Knaves Templar

by Leonard Tourney

  “Come, Peregrinus. Let’s not play cat and mouse—”

  Litchfield did not finish his admonition, nor did he try again for the purse. His head swam and his vision clouded over. God’s blood, had he drunk that much?

  He looked at Monk, but saw only the outlines of a man.

  “Peregrinus?”

  He reached out blindly, his head swimming. He felt his fingers touch the purse, the slippery leather. Then he felt himself falling forward and caught, smelled the damp wool of Monk’s cloak and the smell of the man himself. For an instant he remembered when the two of them had challenged each other as to how many stoups of Ned Hodge’s strong black ale the other could drink. Monk had carried Litchfield home then in his arms. The same smells then of cloak and man, the same not unpleasant sensation of being borne in another’s arms. But not the same dizziness, or the terrifying blindness.

  At the time Monk had assured him that although he was a boy in years, he was a full man in his cups.

  The old memory faded beneath the burden of his agonizing pain, and then Litchfield felt nothing, thought nothing, was nothing.

  At dawn, Henry Sherlock, with nearly thirty years on his back as a Thames waterman, nosed his wherry into the Temple Stairs, thinking he might find a little morning business. Some Inn of Court gendeman to haul upriver or cany over to Southwark.

  “God save you, sir!” Henry cried, perceiving that there was indeed someone waiting on the Stairs. “Upriver or down, it’s all one to me, sir.”

  The lone figure on the Stairs made no answer to Henry’s invitation. His curiosity aroused, Henry stepped ashore for a better look. He thought the gendeman sitting with his back to the wall might have fallen asleep or frozen to death. It had happened before. In Henry’s thirty years on the river, he had seen almost everything.

  His second supposition proved to be closer to the truth. The gendeman was no more than a boy, really. Perhaps sixteen or seventeen, Henry reckoned. Glassy-eyed and stiff as a mackerel, he was sitting without complaint on the hard, wet stones, his white face turned upward and toward the east as though in expectation of the dawn, or a glorious resurrection.

  Henry crossed himself and was about to exercise his salvage rights on the dead man’s earthly goods when he realized the poor devil at his feet had more than the cold to blame for his demise. The corpse’s arms were stretched out along the legs, and the palm of the right hand was open, as though its owner expected some charity from the next passerby. Several inches of wrist were exposed as well, and all bloody, and now Henry could see that the dead man’s stockings were soaked with blood and that there was a great pool of blood the dead man sat in. Clutched tightly in the right hand of the corpse was the apparent instrument of this violence—a bloody razor with an ivory handle.

  Henry crossed himself again, and being a devotee of the old religion, he muttered a quick prayer to the Virgin and to whatever saint looked kindly upon suicides.

  Henry was tempted to take die razor as well as the purse, which he was pleased to see contained a handful of coins, but when he tried to open the dead man’s clenched fingers, he could not.

  Later that morning, the body found by others and duly reported to those authorized to handle such matters, a constable’s man, just sworn that day to his office, had to break the fingers of the dead man to release the razor.

  Two

  A FORTNIGHT after Litchfield’s body was discovered on the Temple Stairs—and not more than a quarter mile from the scene of the crime—Matthew Stock, a clothier of Chelmsford, Essex, and constable of the same, relaxed before a fire banked high and red, enjoying a pleasant conversation with his wife. He was a man of about forty with a plain, honest face, brown complexion, and black hair only beginning to show a little gray about the temples. Somewhat below the middle height, he was plump, although by no means corpulent, and quite well spoken for one whose people had risen to prosperity and public honor only in his own generation.

  Joan Stock appeared younger than her husband, yet their christenings had not been more than two months apart. Her coloring was similar to his, and twenty years of marriage had blessed them (or cursed them, however one regarded it) with common mannerisms. Joan had a winsome oval face and dark eyes full of expression and a thoughtful cast that, when she was angry or resolved, erased every impression of the softly feminine. Like Matthew, Joan was short, but more trim, especially since a recent illness had shriven her of some of her former weight.

  The Stocks were guests of Master Thomas Cooke and his bride, Frances Challoner Cooke. Matthew, having performed valuable service for them both in the way of discovering the murderer of Mistress Cooke’s uncle not a month before, had now been prevailed upon to remain in London to inquire into an even more mysterious enormity at the Middle Temple, where Thomas Cooke was a prominent member.

  At the moment, however, Matthew’s discourse did not touch upon enormities. Rather, he spoke of the delights of the palate and the ear—hearty victuals and the joys of music—having never been able to tell which in life he loved the more. Joan listened attentively, even while her fingers busily stitched and her eyes remained fixed upon her work as though to look away for a second was to spoil all.

  “Tender meats succulent beyond belief,” he continued with unconcealed relish and staring into the middle distance as though what he described were at the very instant being borne into the parlor by a troop of ghostly servants. “Pheasant and godwit, pig and pudding,- fruits, cheeses, candies and confections. What you will and as much and a plenty of drink, draining every cellar in Burgundy or Spain.”

  His recital caused her to look up from her stitchery. “Humph,” she said. “Fine fare for gluttons and wine-bibers.”

  “Not so,” he protested. “Sufficient, rather, for any honest stomach.”

  She laughed. “God bless us, like yours, I warrant.”

  “I’ll not deny I like to eat,” he returned defensively.

  “Well, then, proceed,” she said in the same good-humored vein. “Let us have the rest of the tale.”

  Matthew shifted in the high-backed chair with the elegantly carved arms, and smiled broadly. The vision floated back into his head. “Imagine, then, all this plenty stretched out through practically the whole month of December and into January as far as Twelfth Night. With one of their number crowned Prince d’ Amour, as he has been called from time out of mind.”

  “Goon.”

  “With as much ceremony, display, and feasting as one might wish. Plays, masques, jousts, pageants, performed almost nightly.”

  Joan said: “You make the Inns of Court sound like academies of pleasure rather than colleges of learning. I supposed these young gentlemen went thither to learn the law. ’ ’ “Oh, they study, according to Thomas, but they play as well, especially at Christmas.”

  Joan pondered the delights her husband had described. Then she remembered the other things not so merry or pleasant. “I suppose Thomas did not darken this vision of Christmas revelry with more sad stories about suicide deemed murder, did he?”

  “Marry, I have learned the name of one of the dead—the circumstances of one other. The first was the son of a Suffolk gentleman, a former member of the Temple himself. The poor boy had just turned seventeen.”

  “Ah, that would be he who slashed his wrists,” she said, putting her stitchery aside. “What of the others?”

  “A hanging and a poisoning.”

  “Jesus preserve us!” she exclaimed. She was not sure of the wisdom of continuing this morbid topic so near to bedtime. Would not such thoughts stir up dreams of equal horror, of white, bloodless faces of hanged men with broken necks, bulging eyes, and blackened tongues? And the poisoned. Would those images not be of equal horror? ‘ ‘Thomas thinks they were all murdered?”

  “So he does,” Matthew answered. “For reasons he has promised to explain in greater detail when I meet Master Hutton tomorrow.”

  4 ‘Master Hutton? ’ ’

  “The Treasurer of their Society, t
he chief officer.” “Three dead men in as many weeks—very suspicious unless suicide is contagious. ”

  Their conversation yielded to a companionable silence. Matthew rose from the fine, comfortable chair to crouch before the fire. He laid two faggots on the charred ruin of earlier ones and maneuvered them into place with a poker. Then he

  remained there, staring into the rising flames. Joan returned to her stitchery, thinking. She recalled the strange concatenation of events by which they had come to know the Cookes and be their guests. It had begun at Bartholomew Fair, nearly half a year before, when Matthew’s success in apprehending a would-be murderer of the Queen had brought his unusual talents to the royal attention. Next, to service on behalf of Frances Challoner, then one of the Queen’s Royal Maids, and immediately thereafter to a dangerous sojourn in Derbyshire in a decaying castle, and more murders discovered and prevented.

  That mystery unraveled to everyone’s satisfaction, comes young Thomas Cooke with another. And at the very moment when Joan could think of little else but getting home again to Chelmsford for Christmas. For she had grown weary of castles and great houses, of royal courts and all the bowing and scraping. She yearned to be mistress of her own house again, no matter how humble, and dreamed of her kitchen with its orderly ranks of utensils and its sooty ceiling, her own good pewter and neatly arranged cupboards, where she could find whatever she wanted. And most of all she missed her daughter, Elizabeth, and her little grandson, who Joan feared would be gangling and bearded by the time she laid eyes on him again, so fast did children grow these days.

  And then, even as they were readying themselves for the journey home, Matthew had come to say that Thomas had invited them to remain in London for Christmas.

  “Remain in London!” sheened. “Whateverdo you mean, remain in London?”

  Thomas had told Matthew about the suicides.

  “What!” she declared, working herself up into a fine frenzy of opposition. “A pox upon all lawyers! Do they not stir up enough trouble in the courts with their quiddities, their suits, and their gibberish comprehensible only to their own breed, that they should murder one another and draw simple, honest souls like ourselves into the fray?”

  But Joan’s longing for home had succumbed to the powerful demon of curiosity. Besides, the Cookes had proved generous hosts. Joan now counted Frances Cooke a friend,

  who had seemed so aloof before when she was a Queen’s Maid and Joan had been sent in disguise into Derbyshire to play housekeeper. Even Frances’s handsome young husband, with his good humor and hospitable nature, had advanced in Joan’s esteem.

  And so Joan had given her consent, and now, by God, it was two weeks before Christmas itself, London as cold as a witch’s teat, and Matthew hobnobbing with lawyers and beginning in some of his phrases to sound like one too!

  Leaving her to stay at home.

  There, indeed, was a bone to gnaw upon! She asked again, breaking the silence, was there not a place for her in Matthew’s new adventure? After all, had husband and wife not always shared all, bed, board, and yes, danger too?

  “Impossible. The Inns are a man’s preserve, a precinct as sacred to the sex of Adam as was the island of the Amazons to females.”

  “Stuff and nonsense,” she snorted. “Of course women go and come. Has not the Queen herself stoopped to enter these sacred masculine precincts you speak of? Was she not present when Master Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night was performed only last year? Tell me, is Royal Elizabeth a woman or no? Answer me that! And has she set foot within the Middle Temple or no?”

  He conceded that the Queen had, got up from his crouching, and returned to the elegant chair.

  “Then she’s a woman and so am I, and my rights of passage follow as the night the day. Let us speak no more nonsense about male precincts.”

  “Great ladies come to the entertainments,” Matthew said, “but even the laundresses must by House rules be beyond the age of forty to enter there. As for Her Majesty, she is, after all, Queen of England. That office guarantees her certain privileges that might reasonably be denied to mere mortals like Chelmsford housewives whose husbands are no more than clothiers and constables. A fine lot of searching out we’d get done together. Why, we’d be as conspicuous as ravens in the henhouse.”

  “More like sheep among wolves,” she said.

  “No, sweetheart, as much as I would like your company and good counsel, you must keep the home fires burning on this occasion. Trust me. You’ll know my heart; I’ll keep no secrets from you. You’ll know everything.”

  She regarded him skeptically, but she decided against further protest—at least for now. Her exclusion was no small annoyance. Didn’t she deserve some compensation for being denied Chelmsford at Christmas?

  Later, in their bedchamber, perched cross-legged upon the immense four-poster bed, she said: “When is it you begin your scratching for clues?”

  “Tomorrow,” Matthew answered, avoiding his wife’s glare. “I’m to meet Master Hutton, the Treasurer. A very learned gentleman, I’m told.”

  “Oh, he is learned, is he?” Joan remarked. “Then a great wonder it is he cannot solve these mysteries himself, else what good, pray, is his learning?”

  Joan put her question indifferently, as though she cared not a fig that she had been excluded from the hunt. And all because she was bom a woman.

  Three

  COME spring and summer, London would flourish, ripe orchard and garden countrify the town, their exhalations sweeten the air, fetch bird and bee, redeem damp and squalor. It was not so now. London was bleak in December, gray and webbed like an old man’s face.

  The four Inns of Court—Gray’s, Lincoln’s, the Inner Temple, and the Middle—were situated on the north bank of the Thames in a ward known as Faringdon Without. Once in the country, the Inns now nestled in the heart of Elizabethan London, the City having grown up rankly about them. They were now a tolerably easy walk from any quarter of the metropolis, given passable weather and the absence of urgency in getting oneself there. Since on this morning neither weather nor time was to be reckoned with, Matthew and his young host, Thomas Cooke, had decided to walk.

  Fleet Street was the most direct thoroughfare from Cooke House, but though it was not yet seven o’clock, the street was already thronged with wagons, carts, coaches, horsemen, and pedestrians of every class, with such a rumble and clamor of wheel, beast, and man that Matthew wondered the inhabitants along the street could abide it. At their backs the

  morning sun shone distantly through a gray haze of smoke that scented the air and stung the eyes and covered the cobbles with a fine layer of soot.

  While they maneuvered through the crowd, Thomas, tall, fair-haired, elegantly caped, and in all, a fine specimen of his class, was lavish in his praise of the Society of which he was a member.

  “Of the four Inns, the Middle Temple is indisputably the most illustrious, having been founded by the famous Knights Templar in King John’s time.”

  “The Knights were lawyers then?” Matthew asked.

  Thomas laughed. “Crusaders, rather. They established themselves near the Holy Temple at Jerusalem, hence their name. They adopted as their battle chant Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed tuo Nomini da gloriam. Not to us, Lord, but to thy name give the glory. A pious motto. These knights pledged themselves to resign all earthly wealth. To serve only Christ.”

  “A laudable aim,” murmured Matthew to the back of his long-shanked friend and hastening to keep up.

  “But there was a falling away. The Knights performed great feats for our Saviour’s sake, then acquired the very wealth they scorned. They grew proud and arrogant, and were suppressed at last by the Church they strove to defend. The property that was theirs, where the Temple now stands, was given to students of the common law.”

  Matthew listened, took the lore in, both what was new and what familiar. It was too early to say what was material to his purpose. He had a philosophical view of his work. Finding truth was not like l
ooking for a lost coin where one recalled having seen it last. It was like thrusting a hand into a rabbit’s hole and finding the hole inhabited by a serpent.

  The two men passed by Fetter Lane and Chancery Lane, where the Royal Courts of Justice stood and where Matthew saw an assembly of gowned lawyers and judges and their petitioners. Thomas pointed out this exalted personage and that, and then the two turned down Essex Street, and ahead of them Matthew glimpsed the river and, upon its gray surface, a flotilla of barges, tiltboats, and the ubiquitous wherries that bore passengers upriver and down.

  They paused while Thomas tossed pennies to a cluster of beggars, none of whom could have been more than ten or eleven. Their grim faces were hard; experience had made them seem older. Matthew gave from his own purse, and while he did he reflected on what a wonderful and wicked world London was. Not all the villages of the realm equaled the sum of its humanity. And constantly growing, too, added upon by rural folk, adventurous or desperate, flocking hither to seek their fortunes. Some never to be seen after; others to return to their native ground with fine clothes on their backs, a new world of stories to tell, and good hard money to buy land and houses and lord it over their old neighbors, who must now call the returned prodigal “sir” and his good wife “madam.”

  The beggars behind them, Thomas returned to his earlier theme. “We Templars are a close-knit company, as you shall presendy see. We are bound by a common purpose—the noble ideal of justice, without which man would come at his brother with tooth and claw. ”

  “How many are you?”

  “Nearly a thousand men and boys dwell in the Inns. And that is not to count servants, underbutlers, panniermen, cooks, gardeners, and porters. Almost the size of the Queen’s own household by comparison. All are persons of quality, the students, I mean. Sons of knights, earls, barons, the upper gentry, although some of our more prosperous merchants are deigning to send their offspring there. I mention Edmund Morlas, mercer, and Henry Doubleday, merchant, to name but two. Our chief officer at the Middle Temple is called the Treasurer.”