Gerald – the boy without the scar, according to Lockswood – answered with chilling casualness. ‘Just hunting him around the house. We felt like a bit of sport, and there’s no deer or game here in London.’
‘Take him to the constable, if you like.’ Barnabas added. ‘There’s some silverware missing from the house, enough to hang this little rabbit.’
‘Or have him branded and put to service at least, under the new law,’ Gerald said.
The boy looked at me. ‘I’ve stolen nothing,’ he said frantically, ‘by Christ’s wounds!’
I noticed that Barnabas and Gerald had full pouches at their waists, remembered what Lockswood had said about them coming here to steal, and stared hard at them. ‘Maybe you’d like to show us what you have in those pouches,’ I said, glancing at Nicholas, whose hand was still on his sword hilt.
The twins looked at each other. Perhaps realizing the odds were against them, Gerald said, ‘Naah. I think we’ll fetch our horses and go back to Brikewell.’
I thought of forcing them to open the pouches, but sensed they would fight and I did not want to start this investigation by dragging Nicholas and Lockswood into a scuffle with Boleyn’s sons. I asked, though, ‘Did you open the chest in your father’s office?’
‘Yes,’ Gerald answered truculently. ‘Why shouldn’t we? If they hang him we’re his heirs. We wanted to see what we might get, but we couldn’t make much of the Latin and French rubbish written in those papers.’
‘If they hang your father, his lands go to the King, and you become the King’s wards,’ I said.
Gerald’s eyes narrowed, ‘I’ve heard that sometimes, if the heir’s a minor, the King will grant the land back to him.’
‘And Protector Somerset’s known to listen to a sob story,’ his brother added.
‘You’d have to get past the escheator first,’ Lockswood said. ‘John Flowerdew is his local agent, he’d be responsible for the lands. You’ll have heard what he’s like.’
Gerald shrugged. ‘Well, whatever happens, that bitch Isabella won’t get anything. Come on, Barney, let’s get away from these leeching lawyers.’
The two boys turned and went back into the house. I heard the outer door slam. The little boy they had been hunting had got to his feet and stood shivering, his back to the courtyard wall.
‘Have they hurt you?’ I asked gently.
‘They got my side with a stone, then my ribs.’
I looked at the ground and saw a couple of small, pointed flints. ‘They came in and when I tried to escape they chased me all over. I heard one shout that the first to break my head open would get a half-sovereign.’ He tailed off, crying again. ‘I was only looking for shelter. It’s been so cold and wet till this week.’
I sighed, and gave the boy two shillings from my purse. ‘Be off now. We’re going to lock up the house, and it’s probably safer not to come back.’
‘I stole nothing, sir. I promise. I was asleep in the room next to the kitchen and heard sounds like metal clanking. Anything that’s gone, they took it.’
‘All right. Just go now. Straight through the house and out the front door.’ It was hard to look at the child, rake-thin, his dirty shirt bloodied, spots and scabs on his face. As he limped away I realized I had not even asked his name.
We stood in silence in the sunny courtyard for a moment. ‘So those are John Boleyn’s sons,’ I finally said.
Lockswood nodded. ‘A nasty pair. They’ve had a bad reputation since childhood.’
Nicholas said, ‘They seemed to care nothing for their father’s imprisonment, or their mother’s death.’
I looked at Lockswood. ‘Was that bravado, do you think? Pretending not to care?’
He sighed. ‘I don’t know. But hunting a helpless child as though he were a rabbit – that does not surprise me.’ His round face was set now, and angry. And indeed there had been a coldness about those boys that chilled me. He continued, ‘A few months ago they took part in the scuffle with Leonard Witherington’s men over the estate boundary. They mix with a crowd of gentlemanly ruffians, some of them Sir Richard Southwell’s servants. They’ve hired themselves out more than once to landlords who want to get tenants off their land. There’s stories of cattle maimed, ricks set on fire, people hurt.’
Nicholas asked, ‘How did that one – Barnabas, is it? – get his scar?’
‘There’s a story that has gone about for years, though nobody knows if it is true.’ Lockswood took a deep breath. ‘Apparently, Edith Boleyn, God save her soul, was no good mother to the boys. As soon as they were born she handed them over to a wet-nurse and wanted nothing more to do with them. As they grew up she ignored them as much as possible, although both of them took after her, fair-haired, strong in build.’ I remembered Parry telling me the woman who had visited Hatfield had been thin and scrawny, but also the story that sometimes Edith starved herself. Lockswood continued, ‘She never behaved like a mother, for all they sought her attention. All she did was criticize and chastise them, and one thing that made her angry was that she was unable to tell them apart. One day they were pestering her in the kitchen and she said she’d give anything to tell one from the other, to know who to punish when one was rude to a servant or reported for stealing apples. Apparently, the boys went outside into the yard. A servant saw them talking, heads together, then one took a couple of pieces of straw from the yard and held them out to the other. He picked a straw, and it turned out to be the short one. Then there was a flash of metal and a scream. A moment later the boys reappeared in the kitchen doorway, standing side by side, only Gerald had ripped Barnabas’s face open with a knife taken from the drawer; he was covered in blood. Edith screamed, asking what they had done now, and Gerald just said, “We did it for you, so you can tell us apart now.”’
Nicholas gave an uneasy laugh. I looked at Lockswood, aghast. ‘Do you think the story true?’
He shrugged. ‘It’s what people say, the common fame of the district. But the twins never talk about how Barnabas got that scar, they don’t like people asking. They’re such devils, perhaps they started the tale themselves. All I know is they were the despair of their father. People have often said those two were born to hang. Yet it is their father in gaol on a charge of murder.’
Nicholas and I looked at each other. If that was what their childhood had been like, it gave the twins a twisted motive to kill Edith Boleyn, and I could easily imagine them capable of leaving her body in a position of grotesque humiliation. Yet I was aware of how much I had heard was gossip and ‘common fame’, and knew how a story can become embedded like a rock in its neighbourhood of origin, when it contains but a wisp of the truth.
WE LOCKED UP the house, and Lockswood left to find the constable and ensure a close eye was kept on the property. We arranged to meet him on Monday morning at the Moorgate, to commence our journey to Norwich.
Nicholas and I walked slowly back to Temple Bar; he was to return to his lodgings, while I decided to take the opportunity to go and see Guy. The visit to Boleyn’s house had given us both food for thought.
‘There seem to be more and more people with a possible motive to kill her,’ Nicholas said. ‘John Boleyn, his second wife Isabella Heath, his neighbour, and now those boys. But everyone would have been safer if they’d just buried her.’
I said, ‘Those boys are hardly’ – I struggled for a word – ‘normal.’
‘No, they’re not.’
‘If that story of them drawing lots to see who would get his face carved, just so their mother could tell them apart, is true, that needed an extraordinary degree of control. Was it a gesture of love, I wonder. Or hate?’