh.
Somewhat belatedly, a bell began to chime, but an administrative hiccup had seen the ringers provided with their barrel of refreshing ale far too early in the day, and most were now incapable of performing the task in hand. The man who had been assigned the largest bell hastened to make up for his colleagues’ shortcomings, and produced a deep, sepulchral toll that was more redolent of a royal funeral than a celebration to mark the third anniversary of the King’s coronation. Yet if any Londoner did think the monarch was dead, he shed no tears: in the three years since Charles had been restored to the throne, his Court had earned itself a reputation for debauchery, vice and corruption, and Chaloner was not the only one to think England might have been better off under Cromwell and his sober Parliamentarians.
Courtiers, barons and members of the Royal Household hastily followed their ruler’s example by abandoning their steeds and scurrying inside the church to escape the battering of icy missiles from the sky. Chaloner was astounded by the number of people who were taking part in the procession, and thought it small wonder that the King was always clamouring for money to maintain them all. There were grooms, pages and gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, masters of hawks and buckhounds, ladies-in-waiting, and keepers of the King’s wine cellars, jewel houses, kitchens and laundries, all combining to make a dazzling spectacle of red, blue, gold, purple and silver.
The most glorious of all was not the King, whose taste in clothes was comparatively modest, but the ebullient Duke of Buckingham. Buckingham was the brightest star of the dissolute Court, and one of its leaders in fashion and mischief. The man who bore the brunt of his spiteful waggery tended to be Lord Clarendon – Chaloner’s master. The Duke was always jibing the older man about his obesity and prim manners, and their paths seldom crossed without some insult being traded. That day, Chaloner watched Buckingham give a fair imitation of Clarendon’s short-legged waddle up the abbey steps. The voluptuous Lady Castlemaine laughed uproariously at the performance, but no one dared rebuke her – as the King’s current mistress, she could guffaw at whomsoever she liked.
Behind Buckingham stamped the Earl of Bristol, swearing furiously under his breath – poor horsemanship had nothing to do with his fall into the mud, of course; incompetent servants and the weather were to blame. He was a handsome, although portly, man with thick brown hair and a thin moustache, like the King’s. He hurled his soiled cloak at one of his retainers, revealing that underneath he wore an overly tight doublet with ruffs, and the kind of ‘bucket-topped’ boots that had been popular during the civil wars. Either he could not afford fashionable clothes, or he did not care that he had donned an outfit that would not have looked out of place thirty years before.