The Tainted Relic

by The Medieval Murderers

  Jack and Abel were curious to know what had happened with the bookseller. I stayed quiet about the relic, saying only that Ulysses Hatch claimed to be in possession of Shakespeare’s foul papers but that he’d needed time to search for them. I added that there was some old enmity between Shakespeare and Hatch and that the bookseller kept some odd company, which included, as well as the woman we’d just seen, a talking raven called Hold-fast. I also told them of my encounter with Tom Gally.

  While we were waiting to return to Ulysses Hatch’s lair we occupied the period wandering round the fair, stopping to sample some ale and being propositioned by the sellers of horseflesh, human flesh and other gewgaws. As smart Londoners, however, we were resistant to pretty well every temptation.

  Eventually, after we’d judged that enough time had passed, we found ourselves once more at the mouth of the bookseller’s tent in that quiet quarter of the fair. It was odd that Master Hatch should set up here out of the run of things. Maybe his customers liked to visit him discreet and unseen on account of his spicy wares. The books and pamphlets lay undisturbed on the trestle table. The flaps of the tent were open and, once again, I had the sense of being spied on through the curtain that hung across the interior. Perhaps it was the raven with his diamond eye. I’d have preferred a human gaze.

  I called out for Master Hatch. No reply. Called more loudly. Half expected Hold-fast to tell me to jump to it. Or shut my gob. I glanced at the others and indicated that we should go inside. Hatch could have no objection, surely. A simple transaction, no more. Hand over the four pounds and depart with the Domitian papers. And, on a future occasion, show myself a little less ready to undertake errands on behalf of William Shakespeare.

  We filed into the tent. I slipped round the curtain.

  Inside, it was dim and stuffy and smelly. But the smell was different this time, burnt and bitter.

  You know what we found next.

  ‘My God, Nick, what shall we do?’ said Abel Glaze.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘We should go to the Justice,’ said Jack Wilson. ‘This is murder plain and simple.’

  ‘He’s been shot,’ said Abel, looking at the dark hole in the man’s upper chest and the bloody flag surrounding it. In his very young days, before he turned to confidence trickery, Abel had served time in the Netherlands campaign, and so knew more about war and wounds than I ever hoped to know.

  ‘With his own pistol, it must have been,’ I said. ‘He showed it me when he was showing me…something else.’

  Jack and Abel looked at me. Perhaps they were wondering what the ‘something else’ was. I pointed to the murder weapon, which lay in a corner of the tent, as if the perpetrator had flung it there in panic before his exit. Or her exit. For a pistol can be discharged by a man or a woman.

  ‘That’s a snaphaunce,’ said Abel. ‘They were much used in the Low Countries.’

  Neither of us responded to this piece of professional information.

  ‘We can just walk out,’ said Abel after a moment. ‘We don’t have to report this to anyone. Not a soul knows we’ve been here.’

  ‘You can walk out,’ I said. ‘But I’ve been seen already in this place.’

  I was remembering Wapping Doll. I also recalled the individual with the straws in his hat who’d slipped out as we arrived at the tent for the first time.

  ‘Then we must go to the Pie-Powder Court,’ said Jack. ‘This isn’t some case of a cutpurse and a ballad singer.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right, we must go to the court,’ I said, looking round. ‘Where’s the bird?’

  ‘Bird?’

  ‘Hold-fast, the raven I told you of.’

  ‘Blast the raven,’ said Jack. ‘We have a dead man on our hands.’

  ‘Wait a moment,’ I said, bending down to examine a pile of paper which I’d just noticed lodged beneath Ulysses Hatch’s bulk. I eased it from under the body. The sheets were old and crumpled and blood-smeared but a glance was sufficient to show that they were WS’s unperformed play of Domitian. It said as much on a handwritten title page. Hatch had found it after all. The last thing he did, perhaps. Well, I thought, as I tucked the creased sheets into my doublet, I’ve saved my master four whole pounds. It’s odd how these trivial thoughts come at the direst moments.

  Seeing that I’d obtained what we’d come for, the others made to leave, but I lingered for an instant, curiosity overcoming fear and revulsion. I glanced inside the open trunk then rummaged among the cloth and plate. I’d been right. There was no little box, nestling among folds of cloth. No glass vial, no sacred fragment of wood.

  ‘He said it was cursed,’ I said.

  ‘Who said it was cursed? What was cursed?’

  ‘What are you talking about, Nick?’

  There was exasperation as well as alarm in my friends’ voices.

  ‘It’ll take too long to tell now,’ I said.

  ‘Then tell it to the Justice,’ said Jack. ‘Let’s get out of here, for Christ’s sake.’

  But it was too late. We should have quit the tent the moment that we’d seen what it contained. All at once the crowded space–three living players in the company of one dead publisher and bookseller–was filled with two more figures. Big fellows they were, the ones with beetling brows. Justice Farnaby’s constables. We’d seen the easy way they dealt with large Ursula the pig woman and the equally large Wapping Doll. Three slender players were no match for them.

  They indicated in their rough-and-ready fashion that they’d been alerted by reports of a pistol shot. Now we were to accompany them to Justice Farnaby. Obviously, we stammered out our innocence and ignorance. But equally obviously we had questions to answer. Jack and Abel and I were left with no choice but to go quietly to the Pie-Powder Court. We exited the tent, leaving the body on the ground. The constables hadn’t quite placed us under arrest. Yet, if we had tried to flee, not only would it have suggested guilt but we would most certainly have been brought down by their long staffs of office.

  The only crumb of comfort in all this was that the makeshift court was situated in part of what had once been St Bartholomew’s Priory–a tent or stall obviously being an undignified place for the administration of justice–and that the old monastic buildings lay in this quarter of the fair. As I’ve already mentioned, it was a comparatively quiet spot, and so we didn’t attract too many gawpers while we were being escorted there. We tried to put on an air of innocence, as though we were simply out for a stroll with this pair of hulking figures. But then innocence is the air assumed by every guilty man, isn’t it?

  The grounds and buildings of Bartholomew Fair are owned by the Rich family (never was a family better named) and, at some time in the past, one of them had caused parts of the priory to be restored, not for pious reasons but so that he could swell his coffers by leasing them out. So we found ourselves shoved into a room that might once have been a monk’s cell and was now used for holding malefactors caught at the fair. The constables searched us in a rudimentary fashion. We had nothing of interest about our persons. The pile of paper that I’d retrieved from under Hatch’s body and tucked into my shirt, the foul papers of Shakespeare’s Domitian, were riffled through. I doubted that either man could read, and even if he could, what was there to see? A load of paper which its creator considered worthless and wished to see destroyed.

  It crossed my mind to attempt to bribe our gaolers with the money that WS had given me, and indeed they were reluctant to hand back the coins once they’d tipped them out of my purse. But the very fact that they did return them indicated that they were principled. Either that or they were more fearful of Justice Farnaby than they were eager to be corrupted into letting us go. Our search over, they turned the key in the door. There was nowhere to sit in the cell. A small barred window let in a few dusty strings of light and the distant sounds of people enjoying themselves.

  Jack Wilson and Abel Glaze looked at me. They didn’t have to say a word. This was my fault, wasn’t it? What had I
got them into? Nevertheless we were innocent. Cling to that fact. Rely on English justice and fair play. A few words with Justice Farnaby should be enough to clear up the confusion. Or so I thought.

  ‘Nick,’ said Abel, ‘have you told us everything?’

  ‘Yes. No. Not exactly,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe you had better tell us everything,’ said Jack, ‘before we find ourselves going to Heaven in a string.’

  Jack’s reference to a Tyburn execution was casual enough, but it made me feel cold in spite of the stuffy cell.

  ‘There’s not much to say,’ I said. ‘But Ulysses Hatch wasn’t only in the business of selling Shakespeare’s foul papers…’

  And so I explained how the bookseller had mistakenly assumed I’d come in quest of the relic, how he’d shown it to me and how–when it was evident that I knew nothing of it–he had hastily hidden it away again in the chest, with instructions to keep mum. The revelation about the relic took them aback, but I could see that they believed me. If I was going to invent a story it wouldn’t have been as far fetched as this one.

  ‘That’s what you were looking in the trunk for?’ said Abel. ‘A fragment of the True Cross? Can it really be so?’

  ‘Real or sham, the item has gone.’

  ‘Taken by whoever murdered Hatch?’ said Jack.

  ‘It looks like it.’

  ‘Then it’s easy,’ said Abel. ‘We find the person who’s in possession of this so-called fragment and get him arrested.’

  ‘And how are we going to find this individual when we’re locked up in here?’ said Jack. ‘Besides, if he’s any sense he’ll be miles away by now.’

  ‘It may be that we’re looking for a dead man,’ I said. ‘Ulysses Hatch told me that to touch the relic was death. It seems to have worked in his case.’

  Like the remark about the Tyburn string, this added to the general discomfort of the cell.

  ‘Tom Gally is at the fair,’ said Jack. ‘From what you said, Nick, he was after something.’

  ‘It might have been the foul papers or the piece of the cross–but perhaps he wasn’t after anything particular. Gally’s the kind of person who sniffs around by instinct. Like a dog. Though it may be that he…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He noticed me leaving Hatch’s tent. Perhaps he’d already arranged to buy the relic–or the foul papers–and got worried when he saw me. Thought I was trying to get my hands on them and stepped in to prevent it.’

  ‘But why should he kill Hatch?’ said Jack. ‘He’d simply offer him more money than you did. Henslowe’s got deep pockets.’

  This was true enough and I could think of no reply. After a time, Abel said,

  ‘There were those two women about to fight over Hatch, weren’t there? The pig woman and what’s her name…?’

  ‘Wapping Doll.’

  ‘Either of them looks as though she’d be capable of felling a man with her bare hands. Where did Wapping Doll go after the Justice broke up the fight? Back to the tent to confront Master Hatch?’

  Abel was so excited by this possibility that he couldn’t resist throwing us another suspect. ‘And don’t forget we saw Nightingale’s accomplice–that nip called Peter Perkin–coming out of Hatch’s tent just as we got there.’

  ‘Hatch was alive then,’ I said. ‘And afterwards.’

  ‘Perkin could have gone back later.’

  ‘Someone went back later.’

  ‘You said that there was bad feeling between William Shakespeare and Ulysses Hatch?’ said Abel.

  ‘Yes. It’s one reason why he wasn’t willing to deal with the bookseller himself,’ I confirmed. ‘And before you go any further, Abel, I don’t think WS slipped into Hatch’s tent and killed him with his own pistol. Have you seen him around this fair? I haven’t.’

  ‘Master Shakespeare is good at passing unnoticed,’ said Jack.

  It was true that WS had the knack of slipping into places and out again without drawing attention to himself, but for some reason the comment irritated me.

  ‘Don’t forget he’s killed many–in his imagination,’ said Abel.

  This irritated me even more and I said, ‘Well, so have I killed many, and so has everyone, apart from the purest nun.’

  ‘Leaving aside William, we have at least three people who might have done this murder,’ said Jack. ‘Two of them possibly because they wished to get their hands on the relic, that’s Tom Gally and Peter Perkin. And then we have this Wapping Doll, who is apparently jealous of Hatch’s success with the pig woman. Perhaps she headed back to the tent when the fight was stopped. Her blood was up and she decided to have it out with him.’

  I recalled the scene between Wapping Doll and Ulysses Hatch in the tent. There’d been a kind of ribald affection there. They might strike each other, just as she might swap blows with a woman. But to seize a pistol and shoot him…? And why should she take the so-called relic away with her? She was frightened of it. I didn’t think so. I shook my head, and noticed that the others were shaking theirs at the same time.

  ‘It doesn’t work, Nick,’ said Jack. ‘I know Tom Gally a little better than either of you since I’ve been with the playhouses longer. He’s a nasty piece of work, ready to spread lies and slander and not above a spot of pilfering. But that’s a distance away from being a murderer.’

  ‘It’s the same with Peter Perkin,’ said Abel. ‘I don’t know him or Ben Nightingale except by reputation. But nips and foists rely on their wits and the speed of their hands. I have kept company with a few of them in the past. They don’t kill people. Why, their proudest boast is to rob you without you noticing it for the next five hours.’

  ‘I was thinking the same about Wapping Doll,’ I said. ‘She’s not a murderer surely. So…if we exclude them, who does that leave?’

  ‘It leaves us,’ said Abel.

  ‘You mean, it leaves me,’ I said.

  My friends didn’t reply but I realized that this was exactly what they did mean. I had been summoned into the tent by Ulysses Hatch while they had been left outside, only to drift out of earshot after a few minutes. The bookseller and I had been talking for half an hour perhaps. In all probability, I had been the last person to see him alive apart from his murderer. Of course, Jack and Abel couldn’t really think I was guilty of shooting him, could they? If so, why would I have urged them to accompany me on my second visit to Hatch’s tent? Besides, if I’d really killed Hatch I would be halfway across the Surrey Downs by now.

  These were gloomy thoughts. We lapsed into silence, slouching against the cell walls or sitting with our backs to them. The dusty rays of sunlight inched up the far wall. For all that there was nothing so alarming about our present predicament, my confidence that this was a simple confusion which would be cleared up after a few words with Justice Farnaby began to dwindle. I’d been in gaol before, under a false accusation. So had Jack Wilson, come to that, since he’d served a few days in one of the Clink prisons following a youthful affray. And I didn’t doubt that Abel was familiar with the inside of a cell or two. Nevertheless, it is not pleasant to be locked up, even for an hour or so. And there’s something incongruous about being confined in the midst of a fair while everyone else is so free and easy. When the noises of it–the shouts and the cries and songs–come distantly to your ears you feel like a child, punished and shut out from some treat.

  I may have been quietly fearful but, sitting against the rough-cast wall, I fell into a kind of daydream in which the figure of Tom Gally pursued me, trying to sell copies of a pamphlet called The Wanton Wife complete with salty pictures. Over Gally’s head hovered a raven shrieking ‘Jump to it!’ Then I visualized a youthful William Shakespeare–more hair in those days–whispering compliments into the ear of an equally youthful Wapping Doll, as fine a piece of goods as Ulysses Hatch had claimed. Suddenly I was woken by the sound of the key turning in the cell door. Jack and Abel also jerked to attention.

  The beetle-browed constables stood at the door. By gestures rath
er than words they indicated that we were to follow them. They escorted us down a flagged passage and into a pillared chamber that had probably been the monks’ refectory. At the far end, seated in an oak chair that could have belonged to a prior, was Justice Walter Farnaby, neatly bearded and precise. There were a handful of other individuals standing or sitting near by, including a couple more constables and an elderly clerk positioned behind a table with pen and paper. This was Pie-Powder Court. I don’t know the origins of this strange name but I do know that it’s not empowered to hear serious cases, only instances of trading without licence or cheating or petty theft. Nevertheless, Justice Farnaby had the authority to arraign any man and to cause him to be taken before a more severe court. We lined up before him, flanked by the constables. To judge by the way he was looking at us, if we weren’t quite prisoners we were definitely not free men.

  There was a sudden shriek of ‘That’s him!’ from one of the bystanders. This was unnerving. More unnerving still was to discover that it was Wapping Doll. She was pointing at me. Her face was distorted with rage or grief. ‘I saw him with my Yew-lee. I left them alone together. He killed Ulysses Hatch!’

  ‘Be silent, woman,’ said Justice Farnaby. ‘You don’t know what you’re saying.’

  His voice was low but commanding. Wapping Doll gaped but said nothing more. Farnaby requested that we identify ourselves by name and occupation. It was for the record only, since I’d have bet a week’s wages he already knew who we were.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said Justice Farnaby to us when this process was complete, ‘a man has been murdered. This is too grave a matter for Pie-Powder Court. I have given orders that Hatch’s tent is to be guarded before the body is removed. Nevertheless, preliminary statements will be taken here and, if the evidence is persuasive, indictments will follow. I have already heard accounts from several of those who recently saw Master Hatch alive, like that lady there. But you were the first to find him dead. Your stories, if you please.’