The Point of Death (Tom Musgrave Series Book 1)

by Peter Tonkin

  Tom caught the boy by the shoulder. 'Who?' he demanded. 'Where?'

  'Mistress Kinch the Searcher,' he answered breathlessly. 'She was called to St Margaret's to lay out a corpse but as she crossed into Old Jewry a man walking past her reached over and cut her throat. Cut her throat in broad daylight, just like that and vanished before any could call hue and cry. A man all in black, they told me, and I must find Master Curberry, the Captain of the Watch.'

  Chapter Eighteen - The Raid on Bridewell

  Tom and Robert Poley ran back at once, their eyes everywhere as they went, knowing that the Spaniard must be somewhere about. It had to be the Spaniard's handiwork- the swift execution had none of Baines's brutal stamp about it. If they saw him they would take him, hue and cry or no; whether the Watch were present or not. But there was no sign of him. Instead there was a bunch of onlookers crowded round the corner where the boy had said the murder had been done. With the necessary brusqueness of high office, Poley shoved the crowd around the body aside. Tom knelt by the Searcher as she lay, white as wax in the midst of a great puddle of blood. Typically, thinking to the end, her hands were clasped around her throat, trying to hold her blood in to the last. Her eyes stared fixedly into his as though trying to communicate some last, vital message. Some men believed, thought Tom, that the image of her murderer would be there, engraved upon the back of her eye, available to any who knew the correct necromantic spell. But he needed no magic to see who had done this. He eased the grasping fingers and laid bare the exact opposite to the last cut throat he had seen. The body under the rubbish pile outside Morton's lodgings had had his throat torn out as though by a wild dog- the work of a dull blade, of inferior quality, roughly wielded. Baines's work, thought Tom now, beginning to see clearly the differences between his opponents' handiwork. Here, however, lay a masterpiece of the assassin's art. Like Tom himself, like Will, like Morton, she would scarce have felt the blade slip in behind her Adam's Apple and slit through on its swift way out. The first she would have known about the serpent-swift bite of death was that first great spray of blood which soaked into the rags at her breast now, and the fact that when she tried to scream, nothing at all would come.

  Tom glanced up at Poley. 'There is nothing we can do here. Let us haste away now or we will waste the morning talking to the Watch.'

  Poley nodded and the pair of them shouldered their way back out of the crowds and turned south for the river at once. Poley was bound - more urgently now than ever - straight to Whitehall in the hope that Lord Hunsdon was still there. But that hope was increasingly faint- for Lord Hunsdon was also Lord Chamberlain, responsible for running the Queen's household - as Essex, Master of the Horse, was responsible for moving it. And if the Queen was growing restless at Nonesuch Palace, then her Chamberlain had best be close at hand. Tom was bound for Bridewell, armed with Poley's commission from My Lord in his purse. They separated at the Steelyard steps, Poley's wherryman unwilling to break a long westward run at Bridewell Stairs and Poley's urgency supporting him in this.

  They were to meet by noon, however, back here at the Steelyard, though Tom had no idea why. He knew that, whatever their business there, they would have to be quick. His first student of the day was due to be in Blackfriars at one - then his time was full once again until six tonight.

  The keeper of Bridewell's Black Book was so impressed with the commission that he did not even ask whether Tom was the Master Poley so trusted by the Lord Chamberlain and Her Majesty's Council. Together they looked through the admissions register, noting the names of the men and women brought here during the day, checking the times of their arrival and their destinations within the massive place. There had been no one called Shelton admitted at all. Caught between relief and concern, Tom was just turning away, when a thought struck him. 'May I see the book again?' he asked. And, while he checked through the names to see whether any bore the mark of Mistress Kate's peculiar brand of code, he fell into conversation with the man. 'I suppose you see most of the people you record here?'

  'Most, aye. They stand before me to tell me their names for the book and wait while I assign them to their quarters. It is a huge place, this, and we are not a huge company to run it. It was a palace you know, until poor King Edward gave it to the city. 'Tis a weighty responsibility, recording all the comings and goings.'

  'And you do it well. I shall mention it to the Council, rest assured. Do you call to mind a woman brought in earlier today? Brought by the Watch from St Martin's.'

  'One of Vicar Parris's trulls? He's always calling whore on some girl or another. Then, often as not he's here to see 'em whipped in. We do it on the bare back here, sir, all clothing pulled down. And no telling where the whip will wander.'

  'Aye, aye ...' Tom's mind was elsewhere as his eyes scanned the columns of names recorded in handwriting that only served to make the spelling more impossible to decipher. 'Did you see any such today? A tall, well-set woman with red hair and clear brown eyes. Modishly dressed.'

  'Oh, aye, I saw such a one and no mistake,' said the bookkeeper roundly. 'Gave me the benefit of her wisdom, too - though as nothing to what she was saying to the poor men from the Watch. Hair like a fox and the tongue of a shrew. Now what did she call herself ...'

  But Tom had found her. 'Mistress Catherine Poley. Bawd.'

  'You have it. Why, but that's ...'

  Tom had an instant to think. 'My wife,' he admitted, shamefacedly.

  'Well, you're not the first, Master Poley, and you won't be the last. 'Tis quite the fashion, I am told, for ladies of the better sort to go whoring around the town these days. But if you're here to buy her out, you must see the governor, or better still the treasurer-'

  'No, no.' Tom rose quickly. Mistress Kate had been here several hours - but she planned to try and make contact with a Spaniard in the Armada dungeons and that would likely take time. 'Let her stew for a little longer, eh?' he said to the bookkeeper, man-to-man. And was rewarded with a large wink in return.

  'They're all trulls at heart, Master Poley. You leave her with us and she'll learn to repent her ways. Come back at six this evening if you want to leave her that long, and see her whipped in with the others as I said. Fifteen lashes on their bare backs to welcome them. Then, if you'll take a homely man's advice, sir, you'll take the lady home and repeat the dose below the girdle that we have given her above. Then she'll mend her ways, doubt it not. "A woman, a cur and a walnut tree, the more you beat them, the better they be."'

  Tom left without further comment, mentally swearing by all he held dear that he would be back for Kate before six. With or without the real Master Poley.

  The Steelyard was a great maze of buildings on the riverside a couple of hundred yards upriver from the Bridge. Here the smaller boats and barges docked, having transferred part cargoes in the Pool below the Bridge or in Deptford where the big ships docked when they came in from Germany and the North. It was the headquarters in London of that great pan-Germanic political and trading empire called the Hanseatic League. Since the times of Harry the Great and his movement away from Rome and into the Protestant camp, the Steelyard had been the gateway to a wonderland of artistry and invention slowed only during the Catholic excesses of Bloody Mary and her husband Phillip, King of Spain, and, briefly, of England.

  Tom could have been meeting Poley at the Steelyard for any of a thousand reasons - but the true one was the last he would ever have guessed. As Tom explained what he had discovered at Bridewell, Poley led him purposefully through a maze of corridors. His hurrying footsteps faltered only once - when Tom told him Kate's current alias. 'God's my life, she goes too far. I will leave her to the post and the whip. On my life I will. Catherine Poley. What of my good name now?'

  'Your good name ...' said Tom, carefully ­ for no one is more careful of his reputation than one who has been to prison. Poley had first been there for using a Catholic priest in a plot to seduce Mistress Joan Yeomans. He had needed neither priest nor prison to repeat the offence on a regul
ar basis, by all accounts. 'Your good name will by no means be enhanced by having her stripped and whipped under the common eye. The Bookkeeper tells me that like as not the Reverend Parris will slip up there after evensong to see it done. Purely for spiritual reasons, I am sure.'

  'Well, we must go in after her. And here is the best place of all to begin to make our plans.'

  As he spoke, Poley pushed open a little door and swept Tom into a small shop. Behind a table stood a rotund man in a leather apron and thick spectacles. 'Guten tag,' he welcomed them courteously. 'And how may I serve you gentlemens?'

  'As you might expect,' said Poley, apparently to both of them, 'we are here in the

  Steelyard to buy a yard or two of steel.'

  'Ah,' said the German with solid satisfaction.

  'The best. The very best,' said Poley. 'For the Master of Defence, here.'

  'Please to stand up straight, Mein Herr.'

  Suddenly short of breath, like a boy at his first play, Tom stood.

  'You use the right hand, ja?'

  Tom nodded, and followed the German's instructions to the letter. He stretched out his arm and was measured from shoulder to fingertip, from armpit to wrist. He picked up and balanced a series of weights and hefted a series of rods while the German made careful notes. When it was all finished, the little man bustled off into a stockroom behind the shop. A moment later he returned with a length of steel. White as silver, it gleamed with wicked brilliance as it lay on the dark wood of the table. At one end there was a spike of steel stretching little more than a hand's breadth of slightly duller roughness down to the brightness beneath. Then it was a finger's width of icy silver reaching down along a yard to the finest of points. At the spike-end, where the blade was thickest, in black chasing there was marked the figure of a running wolf. Tom reached out, entranced.

  'Nein,' called the German. 'Mein Herr, please to wait.' He pulled on a leather gauntlet and reached back into a cupboard behind him, then he lifted the blade with the utmost care and slipped the spike end into a plain steel hilt. A moment more of fiddling, then he handed the sword to Tom, holding the blade in his gauntleted hand. 'Take care with the blade,' he warned as Tom took the thing. 'It is so sharp it will cut to the bone and you will never even feel it.'

  'I know,' said Tom. 'I've had one through my arm and scarce noticed it. And I know a man who was run clear through the breast with one but only felt it when it also pierced his hand ...'

  Tom made a series of passes, watching the lethal beauty of the thing, utterly entranced. But more than his eyes were ravished. Even with this common steel handle - hardly to be called a hilt - the balance of the thing was wondrous. It exuded almost God-like power. Or rather, a Satanic power, for it whispered to him as he held it; wielded it. Like Marlowe's Mephistophilis it said, seductively, 'Kill before you put me up. I will only sleep if I have drunk enough of blood.'

  'This is a wondrous, terrible thing,' he said. 'Even my Ferrara blade was nothing compared with this...'

  'It is a Solingen blade,' said Poley, redundantly, 'like my own. And it is what the Spaniard wields, as you have said, I think. This is to replace the blade snapped by Nick o' Darkmans and his men.'

  'A thousand thanks, Master Poley...'

  'It is not from me,' said Poley shortly. 'I could never afford the like of this. But Lord Hunsdon wants you properly armed for the tasks we ask you to undertake.'

  'You saw him today, then? I had thought Nonesuch Palace called most urgently.'

  'Not today, no,' said Poley thoughtlessly, then checked himself.

  'You have hilts for this blade?' the German interrupted, with a pointed glance at the workaday rapier Tom had borrowed from the school.

  'I have some hilts of Ferrara make,' answered Tom, distracted, entranced. The German nodded approvingly. 'And,' he continued, 'I have a Dutchman who will fit them for me.'

  The German smiled.'Sehr gut. But you will wish this to make the match, ja?' Where the blade had lain he placed a naked dagger - the very match of the rapier except that it came with a hilt. The blade alone was fifteen inches of razor sharpness almost impossibly slim and narrow. As Tom looked at it, he saw it in his imagination, sliding in through the Scavenger's throat and slitting its way almost painlessly out of the front. 'Aye,' he said breathlessly. 'I'll take that too, Mein Herr.'

  'But,' said Poley quietly, 'we are only half­way through our business. Put that blade down, Tom, and let the Steelmaster of Solingen here measure your left arm too.'

  By the best of good fortune, Tom's last pupil of the day - filling the full hour from five to six - was Will. As soon as he arrived, Tom explained what Poley and he proposed to do and the playwright was happy enough to join the enterprise. Raids on Bridewell were an occasionally popular sport with young gentlemen, for the keepers of the prison were notoriously reluctant to put up a fight, and the whores who were rescued were famously grateful. Then Tom and he spent a quarter hour exercising with extreme care so that Will could test his technique and Tom could try out the Solingen blades that Ugo had set in the finest Ferrara hilts. As he warned Will about the properties of the blades, Tom reminded him about the almost painless wound the Spaniard had given to his side, and repeated his worrying theory that Julius Morton had not felt the same blade - or its sinister companion - pass through his body; only his hand.

  Ugo came out of the workshop at last and Tom pulled up his blade. 'Time to go.'

  'You're not wearing them?' said Ugo as Tom completed his preparations.

  'I am.'

  'Both?' The Dutchman was frowning, worried.

  'Both,' said Tom decisively, 'and the dagger in the belt at my back.'

  As they shouldered their way along the foot of City Wall, Tom explained. 'Half of the Spaniard's power comes from his two blades. Poley and I have discussed the matter and I agree. We face up to the Spaniard, Baron Cotehel and whoever else works with them, and we make ourselves the stronger. And how better can we face up to the Spaniard than in this way? My swords are the equal of his. My cunning is the equal of his - better, forsooth - in my right arm and my left. Let the Spaniard and Master Baines and Master Outram be afraid therefore -Tom Musgrave will meet them beard to beard.'

  'Take double care, and more, even so,' said Will, quietly, as Ugo nodded agreement. 'The man who declares a war is often the first to die.'

  The City Wall led them directly to the Bridewell Bridge over the River Fleet. Then they were on familiar territory hurrying south along the stinking bank down to the Bridewell steps and the Bookkeeper's entrance. They arrived in the midst of a stirring bustle. Men of all sorts were pushing in through the gates. Tom paused, looking around, well aware that it must be near six already - though he had not heard it struck. There was no sign of Poley and the men he had promised to bring with him. Instead, there was the Reverend Word-of-the-Lord Parris, his face folded into a frown and his eyes focussed solely ahead. He pushed rudely past, safe from the danger of challenge at his rudeness behind the reverend sobriety of his clothing. He was far too distracted to notice Tom.

  Tom met the eyes of his two companions. 'In,' he said quietly. 'We'll mask our faces when we act but until then we are simply part of the audience.' As he spoke, the bells of all the local churches began to chime the hour.

  The great court of Bridewell was busy. Men strolled or sat in a rough circle around the raised stage on which there stood the whipping post. There was an air about the place which was, to Tom's mind, vicious and unhealthy. It was the atmosphere he had experienced on the rare visits he had made to Tyburn, but there was an undisguised lustful element added to it - and by no means a lust for blood.

  Tom's narrow eyes raked the faces of the men there, looking for Poley. He did not see him, nor anyone else he recognised. Except for Will and Ugo, every man there avoided his gaze, until he began to wonder whether he would need to mask after all, for it seemed that he was hardly here at all. The feeling of invisibility was suddenly compounded by the throwing open of a large double door
. Every eye in the place was suddenly fastened on the entrance of a column of girls and women led by the pompous Bookkeeper out into the yard. The women were of various ages and various aspects. They wore a range of clothing from the courtly to the ragged. They all wore chains. Cuffs closed around their wrists and were joined with fetters to each other - and to the ankle gyves they also had to wear. Tom used the collective sigh which whispered around the place to cover a swift check - still no sign of Poley. He narrowed his eyes, his mind racing. He would be prepared to act without the spymaster's help, but the risks were higher and the options for wider action limited. He moved sideways so that he could get a clearer view of the line of bawds. There were a dozen or so of them. Closer inspection showed them by and large to be a sorry lot, bedraggled and dirty, with a couple of cleaner, better­ dressed exceptions. They were all round­shouldered and downcast except the woman who led the sorry troupe - led in every way, as though she was their spirit, their pattern and their commander. The first of the line walked tall, with her red head set as high as the Queen's at a state occasion. There was no mistaking Mistress Kate Shelton. And no mistaking just how little time he had in which to free her if she was going to escape a whipping.

  Already one of the three guards accompanying the women was leading the first fair victim up on to the platform. The Bookkeeper and another two men stood waiting. The first of these was clearly the cell keeper, for he carried a chatelaine of keys and was reaching forward to unfasten the woman's wrist shackles as she mounted the stage, looking down her nose at him with undisguised disdain. The second man, having shaken out a whip of five lashes about a yard in length, accepted the woman had hooked her fetters up on to the top of the whipping post. Then, to another communal sigh from the increasingly excited crowd, he pulled open the back of Mistress Kate's dress, which she had wisely enough left unlaced. Beneath the finery of her bodice, she wore a shift of the snowiest white. The flesh of the bare back beneath it was exactly the same colour.