‘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.