Execution

by S. J. Parris

  ‘I’d let you at them in a heartbeat if I could,’ I said, trying not to move a muscle. ‘But it’s not as simple as that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  I swallowed carefully. ‘It’s about more than finding Joe.’

  ‘Not for me. You think I give a shit about anything else?’ She burned me with her stare for a moment longer, then reluctantly lowered the knife. ‘Joe’s gone because you started poking around asking questions.’

  I breathed out slowly. ‘No. Joe’s missing because he knew about the henna, and he probably saw the killer in the Cross Bones that night.’ But she was right; if Walsingham had not asked me to look into Clara’s death, the killer would have believed he’d got away with it, and Joe might have been safe.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked, softly.

  ‘I’ve told you.’

  She sucked her teeth. ‘You’ve told me nothing. I thought you were a secret priest, but now I’m not so sure. Are you working for the authorities?’ When I didn’t reply, she tilted her head back and gave me an appraising nod. ‘I see. Then why don’t you arrest these people you think might be possibilities? Put them in your prison instead of my father-in-law, make them tell you where Joe is?’

  I looked down; her fingers were still clamped tight around the knife in her lap. ‘Because it’s bigger than these murders.’

  ‘Two innocent girls dead for this Clara woman. Abe Goodchild in prison. Maybe my Joe dead too. But when you say there’s something more important than all that, you mean rich people’s lives, right?’ Her voice was cold as flint.

  ‘Listen.’ I could not fault her logic. ‘As far as I know, the person who killed Lotte doesn’t yet know that anyone has discovered his deception. He thinks the world believes it was Clara’s body. While he thinks that, he’ll imagine he’s safe.’

  ‘As long as he’s silenced everyone who could tell the world otherwise,’ she said. ‘Starting with Anneke and Joe.’

  ‘And you,’ I said quietly, as the realisation dawned. ‘He might think Joe or Anneke had told you about the business with the henna and pretending to be his wife. You need to take care. Is there a friend who could stay with you for a while, until this killer is no longer at liberty?’

  She held up the knife with a dry laugh. ‘You don’t need to worry about me, Spanish boy. I was a prisoner of war, and a slave at twenty-four. It was your soldiers taught me how to defend myself against men.’ The blazing fury was back in her eyes; if I were a superstitious man, I might have been afraid. I wanted more than anything to tell her I was not in fact Spanish, to deflect that anger and contempt, but I was still a man, so I doubted it would get me off the hook.

  ‘Promise me one thing,’ she said, her voice calmer. ‘When you find this person, tell me he’ll be properly punished for what he’s done to those girls.’

  ‘I can promise you that when this man is arrested, he’s going to suffer.’

  ‘Good. It will be nothing to what I would do to him if he’s touched a hair on Joe’s head. He should count his blessings.’ She stood abruptly, tucking the knife away invisibly in her skirts. ‘I must go and see about Anneke, have her body brought in. The parish will put her in the Cross Bones, I suppose. There’s an irony.’

  I reached into the pocket of my doublet and drew out a half-sovereign. I was running out of money with all these bribes, but in some obscure way I felt Walsingham owed the dead girl, who would in all likelihood be alive now if he had not insisted on leaving the conspirators at liberty so that he could lure Mary Stuart to the block. She turned the coin over in her palm and raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Blood money?’

  ‘For the funeral expenses.’

  She snorted, but she tucked the coin away.

  ‘One more question,’ I said, as she reached the door. ‘Did a young woman come to you in the past couple of weeks, asking to be rid of a child? A gentlewoman, mid-twenties, long auburn hair?’

  She shook her head immediately. ‘No one like that. I get asked to see gentlewomen sometimes, but they don’t come here, they send their servants to bring me to them. Mostly I say no, despite the money. It wouldn’t be worth the consequences if anything went wrong.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Why, is that your Clara? She’d got herself in trouble, that’s why someone faked her death?’

  ‘It’s one theory.’

  ‘So two street girls had to end up in the Cross Bones to get her out of trouble.’ She clicked her tongue. ‘Lucky for some. And where is she now?’

  ‘I’m trying to find her.’

  ‘Spit in her face for me when you do.’

  ‘Leila—’ I said, as she opened the door. ‘Take care of yourself. I’m serious – as far as this man knows, you’re the only one left who might know the truth about Lotte.’

  She rolled her eyes, and patted the side of her skirts where she kept the knife hidden. I did not doubt her willingness to fight – nor her boast that she had killed a man – but I felt an uneasy sense of responsibility for her, as well as her child.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I found a stone bollard by the quayside where the boatmen tied up and sat down to wait for Ben, my face tilted up to thin morning sunlight. The story Lotte had told Anneke, about her mysterious customer, was so absurd as to be almost unbelievable, yet it made a strange kind of sense. The killer had been logical; perhaps he and Clara had been discussing her escape, and on seeing a young woman of similar appearance and build, with her hair already shaved, he had formed a plan that was guaranteed to put Clara beyond the reach of whoever wanted to harm her. How he had persuaded Lotte to climb the wall of the Cross Bones with him I had no idea – perhaps he had suggested that he wanted a tumble after all – but at least I knew why he had chosen the place. Nothing to do with the symbolism of being a harlot; Clara was supposed to be at the Cross Bones that night. Phelippes had sent her there, and she must have shared that note with the killer. That argued against Titch – would she have risked his trust by telling him that she had actually been working for Her Majesty’s spymaster? I couldn’t see it. But it also argued convincingly against Walsingham; to make Clara appear to turn up dead in the very place where Phelippes had sent her suggested that the deception was intended to fool them too. The only person I could imagine her confiding in about everything was her brother. He was tall and good-looking, with a supreme talent for dissembling.

  I drew out the note Frances Sidney had given me earlier, and looked again at the pictures. The four-legged animal – unfortunately the artist’s skill was not sufficient to distinguish it, which didn’t help; the horseshoe and hammer; the field or garden; the document that read ‘Testament’. That last could be a will; the man who lured Lotte to her death had pretended he needed help to secure an inheritance. Could that be connected?

  ‘Is it a puzzle?’ a voice said, brightly, as Ben’s tousled head popped up over my arm. I jumped a foot in the air, and cursed myself for my lack of awareness; next time someone snuck up on me like that, they could be holding a knife.

  ‘It is, Ben – it’s a secret message that means something to someone, but I’m damned if I can read it. Go ahead, if you want to try. Just don’t let it blow away.’

  He took the paper and frowned at it, the tip of his tongue poking between his lips in concentration.

  ‘Smithfield,’ he said, after less than a minute.

  ‘What?’

  He pointed to the middle two images. ‘It’s like, say what you see, isn’t it? That’s a horse being shod – smith – and that’s a field.’ He gave me a look as if embarrassed on my behalf, for my stupidity. I remembered Phelippes making a sarcastic joke about a place called Beechfield, when we were studying the first note; perhaps he had not been so far off the mark.

  ‘All right,’ I said, not quite convinced, ‘but what about the rest?’

  ‘Something about the Lion, I reckon. That’s a lion, there—’

  ‘I thought it was a dog.’

  ‘Nah, that’s meant to be its mane, look. It’s not a very good
lion, granted. Maybe this person is saying to meet at the Lion in Smithfield.’

  ‘That’s a real place?’

  ‘It’s an inn.’

  ‘And the testament?’

  He grinned. ‘You got me there. Maybe the note came from a bloke called Will.’

  I stared at him. ‘That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.’

  He pulled himself up, indignant. ‘You do better, then. Or go to the Lion in Smithfield and ask if there’s a bloke called Will there, then we’ll see who’s the clever one.’

  ‘I’m not even going to consider wasting my – wait a minute.’ I fished out from my pocket the other note, the one that began with the half moon. ‘Tell me what this one means, then. Is there a place called Beechfield that you know of?’

  He considered, with his same intent concentrating face. ‘Shoreditch, you lummox.’ He said it quite affectionately.

  ‘I thought that was a ploughed furrow, in a field?’

  ‘Or a ditch. See – there’s the seashore, there’s a ditch. And this time it’s the Half Moon. Sent by a girl called Rose.’ He beamed up at me, like a star pupil expecting a prize. ‘I like this game, can we do another one?’

  ‘That’s all I have. So there’s an inn called the Half Moon in Shoreditch?’

  ‘Yeah. You want to go there?’

  ‘I’m not riding all the way to Shoreditch to see if they’ve ever met a girl called Rose.’

  He shrugged. ‘Suit yourself.’

  Ben’s interpretation was absurd, but he was right – I didn’t have anything better. The Half Moon Shoreditch note had appeared twice – once in Clara’s locket and once in Titch’s room, and Robin Poole had appeared surprised by the one in the locket. Perhaps it was worth a try. I shook my head and laughed.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ Ben demanded.

  ‘Nothing. You’re a bright boy.’ I was picturing Phelippes, with all his treatises on cryptography and his prodigious memory, struggling all night to make sense of a picture puzzle that a child had solved at a glance. ‘Can we borrow your dad’s horse, do you think?’

  ‘Course.’ He jumped up and waved down a wherry. ‘I reckon that’s worth an extra sixpence?’

  ‘Let’s see if your mad idea is right first,’ I said. ‘If I find a woman called Rose at the Half Moon in Shoreditch, you’ll get a shilling.’

  ‘Deal,’ he said, spitting on his hand and holding it out to shake.

  ‘I’ll trust your word,’ I said, as the boat pulled up to the stairs.

  * * *

  On the way back to the Saracen’s Head, he told me of his discoveries at the Unicorn: as far as the stable lads knew, there was a network of cellars beneath the main building, an attic and any number of mythical hiding places in the walls, including a cupboard behind the chimney breast in Madam Rosa’s parlour where she supposedly kept all the jewels and money stolen from customers while they had their breeches down, and a secret room behind a beam on the top landing that was haunted by the ghost of a dead virgin who had been bricked up alive because she refused to give in to a rich nobleman’s wicked desires. All that I discounted; I no longer thought Ballard was the killer, and therefore it was unlikely that Joe would be imprisoned somewhere around the Unicorn. More useful was the stable boy with the skin condition who said he had seen Joe leave with the tall man he was talking to at the gate; the boy had told Ben that Joe had appeared to go willingly, and he had seen no sign of the child being dragged or forced. None of that led us very far. By the time we reached the Saracen’s Head, I was certain that all the evidence led to Robin Poole. I even wondered – with a strange, dizzying sensation – if Walsingham had suspected Poole’s loyalty all along, and brought me into the conspiracy to spy not on Babington and his friends, but on his own man.

  The courtyard was quiet, awaiting the midday rush. Ben went to ready the horse; I made my way to the tap-room to ask Dan’s permission. I found him drying plates at the serving hatch.

  ‘Fella to see you,’ he said, in a low voice, nodding. I turned, one hand already moving to my dagger, and to my amazement saw Thomas Phelippes, sitting bolt upright at a corner table, his face fixed straight ahead but his eyes flicking anxiously left and right as if he were about to make a dash for the door. He was right; I had never seen a man look so out of place in a tavern. I slid into the bench opposite him and raised an eyebrow.

  ‘I thought we weren’t supposed to be meeting?’

  ‘Yes, but there’s been something of a crisis.’ He said this in his usual, expressionless tone; he might as easily have been telling me discreetly that I had food down my shirt.

  ‘You sent Clara Poole to the Cross Bones that night,’ I said through my teeth, before he could launch into his crisis.

  He quirked an eyebrow. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Never mind. To meet a man with a white feather in his hat. Who was he?’

  He adopted that prissy face that drove me mad. ‘Not your concern.’

  ‘Listen here. I was asked to find out who killed her. The next day she turned up dead in the place she was supposed to meet this man, at your request, which you didn’t think to mention to me – you don’t suppose there might be a connection?’ I jabbed a finger on the table, half-forgetting in my irritation that Clara was not actually dead.

  ‘No. Now you listen—’

  ‘Explain first. If you want me to find this killer, you need to tell me everything. I’ve wasted a lot of time trying to figure out what on earth she was doing in Southwark in the first place.’

  He made a little impatient huff, but he steepled his fingers together and looked at them, so he didn’t have to meet my eye. ‘The man with the white feather – I’m not telling you his name – was bringing me something urgent from Flushing.’

  ‘From the Low Countries? Why?’

  ‘That’s where Flushing is, the last time I looked. There’s a war on. This man had extremely sensitive military intelligence.’

  ‘What had Clara to do with that?’ I had visions of this business spiralling out beyond the Babington group to encompass the fate of armies across the Channel; if I had not been feeling out of my depth before, I certainly would by now.

  ‘Nothing at all. But I didn’t want him bringing it to any of my regular contacts, in case they were being watched. It had to be someone fresh. I thought no one would pay attention to a man meeting a girl under cover of darkness in Southwark. I asked Clara, she was happy to oblige. All she had to do was take some papers from him and carry them back to Seething Lane.’

  ‘And when she was found dead, you didn’t for a minute think it could have been him?’ The question was partly a test; I wanted to work out if Phelippes really believed that Clara Poole had been killed.

  ‘For the first day I wondered,’ he said. ‘It did seem too much of a coincidence. I even worried that a third party had followed him, and killed her to get the papers after he left. But then I received a message from him – Mr White Feather – to say that bad weather had delayed his ship by half a day. So he hadn’t been there at all that night. But someone else obviously followed her to the meeting point, and took advantage of the remoteness of it to kill her.’

  ‘That’s what you believe – that one of the conspirators knew she would be at the Cross Bones that night, and murdered her because he suspected her of being a spy?’

  His face twitched with impatience. ‘You know that’s always been the theory.’

  We watched one another for a long moment, until his eyes flinched away. If he suspected that the dead girl was not Clara, or that her brother had anything to do with it, he was not giving it away. I decided not to share what Lady Frances had said about Clara until I had better evidence. ‘Anyway,’ he continued, before I could interrupt again, ‘we’ve got bigger problems right now. Father Prado has escaped.’

  ‘What?’ I glanced at the door, as if the priest might come bursting through at any moment demanding his clothes back. ‘How did that happen?’

  Phel
ippes frowned; the question clearly touched a nerve. ‘Incompetence. He was being held at Barn Elms, in the cellars there. Master Secretary was away at court, his steward took Prado some food this morning. The priest said he had lost all feeling in his arms and asked for the restraints to be removed briefly so that he could stretch, the steward is a soft-hearted man and indulged him. What happened next is unclear, I suspect because the steward is embarrassed. He was hit in the head with the pitcher of water he had brought and doesn’t remember much, except that when he came round the priest was gone.’

  ‘Were there no guards?’

  ‘On the outer doors of the house, not on the cellar door. Apparently Prado went out a back window and stole a boat.’

  ‘And he was in a fit state to row it?’

  Phelippes blinked, offended. ‘He hadn’t been racked. There was no need – he was offered a choice and gave us everything we wanted, willingly.’

  ‘So where is he now?’

  ‘If I knew that, I wouldn’t be here. The supposition is he’ll either be on his way to the conspirators, or – more likely – to find his friend Father Weston.’

  ‘Yes, it would have been useful to know they were friends. I’ve met Weston.’

  ‘I see. So he knows you are not Prado?’

  ‘Obviously.’

  Phelippes gave a brisk nod. ‘Right. Then it’s time to pull you out. It’s unfortunate – you were doing a good job – but with Prado and Weston at large knowing your identity, it’s only a matter of time before the conspirators learn it, and they will kill you. We’ll keep you safe somewhere for a few days until they are all arrested, and then get you back to France.’