‘Joseph?’ Allys Fludd knew better than to speak to her husband whilst he was working the lathe. She came from a family of carpenters and knew only too well from the tales of some of her six-fingered uncles how dangerous that could be.
He turned. She stood in the doorway of his workshop, holding a tankard of ale and a plate of bread and cheese on a tray. ‘Is it dinner time already?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I think this is by way of being breakfast, Joe.’ She pushed aside some shavings and put the tray down on a half-finished chair. ‘You’ve got to eat. You’ll make yourself ill.’
‘I do eat,’ he protested. ‘I ate . . .’ He wasn’t quite sure when.
‘It’s this constable nonsense,’ she said. ‘You’ve done it often enough, and that’s God’s truth. When they ask you next, just say no.’
He took a swig of ale, looking at her over the rim of the tankard.
‘And don’t look at me like that either, Joseph Fludd. You can’t woo me with those eyes any more.’
He lowered the tankard and his eyelids, his lashes lying on his cheeks like a girl’s.
She boxed his ears, but lightly and with love. ‘Well, perhaps you can, then,’ she said. ‘But it’s because you can, Joe, that I worry about you. You can’t keep on at this rate.’
He sat down on his working stool, putting the plate in front of him and tucking into the cheese, soft and tangy. He gestured to it, mouth full, nodding.
‘I know I make good cheese, Joe,’ she said. ‘And good ale. And bread. And all sorts of other food. I make good children, too.’ She tossed her head back to the house where their daughter was playing in the shavings on the kitchen floor and patted her belly where, hopefully, a healthy son lay. ‘But for all you know, I may as well not bother. Talk to me, Joe. Tell me what’s the matter.’
He washed the cheese down with the ale and wiped his mouth. ‘I don’t know where to begin, Allys,’ he said. ‘It’s constable’s worries. It’s not for you.’
Allys set her feet firmly apart and folded her arms. ‘I can be the judge of that, Joseph,’ she said.
Joseph Fludd had chosen a strong woman for a wife on purpose, against his mother’s better judgement. It had paid off, more or less, over the years. But every good thing came with a price and this was it. He sighed. ‘Sit down, Allys,’ he said. ‘Don’t loom over me like that. You addle my brain.’
She sat on a bench and waited for him to begin.
‘In all my years as Constable,’ he said, ‘I’ve never encountered what I have encountered in the last month. Three murders . . .’
She laughed, rocking back and slapping her knees. ‘Three murders in a month. Joe Fludd, you need to have a think before you say things like that. You had three murders on one day of the Sturbridge Fair not two years ago.’
‘Ah, yes.’ He had no choice but to agree. ‘But they weren’t murders. Not like these. They were stupid drunks with knives killing each other. The three murders I have got on my mind are . . . what’s the word, when it is done secretly, cunningly?’
Allys shrugged. Either of those words would make it clear, to her mind.
‘Clandestine. That’s the word the scholars would use. Clandestine. Someone killed these people and did it in such a way that no one would know they had done it. Might not even say it was a murder, even.’
‘But the inquests . . .’
‘Suicide, found drowned, natural causes.’ Fludd ticked them off on his fingers. He didn’t need to burden Allys with the names, though they were all human beings once, with hopes and dreams and families of their own. Ralph Whitingside. Eleanor Peacock. Henry Bromerick.
Allys leaned forward, hand cupped theatrically to her ear. ‘I don’t think I heard properly, Joe,’ she said. ‘I didn’t hear you say “murder” in that list.’
‘No,’ Fludd sighed. ‘I know you didn’t. And that’s the problem. The suicide and natural causes were scholars from the university, different colleges. The found drowned was a woman from Royston, a nun.’
‘A nun?’ Allys was genuinely surprised by that. ‘Not so many of those around,’ she said. In fact, the last time she’d seen one, she was still a small child, knee deep in wood shavings in her father’s workshop. ‘Quite long odds on finding one drowned, I would think.’
‘Don’t mock me, Allys,’ he said. ‘Perhaps a nun is the wrong word, but she was certainly very religious. Had only been back in the county . . . the country, I should say . . . for a few days. Knew no one but her family . . .’
‘But?’ she said quietly. She loved her husband and didn’t mean to scoff, but he sometimes took himself too seriously.
‘But she had a rosary embedded in her neck.’ He fingered his own throat in reminiscence. ‘The scholars were both poisoned, or so they say.’
‘They?’
‘A scholar called Marlowe and Dr John Dee.’
Allys’s eyes widened. Even here in Trumpington, that man’s name was a byword for all that was unholy. She wouldn’t show it, but suddenly Allys Fludd was afraid. ‘The Queen’s Magician,’ she said softly. ‘You mix in high circles these days, Joe.’
‘Hmm?’ Fludd’s eyes were troubled and he crumbled a piece of bread between restless fingers.
His wife watched him for a while and then got up, went over to him and kissed him on the forehead. ‘Joe,’ she said, smoothing his hair back from his face. ‘I can see you are worried and that worries me. Look into your murders, and when you do you will find they are a suicide, a found drowned and a natural causes. Stay away from magicians. Stay away from scholars. But mainly . . .’
He looked up. ‘Yes?’
‘Eat. Your. Dinner.’
He kissed her back and patted her backside, comforting, wide and warm. ‘Yes, my love,’ he said. ‘I promise.’ He watched her go, back into the yard with the cackling hens and the summer sun. But his eyes were thoughtful as he ate his bread and cheese.
It was chaos at Madingley that morning, largely because the dragon that was Ursula Hynde was roaring through the house. She was a large woman, reminding John Dee of those stately merchantmen that blew in from the Channel, three-masted and full-rigged. Dee and his old friend Roger Manwood had spent the last few days studiously avoiding her, closeted deep in their host Francis Hynde’s study. But there was no comfort there today because on the bride-to-be’s orders, every door in Madingley was thrown back; every casement opened wide.
The pair tried to have a conversation in the hall, then in the parlour, but her shrieked commands to the little knot of servants who followed her everywhere drowned out their attempts. A clerk did his best to scratch her instructions down as she hurled them out, another trying to keep pace so the man could dip his quill into the inkwell he carried for him.
‘Those curtains will have to go,’ she screeched in the Long Gallery.
Francis Hynde, who had taken what he thought to be refuge on a padded windowseat behind one such hanging, stuck his head out. ‘Ursie, dearest sister,’ he said plaintively, ‘these hangings were chosen by my sainted mother and I love them dearly. They have hung here for thirty years and more.’
‘So have the traitors’ heads on London Bridge and it’s all the more reason for them to go,’ she snapped. She and her train swept on, nearly stamping on the Lord of Madingley’s toes. The clerk scribbled. Hynde gestured to the man and he crossed out his scribbling. Ursula Hynde stopped, peered at the paper and pointed imperiously. The clerk rescribbled, shrugged apologetically at Hynde, ducked his head and the circus moved off once more.
Hynde looked after his sister-in-law with hatred in his heart and venom in his eyes. But discretion being the better part of valour, he withdrew his head, like a snail into its shell and went back to his book and a rather nice bottle of claret.