Sword of Shame

by The Medieval Murderers

  ‘You are staying the night, master?’

  ‘It seems so.’

  ‘You need more blankets?’

  ‘I’ll manage,’ I said. ‘Don’t trouble yourself.’

  She snorted and returned to her work. Over her shoulder I could see a girl struggling with pots and pans.

  I walked on and after a couple of false turnings reached the entrance hall where there was a table which had been laid for supper and which was already occupied.

  It took me a little time to work it out but eventually I understood that the carrion bird names which Elias had bestowed on his cousins–crow, vulture and so on–were not only linked to the way that they came flocking to the house at the first whisper of his illness. The names were also suggested by the appearance of these men. By the better light around the supper table I had a chance to study my fellow-guests. This was a beaky, big-nosed family–undoubtedly it was the lack of this feature which had caused the disrespectful Davey Parsons at the gate to tell me that I hadn’t got the nose–and it made them look bird-like. Elias too was long-nosed and even Martha’s was slightly too large for her face.

  The three men whom I’d first encountered on my arrival were at table. The old man, with stick and spectacles, was called Valentine. He was stooped with age and mumbled his words and his food together in one spittly stream. Fortunately, he didn’t say much but he was sharp enough when he wanted to be. He looked closer to death than Elias Haskell lying in bed at the other end of the house. From some remark, I learned Valentine lived in Cambridge. I doubt that he’d have been able to travel any more than a handful of miles to visit his ‘dying’ cousin, and marvelled that he’d come as far as he had. He had no occupation–the old are exempt from all that. The stoutish, middle-aged individual with the close-fitting cap of grey hair was Cuthbert. He was a lawyer hailing from, I think, Peterborough. The third man, the one who’d been standing by the chimney-piece when I arrived, was called Rowland. He was a merchant from Huntingdon. They were Haskells by name, every one of them. This simplified matters, I suppose.

  Elias Haskell had mentioned four carrion birds, though. An empty place at the table indicated that someone was still expected. I wondered who this person was. It seemed unlikely that he would arrive now, in the darkness of a winter evening and through the perils of a snow-storm. Meantime I was glad enough of the food, which was plain and wholesome–beef and barley bread, brawn soused in beer, and so on. The service was plain too, at the hands of the other servant I’d glimpsed in the kitchen and who, judging by her narrow mouth, was sister to the porcine girl in the lodge. The guests at the table kept darting wary glances at me, and from one or two remarks dropped by Martha I guessed that she’d spun them some story about Elias’s interest in the playhouse to account for my presence in Valence. Perhaps they had jumped to the conclusion that the old man was going to leave his money to a troupe of players.

  They made a couple of perfunctory enquiries about the health–or more precisely the sickness–of the man in the neighbour room and I noticed that Martha made Elias out to be rather worse than he had seemed to be. I wasn’t sure whether she was doing this on her own initiative or because he had instructed her to give a bad report. I noticed also in the three men a kind of satisfaction, which they scarcely bothered to conceal, that their cousin continued in his apparent decline. They were curious to know what we’d talked about.

  ‘This and that,’ I said. ‘He showed me Grant the monkey.’

  ‘And did he show you the sword?’ said Rowland Haskell.

  ‘That rusty old thing,’ said Cuthbert.

  ‘I saw a sword over the chimney-piece,’ I said.

  ‘Elias believes it can sprout wings,’ said Rowland.

  ‘Pah! Superstition!’ said Cuthbert.

  ‘Stranger things have happened,’ said old Valentine.

  Rowland the merchant turned to me at another point during the meal and said, ‘That William Shakespeare is one of your fellows, isn’t he?’

  ‘He is a shareholder in the Globe. Sometimes he’s a player but mostly he’s a writer.’

  ‘I saw his play about the mad Dane who murdered his uncle.’

  ‘That is Hamlet,’ I said. ‘But the Prince was provoked and it was not altogether murder. The uncle had killed his father first.’

  ‘There was a deal of killing anyway,’ said Rowland. ‘And a lot of silly talk about hawks and handsaws and crabs going backwards.’

  ‘I saw one of his plays in London,’ said Cuthbert the lawyer, narrowing his eyes as if he were examining me in court. ‘I chiefly remember a single line in it. Do you know what it was?’

  ‘No, but you are about to tell me, sir.’

  ‘The line was “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”.’

  ‘Kill all the lawyers,’ I repeated.

  I must say that, in the present company, I rather relished the words and perhaps I didn’t much bother to conceal the fact.

  ‘Good, good,’ said Valentine, ‘Kill all the lawyers. That would be a start.’ The old man’s spectacles glinted sightlessly in the candlelight.

  ‘Is that Master Shakespeare’s true opinion, do you think, Master Revill?’ said Cuthbert. ‘That the world would be a better place if we lawyers were all…no more?’

  This might be quite close to William’s opinion–certainly it is the view of plenty of other people in this island of ours–but I said, ‘I do not think so, sir. Words only, from a character in a play.’

  ‘I deal in words,’ said Cuthbert.

  ‘You’re no better than a tanner,’ said Valentine to his cousin. ‘You deal in skins. In the sheep-skins and calf-skins which you write your double words on.’

  ‘You dislike lawyers, sir?’ I said.

  ‘My father was a lawyer, sir,’ said Valentine, though he looked too old to have any father apart from Adam.

  Cuthbert ignored all this, perhaps putting it down as the bitter ramblings of an old man. Instead he simply grunted and levered another slice of brawn from the dish on the table. Now it was the turn of Rowland the merchant to accuse me and my kind.

  ‘But you can’t deny that you players are against authority, can you? That is why audiences are drawn to you. The people who attend your performances are not respectable people.’

  ‘Then you’d have to say that the King and Queen of England are not respectable,’ I said. ‘King James is our patron while Queen Anne has even performed in a masque.’

  ‘Oh, he is Scottish…’ said Cuthbert.

  ‘…and she is Danish,’ said Rowland. ‘Foreigners both.’

  Cuthbert and Rowland Haskell looked slightly uneasy at this point as if a government agent might be about to sneak out of the wainscot and arrest them for treason. For my part, I would have welcomed one.

  ‘Uncle Elias likes plays,’ said Martha. ‘He remembers the old playhouses in London.’

  What else she would have said to bring a bit of goodwill back to the conversation I don’t know because at that moment we were interrupted by a figure who swept into the hall and took her place at the table with a great fuss and bother. The missing guest was no man, as I’d expected, but a formidable-looking woman. I was startled because she bore more than a passing resemblance to our late queen–I mean, the great Elizabeth. This person had the same pinched face and aquiline nose and haughty manner. (And I should know because I was once in personal conversation with Queen Elizabeth for at least a quarter of an hour.) But the nose alone revealed this newcomer to the dining table to be yet another Haskell cousin. Also the way in which the three men reacted with impatience to her presence.

  ‘Why did no one wake me?’ she demanded. At the same time, she stabbed with her knife at the beef and brawn and other dishes, using the implement as if it was a weapon rather than an eating tool. When her plate was piled high, she looked round. ‘Well? Why did no one wake me?’

  ‘You must have been tired after your journey, cousin Elizabeth,’ said Martha.

  I almost jump
ed to hear that this woman was even named for our late queen, but then I suppose many women of the older generation must have been baptized in the sovereign’s honour.

  ‘True, I have travelled in the dead of winter and over terrible roads all the way from Saffron Walden to be at the bedside of dear Elias,’ she said. ‘True, a lady of my age is permitted to be exhausted after such a journey. True, she may be allowed to lie down on her bed for a few minutes to recover from her travels. But it was light when I arrived and now it is dark. I should have been woken. You must speak to your servants, Martha dear, and to that housekeeper in particular. Naturally the first thing I did when I awoke was to go in quest of poor Elias. But, on reaching his door, I was refused admittance. I was told that he was asleep.’

  ‘He is very ill,’ said Martha.

  ‘He would have been pleased to be woken to see his cousin Elizabeth. I have a gift to give him. Yet the woman–what’s her name, Abigail is it?–barred me from the door, and said that I must wait until he asked to see me. Who are you?’

  This last remark was directed at me. Whether she really hadn’t observed a stranger at supper or whether she’d wanted to unburden herself of her complaints first, I don’t know. Swiftly I introduced myself, adding for the third or fourth time that day that I was a player with the King’s Men.

  ‘So what are you doing here?’ said Dame Elizabeth.

  ‘Master Revill is here by appointment. He has brought a letter of introduction from his employers in London,’ said Martha. ‘You know how much uncle Elias enjoys plays.’

  Elizabeth humphed at this as if she couldn’t see how anyone might enjoy plays, but she asked no further questions. I was grateful for the deft way in which Martha had dealt with her. She had not lied–I was carrying a letter of introduction, after all–but she had left out the fact that I’d come to the wrong house.

  The conversation wore on, fuelled by drink. Cuthbert the lawyer boasted of how much money he was making from his cases. Rowland the merchant boasted of how much he was earning from his deals. They were well-to-do, you could see that from the quantity of rings they wore on their fingers. Valentine nodded away at all this, occasionally interjecting some crabbed comment. Dame Elizabeth looked ready to be offended. Towards the end of the meal, the housekeeper called Abigail appeared. She came across to me and whispered, a little too loudly, that the master of the house would like to see me now. This provoked glances between Cuthbert and Rowland, while Dame Elizabeth objected, ‘But he hasn’t even seen me yet!’

  ‘Those are my orders, my lady,’ said Abigail.

  Reluctantly I got up from the table. The reluctance wasn’t altogether put on. I felt as if I was taking part in a play where I knew neither my lines nor how things would unfold. I didn’t even know whether I was participating in a comedy or a tragedy or something in between. Nevertheless, I had little choice but to follow Abigail and once more go down the passage to the sick man’s chamber.

  I knocked and entered. Elias Haskell was lying almost flat on his back, his head propped up on a bolster. I glanced towards the corner which was occupied by Grant the monkey. The door of the wooden cage remained closed, as if he’d shut himself away for the night. Elias motioned for me to sit down once more on the chest near the bed.

  ‘Well, what did you make of them, my carrion birds?’

  Elias’s voice seemed to have grown weaker. Only his eyes remained lively, with that glint of malice or mischief at the bottom of them.

  ‘They are very much as you described them.’

  ‘That’s disappointing. Can’t you say anything further?’

  ‘The two, er, younger men are so prosperous by their own account that you wonder they need to come sniffing round someone else’s fortune.’

  ‘Fortune, ha! Yet it’s true they are well-to-do. Cuthbert in particular thrives as a lawyer with his twists and turns. But it’s a wise man, Nicholas, who knows when his plate is full. Some are never satisfied. I can see that you are one of those wise men, you would not go grasping when your hands were already full.’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ I said. ‘I have never had what you call full hands.’

  ‘Of course not, you’re a player.’

  This was halfway to being a compliment, perhaps, yet it made me uncomfortable. I changed the subject.

  ‘It seemed to me that the old man–Valentine–might be better occupied in thinking about his own end instead of…’

  ‘Instead of dwelling on mine. But the prospect of gold is a great preservative. It makes people think they will live forever.’

  ‘Is there gold here?’ I said. The question made me feel that I was playing his game.

  ‘All rumours,’ Elias said vaguely. ‘My cousins are like chameleons. They can eat the air, it is so full of promises. In return they give me gifts. Their tribute. Over there. Plate from the lawyer, a goblet from the merchant, and a mirror from the old man. He’d have done better to examine his own visage for signs of decay.’

  I glanced towards the area of the room which he was indicating. A little mound of objects was heaped there although I could not distinguish one from another. This was the tribute of the heirs, little gifts given in expectation of a greater return.

  ‘Shall I show you my most precious object, player?’

  I nodded, almost beyond caring at the next twist in this peculiar evening yet at the same time thinking that here I was sitting inside a sick man’s chamber, in the presence of a monkey called Grant, within a ramshackle, snow-bound house in Cambridgeshire. A few hours ago I had never heard of the Haskells. Yet now I had been thrust into the heart of this strange family, and already knew more about them than was perhaps proper or prudent.

  ‘Why not?’ I said. ‘Let me see your most precious object.’

  ‘Then go and take that sword from its resting place,’ said Elias Haskell, nodding in the direction of the chimney-piece.

  I walked over to the fire. The sword rested on a couple of iron brackets. This was what had been talked of briefly at supper.

  ‘Lift it up, Nicholas,’ said the man in the bed.

  It was heavy and cumbersome but there was nothing to prevent anyone taking it. Elias wasn’t concerned about thieves, I assumed, otherwise this item would be locked up in a chest if it was really valuable.

  I cradled the sword in both arms for fear of dropping it, and also because I was curiously unwilling to wield it like an old-time soldier.

  ‘Lay it on the bed near me,’ said Elias.

  I did so and, half sitting up, he reached forward to grasp the circular pommel and raise the sword. The blade shook with his effort. The man had strength, old and sick as he was. The sinews stood out and his arm quivered as he lifted the dead weight a couple of feet into the air. The weapon gleamed dully in the candlelight. Despite its age and battered condition, there was still a bluish sheen to the blade. I am not particularly knowledgeable or comfortable with weapons but even I could see that in its own way this was an object of beauty, one forged with a craftsman’s care and, more important, a craftsman’s love. At the same time it gave me the goose-bumps to see the old man half sitting up in bed and raising aloft this antique weapon.

  ‘It is ancient,’ I said.

  ‘Centuries old. They say that it was used against the Normans who first came to this island. It has been with my family alone for more than a hundred years. That is why I call it precious.’

  ‘How did you come by it?’

  ‘It was discovered in that very chimney,’ said Elias, obviously unwilling to say more. ‘Try it for yourself. Hold it properly.’

  I took the sword from his grasp again. The blade was long and straight, tapering only near the point. The cross was like a down-turned mouth. Studying it more closely, I saw that each end had been carved into the shape of a dog’s head. Elias waited until I’d had a good look before saying, ‘There are strange stories attached to that weapon, shameful ones too. Sometimes it almost seems to have a life of its own. As if it had a mind to think wit
h, or wings to fly through the air with. That’s the legend of it. Also that it brings bad fortune.’

  ‘Why do you keep it then?’

  ‘In the hope that it will bring bad fortune to my enemies,’ said Elias.

  Whether it was the nonsensical words about flying and fortune, or whether it was something within the sword itself (but how could that have been?), it seemed to me that the weapon gave a little start in my hand and I nearly dropped it. I took a firmer grasp on the hilt and banished these foolish thoughts. The sword was weighty. Only an expert would be capable of wielding it to good effect. I wondered how many lives this blade was responsible for finishing. How many fatal slashes and stabbings it had delivered down the years. Many, no doubt, many slashes and stabbings. This was a foolish thought in its way, since it was not the blade but the men who had hefted it that were responsible. Even so, I shivered without knowing why. Perhaps to disguise these feelings I made one or two experimental sweeps through the air, holding the hilt two-handed. I glanced in the direction of the cage in the corner. If Grant the monkey had chosen to reappear at this moment I would have shown him who was master.

  The door opened and Martha entered the room. She was carrying a small bowl. She almost dropped it, I thought, perhaps under the impression that I was about to attack her uncle. I lowered the sword-point to the floor and grinned sheepishly. Martha took the bowl across to Elias and cradled his head in her hand so that he might drink from it. After a couple of sips, he said, ‘That’s enough. I’ll finish it later.’

  ‘You must drink it, uncle. It is a soporific,’ she said, more to me than to Elias, then turning to him once again, ‘You will have a restless night otherwise. And I cannot sleep if I know that you are not sleeping.’

  Nevertheless she did not compel him to drink any more but placed the bowl on the floor beside the bed.

  ‘Is cousin Elizabeth here?’ he said.

  ‘She tried to see you before supper but Abigail would not admit her,’ said Martha.

  ‘Send her to me now.’