“Who is it?” The voice could have come from a dying animal; it was barely human.
“Robert Padget?” Timon asked, unable to see where the voice had come from, peering around the room without going in farther.
“Close the door,” Padget croaked. “There is a draft.”
Timon found he could not move, fearing what more darkness and less air would bring to that room.
“Who are you?” Padget asked, exhausted by the words.
Timon heard the rustle of bedsheets and tried to focus his eyes on the bed. As they adjusted a little to the darkness, he could see a hulk shifting on the wooden frame several feet to his left.
“May I light a taper?”
“I have none,” Padget sighed.
“And you won’t!” came a sudden voice from the hallway.
Timon spun around.
The landlady had followed up the stairs, silent as a ghost. Her voice was a nail in the skull.
“No candles until you pay me!” she finished her short tirade.
“I will pay for a taper,” Timon said quickly, digging into his pouch. “Here is a farthing, bring several, and a tankard of ale for Mr. Padget.”
She took the money, stood a moment trying to understand what was happening, gave up, and disappeared.
“Are you buying me candles and ale?” Padget managed, his voice gathering a little strength.
“I am.”
“You have no idea,” he said, almost like a little child, “how long the nights are in this room without a bit of flame.”
Timon shuddered, knowing all too well what it would be like.
“What is your business with me, then?” Padget sniffed. “Surely Mrs. Isam has told you I have no money.”
“Is there a place for me to sit? A chair?”
“No,” Padget said curtly. “I have only this bed.”
Mrs. Isam appeared at the top of the stairs, three tapers in one hand and a lead tankard in the other. Money, it seemed, made her quite fleet of foot. She shoved past Timon as if he were not there and thrust the ale in Padget’s direction.
He took it and drained half the tankard before she turned in Timon’s direction.
“Here,” she said, handing Timon the candles. “There’s a flint on the windowsill. I’ll come back up if you’re not gone in half an hour.”
“Yes,” Timon assured her.
She eked past and was gone down the stairs.
“Delightful woman,” Padget intoned, then finished his ale. “God, I have a thirst. Burning up with fever.”
“Mr. Padget,” Timon said calmly, “I am an emissary from His Holiness Pope Clement the Eighth.”
“Mrs. Isam!” he bellowed, his voice stronger than one would have thought possible. “You have let in a Catholic!”
“Shut up!” she hollered from the bowels of her house.
Timon moved toward the windowsill, barely visible in the fading light. He felt around, found the flint, struck one of the candles, and pocketed the flint.
The room whitened. Timon instantly wished it had not.
The walls were spotted and stained where they were not crumbling; the ceiling was a nest of spiderwebs. Crumpled paper filled the room, piled two feet high or more in the corners.
Three stomach-churning chamber pots overflowed at the side of Padget’s bed, the only stick of furniture in the room.
The covers around the man were smeared, blood-spotted, torn, and fouled. A pile of filthy clothes covered his feet. The bed’s wooden posts were splintered, cracked; the whole frame threatened to give way at any moment.
Leering at Timon from this haven was the oozing face of a bloated corpse. His skin was yellow, pocked; blistering. His eyes were rimmed crimson, no white to be seen. Fewer than ten strands of gray hair twisted around his otherwise bald, liver-spotted skull. Parched lips curled back over gray teeth; his tongue was nearly black.
Every breath was a labor of Hercules; the little light from one candle stung his eyes. Yet he had the strength to sit up and examine Timon’s features, his eyes taking Timon in with lewd abandon.
“You have come into possession of a document that does not belong to you,” Timon said, advancing a step or two. “What is worse, you have written a pamphlet about it.”
“I have written a thousand pamphlets,” Padget wheezed.
“Not like this one. You acquired a document which was illegal to possess, and then quoted it. The document begins, ‘I am the whore and the holy one—’”
“No!” Padget exploded. “It begins, ‘I am the first and the last; I am the honored one and the scorned one’; then, ‘I am the whore and the holy one—’”
“From whom did you acquire this document?” Timon insisted, ignoring Padget’s pedagogy.
“This is actually quite a blessing.” Padget coughed. “Come over here.” He began to struggle with the sheets, trying to peel them back.
Timon did not move.
“Come on,” Padget encouraged with a dead hand, “I want to piss on you, and I can’t do it if you stand that far away. You are, in my opinion, a gutterful of spittle.”
Timon smiled.
“No?” Padget rasped. “Well, then bugger a bunghole and get out. You can see how badly I need the money. Look there, at that chamber pot.” His eyes shot downward.
Timon had already seen enough of Padget’s chamber pots.
“What is in those pots is more useful to humanity than anything your Pope has to say on any subject,” Padget said sweetly, as if he were talking to his grandchild.
A fit of coughing suddenly racked Padget’s body. Rust-colored phlegm flew from his mouth. The lead tankard fell from his fist, rolled off the bed, and clattered on the floor between two chamber pots.
“Take a good look at me, whoever you are. Light no more candles, I want to save them. But take a gander at what I am. This is what you have in store for you. I am your future, poxed and unable to piss; parched and poor. My wife left me, my whore ran off with my money, and my children recoil at the sight of me. Such is the inheritance of all men.”
The effort of so much bile had spent him. Padget closed his eyes and began to snore almost instantly. Drool like an egg yolk escaped the corner of his mouth.
Timon stood a moment, trying to think what to do next. His assignment was clear, but this man would never say where or how he acquired the secret text. Best to move on to the rest of the task.
Timon picked up the taper and searched the room until he found a rotted leather pouch. In the pouch, as expected, he found a sheaf of papers, among them the document for which Timon had been dispatched.
All that remained was to burn the document and kill its current owner.
He stood in the hellish room for long, silent moments, reading the document enough times to memorize it. It was short enough that it did not require his wheel. It was also beautiful enough that it required no effort. It seemed to be a revelation from Mary Magdalene, but Timon pushed that idea to the farthest recesses of his mind.
When he was done, Padget’s snoring had reached a thunderous level. Timon took three long steps to the bedside, produced a dagger, and sliced Padget’s throat from ear to ear. Padget made no sound whatsoever and was dead instantly. Thick brown blood erupted from the wound like pulp from a rotted pomegranate. It was the first of a hundred such wounds that Timon would inflict.
Timon tossed the offending document onto Padget’s chest and lit it with the candle. Then he touched the flame to Padget’s hair, his bedshirt, the stinking sheets. Fire was slow to catch, but it grew, and flesh began to boil.
Timon put the taper in Padget’s liver-spotted hand and was down the stairs in the next instant.
Out in the street, he strode toward the river before taking his first deep breath in a quarter of an hour. Needles of cold air stung his throat, and they were glorious.
He had the odd sensation that he had just played his own death scene in a play no one was watching. Had Padget correctly foretold the future? Would the man
called Brother Timon end up dying in such horror?
Over and over a circle of questions ran about his head like buzzing flies. Why kill a man who would have been dead within the week? Why burn the document? What in that document so threatened the Pope that he would send Timon to London to murder a man and burn a holy revelation?
But the questions soon dissolved into the satisfaction derived from a job well done.
My first murder, Timon thought as he emerged from the back street onto a main thoroughfare. It wasn’t as difficult as I had imagined. It seems easy enough to kill when you know you are doing God’s work.
30
All the visions were gone by morning. Nightmares retreated to their hidden places. A single lark announced the rising of the sun.
Timon was awakened by a commanding series of thumps upon the door of his cell.
“Please go away,” Timon managed weakly. “I am asleep.”
“Brother Timon, this is Dr. Spaulding,” the angry voice responded. “You must come to the door immediately.”
“I am at morning prayers,” Timon mumbled, turning over.
“I believe that I have now deduced the true identity of the murderer,” Spaulding insisted coldly.
Timon licked his lips and opened his eyes, blinking them like bat’s wings.
“Have we already played this scene?” Timon asked, trying to sit up. “Did you come to my door yesterday morning with the same . . .” But he trailed off, suddenly afraid that he might actually have imagined the similarities between the two mornings, or confused reality with his dreams.
“Will you come to the door?” Spaulding snarled.
“The door is not locked,” Timon sighed. “If your brain burns to confer with me, come in.”
Immediately the door swung open. Light from Spaulding’s taper charged into the room. Illumination from the high windows of the hallway admitted a greater gold. It was, indeed, morning.
Timon sat up. He dipped his hands into the water basin beside his chamber pot and splashed the water onto his face, which only made his thirst more desperate.
Spaulding strode into the room like an army of men. Even in his desiccated state, Timon could see that hundreds of thoughts were battering about in Spaulding’s head. The weasel eyes squinted and he seemed to be pointing his nose at Timon’s face. His perfect, unwrinkled robe and skullcap only added to Timon’s suspicion that he was, in fact, death incarnate.
“Stand!” Spaulding demanded.
Timon remained seated, calculating how much effort it would take to kill Spaulding at that moment, dismember his body, and hide the pieces inconspicuously around Cambridge.
“Too much trouble before breakfast,” Timon mumbled, rubbing his eyes.
“Eh?” Spaulding snapped.
“You have been saved by a boiled egg and a bit of ale,” Timon yawned.
He stood, at last, towering over the Spaulding, whose stooped height was no match for Timon’s six-foot frame.
“What are you saying?” Spaulding demanded.
“Let us confer upon the matter of your latest theory,” Timon explained, headed for the door, “over breakfast.”
“I think not. We are expected in Deacon Marbury’s office immediately.”
“If I do not have an egg and an ale first,” Timon allowed, nearly out the door, “I shall be distracted, and there is no telling what I might say or do.”
Spaulding hesitated, watching Timon leave. “Quickly, then,” he said, a bit less vigorously, following after. “The deacon is waiting.”
“Why not invite him to join us for breakfast?” Timon called over his shoulder as he moved lazily down the hallway into the honeyed sunlight.
THE KITCHEN IN THE DEACONAGE was scarcely more than twelve feet square. It had been built well away from the main living quarters of the house. This was so that cooking smells and noises would not disturb the rest of the household. All black and gray stone, it had one window through which the morning sun bisected the darkness of the room; cut it exactly in half. There was space for a fireplace, a stove, a large table for food preparation, a cabinet that served as a larder, and a small table with four chairs. There, at mealtimes, servants might gather to eat off wooden platters.
The preparation table was laden with food, medicines; sweet-smelling potpourris. The fireplace was large and wide, almost the entirety of the outside wall. Candle burns on the timbers of the window evidenced a thousand early-morning preparations.
The stove, to one side of the fireplace, had been used earlier that morning to cook sausages and oatcakes. It was still warm, and the smells lingered.
Timon breathed in the rich air of the room, glad to be alone to collect his thoughts. Spaulding had gone to fetch Marbury.
After a moment’s investigation, Timon gathered hot embers from the hearth and placed them in a firebasket on top of the stove. As luck would have it, a dozen or more eggs lay in a bowl on the preparation table. He found a saucepan underneath the arch below the stove.
The kitchen was well stocked with a large collection of earthenware cooking and storage pots. Huge decorative platters, obviously used to present food at the deacon’s table, took up space on the preparation table. An array of mugs and three-handled tygs lay on the floor, more basic in design than those used in the dining room. In one of the mugs Timon found ale. He poured some of it into a saucepan, in the absence of good water, and set the pan on a trivet over the firebasket. Ever so carefully he slid his egg into the dark brown liquid.
He also found several oatcakes drying in a rack above the fireplace. He grabbed one as if it might save his life.
Spaulding stormed in. “I have sent for Deacon Marbury,” he told Timon in pinched syllables.
Timon answered by waving his oatcake in Spaulding’s direction. “This is the perfect companion for my egg.” Timon swallowed the cake whole.
“You are cooking your egg in ale,” Spaulding said crisply.
“Yes. And I am drinking the rest.” Timon hoisted the mug with the remainder of the ale and drank heartily for a full minute.
“There,” Timon gasped. “Now—we wait.”
For Spaulding the wait was interminable, and he paced the short breadth of the kitchen nearly one hundred times before Marbury appeared in the doorway.
Timon suffered for what seemed like hours waiting for a five-minute egg, though a bit more brown ale had worked to ease the agony.
Marbury alone was cheerful when he burst into the room. “I slept like an infant.” He beamed. His eyes were clear; his face was washed. He was wearing his comfortable clothing: gray tunic and pants, old leather boots, and a blue, quilted coat.
“You needed it,” Timon acknowledged as obligingly as he could manage. “I hope you were not troubled by dreaming.”
“I dreamt that long stacks of paper were flying out of my mouth whenever I tried to speak,” Marbury answered, a bit amazed at his own imagery. “Whatever could it mean?”
“That dream owes itself to your humiliating experience outside another kitchen yesterday morning, no doubt,” Timon suggested.
“Of course, that must be it.” Marbury clapped his hands. “Speaking of which, I am famished. Good idea, this meeting in my kitchen. What is that cooking on the stove?”
“I am boiling an egg,” Timon answered.
“Excellent,” Marbury roared. “I shall have six. And an ale.”
Marbury moved toward the larder perhaps three or four steps before Spaulding exploded, “We are not here to discuss your dreams or to cook your breakfast! We are here to confine a murderer!”
“Confine, did you say?” Marbury stopped in his tracks.
“This monk,” Spaulding responded, pointing a bony finger at Timon. “He is the assassin. We must, together, confine him to this kitchen until we can alert the local constabulary.”
“Timon is the murderer?” Marbury asked, barely containing himself.
“I have concluded that a man of his ilk could not possibly know all the things he knows
with only a church education. He is not of the proper class to be able to accomplish such thoughts, nor to deduce anything about our present troubles. Let him deny it. I see clearly now that the only reason he knew Dr. Chaderton was not the murderer was that he was, in fact, the murderer himself! I have assumed command of our group since Lively’s death, and I demand that you call the constables!”
“Stunning logic.” Timon yawned, getting up. “I think my egg is ready. Shall I drop in half a dozen for you, Deacon?”
“Please,” Marbury answered.
“No, but do you not see—,” Spaulding sputtered.
“My dear Doctor,” Marbury said calmly, “perhaps I should remind you that the first murder—that of dear Harrison, may he rest in peace—was committed before Timon arrived. And, Brother Timon?”
“Yes, Deacon Marbury?” Timon scooped his egg from the boiling water.
“Who are you? What are you doing in my house?”
“I am called Brother Timon, as I was happy to tell you yesterday when you asked me the same question,” Timon responded brightly.
“History runs in circles,” Marbury said, equaling Timon’s cheer. “Go on.”
“I seem to be repeating myself quite a bit this morning—but to completely answer your question, I was hired to find the man who murdered Harrison. And now I must work harder, as the killer seems bent on destroying all the King’s translators here in Cambridge.”
“Yes.” Marbury turned to look Spaulding in the eye. “And he seems particularly bent toward killing anyone in charge, does he not?”
“That he does.” Timon caught his boiled egg with a wooden spoon and laid it gently on the table beside the stove. Then, daintily, he selected six more eggs from a basket on the same table; dropped them slowly in the rolling boil of the pot.
The silence gave Spaulding a moment to consider his next question.
“How did you come to hire this Timon, Deacon Marbury?” Spaulding folded his hands in front of his chest. “Where did you find him? Did you know him?”
The King James Conspiracy Page 15