[Master Mercurius 02] - Untrue Till Death

by Graham Brack

‘Nobody? Did you check him for concealed poison?’

  ‘There was nothing, Excellency. Not a blade, not a string he could strangle himself with, nothing in his clothes.’

  Beniamino muttered in the Stadhouder’s ear. ‘My Lord, if he had such poison he would have used it when I was questioning him. And I searched him thoroughly when he was first detained. He has not harmed himself.’

  William took this in and stomped around the cell for a while, kicking the door in annoyance. ‘So we are to assume that if these two half-wits are right, somebody managed to poison him through the bars of his cell?’

  If ever I saw men looking uncomfortable, I saw it then. They knew that they were being held responsible for Molenaar’s death, and faced summary punishment.

  ‘Perhaps the answer is simple,’ William continued. ‘Perhaps you poisoned him yourselves.’

  ‘No, Excellency,’ stammered one, dropping to his knees in terror.

  ‘I could question them if you like,’ said Beniamino. His eyes betrayed too much relish for my liking, and the two guards saw it too. One wet himself where he stood.

  His kneeling companion looked pleadingly up at the Stadhouder. ‘We’re telling the truth, Excellency. From the moment we locked the door and stood outside to the moment he collapsed, nobody went in. In fact, nobody even approached. Perhaps it is God’s hand.’

  Being of a religious turn of mind, I am very happy to ascribe miracles to God, but when He smites wrongdoers He normally prefers fire and lightning, not to mention making it very plain that He is responsible and why He did it. Read the Old Testament and you will see what I mean. He does not go around slipping people nasty drinks.

  At this point the physician arrived, looking bemused and dishevelled. Despite the Stadhouder’s instructions he had obviously insisted on putting his breeches on, since his shirt was half in and half out.

  He knelt by Molenaar, held a mirror to the corpse’s nose and mouth, and tried tickling him with a feather. ‘He’s dead, Excellency,’ he announced at length.

  ‘God’s wounds, your years at the Sorbonne weren’t wasted!’ William shouted. ‘Of course he’s dead. I could see that. What did he die of?’

  The physician dipped a finger in the vomit and sniffed it. Rolling Molenaar onto his back, he tried to straighten him out. ‘The corpse is uncommonly stiff, Excellency. I cannot be sure, but I suspect the poison nut.’

  ‘Poison nut? What on earth is a poison nut?’

  ‘A plant from Africa and Asia, which gives a fruit. In small quantities the grated seed is a stimulant, sometimes used in medicine to stir those who are failing. But in larger amounts it causes the muscles to tighten. The victim suffocates, being unable to breathe due to the tightness of his chest.’

  ‘I know that feeling only too well,’ the Stadhouder replied.

  ‘If you will look, you see that his back is lifted off the floor in a shallow arch. A larger amount would have produced more curvature, something akin to lockjaw.’

  I interrupted. ‘Do you think that this was just a warning, and his weakened state led to death?’

  ‘It is too imprecise a weapon to use as a warning, Dominie,’ the doctor answered. ‘If so little was used, I surmise that it must be because so little was close at hand.’

  ‘And he could not have administered it to himself?’

  The physician spread his arms. ‘Self-murder by poison is not unknown. But where is the phial?’

  ‘That’s true,’ said the Stadhouder. ‘The door was locked when we got here and there is no phial.’

  ‘Maybe he threw it through the grille when he’d taken the poison,’ suggested the kneeling guard.

  ‘Search the yard!’ snapped William. ‘But if, as I suspect, it isn’t there, you two have some explaining to do.’

  Their colleagues scoured the ground assiduously. One suggested that if Molenaar had thrown it underarm, he might have lobbed it onto the roof of the guardhouse.

  ‘God give me strength,’ muttered William, but ordered a ladder to be brought anyway. After half an hour, it was clear that there was no sign of a phial.

  ‘Maybe he swallowed the phial…’ began the other guard, but his voice tailed off in the face of a fierce glare from William. It seemed to me that the more agitated the guards became, the less logical their train of thought. If we could relax them, we might get more sense out of them.

  ‘May I question them?’ I asked.

  ‘As far as I’m concerned, you can set them on fire if you want,’ the Stadhouder answered. ‘I’ve done with them.’

  ‘Think carefully,’ I began. ‘Let’s go back to the moment when we all arrived from the barge. What happened then?’

  The kneeling one seemed to be reflecting, rerunning the events in his head. ‘The captain directed the guards from Utrecht to the barracks to find a place to sleep and told them to sup there.’

  ‘Yes, I remember that too. Then?’ I asked in as encouraging a tone as I could.

  ‘Well, we were ordered to put the prisoner in this dungeon, so I went to fetch the keys. His wrists were loosed and he was led inside. He didn’t resist. Then we fastened one of his ankles in the irons.’

  ‘And he received no visitors?’

  ‘Well, just the one, obviously. You brought him his dinner.’

  I suddenly felt very uncomfortable, and very aware of the Stadhouder’s aggressive gaze.

  As is often the case, once you have freed a mental block, the idiots became very vocal.

  ‘That’s right,’ the other guard said. ‘You brought his dinner. I remember now.’

  ‘I brought his platter from the kitchen, that’s true. But he had the same food that we did.’

  I was grateful when Beniamino chipped in. ‘That’s true. I saw the Master putting the food on the platter, and it was exactly the same as ours. In fact, I just picked up any of the platters. If it had been poisoned, it might have been me lying dead.’

  I relaxed.

  ‘Of course, he could have poisoned it on the way down the stairs…’ Beniamino unhelpfully added.

  ‘But why wait until now to do that?’ William asked. ‘He had abundant opportunities to kill Molenaar on the journey, presumably.’

  ‘Certainly,’ Beniamino agreed. ‘Well, not on the barge, obviously, because the Utrecht men were guarding him. But in the warehouse he could have done it. I would have known it was him, but he could have fled, I suppose.’

  William looked me up and down. I hoped he saw someone who patently was not a murderer. ‘Let’s go inside,’ he finally said. ‘Clear up this mess, put this villain somewhere and get back to work.’

  I trudged back into the building, feeling that I ought to be grateful that they were cleaning the dungeon of vomit and corpses before throwing me into it and wishing Beniamino would keep his mouth shut. As if in apology for his half-hearted — some would say half-witted — defence of me, he patted me across the shoulders as we climbed the stairs. I am sorry to say that my suspicious nature only made me wish I had not gone in front of him. I would rather have kept Beniamino where I could see him.

  The Stadhouder paced back and forth in his chamber. ‘Well, this is a damnable mess!’ he said at length.

  I felt the need to get something off my chest. ‘Stadhouder, I realise appearances are against me, but I want you to know that I did not kill Molenaar,’ I said.

  ‘You would say that, wouldn’t you?’ he replied. ‘But by the time the fellow beside you has finished with you, you’ll be confessing to killing people who aren’t even dead yet.’

  I gulped. Actually, all I seemed to be able to do was gulp, because I kept doing it.

  ‘Oh, stop looking so miserable. I never thought you did,’ he added. ‘You’re not stupid enough to embarrass me by killing someone in my custody for a start.’

  I had not considered that very welcome way of viewing the matter.

  ‘But who could have poisoned the food?’ asked Beniamino.

  ‘I can’t think,’ I said. ‘It was all
so ordinary and everyday. I wasn’t really paying attention. We were shown into the kitchen, then we collected our dinners and I had a second platter for Molenaar.’

  ‘You can’t have held both and still had a hand free to pick things up,’ the Stadhouder pointed out.

  ‘No, I filled one at a time.’

  ‘Therefore you must have put one down.’

  ‘I prepared my own plate, put it on the table next to Beniamino’s, then went back to get something for Molenaar.’

  ‘And did you take it straight to him?’

  A bright light shone inside my head; belatedly, admittedly, but still there. ‘No! I thought one of the servants would take it, so I put it on the table near the door. It was only when we’d eaten ours that I realised Molenaar’s plate was still there.’

  ‘I remember you said you’d better take it if nobody else was going to,’ Beniamino added in his first helpful contribution to discussion for some time.

  ‘So there was a considerable time when that food, which was known to be for Molenaar, could have been poisoned,’ concluded William.

  ‘Yes,’ I readily agreed.

  ‘But you didn’t see who did it?’

  ‘I had my back to the door,’ I said. ‘Beniamino was facing it.’ I was rewarded for this comment with a hard stare from the man beside me. Good; it was payback for failing to exonerate me at once.

  ‘I didn’t see anyone,’ said Beniamino, ‘but people were coming and going all the time.’

  ‘But who could have known that food was intended for Molenaar?’ I asked. I did not intend it as a rhetorical question, but since nobody answered that is what it became.

  William broke the lengthy silence. ‘So what happens next?’

  ‘We have to find Van der Horst and Terhoeven, which means going back to Leiden,’ I said. ‘We can go to the University Registry to get their addresses. Should we take some soldiers?’

  ‘The trouble with that idea is that if people see soldiers marching through town, word will soon get back to the people we’re trying to arrest,’ William commented.

  ‘I have great respect for your abilities,’ I said to Beniamino, ‘but as you have pointed out in the past, I’m not much use when it comes to rough stuff.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Beniamino. ‘I agree we should take someone. I just don’t think it should be soldiers, or even the Utrechters who came with us. Give me an hour and I’ll round up some irregulars. I know where to look.’

  William nodded his agreement, so Beniamino left us to make his arrangements.

  ‘Even if you don’t know the individual who killed Molenaar, what was the point of doing so?’

  ‘He was going to be executed, so there was no point in any of your followers doing it. I assume his fellow conspirators did it to prevent his betraying them.’

  ‘But he already had.’

  ‘He hadn’t really. He only knew the two he’d met. But the others may have worried that he had learned more somehow. Killing him here was a very risky option, which makes me think that they were desperate to silence him. They must have believed that they would never get a better chance.’

  The Stadhouder stood up, so I did the same. ‘Can you amuse yourself for a few minutes? I need to give Pieters some instructions.’

  I did not think I had any option in the matter, so I agreed.

  ‘Why not take a look at my library? There may be some books in there of interest.’

  I doubted that William could have told me which books those were likely to be. Some men have shelves of books where others hang tapestries, purely as decoration, but I have never been able to resist an hour in a library, so I was very happy to do as bidden, especially as William called in one of the guards outside the door and told him to go with me and see that I came to no harm.

  The library was, at that time, not in the best condition because when the French left they took a number of the choicest volumes with them, and despite repeated diplomatic protests they had not been returned, nor were they likely to be given that the dastardly French refused to admit that they had them; but there were some books there that I had never seen, and I spent a few minutes scanning the titles to see which I should like to inspect further.

  William had a desk between two of the bookcases. It was an unostentatious, dark wood table with an inlaid leather top, tasteful but definitely for use rather than for show. It was against the wall near one corner of the room and appeared to be where he did his serious work rather than simply signing documents. Diplomatic despatches littered its surface which I was careful to avoid reading, and over the desk there hung a beautiful pen and ink map of the Netherlands. The sea had been given a light blue wash, and there was a margin which enclosed the coats of arms of the major towns and cities.

  And then I saw it.

  On the left side, the fourth shield down: four six pointed stars, a small cross with equal arms and a sword pointing up the shield to the cross. I feverishly rummaged in my pouch to find Van Looy’s secret papers, smoothed them out on the desk top and found the one I wanted. Holding it up to the map, this time having it the right way up, it was crystal clear. Van Looy had drawn the arms of the city of Haarlem.

  The obvious reason for that was that Van der Horst came from Haarlem, so it was perhaps from Haarlem that he was receiving his instructions; and since his father was a minister there, and was known not to be well disposed to the House of Orange, his father might be the intermediary who was relaying the commands from the leader of the rebels.

  On the other hand, Van der Horst made no secret of the fact that he and his father did not see eye to eye and he had made no effort to travel to Haarlem during the vacation, choosing to remain in Leiden. It was at least possible that there was someone else in Haarlem who was actually his contact.

  My first thought was that we would never know, but then I came round to thinking that we could know if I went there to speak to Van der Horst senior. If a man knew that his son faced a public execution, surely he would confess himself or attempt a rescue. Either way, we would know what was behind this.

  I sat on tenterhooks waiting for either the Stadhouder or Beniamino to return, itching to share the result of my research. Admittedly “research” is quite a pompous word to use for looking at a large wall map, but at least I had made the link from my memory.

  The time dragged. I tried saying a few prayers, but my excitement was such that I could not concentrate, and then a happy idea occurred to me. I could now explain two of the pieces of paper; what about the third?

  I looked at it again.

  MTXVI18.

  I turned it upside down, which had worked for the arms of Haarlem, but made no sense at all with this one. I tried to picture it in lower case. I thought it might be a cipher, but why would it mix letters and numbers?

  Maybe if I diverted my mind by concentrating on something else for a while it would be clearer when I returned to the problem. I thought I would read a portion of my bible. There are systems under which you read a small section each day, completing the whole bible in a year or two. Unfortunately I could not remember where I had left off, and my ribbon marker had fallen out, so I closed my eyes and tried to picture the place where I had finished reading.

  If I ever doubt that God watches over me, remind me of this moment. For whatever reason, the riddle that had beset me was suddenly no riddle at all. MTXVI18 was the kind of thing I had written many times; it was a reference to a bible text. MT XVI 18: the gospel according to St Matthew, chapter sixteen, the eighteenth verse. Some of us use roman numerals for the chapter and Arabic numerals for the verses so as not to confuse the two. Out came my New Testament once more, and I could barely control my fingers as I found the relevant verse.

  Et ego dico tibi quia tu es Petrus et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam et portae inferi non praevalebunt adversum eam.

  Tu es Petrus.

  You are Peter. Or, more likely, you are Pieters.

  Beniamino said that nobody notices the musi
cian, but neither do they notice the secretary. Dredging the past up from the sludgy parts of my brain, I was sure he had been in and out of the room when we had discussed this case. It was certain that when I wrote to the Stadhouder to tell him that we were bringing Molenaar to The Hague, the letter would have been given to Pieters to give to his master. Pieters dared not discard it, because I would mention it when I arrived and the Stadhouder was unprepared, but he could make some arrangement to ensure that Molenaar gave nothing more away.

  It was Pieters who had taken us to get some food, and had checked that we were well provided for before he left, but by that time I was eating and Molenaar’s food was set out on a platter. He could easily have poisoned it.

  The part that was causing the feeling of spiders on my spine was that it was so perfect a plot. Who better to know everything the Stadhouder was doing than his secretary, who could pull the strings of any number of plots around the country, watch them mature, protect them from discovery and ultimately assassinate his master? A simple murder now would not guarantee victory because nothing was prepared; but if there were to be uprisings in a few large cities and then the Stadhouder were stabbed to death, who knows what chaos would result?

  The Stadhouder returned. ‘I hope you have not been bored,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately, it took rather longer than I expected.’

  ‘Not at all, Stadhouder,’ I said as I walked past him and checked the door was firmly closed. I motioned to him to keep quiet and came very close so that I could whisper. ‘I have solved the mystery of the secret writings,’ I said.

  The Stadhouder was about to speak so I did something unforgivable. I clapped my hand over his mouth. He was surprised but, give him his due, he did not get angry or beat it away. ‘And?’ he whispered.

  ‘I believe the mastermind behind your opponents’ plans is none other than your secretary Pieters.’

  That this came as a shock to him was plain to see from the look on his face. ‘Are you certain?’

  ‘No. I would like to place the evidence before you and Beniamino to see if you agree, but we must do it without any risk of being overheard.’

  William nodded. ‘Alternatively we do it where there is plenty of chance of being overheard, but not by Pieters. Come!’ He strode to the door, threw it open and marched boldly up to the table where Pieters was sorting letters. ‘Mercurius and I will be gone for an hour or so. When you’ve done that, go to bed, Pieters.’