A Verse to Murder

by Peter Tonkin

  Tom, who was pulling on his fencing gloves, caught Ugo’s eye and motioned for him to leave before slipping his own hand into the Ferrara silver basket around the hilt of his own rapier, reaching past the heavy pommel that helped to balance the long steel blade, curling a finger round the spur of metal that felt almost like a trigger, and sliding the German-made Solingen steel blade free. Capo Ferro said that the sword should be the same length as its owner’s arm, and so this one was - made especially for him. Frowning with deepening concern, he went through his own stretching routine; he knew the late Bonetti only slightly but he could not believe the Italian sword-master would have allowed lessons with naked blades.

  No matter how Tom considered meeting Raleigh’s request, he could see nothing but ill coming from it. But refusing the demands of a new student - especially one such as the man preparing to face him now - would damage, perhaps destroy, his business. Just as, he thought, falling foul of the Queen’s favour - as he had done to great cost in the past - could destroy Sir Walter himself. He looked up, caught a glance at his reflection in the long mirror and swiftly schooled his face into a more amenable expression.

  So at last he turned to face Raleigh, who had already assumed the terza guard, hilt level with the top of his thigh, pommel in front of his hip, blade pointing upward and inward. Those steady brown eyes met Tom’s bright blue ones, neither man able to read the other’s intentions as yet. Tom took up the same guard, keeping back in the mesura largo wide measure from which the blades could be engaged with a thrust, but the opponents could only strike each-other with a lunge, moving forward one step or skipping forward two.

  Feet planted firmly - to begin with at least - the two men thrust and parried increasingly swiftly. Once again Tom was impressed with Raleigh’s technique. He used the debole or more flexible part of the blade behind the point for his attacks and the stronger forte nearest the handle to turn aside Tom’s attacks in riposte. Both men, it seemed, were fortunate in the strength of their wrists the clarity of their vision and the speed of their reactions. The phrases d’ armes became swifter and the rests between them shorter. The guards from which the attacks were launched varied from middling terza to high prima and low quarta, from open to closed. At last Raleigh stepped back. Tom straightened and courteously stepped back in precise measure to his opponent’s movements.

  ‘This will get us nowhere,’ said Raleigh. ‘We need to come to narrow measure, or at least put aside mere thrusting to liberate the lunge. Come to close quarters as we sailors say. That will test our mettle will it not?’

  ‘And quite possibly show us the colour of our blood.’

  ‘I’ve seen enough of my own blood in the past,’ said Raleigh. ‘And a great deal more of other men’s.’

  ‘I’ve seen enough of mine as well,’ nodded Tom, ‘but not as much of other men’s as you, Sir Walter.’

  ‘You are young,’ said Raleigh after a moment’s pause as the ghost of the slaughter at Smerwick lay between them. ‘You’ll see more as you grow older. If you do grow older, of course.’

  *

  Tom returned to the wide measure, assumed Capo Ferro’s preferred terza guard and waited, every fibre of his being focused on Raleigh. Raleigh also assumed the terza guard but only for a heartbeat. No sooner had he settled than he leaped forward, his right foot reaching out while his left foot and left hand balanced the lunge that sped the point of his rapier straight for Tom’s right eye.

  Tom collected the debole on his blade’s forte and turned it aside but the point sped so close to his right ear that he heard it hiss through the air. Raleigh disengaged and stepped back - but only half as far as he had stepped forward in his lunge. They were close together now, in the measure Capo Ferro called strettisima where either man could wound or kill the other with a thrust without resorting to the lunge. This close, thrusts were not only deadly but also dazzlingly swift once more. Raleigh and Tom were of similar size and reach. Their blades also similar in length and temper - Solingen steel against the finest Toledo metal. The first part of the bout had proved that they were equal in speed and technique - save that, as Tom already knew, Raleigh favoured the school of Agrippa, who was particularly popular with the older generation; or those not seduced by George Silver’s fanatical patriotism and rabid defence of English weapons and techniques even though they were little changed from the battlefield at Bosworth.

  The only real difference was that Raleigh seemed to be trying to kill Tom while Tom was working hard to extend the bout for as long as he could in the hope that the older man would tire. As Raleigh had already calculated, Tom was in no position to do his new pupil any serious damage. No damage at all, in fact, whereas Raleigh could do what he liked to Tom and walk away unquestioned.

  Even though Raleigh was of the Agrippa school, he was impetuous and impatient; he soon resorted to an attaccare di spada, pushing the forte of his blade against Tom’s with all his might in the hope of shoving it out of line and out of the way. This was unexpected, for it was a technique Agrippa disapproved of. No doubt therefore Bonetti had warned against it as well. But given the closeness of their bodies and the speed of the bout, it was a logical move to use, especially if Raleigh was at last beginning to tire. Even so, it nearly took Tom by surprise.

  Tom answered with a cederi, apparently yielding to the pressure, but then voiding, or stepping out of line as he had with the first attack. Raleigh was surprised in turn and stepped forward, his own sword out of line now. Tom thrust almost automatically, his blade a streak of steely lightning. Which would have laid Raleigh’s face open along the left cheekbone had he not turned it aside at the last moment. Then he stepped back, resumed a high prima guard and waited.

  ‘You see?’ said Raleigh softly, his voice steady, his breathing easy. ‘I have you over a barrel as we sailors say. You cannot afford to hurt someone as powerful as me while I can crush you as I would crush a worm in ship’s pork. If I die, the Queen will demand full justice. If you die no-one will notice.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Tom.

  ‘I thought you were the Master of Logic. I’m sure you can work it out!’

  Raleigh attacked again as he said the last sentence, this time sotto mano, an underhand thrust rising dangerously under Tom’s blade towards his chest. It was delivered dalla spalla from the shoulder with enormous speed and force. Tom saw it coming, however, and moved an inch or so to the side, allowing the blade to graze his ribs while he answered with an imbroccata downward thrust that would have opened the great blood vessels near the groin, high on the inside of the Raleigh’s thigh. It would have, had Tom not allowed the point to waver.

  Raleigh gave a shout of laughter. He disengaged. Stepped back. Stepped back again, all arrogant overconfidence, then, with amazing speed, from a position that seemed closest to the quarta low fourth guard he hopped and stepped lithely forward into the passata sotto, lowest of the lunges, his point aimed unwaveringly at Tom’s groin in a dangerously accomplished reflection of the sword master’s last attack.

  Tom twisted out of the way so the point of Raleigh’s sword just missed the outside of his thigh as the blade hissed across his stout galligaskins. But he had dismissed all thoughts of the blade the moment he understood the nature of Raleigh’s counter-attack - one that his own high guard made more tempting, particularly as he had just demonstrated how to do it. Now he twisted back again. Raleigh, fully extended, had his chest on his right thigh, his thigh low to the floor with his leading foot surprisingly close to Tom’s. The point of his beard, therefore, was level with Tom’s hip; his head less than an arm’s length distant, and caught in that position until Raleigh, dangerously overextended, found a way to recover.

  Which Tom was not about to allow him to do; instead, he brought the pommel of his sword down onto the back of Raleigh’s red-haired skull with all the force at his command and the weight of the vertical rapier above it. Then he stepped back and allowed Queen Elizabeth’s Captain of the Guard to collapse onto the floor, completely unco
nscious.

  Chapter 16: The Angry Ape

  i

  Lord Robert Cecil, Secretary to the Council, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, MP for Hertfordshire and the Queen’s most trusted advisor, drew himself up and squared his shoulders. He was seated in a high chair so the movement was more effective than it might otherwise have been. Certainly it reduced the effect of his hunched back and disguised the fact that his legs, which were invisible beneath the table, didn’t quite reach the floor. For a moment it seemed that his twisted, stunted frame was equal to that of the figure seated opposite him, as though an ape was managing to mirror a man.

  Lord Robert’s face was folded into a thunderous frown, his slightly protuberant, fiercely intelligent eyes seemed to glint with anger and the bejewelled fingers on the table-top folded into surprisingly large fists. ‘So, that’s what I’m to tell Her Majesty is it?’ he snarled. ‘That her favorite poet might have been murdered by her favorite playwright using poison apparently purchased from my own personal horticulturalist - as witnessed by an apprentice who has just turned up as though by magic dead and rotting in the tomb of Henry Vth’s wife Queen Katherine in Westminster Abbey!’

  The man opposite, the intelligencer Robert Poley, nodded. His mouth opened and closed but no words came out.

  ‘It’s a tale worthy of Mother Hubberd herself,’ continued Lord Robert angrily. ‘But I fear the Queen will not be amused by it - any more than I am!’

  ‘Shakespeare seemed to be a likely culprit at first,’ said Robert Poley uneasily, ‘though the accusation was little more than rumour in the absence of the witness Hal’.

  Poley had in fact been uneasy ever since Cecil had told him to sit down - something unique in his experience and somehow, therefore, threatening. A threat compounded by the fact that the meeting was being held for the first time in the intelligencer’s experience, in Cecil’s newly-built mansion Salisbury House, overlooking the Thames on the southern side of the Strand, immediately across the road from his childhood home Burghley House which now belonged to his tall, straight-backed, good-looking elder brother.

  Everything looked new, smelt new, felt new. There were distant noises suggesting strongly that some parts of the great mansion were so new that they hadn’t actually been finished yet. The only old thing in this room was a portrait of Lord Robert’s father in his robes as Lord High Treasurer painted by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger in a massive gilt frame that towered behind the twisted, dwarfish, simian form of his second son.

  ‘It was rumoured that this Hal, Gerard’s apprentice, would have been able to identify Shakespeare as buying herbal poisons that killed Spenser, and - as the involvement of the Earl Marshal and his pursuivants seemed to make clear - there appeared to be a Catholic connection,’ Poley continued.

  ‘A secretly Catholic or Catholic-leaning Shakespeare killing a stoutly Protestant Spenser - the recently dispossessed landlord and Crown official very active in the Irish war whose home may well still be smouldering above the corpse of his slaughtered child. And performing this murder on secret orders from Hugh O’Neal and his rebels, who would have been damaged - to say the least - had Spenser’s proposals been adopted by the Council and the revolting population simply starved into submission. Or their women and children starved at least: famine as a weapon of war - an interesting reinvention of an old idea, but Spenser was always a classicist and Shakespeare has always been suspect. Given his links to the Earl of Southampton whose father at least had dangerously Catholic tendencies - a Catholic wife and family - Shakespeare is clearly open to suspicion, then there are his activities in the North. That’s a convincing case at first glance - almost enough to call in Topcliffe and his racks.’

  *

  ‘We took Shakespeare to the Marshalsea instead, my Lord. Pursuivant Gauge, Parrot and I all questioned him, formally and informally; our undercover priest and equivocator tempted him without result. He refused to celebrate mass and be granted absolution on three different occasions. It’s all noted in my report to the Council. All we established was that he is almost certainly not the Shakeshaft who tutored children in Catholic households across the North - before serving in the Low Countries and moving to London on his return as we know Shakespeare did. We know that the third Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s patron, has been brought up as ward of some of Her Majesty’s most trusted courtiers and scrubbed clean of the sins of his father in the process. And we established that he did not purchase any poison from anyone and knows absolutely nothing about Spenser’s death.’

  ‘Not this Shakeshaft, tutor to the Hoghton children you say? Despite the similarity of the name?’

  ‘Shakespeare is a common enough name in the West Country and in the North, with a range of local variations - Shakeshaft, Shakebolt, Shackle, Shakleton, Shakehell, Shaddock - Shakehands and Shakepizzle for all I know… ‘

  ‘Enough!’ snapped Cecil and Poley regretted the unfortunately-timed levity of his last two suggestions. Nervousness was the only explanation. He took a deep breath and fought for more self-control. ‘So, if not Shakespeare, then who killed Spenser?’ Lord Robert demanded.

  ‘This is where it becomes more delicate, My Lord. Our discussions and explorations reveal quite clearly that there are likely to be two levels of guilt: to wit, the man who ordered it done and the man who did it. The men likely to have given the orders being courtiers of great power and influence.’

  ‘Of which I can readily call to mind a hundred or so. I presume you managed to create a short-list?’

  ‘Of four, Lord Robert. Yourself…’ Poley paused for a heartbeat expecting an explosion. When none came, he proceeded. ‘Sir Walter Raleigh, the Earl of Essex and Sir Thomas Walsingham.’

  ‘I assume my name was on the list for the briefest moment and then your sanity returned?’

  ii

  Poley gritted his teeth. But he was Lord Robert’s chief intelligencer and the Secretary expected nothing less than the truth. A tantrum from Lord Robert now would lead to a generous apology later - as long as Poley was not imprisoned, deported, murdered or beheaded in the interim. ‘You and Sir Walter were first on the list and remained there longest,’ he said. ‘Our thinking being that you were both mocked in Mother Hubberd’s Tale even through chance and ill fortune given the poem is so old that its original targets are long dead. However, we thought you might, understandably, desire revenge for the insult, especially if it threatened to cause damage to your standing and favour in Her Majesty’s eyes.’

  ‘So I am still on the list am I?’

  ‘Not really, my Lord.’

  ‘A great relief! May I ask why? My honest, open nature? My famous aversion to unnecessary violence? My notable Christian charity and reverent lifestyle? My trusted position at Her Majesty’s side?’

  ‘Because if you were to proceed with Spenser’s murder, then I would be the man commissioned to perform it, my Lord. And if not me, then someone of my acquaintance - Ingram Frizer perhaps or Nic Skeres. But I didn’t do it. No-one I know did it. Therefore you did not order it, my Lord.’

  ‘Logical, if singularly unflattering. This was all your own reasoning was it?’

  Uncharacteristically, Poley sought to shuffle off a little responsibility, though he had a twinge of conscience recalling his conversation with Shakespeare in the Marshalsea about blaming others for your own transgressions. ‘Thomas Musgrave was first to come to that conclusion, my lord.’

  ‘And he became involved why?’

  Poley explained, at some length.

  ‘And Sir Thomas Walsingham? What good could he pretend?’ Lord Robert took up the inquisition some time later.

  ‘None that we can see. And certainly his representative, Kate Shelton, is as firm as adamant that he could never be involved. He has no ties to Ireland and he is as you know, active in courtship of King James in Scotland through Audrey his wife who is bosom companion to the Scottish Queen Anne of Denmark.’ Poley decided not to remark upon the fact that Lord Robert and the Privy Coun
cil to which he was Secretary were exploring a Scottish succession themselves, and often via Lady Audrey into the bargain. Open discussion of such things, as he had already observed, could come close to being treason. ‘Sir Thomas’ power and position are assured if the succession goes that way,’ Poley continued. ‘But he is also proof against any other eventuality. Nor is he mocked in any part of Mother Hubberd’s Tale. He is inviolate - no harm can come to him from any of this. We can see no reason at all for him to bestir himself in the matter of Spenser’s death.’

  ‘Which, to a cynical mind, might suggest that we should place him at the head of the list. Not, I have to say, that I would trust one word proceeding from Kate Shelton’s mouth. But let us proceed…’

  *

  ‘The Earl of Essex does not seem to feature in Mother Hubberd’s Tale, but he has other motivation and also has access to a range of men ready, willing and able to carry out any murderous act he wants: Sir Gelly Meyrick, the Bacon brothers to name but a few. As to precise motivation, we wondered, for instance, whether he might be desperate enough to think that Spenser’s death could prompt the Queen into moving more decisively in the matter of confirming him as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and allowing him to lead his army there. There was an added element of course as Spencer was Sheriff of Cork. If a Catholic plot to carry out the murder could be established, then Her Majesty and her Council might well be moved to retaliate by confirming Essex’ commission.’