A Verse to Murder

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘Indeed! Well reasoned.’

  At this point Will came thundering up the stairs. ‘Am I late?’ he gasped.

  *

  ‘It was at Evensong yesterday that it really started,’ said Hugh. ‘There was the beginning of a stench at Matins and one or two flies, but by Vespers that is to say Evensong, both the stench and the infestation were more pronounced and at the Evening Service later still it was stronger. And when we opened the Abbey this morning…’

  Tom listened attentively as the four of them were rowed along the familiar stretch of the river between Blackfriars and West Minster. He couldn’t see any way out of this which wouldn’t enhance his reputation undeservedly because he knew very well what must be happening but at the same time the Good Lord was offering him a chance to tie up a loose end that had been worrying him ever since last Tuesday night. ‘And the stink is near the Choir, you say?’ he probed, exchanging a glance with a disapproving Ugo.

  ‘Yes, Master Musgrave. It is near the Choir and hard by Master Spenser’s new-made grave. There is a good deal of speculation that it might be Spenser’s spirit rendered restless by the manner of his death manifesting itself in the Abbey. Hence Dean Goodman’s thoughts of exorcism of course.’

  ‘The manner of his death?’ asked Ugo.

  ‘Why yes, sir. Had you not heard? It is an almost certain fact that he was murdered. Her Majesty’s court is all a-buzz with speculation, and as the Dean reports directly to the Queen herself, such speculation is carried down to us with great rapidity. It seems certain that poor Master Spenser was somehow poisoned! The Earl Marshal is fully engaged with the case by all accounts, and there is talk of bringing Sir William Danby the Queen’s Crowner out of retirement to assist him!’

  Tom glanced at his two companions once again and was pleased to see that they were giving nothing away. ‘A restless spirit, you say,’ he turned to the wide-eyed Hugh. ‘If he sends forth stenches and plagues of flies during the day, has anyone waited after midnight to see whether this spirit walks?’

  ‘No-one sir! Such things are said to harrow up the soul and freeze the blood of anyone that dares to look upon them!’

  ‘But perhaps,’ suggested Ugo, ‘you could try that, Master Musgrave, if you cannot plumb the depth of this mystery before sunset.’

  iii

  The silence of the Abbey immediately inside the North Doorway was indeed disturbed on an almost inaudible level by a droning, buzzing hum which became evident the moment the great portal shut out the workaday world outside. Once the ear picked it up, thought Tom, it seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. No wonder the Dean’s men reacted to it with superstitious awe. But that was as nothing compared with the shock of looking upward to discover that the shadows immediately above were alive. Swarms of flies in numbers Tom had never experienced whirled above, threatening at any moment to settle on his upturned face. It certainly explained why, apart from themselves and their guide, the Abbey seemed utterly empty - of men at least. ‘Jesu,’ he said quietly, ‘I have never seen flies of such size and in such numbers. Have you Will?’

  ‘Not above the greatest midden at midsummer,’ said the playwright. ‘Nor following the Fleet, be it never so full of dead dogs and putrefaction! Though now I call it to mind, the Marshalsea prison was almost as badly infested with the things.’

  ‘Ugo?’

  ‘I have heard that Venice on occasion and some lands in the far North near to Russia are plagued. As was Rome of course before the swamps were drained; and sometime along the borders of the Zuyderzee we have midges and mosquitoes. But never like this nor in winter.’

  ‘And there is the stench,’ added Hugh enthusiastically. ‘That emanates from Spenser’s grave for certain!’

  ‘Let us explore, then,’ said Tom and he strode along the transept with the others close behind him.

  ‘Should have brought a dog,’ said the ever-practical Ugo.

  ‘We’ll try and follow our own noses,’ called Tom, ‘and see where they lead.’

  ‘I’d start at Spenser’s grave,’ suggested Hugo. ‘Our noses won’t lead us far from there, I’ll be bound.’

  Indeed, the stench and the flies which seemed to be born from it grew almost intolerable as they passed the tombs of King Henry and Queen Katherine, heading towards those of Spenser and Chaucer. As they approached, however, Tom grew ever more certain where both the stench and the swarms were coming from but he was worried that too swift a revelation would make Hugh suspicious - for the lad was clearly no fool.

  Tom spent a good quarter of an hour examining Chaucer’s grave, then twenty minutes more looking at Spenser’s before he declared that his sensitive nose wanted to lead him elsewhere. Fifteen minutes later again the three of them arrived at Queen Katherine’s tomb. The first thing that Tom noticed was that the top did not quite fit properly. There was a gap less than a finger’s width at the very top. Had they left it open when they hid Hal’s body? he wondered. He had no idea. He thought he had overseen perfect placing but it had been dark and he could not quite remember where Kate was standing when they finally slid the tomb’s massive lid into position. But even had they been uncertain as to the source of the stench, there was no arguing with the way the flies were coming crawling through the tiny gap.

  Tom looked up at the others. He needed to say nothing. Will and Ugo joined him in swinging the tomb’s lid round so that it balanced across the tomb and revealed its contents.

  *

  The most terrible transformation had come over Hal’s corpse. Tom might have supposed, had he thought about it, that the body would have lain safely and relatively free of infestation in a cold marble tomb in a chilly Abbey in the midst of a freezing winter. But clearly something had happened to upset the normal processes in this case. Tom remembered the body he had raised from Spenser’s tomb being slack and flaccid - head rolling, brains just contained in the battered skull, everything below the chest sagging and pendulous, almost as though held together by his clothing. But he had supposed this to be nothing more than the natural outcome of time spent in the outside privy days after death.

  But now it was clear that something else must have been going on. Had Hal been a shoulder of mutton, Tom might almost have sworn he had been poached. Seethed. Boiled. A kind of revelation hit him. There was no doubt in his mind that Hal had been kept in Forman’s hip bath after he fell down the stairs. But what if the bath had been filled with scalding water which remained boiling-hot all the while the mess on the stairs and at the stair-foot was being cleaned? What if Hal’s body was in that state when he was put in the outside privy and left there for day after day, night after night? Steaming at first and offering welcome warmth to any of the creatures usually found in a privy. Warmth and, as Will had discovered at The Marshalsea, sustenance. The outcome, he supposed, might well be just like this. The corpse was falling to pieces. The rotten clothing might have held it together for a while but it had failed now. Just as his jerkin had burst, so had the belly beneath it, releasing more than just that dreadful stench. Hal’s intestines lay between his legs like offal in a butcher’s. Much of the skin and a good deal of the flesh on his upper body and face were gone. His eyeballs were as white as poached eggs. And, from top to toe he was crawling with fat white worms, which had clearly been feasting on him while the flies which had been born from that stunning, sickening stench, multiplied in enormous numbers and escaped out into the Abbey itself.

  ‘Not Spenser’s ghost after all,’ said Tom to Hugh, but the Dean’s young associate was nowhere nearby. He had staggered away, fighting to avoid the ultimate sacrilege of vomiting in Westminster Abbey.

  The three friends looked at each-other. ‘Well,’ said Tom, ‘at least this means we don’t have to move him ourselves.’

  ‘That’s good in some ways but less good in others,’ warned Ugo. ‘We’ll have to stay well clear of any speculation as to how he arrived here - and in this condition. And, frankly, Tom, it opens another question that we cannot avoid by pre
tending ignorance.’

  ‘Which is?’ asked Tom, though he knew the answer well enough.

  ‘Who moved the lid after we sealed it - and why.’

  ‘That’s strange,’ said Will who had not really been listening, consumed by the grotesque sight of a man being consumed by worms, ‘look at his left arm. Could he have been reaching up? Trying to push the lid aside? Fearful that he had been buried alive?’

  ‘No,’ answered Tom shortly. ‘He was long past being alive when we entombed him.’ But then he saw what Will was talking about. Hal’s right arm was raised, the white, near-shapeless excrescence of his hand - looking more like one of John Gerard’s fungi than anything of flesh and blood - rested against the side of the tomb, high above the rest of the body. Without a second thought, Tom reached down and pulled the fist higher still. With a brutality arising from disgust, he closed his fingers round the cheese-like coldness of the thing and pulled the fingers open with surprising ease. To reveal nothing. The digits were like white sausages he had once consumed in Germany. The creases at their joints were correspondingly deep. Their roots vanished into the plump waxiness of the palm. ‘Someone’s been here before you,’ said Ugo. ‘Searching for whatever he held in that fist.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Tom agreed, bending the fingers back and spreading them as wide as he could. Still nothing…

  And yet…

  Tom leaned forward, eyes wide, seeking the minutest detail. And there, almost lost within the deep dark creases of that swollen hand there was something: hair. There was a curl of dark hair which might be of any colour from chestnut brown to foxy red.

  iv

  ‘Why, you’re blushing!’ Simon Foreman paused on the threshold of his library, bottle in hand, looking at Rosalind’s bright red cheeks. ‘What thoughts have brought such colour?’

  ‘None that are improper, sir, I assure you,’ whispered Rosalind not very convincingly. The slaps had cleared her mind and she watched her would-be seducer as he preened under the weight of her flattery. ‘I merely thought what would my poor parents say, God rest them, if they knew I was living with a famous play writer and visiting such important men as yourself. There is no-one such as yourself in Saffron Walden, sir, that’s certain!’

  ‘Well, well,’ he said coming fully into the room. ‘I’m certain-sure your poor parents - whose sad end is clearly demonstrated in your chart just before it becomes so hazy - would approve of your visit here, whatever they might think of your association with a mere actor!’

  He topped up both the glasses and reached for his own at once.

  ‘Can you show me more of what this wonderful chart reveals?’ she asked, taking a judicious sip of her own wine - relieved to feel no ill-effects this time.

  ‘Well,’ he said expansively, leaning forward to gesture at his calculations with the base of the glass in his left hand while his right hand returned to her hip and then slid down, ‘here you are, born where and when you told me. These charts tell us that the Sun is in Scorpio with Leo ascendant. Giving you the determined character we have discussed. All is as it should be until here, the square between the Sun and Lilith. This may warn that your self-reliance and determination can spill over into the taking of dangerous risks and, perhaps even self-destructive ones. Further on we see that your moon is in Libra - meaning that you are always looking for steady and reliable relationships - so, perhaps, your current liaison with a simple actor lies at the root of the vagueness I see in the chart over-all.’

  ‘But what can you see of my life, sir? Before it becomes misty as you say?’

  ‘Of your past, I can see a happy childhood without brother or sister to distract your parents from you. Yet you were not indulged. Your father and mother ran an establishment - an inn perhaps - and you grew up helping them. Then it seems that a dark figure enters your life - all of your lives in fact. He brings good things and bad things. You learn much from him, so much that you can continue educating yourself, perhaps; but the price he exacts from both yourself and your parents is high; ultimately the highest price of all. See here where it shows death and destruction all around.’ He took a sizeable sip from his wine and then another.

  Rosalind sipped hers before she asked, intrigued in spite of herself and wondering how much of this was truly revealed by the chart and how much came from gossip and research, ‘And did this dark figure cause all this destruction?’

  ‘Not directly,’ answered Forman. ‘The chart shows the dark figure in conflict with others far above your reach. It is these others who bring destruction. I see your escape, here,’ he gestured at a section of the chart which meant no more to her than if it had been written in Greek and was lucky not to slop wine over it. ‘And your flight to London. Where the dark figures all seem to be congregated, the one who influenced you so deeply in Saffron Walden most powerful of all - with regard to your chart that is though I cannot speak for his true power in the world.’

  You don’t need to, thought Rosalind. I know all about his power in the world.

  *

  Forman swung round to look more closely at Rosalind, making her jump out of the reflective moment that had claimed her while she thought about Poley. The sorcerer’s pupils were beginning to widen as the fly agaric took its effect on top, she supposed, of a good dose of saffron to sharpen his own lust in anticipation of meeting hers. Certainly, they were both drinking from the same - drugged - bottle now. ‘This is not the chart of some helpless country girl,’ he said suspiciously as if he was only seeing it for the first time. As perhaps he was, reasoned Rosalind. In all probability he had just drawn the chart paying little attention to it other than as a way to get a gullible country girl into his bed; but that surely meant he had not researched her background. Though, to be fair, he worked for the most powerful of the ‘dark forces’ affecting her - Gelly Meyrick, Francis Bacon or Essex himself could have let slip any number of facts about her.

  ‘In fact I have drawn only a very few charts like this.’ He continued as he put down his glass with a decided click, released her waist and swung away, reaching up to the shelf above their heads. He pulled down another chart and spread it in front of her, careful to conceal whose chart it was. ‘You see?’ he said, slurring the ‘s’ very slightly. He picked up the glass again, took a draught and continued to use its base as a pointer. ‘Sun in Pisces, gives her a mutable character, able to change almost as effectively as your actor friend Shagsberd. In spite of appearing open and friendly, she also has a secretive side to her nature. As you would expect from a water sign, she has an affinity with the colour green.’ He took another swig. ‘But I digress. The chart shows us a woman, the younger of two sisters, born to loving parents. In this case they saw to her education, but dark and powerful figures cluster round her from infancy; really powerful ones; royalty or near-royalty. She is one of two sisters admittedly, but see how the elder one also falls under the influence of dark forces, dark individuals, who add to both girls’ knowledge and understanding but only at a price. You see how, especially in later, more recent, sections you and the woman belonging to this chart have much in common. And indeed, your futures in both cases are difficult to descry with any clarity or precision even though they seem, for the moment at least, to run in parallel.’ He paused, then folded the chart and returned it to the shelf. ‘This woman also has found it hard to see clearly her heart’s desire despite her fullest efforts to do so,’ he concluded, emptying his glass with a single gulp.

  Rosalind nodded, wide-eyed, her mind racing: Forman had hidden the name of the other woman, but not her date or place of birth: Wednesday February 29th 1576; Shelton Hall, Norfolk.

  v

  So it seemed that, in spite of her affair with Tom, Kate Shelton had not yet found her heart’s desire and was still actively searching for it. Unless, like Rosalind herself, Kate was on a mission to find out the truth of Forman’s involvement in Spenser’s murder and the circumstances surrounding it. For Sir Thomas Walsingham, her brother-in law and spymaster, no doubt;
which, if so, reflected interestingly on Sir Thomas’ position. Now there was a fascinating possibility, mused Rosalind momentarily distracted once again. Perhaps after all the lingering effects of the saffron were undermining her powers of concentration. ‘But how do I discover the truth of my heart’s desire?’ she asked after a moment, frowning as though she had difficulty understanding the concept.

  ‘I can help you discover it,’ Forman promised airily. His pupils looked like black moons. Like Lilith, perhaps, thought Rosalind coming back into the present and remembering his explanation of her chart from yesterday and the place of the mysterious dark moon within it. ‘I can do this through the use of magic.’

  ‘Magic, sir? Not witchcraft surely…’ She gave a convincing shudder - then realised she hardly need to have bothered. Forman was away with the fairies already, as the good folk of Saffron Walden said. His eyes, his speech, his gestures - and most of all his airy overconfidence and willingness to discuss matters he would presumably have kept secret - all demonstrated this.

  ‘No, no my dear,’ he explained, his face settling into a look of theatrical cunning, She was reminded of Mercutio on Will’s play of Romeo, wildly - almost madly - planning to break into the Capulets’ party as he babbled about Queen Mab the fairy. ‘I speak of natural magic, of good spirits who can be contacted and put to work through certain simple rituals.’

  ‘What spirits, sir?’

  ‘Have you not seen your lover’s play of the Midsummer Dream?’ he asked. ‘As I believe Puck, servant to Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies says: “If we spirits have offended…” Those are the kinds of spirits I speak of.’

  Rosalind had never seen the play but she had seen the players’ copy and was fairly certain that Puck spoke of shadows rather than spirits, but that was not the sort of distinction a simple country girl would make, even one surrounded by dark and powerful forces and going to live with the playwright.