‘If he was, he has an alibi – in his friend Strollot. And I would guess if we were to ask Strollot, he’d say Vyves can vouch for him. Are you sure there were no witnesses to the boy’s killing?’
‘Nay, Master Nicholas. Constable Osborne and ’is night-watch found the poor lad on the corner of the Mutton Lane shambles and Black Bull Alley. He was dead when they found ’im. Not ’nother soul in sight, or so they said.’
‘Well, Ned,’ Nicholas says reluctantly, ‘perhaps we’ll just have to accept that it was what they claim: a purse-cutting that went awry.’
Ned dusts off his huge forearms. ‘Aye, well, the fact remains that Barnabas Vyves and Gideon Strollot are kings – kings amongst arseworms. An’ naught can make me think otherwise.’
And with that, he goes back to his labours.
It is Plough Monday – the first Monday after Twelfth Night – when the ploughs are blessed and prayers given for the summer to come. Bianca always ensures the Jackdaw is part of the accompanying festivities; in the taproom, shepherds, farm labourers, cowherds and drovers are as common as wherrymen or players from the Rose theatre. If she opens the bedroom window of the Paris Garden lodgings and leans out of the jutting first floor she can just about see the millpond beside the Pudding watermill. In spring she can hear cattle lowing in the fields below the pike pools. The southern edge of Bankside is where the city ends and countryside begins.
Save for a few outbreaks of raucous intemperance, the day passes without incident. Until the following morning, two hours before dawn. when the bucolic tranquillity of the Paris Garden is shattered.
The hammering at the street door brings Bianca instantly out of a repetition of the dream she had at Kilcolman in which little Bruno waits fretfully for his Merrow mother to wade out of the sea to comfort him – a task that is beyond her because her feet keep being sucked down into the ooze of the seabed. She shakes the dream out of her head. The noise, she thinks, must be loud enough to wake the Archbishop of Canterbury from his slumber in Lambeth Palace, two miles upriver past the Lambeth marshes. She lets out a stream of invective, involuntarily delivered in Italian.
It does nothing to stem the din. Believing that someone must be in desperate need of Nicholas’s physic, she delivers herself a stern rebuke and makes her way cautiously downstairs, conscious of Nicholas’s grumbled protestations as he dresses. Taking the heavy key from its hook beside the street door, she turns the lock – and finds herself blinded by the flames of a torch held by a man whose black garb makes him all but indistinguishable from the night outside.
‘Where is Dr Shelby?’ a voice demands to know.
‘I’m here,’ says Nicholas. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Come with us, please, Dr Shelby. Sir Robert has need of you.’
In the torchlight, Nicholas can now make out one of the men from Cecil House, a member of the team of inquisitors who’d been here at the Paris Garden lodgings before Christmas. He’s accompanied by two others, also vaguely familiar. His sleepy mind takes a moment to realize they must have come by private wherry, landing at the Falcon stairs.
‘Is Sir Robert ill?’ he asks. ‘Is it his children?’
‘Sir Robert is in good health,’ the man replies. ‘So are his children. It’s the poet he wants you to visit – Master Spenser.’
‘Spenser? Where?’
‘King’s Street. We’re to take you there directly.’
‘What ails him,’ Nicholas asks, ‘that he has need of my attention at this hour?’
‘He has little need of attention, sir,’ the man says. ‘He’s dead.’
22
Nicholas sits huddled in the stern of the private wherry, bleary-eyed and freezing cold. There will come a time, he assures himself, when he becomes accustomed to these sinistrous night-journeys on the river, summoned from his sleep by Robert Cecil. But not tonight. Tonight he is hurrying over a river that he is beginning to think is not the Thames but the Styx, the watery boundary between the living and the dead. Looking around in the pre-dawn darkness at the oily black heave of the water and the infrequent pinpricks of lantern light on the north bank, he half-expects to see the ferryman Charon poling his skiff out of the night to guide him down into Hades. I will have a fine welcome there, he thinks. He peers over the edge of the wherry and imagines the ghosts in the dark water beneath him. There’s little Ralph Cullen, whose murder started him on his fall when Eleanor, his first wife, died. Ned Monkton’s younger brother Isaac, whose eviscerated corpse helped him find Ralph’s killer. The crazed Swiss physician who planned to turn the world upside-down. And Mistress Warren, who thought she could use a perverted physic to bring back her dead lover… They are all there, staring up at the river’s surface with their dead eyes, watching him pass by. It is a relief, he thinks, to be summoned to a death on dry land.
But what manner of death? Robert Cecil surely hasn’t called him out in the small hours of the night because Edmund Spenser has died of natural causes.
They glide in silence to a halt alongside the Court water-stairs. A member of the Whitehall night-guard in breastplate and morion helmet escorts Nicholas through the warren of buildings and out into King’s Street, over the narrow Long Ditch bridge – their footsteps sounding unnaturally loud in the stillness – before delivering him, without having answered even one of Nicholas’s attempts at casual conversation, to a narrow timber-framed house set in a row of similar frontages close by the path to Canon Row. A brief parting of the clouds washes the street for a moment in grey, funereal moonlight. The street door is open. Head down – somehow secrecy seems expected of him – Nicholas enters. A narrow flight of steps awaits him. He climbs quickly. The boards creak loudly, making a mockery of his subterfuge.
Lantern-light flickers on the upper landing where Cecil is waiting for him, a little black raven in its night-roost.
‘The night-watch found him a little after the second hour,’ he says, showing Nicholas into the small sleeping chamber. ‘The street door was ajar. The watch has a dislike of unlocked doors around Whitehall at night. They’re worried someone might find a way through the yards or over the roofs and into the privy areas. A little difficult from the top of King’s Street, I’ll grant you, but better diligent than lax.’
Nicholas is standing in a low-ceilinged room dimly lit by the lantern carried by one of Cecil’s two attendants. Both, he notices, are armed with rapiers and wheel-lock pistols. They stand back a little from the bed on which Spenser lies, their faces slack with tiredness. Cecil, however, looks as though he’s just had a good breakfast after a night of uninterrupted sleep.
Spenser is lying on the coverlet, his legs straight, the top part of his body turned so that his sightless face is set towards the door. One arm is bent across his chest, as though he’s hugging himself in his sleep. He is wearing a plain linen night-shift, rucked up over his hairless legs.
‘Is this how they found him?’
‘Exactly as you see before you,’ Cecil says. ‘They went in with the intention of reminding him to be more cautious. They found him as you see him now.’
‘How did they know who it was?’
‘Not because the watch are aficionados of poetry, that’s for certain,’ Cecil answers with a cruel laugh. ‘The captain of the watch came to see Spenser when he moved in before Christmas. They like to know when a new face appears so close to court. Fortunately he’s one of my fellows.’