A Verse to Murder

by Peter Tonkin

  iii

  There was a deep-water channel reaching up into the north bank of the Thames at Billingsgate, the first downriver of the Bridge and therefore the first available to tall ships too impatient to wait for the draw-bridge to be raised. It was broad enough to allow ocean-going vessels to tie up and unload their cargoes which usually consisted of fish. On the downriver side of this the Billingsgate pier stretched out into the River with the steps on the far edge of it where the wherries nestled. Boats and the occasional ship lay round its farthest reaches but the afternoon was wearing on so the fish-market was all but done for the day. Beyond the pier-end away to Tom’s right London Bridge stepped massively over the Thames with the steeple of St Mary Overie standing on the South Bank beyond it. The wind backed, bringing the roar of the water-wheel and the rush of the falling tide between the starlings to mingle with the clangour of the bells - and an eye-watering stench of fish.

  Tom turned his back on the scene as well as the stink and looked up the hill. The houses here were tightly packed but he knew the one he was looking for. Cheek by jowl with its neighbors, nevertheless it contrived to stand alone. Something emphasized by the fact that the buildings to the south of it were little more than hovels hardly one full storey tall. Narrow alleys ran up either side of it leading, Tom knew, to Forman’s smaller version of John’s herb garden. Like John’s, the rooms nearest the street were a shop front with - no doubt - the kitchen and the laboritorium or preparation area behind. But what lay above? John’s house on Holborn was two storeys high but reached further back, allowing room for the Gerard family. Forman’s was maybe three rooms deep but had tell-tale garret windows in the roof suggesting some kind of accommodation on the third storey as well. Hardly enough for the man, his wife and family though. Not, as far as Tom knew, that Foreman had either. Moreover, it all looked closed and shuttered. Dark, even on a bright winter’s afternoon, and the place seemed to give off a chill that rivaled the coldest night of the season so far.

  ‘Should we try the shop door?’ wondered John, looking towards the front of the house hard up against Billingsgate Street with broad windows beside the solid-looking front door and even broader ones on the floor above.

  ‘I think so - just to discover whether the shop is open and the house full of customers and servants,’ answered Tom, ‘or whether Forman has yet returned from Essex House. Then we will move into the side alley and proceed with caution. We want this visit to go unremarked as far as possible. Does Forman have any apprentices?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ John shook his head. ‘He likes to pursue his studies and so-forth in private.’

  ‘So forth meaning potions, spells, predictions and seductions…’ growled Ugo.

  ‘If reputation speaks true,’ nodded Tom.

  ‘Best go in by the rear then,’ said John.

  ‘Something else he likes to do by all accounts,’ added Ugo.

  The shop was closed, the front door locked and a moment or two of hammering on it proved that the whole establishment was almost certainly deserted. The three of them vanished into the alley on the southern side of the house, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible. Tom led them forward through the unexpectedly dark shadows, his eyes everywhere, his breath clouding on the air.

  *

  The wall of Forman’s house was sheer above their left shoulders with windows marking the ground floor and the upper floor before the overhang of the roof with its garrets. The ground floor windows were high in the wall and tiny - for all that they faced southward, seeking to gather whatever light was coming across the reach of the River. Those on the upper floor were wider, probably affording a view of the river-docks as well as letting in a good deal of brightness. The front of the place showed its broad, mullioned facade to the west across Billingsgate Street seeking the sun in the afternoon and evening.

  Immediately beyond the side wall of the house, ancient brickwork continued, defining the edge of a long garden. The garden wall was twelve feet high, perhaps more - there was no way over it without a ladder, decided Tom regretfully dismissing the idea that he could stand on Ugo’s shoulders and reach up. The top of the brickwork, outlined against the pale sky was a mantrap of broken glass and sharp-edged rusty metal.

  The back gate was almost as formidable as the walls, which was logical, thought Tom, and it boasted an ancient but effective lock. But he had foreseen this eventuality. While Ugo was collecting his pistols, Tom had been slipping another highly specialized set of instruments into his pouch. He had heard quite a lot about Forman’s fascination with the Black Arts, he mused with wry amusement. Now it was time to practice some of his own. He had learned the black art of picking locks under the tutelage of a master, Nic o’Darkmans, one of the foremost charms in Romeville as the thieves’ fraternity called London, charm being the thieves’ cant term for a lock-picker and black art what they called his particular skill. The gate yielded as easily as a Southwark virgin and creaked open to reveal a regimented herb garden as carefully laid out and labeled as John’s own. Tom led the little troupe along the central path, pausing only to ensure Ugo had closed the gate behind them.

  iii

  As with the path in John’s garden, Forman’s led directly to his back door past a solid, brick-walled privy - the nightsoil it contained far too useful a fertilizer simply to be dumped into the street from a chamberpot. Tom would have pushed on with their mission rapidly, but John was too easily distracted by what he saw around him.

  ‘Look!’ said the apothecary, his voice urgent enough to stop Tom and make him turn. ‘Look at this hemlock!’ Tom did as the herbalist suggested. The plant was about a foot tall, the first of a line of identical herbs, all ringed with straw against the winter chill, most looking bedraggled, near frozen but still alive. The nearest seemed the strongest - what was left of it. Tall stems of vivid green spotted with purple marks that reminded Tom unsettlingly of the rash which accompanied the plague. Its flowers and leaves were all gone.

  ‘It has been stripped to the branch,’ continued John. ‘And see, the state of the plant makes it plain that this was done some time ago! I had been wondering...’

  ‘Wondering how it is that the hemlock in your garden, apparently culled last night for the stranger Hal says called himself Will Shakespeare, could have been used in Spencer’s murder. Because the concoction poured into his ear, whether or not mixed with belladonna, must have taken the better part of a week to extract, distil and concentrate. Yes, I have been wondering that too and was hoping to discuss it when we examined the oil from Spenser’s ear more closely. But I doubt that the Knight Marshal will worry too much about such subtleties before he hands Will over to Torturer Topcliffe in the Tower.’

  This was as far as the conversation got, because as Tom turned back, Ugo stepped past him and tip-toed on down the path past a new brick privy to the back door. ‘Tom,’ called the usually placid Dutchman. There was a strange note in his voice Tom could not remember having heard before. It was sufficiently unusual to make him turn away from the privy and hurry to his friend’s side.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Here.’ Ugo pointed with the long barrel of his right-hand pistol.

  The door had been secured by another lock - not a particularly reliable one by the look of things; certainly not in Tom’s experience, nor in Forman’s, apparently, especially as the upper section of the door had several panes of glass in it. Moreover, Tom’s first touch revealed that it had been broken - just as that first touch on Spenser’s shoulder had confirmed that he was dead. But the magician had overcome the weakness of the lock and the fragility of the door. He had done this by clearly understanding how superstitious the London brotherhood of thieves and felons actually was.

  *

  Nailed on the inside so that its long-dead, mummified face screamed out at anyone trying to enter, hung the corpse of a cat crucified against the wooden frame. Its hollow eye-sockets seemed to stare at each man individually, the ears above them disturbingly like demoni
c horns. The black lips shriveled back from white, needle-sharp teeth. An equally black tongue stood a little higher than the gape of the lower jaw. Above it, a piece of parchment had been pinned in place for all to see - and for those who could read to read:

  ‘Best leave this place inviolate

  Or the beast that watches here

  Will hunt thee straight.’

  The three would-be burglars exchanged a lingering look, each one seeking to discern whether his companions were convinced or moved by the supernatural threat. ‘The beast that watches,’ said Tom after a moment. ‘That’s a good one. You think George Chapman penned it? Forman is no poet as far as I know.’

  And he pushed the door inwards, doing a little more damage to the broken lock.

  The unsettling curse and the crucified cat were only the start of things. The door swung inwards at his first push. As it did so, its hinges gave the scream the mummified cat was no longer capable of giving. Ugo had cocked his pistols and John pulled his sword half out of its scabbard before they were fully in the kitchen and even Tom felt his hair stir at the ghastly sound. But they swung the door closed behind them and crept on. The room was warm - a low fire smoldered in a wide grate, heating an oven beside it.

  Forman was apparently not a tidy worker but he had a lively enough sense of self-preservation to keep his foodstuffs and his poisons well separated. Even so, there were herbs of all sorts everywhere, hanging drying from the ceiling or piled on work surfaces waiting to be bound in bundles and suspended. ‘It’s a wonder the place isn’t alive with rats,’ whispered Ugo, gesturing at a pile of succulent flowers.

  ‘It is,’ said John grimly. ‘Well, perhaps not alive…’ he used the blade of his short sword to move the stems aside. There were several dead rats and mice lying beneath them. He prodded one with the point of his blade. It was as stiff as Spenser had been.

  ‘Do you think,’ mused Tom, ‘that the cat on the door died because it ate a rat that had just consumed one of Forman’s potions?’

  ‘Who knows?’ shrugged Ugo. ‘It could have been alive when it was nailed there for all we know.’

  ‘No,’ whispered John. ‘Surely it would have made too much noise as it died…’

  ‘Unlikely,’ said Tom. ‘The thing has been long dead, mayhap centuries dead. I saw such things in Italy. Wonders discovered in Egypt, preserved in tombs of sand and gigantic tombs called pyramides.’ As he spoke, Tom swung open the inner door and unleashed a series of screams and howls that would have drowned any sounds the dying cat could have made.

  iv

  They all froze. Then, as the shrieks died back and nothing further happened, Tom stepped through into the hallway still echoing with the demonic noises, breathing through his mouth as he gasped with shock. A moment later he stepped back into the kitchen. ‘It’s alright,’ he said. ‘There are some birds in a cage here. Giving notice of our invasion like the sacred geese warning the ancient Romans about the Gauls secretly invading their city.’

  ‘Oh very literary!’ snarled Ugo. ‘And is there a record of how many Romans died of fright at the noise?’

  ‘Or Gauls come to that!’ added John.

  ‘Well,’ said Tom, ‘at least we can be fairly certain there’s no-one in the house or they would have reacted to such a commotion!’

  ‘Unless they’re setting traps or ambuscades,’ countered John nervously. ‘But if Hal was here, surely he would have heard such an uproar as well and be seeking whoever caused it - or calling out at least…’

  ‘Always supposing,’ said Tom grimly, ‘that he is any condition to call out or come seeking in the first place.’

  The screaming birds settled, croaking and muttering as the intruders whispered together immediately below their cage. When silence returned, Tom pushed forward once more as his breathing settled and his heart rate fell back towards its normal steady pulse. He reckoned that the crucified cat was only the first ambush. The birds as much another trap as very efficient watch-keepers, for they were likely to frighten anyone entering uninvited as well as warning the household. And a frightened man is much less likely to act calmly, quickly and sensibly in a crisis or a confrontation.

  But he feared as much for his immortal soul as for his mortal body. The mummified creature and the curse clearly relied for their effect on superstition and magic. Yet the strange birds flapping and screaming in their cage suggested a breadth of approaches to the house’s security; but not necessarily a wide one. The demonic birds were of a breed he had never seen before. They looked like black falcons but their brutally clawed red feet and markings at the base of their hooked bills were completely new to him. He would not be surprised to find that they were not native to England or even Europe - perhaps not to the mortal world. He half expected to discover some sort of satanic leopard or demonic hell-hound companion to them shut in one of the rooms waiting silently to attack body and soul.

  As Tom entertained these misgivings, he crept forward along a short dark corridor. On his right, a flight of stairs mounted to the next storey. On his left the first of two doors was closed but, as he discovered, not locked. He opened it carefully, allowing a slit of no more than an inch, still half convinced some monstrous demonic creature might be waiting in there. But no. A narrow window high in the south-facing wall illuminated what was clearly a laboratorium as the Latin had it - the word laboratory only just beginning to come into English. He pushed the door wider, revealing benches on three sides of the room laden with vessels of all sorts - glass beakers, conical flasks, boiling flasks, retorts for distillation, wax candles for heating and boiling rather than illuminating, clay crucibles for collecting and containing, marble mortars and pestles for grinding; metallic equipment that at first looked like bullet moulds which he soon realized was for making pills. The stink of the place was even worse than that of Billingsgate wharf.

  *

  Above the benches stood more racks of glass vessels full of multicoloured liquids, all labeled. John, his sword sheathed once more, pushed past him and walked into the room as though entranced already. This was clearly the first time he had been in Forman’s laboratory, and it looked to be at least the equal of his own. But there was one major difference. His wide eyes soaked up the rows of bottles with their labels. He turned towards Tom and Ugo at his shoulder. ‘There are no medicines that I can see, only potions and poisons,’ he said, his voice awed. He gestured at a retort half full of golden liquid, bubbling gently. ‘Apart from this one where I judge, he’s trying to distil gold out of urine, it’s all potions and poisons.’

  ‘Love and death,’ growled Ugo. ‘That’s where the money is. And gold boiled out of piss of course.’

  ‘There is some logic in that,’ allowed John. ‘Man is at the pinnacle of animal creation after all just as gold is at the pinnacle of mineral creation. The possibility that it could be gold that colours urine, therefore, has been an area of alchemical speculation for centuries…’

  There was a door in the wall which led straight on through from this room to the shop, though that could also be accessed by the door from the passage beyond the foot of the stairs. The door between these two rooms, Tom noted, could be securely locked, though it stood open now. According to John after a swift examination, the more public emporium was stocked with less potent and lethal versions of what was stored in the laboratory. And no retorts half full of super-concentrated urine. The main door to the shop opened into this room, with windows on one side and a more social area on the other. This area was near a fireplace where yet another low-banked fire gave off welcome warmth. Forman clearly made good use of the Romeland coal market at the upper end of Billingsgate. The fireplace was surrounded by chairs and stools with a table where customers could wait to be served while the shop was open and where Forman and any guests could take their ease when it was closed. That, thought Tom, explained the lock on the inside of the door connecting the two rooms: Forman did not want nosey guests or casual shoppers coming through into the laboratory where he k
ept his more lethal and experimental wares unless they were invited.

  The shop front, looking directly out into Billingsgate, was also bolted from the inside with bolts so strong that there was no need for extra curses to be added. The front door was locked but not bolted. Forman clearly had no worries about people breaking in that way thought Tom, for the whole of bustling Billingsgate would be watching them. Once John declared himself satisfied with the relative inoffensiveness of what was displayed in Forman’s shop, he led them back out into the corridor and began to mount the stairs.

  v

  The disturbing atmosphere of the house seemed to gather around them as they climbed higher. Ugo had already primed and cocked his pistols. Now John pulled out his sword once more, the hiss as the weapon came out of its sheath and the bell-like ringing of the steel blade suddenly emphasizing the fact that Spencer’s death knells had stopped. Silence gripped the place and the men within it like dark shadows. Abruptly Tom could hear his heartbeat hammering in his ears once more and it took all his self-control not to slide his rapier out of its sheath like John’s short sword.

  ‘I’m growing bored with this tip-toeing around,’ said John suddenly and before Tom or Ugo could stop him, he bellowed at the top of his voice, ‘HAL!’

  And very faintly, someone called, ‘Help me…’

  The three of them froze in place. The cry was not repeated. ‘Did that sound like Hal?’ asked Tom.

  ‘No. To be honest it sounded more like a woman,’ answered John. ‘It seemed to come from upstairs…’

  ‘But it may even have come from outside in the street,’ added Ugo.

  ‘I can’t be sure…’ John concluded.

  ‘It has all the marks of another trap,’ warned Tom. ‘When we proceed we must do so with absolute caution. If there is someone there it is unlikely that waiting an extra few moments while we ensure we are safe ourselves will make much difference to them. But if it is some kind of trap, then the only thing likely to protect us is caution.’ The others nodded and gripped their weapons more tightly. Still disdaining even to touch his rapier’s hilt, Tom led them onwards and upwards. Once they had all stepped off the top stair, Tom nodded at John and the apothecary called again, ‘Hal! Are you here?’