The Point of Death

by Peter Tonkin

  Hugh Outram, Baron Cotehel, soonto-be Lord Outremer, wishes that Thomas Musgrave, Master of the Science of Defence, will forgive the cancellation of our lesson tomorrow afternoon at Highmeet, and hopes the said Master Musgrave, with any retinue he cares to bring, will follow Baron Cotehel to Elfinstone Castle at Rochester on Saturday next, to celebrate with a festival of feasting, music, theatre and swordplay, the Baron's assumption of his legal title to the lands and possessions of Outremer.

  Tom stood for a while in silence, deeply immersed in thought, for this was such an unexpected development that it required the most careful consideration. Kate crossed to the letter where it lay beside the window and read it through again, distracting him unconsciously by the way the light shone through her shift. She distracted him further by giving a delicious gurgle of laughter.

  'What?'

  'Retinue. You have a retinue?'

  'I have Ugo, if he'd care to come.'

  Ugo looked up. 'After what I've heard about Elfinstone, I would be mad to refuse. The lands down to the river are packed with game. The hunting is beyond compare. The food is legendary. Even the lowliest kitchen maids are among the comeliest lasses in Kent ...'

  'I have a retinue,' said Tom.

  'And I have a thought,' said Kate.

  'What thought is that? That of a sudden I have an afternoon at liberty?'

  'Not quite. I think that Highmeet House is likely to be closed and empty, if Baron Cotehel, soon-to-be Lord Outremer, is entertaining at Elfinstone, and we might be well employed in visiting the place in secret before you and your retinue go gaily into the lion's den.'

  ***

  Like the raid on Wormwood in Jewry, the raid on Highmeet St Magnus began with pottage in the ordinary at the Elephant. Here Tom brought Kate, and hither Ugo sent Poley and Diego Villalar when they came down to Blackfriars from Hog Lane a little later. Here too came Will Shakespeare all aglow with excitement with the news that the Rose Company had been employed for a performance of Romeo on Saturday before the Earl of Southampton. Will could - would - talk of nothing else, not even his letter to the ill-fated Lord Strange. In the playwright's desperation to repair the finances of the company, there was simply nothing more important in this world or the next than putting on a performance before the Earl of Southampton that might get them all recognised at Court and put on a sound financial, social and legal footing before simple beggary gulped them all down and condemned them to the horrors of a vagrant life as masterless men, literally being whipped from pillar to post. If Tom or anyone wished to discuss Shakespeare's past rather than his future, they would have to wait a while yet.

  But long before such things had to be addressed by Tom, Kate, Poley and the rest, of course, there was the matter of Highmeet House in St Magnus's parish, lying as unprotected as a sleeping virgin. 'We need another charm,' said Poley. 'A picker of locks,' he translated automatically for Don Diego. 'But the only man I knew who practised those black arts we left pinned to Morton's door. Do you know any such?' he asked Tom.

  'No, but I know a man who may do,' answered Tom. 'Two in fact. Nick o' Darkmans and the man who holds the key to his fetters.'

  Nick o' Darkmans came himself. He would have been mad not to, given his state in the fetters in the Borough Counter. But he had his professional pride, near to being his downfall though it was. He was not for breaking in during daylight - Darkmans, his thief's name, meant 'darkness', and that was when he worked. And he was taking along no trulls. Not even those that looked like Her Majesty God Bless Her and was easy on the eyes like Mistress Kate.

  'Take someone else with you. Someone with a gun,' advised Talbot grimly. 'And I'd be happier if we were holding a hostage here that we were certain he'd come back for.' 'Like his wife or perhaps his daughter?' suggested Kate.

  'Like his purse if he had one, or failing that, his stones,' said Talbot, tapping Nick o' Darkman's codpiece suggestively as he stooped to loose his gyves. 'I still hold your mittimus,' he said to the thief as he stretched stiffly to his full height. 'You let these men down and I'll be after you. Hell itself will be too hot to hold you, Nick o' Dark mans.'

  Nick took them to St Paul's first, though it was nearing six when they got there and the bustle was beginning to ease. There in the great walk, the thief made glancing contact with a little ferret of a man who followed them out into a quiet section of the churchyard beside the currently untenanted gallows where Nick introduced his friend as 'Kit Callot, the deftest charm and master of the black art of lockpicking'.

  'At your service, gentles,' said Callot, bowing particularly low before Kate and leering with all the effect the black stumps of his teeth were capable of exercising. 'The name of the ken you want cracked?'

  Before they got too deeply into practical talk, Nick led them to the Lion in Pissing Alley, between St Paul's and their eventual destination. Here, over a blackjack of ale - which even Kate shared - they began to talk their dark business.

  'Highmeet. It's an evil place,' said Callot at once. 'Cost you extra bite to have the black art practised on those locks. Less o' course your doxy here'll make up the difference. Fair difference, mind,' he said, exposing Kate to another of his gallant leers.

  'Difference between Heaven and Hell for me, as I shouldn't wonder.'

  'You will have to continue to wonder, Master Callot,' said Kate sweetly. 'Nothing you have ever stolen, not even the sum of all you have stolen, buys one light kiss from me.'

  Callot shrugged philosophically. 'Hope one of you rufflers has a weighty purse at his belt, then.'

  'If I did,' said Tom, glancing around the Lion. 'I'd never dare admit it in this company.'

  Callot showed his teeth again in a smile that stopped well below his eyes.

  'Come along, Kit, I'll stand surety for them,' said Nick. 'Get us into the place and I swear you'll not be the loser.'

  Unlike the last charm who worked on Poley's business, thought Tom grimly.

  'Well,' said the charm, 'if the trull ain't going to occupy any of us then she don't come neither.'

  'She's been told,' said Nick. 'She's off to this gentleman's ken as soon as we're on the move. But does we have a deal in this?'

  The lock-pick spat on to his hand and offered it to the thief-master. They shook over the blackjack. 'Done deal,' they said.

  Highmeet was one of the oldest houses in London. It was named from the belief that, during the years between the Roman withdrawal and the French invasion, the Saxons had held their High Moot, or parliament, in its great old halls. Just where its more sinister reputation had come from was more difficult to assess. Unlike the companion house at Wormwood, there had been no family wiped out here - by plague or poison. But the place had an atmosphere, Tom had to admit that. It wasn't by any means just a piece of imaginative extortion from their low company. In the gathering darkness under a lowering sky as the Bellman began to stir, the huge old house sat brooding. The streets near it were deserted, as though no one else wanted to be nearby when the full darkness came and whatever nameless evils within might be released. They had stopped off at one or two other establishments in various unsavoury locations after they had left Pissing Alley. Callot had supplied them with dark lanterns. They had supplied themselves with weapons and all four of them were armed to the teeth. Perhaps against any unexpected occupants of the house, thought Tom; perhaps against each other.

  As they followed the thin beams of gold light under the glooming eaves of the place, Callot tested all the doors. All seemed to be secured by solid locks on the outside. The trick was, he whispered, to know which were likely to be bolted from the inside as well. But a series of judicious experiments - largely consisting of rattling the doors and feeling how firmly they were secured, led Callot at last to the back door in a tiny alley off Bottolph's Lane. Here the charm practised his black arts to good effect and the lock soon snapped open.

  The door swung silently inwards on wellgreased hinges, ushering them into a corridor leading between storerooms into a wide and a
ncient kitchen area. Grouped into a close-spaced file by the corridor, here they spread out, sliding the darkening doors of their lanterns wider.

  'We are here to look,' Tom warned the two thieves. 'To look, not to lift.'

  Together they followed his careful lead out of the main kitchen into other, smaller, food-preparation areas. The corridors between these were something of a maze but Tom led the way with increasing confidence as the widening of the corridors they followed led to more and more stately chambers. And, at last, out into a main hall. From this great area, stairways reached up on right and left, the walls above them laden, as was the tradition, with family portraits. Tom crossed to these at once and shone his lantern up amongst them, regretting poignantly the fact that he had agreed to Nick o' Darkmans's ban on trulls and sent Kate away. For the faces in the family portraits were oddly familiar. The two lowest in the range, the most recent by the looks of things, were strangely, almost disturbingly familiar.

  One showed the idealised portrait of a fair young man, book in hand, fist on sword, gazing with martial frown into the distance while behind him a town seemed to be exploding. Fascinated, Tom climbed the stairs and narrowed his eyes against the glare of the lantern's light reflecting off the varnish on the oil. The young warrior was not holding just any book. He was holding The Practise of Fortification by Charles Ive.

  Frowning as he wrestled with the relevance of that, Tom stepped down to face the man in the second portrait. A young man whose sneer and curling mustachio simply served to emphasise the fact that he had a harelip. Whose extravagant curls, swept in the fashion of the Earl of Southampton's, could not hide the star-shaped scar right in the middle of his forehead.

  Tom turned, looking down into the blaze of Ugo's wide-doored lantern. 'I know them,' he said. 'I know both of these men.'

  There was a great revelation there, just at the back of his mind, just beyond his grip, if only he could put his finger on it. But then a black-clad figure stepped out of the sea of shadows behind the three hooded lanterns. He pointed up at Tom and a flash of light came with a clap of thunder and a concussion against his temple that stopped everything Tom was trying to think and say as instantly and effectively as a blow from a headsman's axe.

  Chapter Twenty-One - Topcliffe

  Tom awoke to piercing agony in his head and his arms. The pain was such that to begin with he thought he must be making those screaming, babbling sounds himself. But then he began to register that the screams were too distant to be his own. And, come to that, of far too high a register ever to issue from his gruff throat. The suspicion that someone must be torturing a woman stabbed through him like a rapier made of ice and did much to jerk him awake. The last rags of unconsciousness were stripped away by the repetition of one name in a deep, flat tone among all the screaming. 'Kate,' said the voice gruffly. 'You know that another turn or two will render you a crippled beggar for life-' The conversation vanished below a renewed bout of weeping and pleading.

  Only the wildest extremes of agony and terror could have rendered Kate so pathetically incoherent, thought Tom grimly. He began to look about himself, seeking an escape for himself and a rescue for her. Things did not seem too hopeful. He was hanging against a high stone wall. A twisting movement allowed him to glance up and he saw that his wrists were cuffed at the end of a yard or so of fetters and these were held by a huge hook set in the rough stone nearly ten feet above the floor. His ankles were also fettered and the massy chain between them just failed to touch the damp flags below. A couple of feet beyond his pendant toes there stood a little table across which lay his rapiers. The room must be two yards square but four yards high at least, for Tom had to look up to see the ankles of people scurrying past a grating just below the ceiling.

  There seemed to be a market of some kind going on out there, where the screams of a tortured woman might blend in almost unremarked behind the screaming of dying calves, sheep and birds. Newgate Market, he suspected. And that made this place a cell in Newgate gaol. And that was very bad news indeed.

  'Very well, Kate. Another notch,' came the gruff voice. 'You have brought it on yourself. If you are fortunate, the joints of your shoulders will slip back into their sockets in time. I have seen it happen ...'

  The voice vanished beneath another wave of helpless pleading, only to rise again, sharply. 'No, Master Baines. I will turn the ratchet. 'Tis my duty. I am the Rackmaster.' Five years of fencing and practice in the Science of Defence had given Tom massive strength of arm, shoulder and chest. Strength lent an added power by desperation as the screams from the neighbouring chamber attained a new intensity. He heaved his whole body upward on his right hand and caught at the chain with his left. One hook, he thought, and no thought of separating his wrists gave Tom a double length of fetters stretching directly up to the hook. And, one thoughtless – unconsidered - element gave him a further hope. Immediately in the crooks behind his knees a pair of shackles were set in the wall. His plan was simple - this was no time for anything complex. He would pull himself up the double chain above him until he could set his heels in the shackles against the wall. Then, leaning back and taking care, he should be able to straighten and stand tall enough to lift free of the hook above his head. He heaved up on his left hand and his right caught the icy links immediately above it.

  Now, Tom reckoned, the only way for such an escape attempt to be effective was if it came unsuspected. Surprise was all. Therefore he breathed shallowly and moved with all the silence at his command. And because of this, he was able to hear more than he might have done of the conversation in the torture chamber next door.

  'This one knows little enough, Master Topcliffe,' said Baines as the renewed screams died to a broken sobbing. 'God knows, if there was any information in that stubborn heart, your rack would have loosened it by now.'

  'Even so, we must persist. There is no telling what little titbit might lie as yet undiscovered under this sorry tongue. And we need what we can glean from her. When we replace this broken creature with the Master of Defence next door, we have to be more careful. This one we may break. That one we may not. Do you see that? The Earl's warrant is very precise. The information is less important than the damage. It is unusual I allow...'

  'Not so, Master Topcliffe. The damage there has always been paramount. Even were we to prove beyond a shadow of doubt that Musgrave was seated at Lord Strange's shoulder when the strawberries arrived, even then we have no warrant to rack him until he breaks. He must be fit to walk - fit to fight a little - before he goes screaming down.'

  ' 'Tis a great risk, however. If as you say he has a mind well-schooled and gifted in logic, he may well have a tongue that will wag before his race is run.'

  ' 'Twill wag to no effect, then. When we are finished here, I am to take him straight to Elfinstone and there he will end his days. And it will matter not one jot who he can talk to in the meantime, for there are none there that will listen, except for the others marked for death in any case. No, I tell you, at the opening of the next new week we shall look to have a brave new world.'

  'Well. So it may prove. But in the meantime, this one does not lie under the Earl's edict. This one we may rack until the arms and legs tear off. So, now your pleading has quietened, tell us, what does the Master of Defence know of the matter of Lord Outremer? What does he know of the will?'

  'Come,' snarled Baines's brutal voice. 'The will, while your legs are still in place at

  least ...'

  Tom had the hook now. He was breathing in great shuddering gasps, feeling up the rough wall with his boot-heels, seeking for a purchase on the solid step of the wallmounted shackles. He was awash with sweat. Apart from the fierce concentration he was forcing into his heels as they explored, all his mind was filled with the vision of his swords. Calculatedly so, for the sounds from the rack room next door had gone almost to the realms of madness. He could not tell - and would not begin to speculate - whether the creak and tear he could hear were coming from the terrible machine
or from its tortured occupant. He bent his arms slowly, lifting the whole of his weighted body upwards, thews threatening to tear as though on the rack themselves. The howling of the victim ceased sounding even human. He had heard sounds like that at the bull-baiting when one of the dogs got gutted.

  There! He had the shackles under his heels. He began to straighten his legs slowly, easing the muscles in his arms and shoulders. Lifting the shackles out of the hook, he straightened his arms and, falling forward at once by the weight of them, he leaped forward and down.

  The arm-shackles slammed across the table, sending it skittering over to slam against the wall beneath the window even as the rapiers jumped and juddered atop the wood. The ankle fetters fell on to the stone flags of the floor. The sound was like the thunder-machine which hung behind the stage at the Rose. As though someone was battering on the door to the cell with all the vigour and power at their command.

  Tom did not hesitate. He grabbed his nearest rapier and slid his hand into the basket of the hilts, catching the hook with his thumb and hurling the scabbard aside as he spun, blade high and wickedly naked, to face Baines and Topcliffe as they came crowding into the torture chamber door. Tom hurled himself forward, his movements hampered by the weight of the iron attached to wrist and ankle, but deadly still. This was no fencing match, this was a proposed slaughter where speed and elegance were irrelevant.

  Topcliffe froze, thunderstruck. Baines hurled himself back into the rack room as Tom's blade hissed towards the Rackmaster. Topcliffe was a big man, ill-kempt and illshaved. Nothing to look at for a man who boasted of the way his rack stories ignited the Queen's blood and allowed him shocking licence with her person. He was a lucky man, however, in that the blade missed his throat, pulled awry after all by the swing of the fetters. Through the top of his shoulder it hissed and he leaped back with a scream almost as high as those of his victim.