by M. J. Trow
‘How is your husband’s business, madam?’ Thynne asked.
Mary looked confused as if the High Constable were speaking Greek. ‘I don’t know,’ she mumbled. ‘I don’t know …’
‘Look about you, High Constable,’ Bancroft said. ‘Anyone who is anyone in this great city of ours drinks smoke these days. The business is thriving.’
Thynne nodded. That was all to the good. ‘Tell me, madam,’ he said, ‘in the days you saw him last, did your husband seem … different in any way? Distracted?’
Mary blinked. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said, screwing up her kerchief in one hand. She looked up at Bancroft and clutched his sleeve. ‘Thaddeus …?’
Bancroft turned her to face him and held her shoulders gently. He bent towards her and spoke quietly, but not so quietly that Thynne couldn’t hear. ‘What the High Constable is trying to say,’ he said softly, ‘is … did Simon have any reason to kill himself?’
The woman’s hands fluttered up to her mouth and her sob came as a guttural sigh, wrenched from her. Then she controlled herself. ‘None,’ she said. ‘That is no solution to anything. Simon would never … he would never do such a thing. It is a mortal sin.’
‘Indeed it is,’ Thynne said. He turned back to the fire, prodding it with his cane. ‘Well, then,’ he said, stirring the embers. ‘Enemies? Does your husband have enemies, Mistress Bancroft? You say, sir, that his business is doing well. Is it doing too well? You share his trade. You must know everyone who sells this weed. Are any of them, in your opinion, of a murderous disposition?’
‘Have you found his body?’ Mary shouted, unable to bear this cold man and his questions any longer.
Thynne crossed from the fire and looked down at the woman. ‘I have found a body,’ he said. ‘And I should warn you, it is not pretty. It has been in the water for a day, perhaps more. Since then … well, you shall see for yourself.’
The High Constable took his broad-brimmed hat from the stand and hoisted his cane aloft. He nodded at the clerk and ushered the Bancrofts from the room. He led them down the stairs that wound down to the street. Here, people melted away. Those who could avoid his gaze did so, the scurrying multitude scurrying elsewhere, anywhere away from Hugh Thynne. One or two touched their caps to him. No one offered him their wares. And since the Bancrofts were clearly with the High Constable, no one bothered them either. He suddenly ducked to his left, into a dark alley and rapped the heavy end of his cane on the little oak door that seemed to crouch, half-buried in ancient stone. This was the church of St Mary Aldermary and this was where Hugh Thynne habitually took his corpses.
The door creaked open and an old man stood there, bare-headed and wearing a long, leather apron.
‘The Reverend isn’t here, sir,’ he croaked with an ingratiating smile.
‘Did I ask you that?’ Thynne batted him aside. ‘The river body? Which one?’
There were four corpses in the low-vaulted cellar of the church, each one wrapped in a shroud, bound above the head and below the feet, crossed at the ankles. The old man led his visitors to the far corner, where a solitary candle burned. ‘Give us more light, man,’ Thynne barked. ‘Are we moles?’
The old man scuttled away, lighting more tapers as he went and placing them in a semicircle around the body. Thynne took hold of the mildewed linen, then paused. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked. ‘Do you really want to see this? Master Bancroft, would it not be best …?’
But Mary Bancroft had not come down into this dank, dark hole, cold as a witch’s tit and smelling of the sweet dampness of death, to turn back now. She nodded and squeezed Thaddeus Bancroft’s arm. He nodded too and said, ‘Let’s get it over with.’
Thynne pulled the edges of the shroud apart and the candles guttered on the ghastly head inside it. The eyes were sunken back in their sockets and the lips had peeled back from the teeth as the once water-logged skin had contracted. The skin was dark blue, almost black in that half-light. Mary cried out and crossed herself, stumbling backwards and Bancroft caught her in case she fell.
‘Oh, Lord!’ she screamed, her voice coming out in a shrill whistle, as though there was no breath left in her body. ‘Oh, thank the Lord. That dreadful thing is not my Simon.’ She looked up eagerly into Bancroft’s face. ‘It isn’t, is it, Thaddeus? Not Simon?’
Bancroft put a restraining arm around her shoulders and turned her into his chest, where she settled, weeping gently. ‘Show me the hand,’ he said to Thynne quietly. ‘The left.’
Thynne ferreted under the linen and hauled out the limb, limp now and useless. He held the fingers, noting the discolouration of the nails. ‘There may have been a ring here once,’ he said, in case that helped. Not many corpses lay for more than a minute or two along the Thames without losing a ring or two. But it didn’t help.
‘It’s not a ring I’m looking for,’ Bancroft said, over his cousin’s bent head. ‘It’s that. The scar.’ Thynne peered closer. A pale line ran in a jagged pattern from knuckles to wrist. ‘He got that when we were boys, falling from a tree. Lucky he didn’t lose his fingers. That’s him; that’s Simon Bancroft.’
He wanted to get Mary away from that place, with its unburied dead. She had gone so quiet, huddled into his jerkin, clutching at the back of it with one hand, the front of his shirt with the other. She was just rolling her head back and forth and whimpering, ‘No, no, no.’ He wanted to get her to the light, to the air, to the life of Candlewick Street, to reassure her that the whole world did not live in a dripping, foul-smelling tomb. He started to edge around the corpse, towards the door, but Hugh Thynne stepped into his path.
‘A token, if you will,’ he said firmly, jerking his head in the direction of the old man. Bancroft muttered under his breath and fumbled in his purse. He slapped a silver coin into Thynne’s palm. The High Constable looked at it. ‘Then there’s the storage of the corpse thus far,’ he said. ‘Not to mention the shroud. And the candles. And do you want us to see to the burial?’
This last brought a fresh storm of weeping from the widow.
Bancroft was outraged. ‘We Bancrofts bury our own, sir!’ he said, drawing himself up.
‘Well, that is of course your prerogative,’ Thynne said. ‘When shall I tell the magistrate you want to have the case heard?’
‘What?’
Thynne shrugged. ‘Most bodies found in the river are suicides and of course, burying them in consecrated ground is … well, not possible, in fact. There are some clergy who will allow it – they keep a little corner, you know the kind of place …’
Bancroft did indeed know the kind of place. It was usually against the churchyard wall, where the ground was too hard or full of roots to dig too deep. There were no graves marked, no stones to show who rested there. Just nettles and some sad and faded nosegays for a child born dead, a man hanged, a woman drowned. And after a time, grey bones bobbing to the surface to be ploughed back with the next crop. Mary deserved to be kept from ever having to visit a place such as that. He sighed. ‘Or …?’ He let the question hang on the polluted air.
‘Or we can give your cousin a decent burial, no questions asked.’
‘Where will that be?’ Bancroft asked.
Thynne shrugged. ‘Wherever we can find room,’ he said. ‘London’s churchyards are … filling up, as you know. But it will be decent.’
‘A funeral it is, then,’ Bancroft sighed, reaching for his purse again. His sense of family honour surfaced for one last time and he snapped, ‘Would you like something for a Requiem to be sung as well?’
Thynne smiled, thin-lipped as always, sardonic. ‘Now, Master Bancroft,’ he said. ‘We both know that would be against the law, don’t we?’ He watched the pair haul open the door and disappear gratefully into the light of the street. Then he half turned to the old man, pointing the tip of his cane downwards. ‘There are four groats there,’ he said. ‘Pauper’s burial. And tell the vicar he still owes me for the last one.’ He slipped Thaddeus Bancroft’s silver into hi
s purse and left.
Kit Marlowe didn’t mind having guests. In fact, he was only just getting used to being able to have guests, the rooms in Corpus Christi not being built for much carousing and entertaining. But he knew the old adage that was attributed to the Chinese but which was as true in Norton Folgate as it was in the Forbidden City: that guests and fish both stink after three days. If only Shaxsper would stay in the attic, writing poems comparing his mistress to a summer’s day or something equally unlikely, things wouldn’t be so bad. Windlass could feed him and make sure his chamber pot was emptied and in a while the hue and cry would die down, the man could be got out of London and no harm done. But the man would just not stay put and if he wandered out of doors, then he and Marlowe were both for that pleasant little contraption called Skeffington’s Gyves that they kept in the Tower, the innocent-looking machine that punctured lungs and snapped spines. It was true that Marlowe knew people in some very high places, but aiding and abetting a murderer might be a misdemeanour too far, even for Sir Francis Walsingham to put right.
And it wasn’t as though he didn’t have plenty to do. Avoiding Nicholas Faunt was taking up much of his time as it was. Marlowe had seen him at the Rose, meeting with Henslowe and his money men; but investing in plays was not Nicholas Faunt’s style. He had surely been there for some other, darker reason and Marlowe had a sneaky feeling, like a worm in his guts, that said such a reason would involve him, sooner or later. So, the sooner he could move Shakespeare on, out of his garret and back to Stratford, the better. Then he could concentrate on his next play, which, if all went according to plan, would mean that he could retire somewhere that Faunt and his feelers, like the threads of an invading fungus, could not find him. Somewhere he could write, read and laze away his days, with just the fresh air and a few like-minded men for company.
His thoughts had accompanied him in his walk through the dark to the door of Shakespeare’s erstwhile lodging in Water Lane and he raised his hand to knock. But his knuckle had scarcely grazed the wood when the door was flung inwards and a lovely woman stood there, red in the face and with her hair down around her shoulders.
‘Oh!’ she said, hitching up the shoulders of her gown and pulling her hair back from her breasts and trying to tuck it into the combs at the back of her head. ‘Oh! Who are you?’ She peered at him with beautiful, short-sighted eyes. ‘I know you! You’re Kit Marlowe. Will pointed you out one day.’
Marlowe nodded his head pleasantly. ‘I am indeed Christopher Marlowe,’ he said. ‘At your service, madam. And you, I assume, are Mistress Constance Tyler.’
‘Yes,’ she said, giving up the uneven struggle with her hair. ‘I’m sorry to answer the door to you like this. Our maidservant has given notice. Well, not so much given notice as gone home to her mother. She didn’t like—’ Her voice broke. ‘She didn’t like it that there was murder in the house.’
‘A sensitive soul, was she?’ Marlowe asked, pushing the girl back gently and stepping in, closing the door behind him. With the clamour of the street shut out, he dropped his voice. ‘I can’t think of many maidservants who would give up service in a pleasant household like this just because her mistress died. And elsewhere, too. It wasn’t as though the murder happened here.’
‘True.’ Constance chewed her lip, thinking. ‘And it isn’t as though this house was easy before Eleanor died. The children alone would drive you demented, with their constant crying and want, want, want. And the comings and goings at night were like nobody’s business …’ She raised her eyes to Marlowe’s and put a soft, white hand on his chest. ‘And now there’s only me and the old nurse, and the maid has gone. Back to mother, she says, though I don’t think she is any better than she should be.’
‘Her mother?’ Marlowe was almost disappointed that this was proving to be so easy. This girl was like a fountain trickling from a wall; all he needed to do was to sit beside it and he would hear all he needed to know.
She stroked gently down his chest and tucked one finger into his belt. He removed it and held her hand, for good measure. He remembered Shakespeare’s admission that she seemed to know her way about a man. ‘No, Master Marlowe,’ she said, in a voice like a sucking dove, as Shakespeare would doubtless have it. ‘No, the maid is not better than she should be.’
‘Oh, I see. So, you think that she was the cause of all this coming and going, do you?’
‘Well, it wasn’t me, and old nurse is past that kind of thing. And of course, Eleanor is – was – a widow, a very respectable widow. She wouldn’t be up at all hours, with the door opening and closing all night long.’
Marlowe decided to play her at her own game and took a tendril of her ebony hair and twisted it round his finger. ‘Not you, Mistress Constance? Surely you are a woman who could well cause a bit of door opening and closing?’
‘Master Marlowe,’ she said, leaning in to his hand, ‘I am a maid.’
He twisted the hair once more round his finger and she winced, putting up her hand to free it but finding he had her fast. ‘Not a maid, as such, Mistress Constance, surely,’ he said, still in the same friendly tone. He reached with his other hand and patted her belly, which was tight as a drum behind her stomacher. ‘Or should I perhaps inform the Archbishop of Canterbury that we have a virgin birth to look forward to?’
She twisted away, but took his hand with her. He was pulling her hair quite frankly now, there was no caress left in the gesture. ‘Let me go. You’re hurting me. I will tell the Constable.’
‘Will you? I believe that philandery is a felony, Mistress Constance. You have a lovely house here, no doubt with lovely things in it. What a difference some of this would make to the life of poor Mistress Shaxsper, bringing up three children all alone in Stratford.’
Constance stopped pulling against his restraining hand. ‘Mistress Shaxsper?’ she asked, smiling. ‘What has she to do with anything?’
‘Criminal conversation, Mistress. With William Shakespeare, as he calls himself in London.’
‘I would hardly call it a conversation, Master Marlowe, if I were to be honest. We had a chat now and again, to that I will attest. Anything lasting less than three minutes is not a conversation. But, you are right …’ She tossed her head again. ‘Can you let go of my hair? I will tell you all I can, but it is a little painful.’
He twirled his finger to release the curl and she stepped back, combing her fingers through her hair gratefully. She twisted it up behind her head, away from temptation and secured it quickly with her combs.
‘I am right?’ he prompted her.
‘You are right, I am with child. But it isn’t Master Shakespeare’s child. I was already with child when I came to him. He must not know much if he thinks it is his – and yet you tell me he has three children?’
‘He does. Two girls and a boy, if memory serves.’
‘Well, his wife must keep her counsel.’ She smiled wryly. ‘No, my child belongs to someone else entirely and –’ she held up a finger – ‘do not ask who, because I don’t know.’
Marlowe was secretly disappointed. He had hoped not to find that Eleanor Merchant was keeping a common bawdy house, and yet it seemed to be the case. ‘A … customer?’
‘No. I am not a whore, Master Marlowe, no matter what you think of me. After the father of my child, Master Shakespeare is the only man with whom I have lain.’ Her navy-blue eyes looked into his and, although he knew he had often been fooled before, he felt inclined to believe her. ‘I was asleep in my bed some four months since and I was awoken by the noise of a strange knock on the door. I heard my sister go down to answer it and then footsteps on the stairs. Then, before they reached the second landing, where my sister sleeps with the children, there was another knock, a hammering this time, not the gentle knock there had been before. I heard my sister speak, sharply, to whoever was with her and the light that had been shining under my door went out. She went downstairs and I heard her talking again. This time, she took whoever it was into the kitchen, at
the back of the house.’
She sat down suddenly on an oak chair in the hall and crouched over with her hands across her stomach.
‘I was frightened. I didn’t know what was going on. I was too afraid to go to sleep, but could see nothing in the dark. Then, my door opened. I saw the figure of a man outlined against the faint light from the landing and then the door closed again. I held my breath. I didn’t know who it was.’
‘But surely, your sister would not have taken a stranger upstairs, to where her children slept?’ Marlowe was still ready to bet his purse on the bawdy house.
‘I didn’t know what to do. I lay as still as I could as the man backed into the room. When the backs of his legs hit the bed, he sat down and I gasped, or cried out, because he whispered, “Who’s there?” and twisted round to find my throat. I felt his fingers closing, then he said again, really softly, “A girl? How old are you?” I told him eighteen and he took his hand away. He told me to be quiet, for his sake if not my own, then asked if he could hide in my room, that he was a friend of my sister. I was still afraid, but said he could and eventually, I went back to sleep, although I know that sounds strange.’
Marlowe knew what she meant. Often, in moments of extreme danger, he had felt a lassitude creep over him. It was nature’s way of cutting the fear, of sending you to sleep, to a better place. ‘No, Mistress. I understand. And he took advantage of you?’
She smiled then, and looked up under her lashes at him. ‘No, Master Marlowe, by no means. I woke up in the early dawn and he was sleeping beside me. He wasn’t much older than I was, handsome but tired looking and wearing poor clothes. I watched him sleep and saw that he was … stirring. I think you take my meaning?’
Marlowe nodded.
‘I have only a sister, Master Marlowe, and although I lived with her while her husband lived, I was never privy to … any of their private ways, if you understand me. I was curious. I unlaced his breeches, just to see what he kept in there. I was admiring his possessions when I heard a sound and realized that he had woken up. Then … well, who took advantage of who is still a mystery to me. I slept … afterwards, and when I woke, he had gone. Eleanor never spoke of him, and how could I ask her? So, here I am.’ She spread her arms, leaning back so that Marlowe could see the swell of her stomach. ‘No husband, no lover, no sister and, since today, no maidservant. I am not even sure how much money I have. My nephew and nieces are with an aunt in the country, as wards of court. The only thing of value in the house is that old silver jug there.’ She indicated it with a toss of her head. ‘And I’m not even sure that is really mine. Sometimes it stands on that shelf, and sometimes it does not.’