Praise for Leonard Tourney’s previous Matthew Stock Mystery, The Players’ Boy is Dead
“Marvelously readable . . . This detective story, written in the style of sixteenth-century England, is vividly evocative of its era.”
People
“Exceptional.”
Washington Post
“A truly original suspense novel set in Elizabethan England—a most satisfying story.”
M.M. MacGiffin
The Cleveland Plain Dealer
Also by Leonard Tourney
Published by Ballantine Books:
THE BARTHOLOMEW FAIR MURDERS
THE PLAYERS’ BOY IS DEAD
LOW TREASON
FAMILIAR TREASON
Leonard Tourney
BALLANTINE BOOKS • NEW YORK
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States of America by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published, in hardcover, by E.P. Dutton, Inc., in 1984.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast.
ISBN 0-345-34372-7
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Ballantine Books Edition: March 1989
FOR MARTHA, ANNE AND MEGAN
Table of Contents
• AUTHORS NOTE •
• PROLOGUE •
• ONE •
• TWO •
• THREE •
• SIX •
• SEVEN •
• EIGHT •
• ELEVEN •
• TWELVE •
• THIRTEEN •
• FOURTEEN •
• FIFTEEN •
• SIXTEEN •
• SEVENTEEN •
• EIGHTEEN •
• NINETEEN •
• TWENTY •
• TWENTY-ONE •
• EPILOGUE •
• AUTHORS NOTE •
THIS is a novel of detection and of the supernatural. The persons, events, and more specifically the phenomenon described in the book as the Chelmsford Horror are figments of the imagination. The place, time, and psychological atmosphere, however, are real. Chelmsford was—and remains—a town in Essex, England; and during the reign of Elizabeth I over two hundred men and women were hanged for witchcraft there, an act of carnage that dwarfs the better-known episode of a century later that made immortal the name of the little town of Salem, Massachusetts.
It is small consolation in this more rational age to think that the great majority of those accused, tried, and hanged in Chelmsford were innocent—or, at worst, guilty only of being old, in most cases female, and, in the eyes of their neighbors, strange. Hardly more consolation to consider that a minority of the alleged witches may have been witches in fact! Innocent or guilty, either would have cause, were it possible, to rise from their graves to avenge themselves on their accusers. One must keep an open mind in such matters.
CHELMSFORD, ESSEX, ENGLAND
September, 1602
• PROLOGUE •
IN THE DARK, GLOOMY HOUSE ON HIGH STREET, THINGS WERE GOING FROM BAD TO WORSE. SUSAN’S MASTER, A GLOVER BY TRADE, WAS AFFLICTED BY A MYSTERIOUS AILMENT THAT HIS PHYSICIAN WAS UNABLE TO DIAGNOSE, MUCH LESS CURE. THE GLOVER’S WIFE, A TERRIBLE TERMAGANT IN THE BEST OF TIMES, HAD BECOME MORE SHREWISH AND WILLFUL THAN EVER, AND POOR SUSAN HERSELF, ONE OF THE TWO REMAINING SERVANTS IN THE HOUSE, HAD FALLEN AFOUL OF A STRANGE MELANCHOLY HUMOR THAT MADE HER CONTINUALLY NERVOUS AND MOROSE. FOR WEEKS SHE HAD BEEN MOVING ABOUT IN A FOG, STARTING AT EVERY KNOCK, CREAK, RATTLE, OR SLAM, SHUNNING CERTAIN ROOMS IN THE HOUSE AS THOUGH THEY WERE UNDER HEAVY CURSE, AND PERFORMING STRANGE RITUALS, MANY OF HER OWN DEVISE, THAT GAVE HER SMALL COMFORT IN HER CONDITION OF HELPLESS AND SEEMINGLY INEXPLICABLE DREAD. BEFORE SHE MADE A BED, SCOURED A POT, SWEPT THE RUSHES, OR FETCHED WATER FROM THE WELL, SHE BLESSED HERSELF. NOT ONCE BUT THRICE! WHEN PASSING AN OLD WOMAN IN THE STREET, SHE WOULD QUICKLY AVERT HER EYES. SHE AVOIDED STRANGE DOGS, ESPECIALLY BLACK ONES, AND AROUND HER NECK SHE WORE AN AMULET, A SMALL LEATHER POUCH FILLED WITH SWEET SCENTED HERBS. URSULA HAD GIVEN THE AMULET TO HER. URSULA WAS HER FRIEND. SUSAN BELIEVED THE AMULET WOULD PROTECT HER, AND ALTHOUGH SHE SUSPECTED IT WAS THE CAUSE OF THE SKIN RASH ON HER BREAST, SHE WAS AFRAID TO TAKE THE AMULET OFF.
Her melancholy had developed to such a state that Susan regularly forgot to perform the most ordinary and essential chores, which is how it was that on a certain evening in mid-September, darkness having already enveloped the street like a cheveril glove, she had quite forgotten to empty the upstairs chamber pots. Her master’s young nephew and house-guest, alerted to her negligence by the reek, gave her a terrible scolding. He called her a dumpish whey-faced slut and lazybones. He said she wasn’t worth the food she ate.
Blubbering and disconsolate, she threw a wrap around her shoulders and carried the offending pots out-of-doors, casting a nervous eye at the big back yard with its cluster of shadowy outbuildings. She made her way down the long garden path without a moon to guide her steps, listening to the crickets’ chorus and the flutter of her heart. She hated the dark more than anything, and the darkest of places was the privy.
The wooden shed, decked with a lush growth of vines and scarlet runners, loomed before her. She took a deep breath of the warm night air and kicked open the door. The stench assaulted her nostrils. She bent down for the low lintel and entered. The door creaked shut behind her.
Worse than a hundred rotting corpses in the charnel house, she thought, braving the stench to empty the pots. She groped in the darkness until her hand found the lime bucket, and with the little handspade kept therein she scattered a fine layer of the stuff over the ordure, like the priest swinging his censer. Then she pushed the door open and went out into the lesser darkness of the night.
“Susan.”
She froze at the sound, then spun around in the direction it came. Next to the privy was a ragged gorse bush, and just beyond its shadow she perceived a shape that she knew was no part of the bush. The shape was motionless but in dim outline female, as the voice whispering her name had been.
“Who’s there?” she asked, her voice quavering. “Who is it that calls my name? Brigit, is that you?”
The shadow stirred and slowly moved toward her. Her heart leaped into her throat, and in her fright she let the pots slip from her grasp and they went clattering onto the cobbled path. “Oh, Christ my Saviour! It’s you, Ursula. Oh, Jesus
God, Ursula. You gave me such a fright! You make no more noise than a cat.”
Her friend laughed, advanced until Susan could see the girl’s features quite clearly, even in the dark.
‘‘I thought you were a ghost,” Susan said.
Ursula laughed again. “We’re meeting tonight,” she said. “In the loft.”
The invitation was softly uttered. Susan hesitated. A little voice inside her head seemed to say: Go back to the house straightway, but something else, something as strong and dark as the night around her, urged her to follow. She clutched the amulet at her breast, her heart racing. Walking softly as in a dream, she followed Ursula.
Susan retrieved the pots the next morning. Her mistress, who had wanted to ease herself during the night and had found no receptacle for that purpose, threatened to beat her black and blue if she did not fetch them.
•ONE’
CONSTABLE Matthew Stock looked out his shop door and had one foot on the cobblestoned street when he saw the hangman bearing down on him like a galleon under full sail making for port.
“Good morning, Constable Stock!” the hangman cried in very good humor.
Matthew returned the greeting, closed the shop door behind him, and shook the hangman’s hand. The hangman screwed up his eyes to peer at the sun. “We’re well met,” he said in the same jovial tone of his greeting. “Since our destination is the same. Both late too, if heaven’s clock tells truly.”
The two men threaded their way down the busy street, Matthew lengthening his stride to keep pace with his companion. As they went, Matthew glimpsed in the little square panes of shopwindow glass the many reflections of himself.
They made an odd pair for a morning’s walk, the hangman and the constable. Matthew was somewhat below the mean in height, stoutish—of unprepossessing figure if the truth be told. He wore a heavy fur-faced gown of the sort successful merchants wear, and a flat velvet cap pulled down to a point just above the brow and covering almost completely his thick black hair. Beneath the cap was his earnest, well-meaning face, forty years in the making, dark like a gypsy’s, smooth-shaven and intelligently affable. Little lines around his eyes and a determined set to his small mouth gave his countenance additional character.
The hangman, on the other hand, was a veritable giant—a good six feet or more if he was an inch. Sims by name, he had broad, muscular shoulders, a tree trunk of a chest, and sturdy thighs and calves taut with energy. He wore a leather jerkin without sleeves and russet hose, and he had a wide freckled face and huge hands downed with curly hair of the same burnished gold hue as that which crowned his head in rich profusion. Astride, bent on his mission and happy for it, he was an intimidating presence who looked more like a forester or a blacksmith than a barber, which is what he was when he wasn’t making a few shillings extra by lopping off the bodily parts of malefactors or stringing them up on the gallows tree for their own good and the entertainment of the town. Tucked beneath his brawny arm was the black hood he wore when he engaged in official duties. A grin of cheerful anticipation lighted his freckled face.
“Marvelous fair morning for a hanging, eh, Constable?” remarked Sims as the two men maneuvered around a farmer’s wagon lumbering up the street and then stopped suddenly to avoid collision with a pedlar carrying a long staff and his gear piled high upon his back.
When they continued on their way, Matthew agreed with Sims’s comment. It was market day in Chelmsford. High Street was full to overflowing with citizens and countrymen come to buy, sell, or just gawk at those who did, and it was fine weather too—a late-October morn with a sky as bright and blue as a robin’s egg, not a wisp of a cloud, and the pleasant smoky wood-fire scent of autumn in the air. It was a marvelous fair day indeed. For some.
Sims began talking about the condemned, ticking off their names with the nonchalance of a storekeeper inventorying his goods—as though Matthew didn’t know who they were, the three malefactors Sims humorously referred to as a “pair and one.” Sims did not break his stride as he talked, looked aside only to wave at a friend leaning from a doorway or to acknowledge the greeting of another poking his head from a window. The crowd in the street was thinning out. Sims picked up speed.
Matthew knew them all, the condemned, and marveled at Sims’s cold-bloodedness. Here was a rare gift—either of God or the Devil, who could tell?—Matthew thought as the two men crossed the bridge into the neighboring hamlet of Moulsham. Within the hour, Sims would string up three souls and take their bodies down again and all his contemplation was a casual remark about the weather! A fine day for a hanging indeed!
Well, it was a wondrous fair day and Matthew thanked God for it, but he himself had no love of hangings. He thought them cruel, gruesome affairs, and only his civic duty, such as beckoned him now, prodded him into attendance. How awful it all was. That terrible moment when the slender coil of hemp fell heir to the body’s weight and, like an obdurate landlord, evicted the soul from its temporal lodgings. If the neck did not snap with the force of the fall, the condemned man—or woman—would wriggle in helpless torment. The eyes would start from the skull and the black swollen tongue protrude obscenely. The pendent body— hardly human now—would become a mockery of its former self. Would dangle like a thing to scare crows. The head would loll foolishly, as though to declare: “See now, gentles, how easily the trick is done. A moment before you saw me quick who now am dead. Avoid my fate—if you can.”
We live in hope to escape the rope, the constable quoted to himself when, the houses falling away on either side, he could see in the distance the place of execution. Sims pled the need to hurry, leaving Matthew to a more leisurely approach to the scene.
In a broad meadow, the scaffold had been erected, raw and grim in the still morning air. The constable mingled with the large and varied crowd. It was, indeed, a veritable anatomy of society—a great press of all ages and conditions such as a clever artist might depict on a broad canvas, from the gentleman in courtier’s hose, doublet, and cap to the poor scraggily bumpkin with his undernourished flea-bitten dog at his feet and hardly a breechclout to his name. Matthew saw women with young children in tow, sad-faced merchants and clerks, a rout of apprentices, and an equally large number of schoolboys released from their Latin exercises of the morning for the greater edification of a public execution. There were balladmongers and vendors of sweets and fruits, laborers and mechanics, alehouse wenches, the poor of the town mingling with the gentry of the county, learned divines, and at least one prominent knight, decked gloriously in a scarlet cape, his manhood celebrated by the monstrous codpiece he wore.
The constable greeted those he knew and pushed his way toward the scaffold where the hangman had now taken his place and was testing his equipment. Hooded and anonymous, Sims seemed even larger and more threatening a personage. Sensing himself the center of attention already, although the prisoners were yet to arrive, Sims was making a great show of these tests, yanking back the lever that operated the trapdoor and then jamming it forward again. The trapdoor fell open with a clatter, banged shut, clattered open again. He seemed to take pleasure in the simple mechanical operation.
He began testing the rope. He put his whole weight on it, then lifted himself up, his brawny arms bulging.
The crowd, increasing in number by the minute, watched it all with interest. They pressed in around the scaffold, talking excitedly. A few applauded when Sims, apparently satisfied with the good working order of his tools, stood back and took a braced stance at the rear of the platform.
While this was going on, Matthew had worked himself into a good position in front of the crowd. He could see the scaffold clearly, and the slight elevation on which the structure had been erected afforded a sweeping view of the spectators as well. He thought about the deaths he would presently witness.
A pair and one, Sims had said. That meant two men of no unusual demerit, and a single woman whose offense was as pernicious as it was damnable. William Hunt had stolen five swine—and poor underfed creatures at that!—from Jacob
Stone, a neighbor and kinsman. Matthew knew Hunt well. The other man was Diggon Ruttledge. Ruttledge was charged with having declared the Queen’s teeth and hair were none of her own, which everyone knew to be the truth but had the wisdom not to publish out-of-doors.
Last would come Ursula Tusser. Ursula was a pale, thin girl of about fifteen, a servant of Thomas Crispin, the tanner. It was her death the crowd had come to see on this fair morning. Not only come to see, but to relish.
A bell tolled in the distance, sweet and clear in the thin air. The crowd quieted. Matthew heard the clomping of horses and the creaking of wheels.
It was the prison cart, preceded by about a dozen men on horseback, some officers, others town officials. One of the dignitaries was the high sheriff of Essex, resplendent in
his chain of office. The procession moved slowly toward the scaffold, the crowd drawing back to let them pass.
The three prisoners in the back of the cart were very miserable in countenance. They were dressed in prison garments—garments that would also serve as their winding sheets. Matthew watched as they were taken out, their manacles and leg-irons struck. The parson led the first of the condemned up the steps to the platform, followed by three of the sheriffs men with halberds, the sheriff s clerk, and the sheriff himself. When everyone was in his place, the parson stepped to the front of the platform and addressed the crowd.
He was a young man with fresh ruddy cheeks, fair hair, and a serious expression. Dressed in his cassock and surplice and with a copy of the Geneva Bible in his hands, he presented a satisfactory image of ecclesiastical authority. He spoke slowly and confidently, addressing the crowd as though they were his own parishioners, which in fact most of them were. In solemn tones he admonished them to take good heed to what they would presently see and reminded them that while all must die, to some it was reserved to die by the law’s hand for numerous crimes he proceeded to summarize. He said he hoped there were none present so frivolous of mind to find more pleasure than instruction in the death of their fellow beings—miscreants as they might be—and then he bowed his head and recited a long prayer.
When this was done, the parson indicated to the sheriff in charge that the secular powers might proceed with the business at hand. The sheriff directed one of the clerks to step forward and read the charges against the prisoners. The charges were lengthy, couched in legal language, and it was doubtful that many hearing them could make sense of it all, although their sum was clear enough: death. Then, without further ado, William Hunt was brought forward beneath the rope.
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