Blood On the Stone

by Jake Lynch

  ‘Bit of cold steel would soon put them in their place,’ Sutherland growled, jutting his chin.

  ‘Hold back, Captain, please,’ Luke said. The Guards had more than enough weaponry at their disposal to quell any civil unrest – but at what cost? It would be the City authorities who would have to cope with any continuing ramifications if the incident ended in bloodshed.

  ‘Get your men to deploy on all the routes from the High to the Sheldonian: Catte Street, Turl Street, and the Broad. Then the King will be protected. We’ll deal with the trouble at source.’

  ‘That man to whom all Asia bowed has learned to kneel,’ another of the characters intoned as the men quit the theatre, ‘to Tamerlane’s more mighty power. Avert, ye gods, all nations cry, from us the hand of the all-conquering god-like Tamerlane.’

  *

  The sound was unmistakable: a weighty pebble landing and skidding on the paved surface of the High, marking an escalation in what had been, until shortly after Luke and Robshaw arrived, a largely verbal confrontation. From one side came the Whiggish mob, dotted with blue ribbons in the hatbands of London men, but with clearly audible undertones of Oxford voices in their battle-cry of ‘No Popery, No Slavery!’ Several held placards aloft bearing the name, ‘William Harbord MP’, where the initials for ‘Member of Parliament’ had been used to spell out ‘Murdered by Papists’, in a suitably lurid shade. It was answered in the other direction by the Tory taunt ‘The Devil hang up all Roundheads!’ – and, more ominously, from the undergraduates, ‘Make ready! Stand back! Knock ’em down! Knock ’em down!’

  Reinforced by a dozen University proctors now seconded to daytime duties – following Luke’s request to the Provost, as he’d promised Mayor Bowell – the constables were holding a narrow band of the High Street separating the two groups. Luke crossed first one way, then the other, straining to locate the stone-thrower. Suddenly, he spotted a group of four young men – almost certainly students – emerging from the end of Queen’s Lane. They were carrying a coat by its corners, which, as they set it down on the edge of the High, revealed its load as a pile of cobble-stones.

  ‘Robshaw!’ Luke shouted immediately, pointing in their direction. ‘Take a snatch squad and get those men! And for God’s sake don’t let them throw those cobbles!’

  Tamerlane’s lines flashed into his mind, in Betterton’s distinctive ringing delivery: ‘Gazing on the golden prey, you thought it looked too great to be so cheaply bought, then seizing it with danger, and the famous lot of war, made it your merit’s due, and valour’s right.’ Robshaw and three burly colleagues closed quickly on the students, quelling the young men’s appetite for the fray with sharp blows from their wooden staves to the knees and shoulders. Two of the constables gathered up what they could of the cobbles – levered out with a strong knife, no doubt, from the surface of Queen’s Lane – but it was too late to avoid the escalation entirely, for some had already been picked up by other students. A volley of stones across the line was met with an answering surge that the constables and proctors were powerless to prevent.

  Suddenly the rival mobs were mingling in chaos under the now slate-grey sky. As if in response to the distant rumbles in the heavens, the noise at street level ratcheted up, and in the fading light Sandys could see weapons being wielded above the heads of the crowd: sticks and clubs, but also the occasional flash of a sharp blade. Forced to the side of the High Street, Luke formed his men into squads of three or four, directing them to pick out what seemed like leaders amid the press, and move in to seize, arrest and shackle them.

  ‘There, man, there – that tall fellow with the pitchfork!’ he yelled at Tim Blount and his team.

  He was so preoccupied with watching the riot that he didn’t notice a cobble tracing an arc in his direction until it was almost too late. At the last moment he turned aside, ensuring that the blow was a glancing one, but he felt a white-hot shaft of pain, and – dabbing the side of his head – noticed the scarlet stain on his fingers as he pulled them away. Luke sat down sharply on the pavement, took out his handkerchief and pressed it to his right temple, and forced himself to take a series of deep breaths.

  Chapter 28

  Binding of Wounds

  John Radcliffe held up his jar of salve to the candlelight from the end of the bar at The Mitre and scraped his spathomele round its inner edges to lift off what little remained of the mixture: a reduction of plantain leaves in sheep’s tallow, beeswax and oil of turpentine. For the last hour-and-a-half, since the rioters had been dispersed by the brief, intense and long-threatened shower the clouds had finally unloaded on the city just before dusk, he had been applying a dressing here and a splint there to the limbs and heads of the walking wounded.

  Now, his medicinal supplies were exhausted, and – having smeared the last of the ointment over a nasty gash on a young man’s shin – he packed away his instruments and turned his attention to the caraway cake and mug of ale that Cate Napper had placed on the counter for him.

  ‘Most palatable,’ the physician opined, as he finished a mouthful of the crumbly confection. ‘Your own work?’ he asked, as he caught Cate’s expression of satisfaction out of the corner of his eye.

  ‘Yes indeed, Doctor. ’Twas a good batch.’

  Luke Sandys wholeheartedly agreed: on the plate in front of him were the last few crumbs of his own portion, which he was surreptitiously scooping up between forefinger and thumb. Waste not, want not.

  *

  At the first pattering sound on the pavement beside him, Sandys had turned his eyes heavenwards and thanked God for the timely arrival of the rain. It fell, literally, on the just and the unjust, as Matthew’s Gospel said. The constables’ efforts to identify, isolate and arrest the ringleaders on either side of the disturbance were abruptly curtailed in the rush for shelter, but that seemed a small price to pay for the restoration of the King’s peace on the streets of Oxford. Just yards away, His Majesty sat enraptured by the fictional conflict unfolding on stage at the Sheldonian, blissfully unaware of the real-life blows, missiles and insults being exchanged between rival factions of his subjects outside.

  ‘Still, no one’s died, eh?’ Radcliffe enquired.

  ‘Not that I know of,’ Luke replied. He himself had escaped the danger of any more serious injury thanks to Robshaw, whose strong arm had lifted him up and helped him to where he knew his master would receive both practical help and sympathy.

  ‘Strange,’ Radcliffe said as he supped his ale. ‘’Tis the second evening this week that I’ve been called away to deal with a medical emergency.’ An old friend of the Nappers, he had been summoned by Cate from his Lincoln College rooms, just across Turl Street, at the first arrivals from the riot. She’d spent the evening bringing fresh supplies of muslin cloth for bandages, even once slipping out to knock up Gibson, the apothecary, for a small quantity of opium, for a patient whose ulna had sustained an especially painful fracture.

  ‘Well, many people in Oxford know you as a good doctor and a good man,’ she said. ‘Take it as a compliment.’

  ‘Kind of you. It certainly shows the trouble we’ve brought on ourselves by having Parliament come here.’

  ‘So what was the first incident?’ Luke asked. ‘Not another political free-for-all?’

  ‘Not exactly. This involved a soldier, a Royal Guardsman judging by his uniform. He’d have come in with the King on Monday.’

  ‘You’ll have to put in for a regular appointment as physician to the regiment,’ Cate said teasingly.

  ‘Ah, well, I’m pretty sure this was all highly irregular,’ the doctor replied. ‘Fellow had discharged his pistol and had a backfire, by the look of it. I had to patch up his wrist and hand as best I could.’

  Despite his sore head, Luke sat bolt upright.

  ‘Where was this, Doctor, and when, if you please?’ His companions looked at him in surprise at the sudden tone of urgency.

  ‘I was with friends in The Spotted Cow, on Hell’s Passage.’

&nbs
p; ‘No, I mean, where were you called out to?’

  ‘Oh, I see! Well, the surroundings were not the most salubrious, I must say: the upstairs room of a house in a rather grimy alleyway off St Michael’s Street.’

  ‘And when?’

  ‘Monday evening, as I said.’

  ‘No, I mean, what time Monday evening?’

  ‘Well, to be honest, I was rather frogmarched over there by the man’s comrade, who said I was to attend to his colonel. I knew that was a lie. Anyway, as we were setting off I remember hearing Great Tom sound the student curfew, so that must’ve been nine o’clock.’

  Luke’s head was ringing: with the imagined sound of the Christ Church bell; with the after-effects of the blow he’d received; but above all with the shattering impact of the physician’s tale on his assumptions about the murder. If Gregory had been undergoing treatment shortly after nine o’clock, then – given the firm recollection by Hignett, the college porter, that Fish Street had been clear when the bell tolled – how could he have killed Harbord? What about later?

  ‘How long were you with the man, Doctor?’

  ‘Well… there were many small burns to be cleansed and salved. One likes to do a thorough job, of course. And it was slow going because they only had the one rushlight. Not like the decent candles the Nappers keep here. So, I might have been there about twenty minutes, all in.’

  Luke still had Ed’s sketch of Gregory folded up in his inside pocket, he realised. He drew it out and showed it to the doctor.

  ‘Was this the man you attended?’ Radcliffe held the drawing close to the candle flame.

  ‘Why, yes! That captures him rather well: the Cavalier whiskers, and the disagreeable expression. Yes, that’s a decent likeness.’

  ‘That’s a sketch of the man we’re holding in the Castle for the murder of the MP, William Harbord.’ Radcliffe and Cate made suitable noises of astonishment. ‘And now I’m rather afraid we’re going to have to let him go, because your story, on the face of it, provides him with a rock-solid alibi.’

  Chapter 29

  ‘The Protestant Whore’

  Luke stalked off down the High towards Magpie Lane in a state of inner turmoil even more unsettling than usual when leaving Cate’s company. The evidence he’d seen for himself, which pointed so clearly to Gregory as the killer: how could it be wrong? As Robshaw said when he brought in the trooper’s dark blue military tunic, there was no doubt the fibres they’d found in the wound had come from there. The colour, and the singeing from the gunpowder, were a precise match.

  One slight possibility remained, that Gregory had left Goat’s Head Yard after being bandaged up, and headed straight for The Unicorn and Jacob’s Well, where he’d then slain the MP. Would he have had enough time to do that before the proctors found the body, and reported it to Robshaw? It seemed highly doubtful: but, Luke now recalled, he’d intended to ask Ed what time was showing on the pendulum clock in the hallway when his deputy had knocked on the door that night. That would allow him to calculate the likely time bracket for the murder, and determine whether Gregory could possibly have done it.

  *

  His brother was in at home, together with Elizabeth, who took one look at Luke’s bandaged head and turned sheet-white. ‘By God, husband, what’s happened to you?’ she wailed.

  ‘It looks worse than it is – got caught by a flying pebble in the riot,’ he replied. She was used to his habit of playing down the dangers that occasionally came his way in the line of duty, but, after being allowed to inspect the wound and dressing for herself, she was somewhat mollified.

  ‘But why didn’t you come home? I’d have tended to you myself, as a wife should.’

  He was touched.

  ‘I know you would have done, my dear, but Dr Radcliffe was at The Mitre.’

  ‘You and that Mitre, you want to spend more time there than you do here,’ she exclaimed – striking a nerve more sharply than she could possibly realise, he told himself – but her overriding emotion was clearly one of relief. When Luke had changed into dry things, she poured out cups of sack and the three of them began to settle back down.

  Before Luke arrived, Elizabeth was nearing the climax of an anecdote she’d heard in the market, which she evidently found highly amusing. Now she insisted on starting all over again. A luxurious carriage had, apparently, been making its way down the High Street, past the junction with Cornmarket and Queen Streets, when a rumour rippled through the semi-permanent mob hanging around that area that the vehicle contained none other than Louise de Kérouaille, the Duchess of Portsmouth and the King’s French mistress. In common parlance, the Duchess was known, as Elizabeth reminded the brothers, as ‘the Catholic whore’.

  ‘Anyhow,’ she went on, ‘they followed the carriage, till they were all standing round it, and the driver says “make way, make way”, only they wouldn’t! “Not for the Catholic Whore,” says they. Then what d’you think happened?’ The brothers looked blank. ‘Cussed if the curtains didn’t open, and out pops a head of red hair. ’Twas only Nell Gwynn! And she says to the crowd, she says, “Calm yourselves, good people… I am the Protestant whore!”’ Elizabeth threw back her head and laughed long and loud.

  ‘And what happened then?’ Ed enquired at last.

  ‘Why, the people gave a great “hurrah,” and let the carriage go past,’ Elizabeth said, dabbing her eyes. ‘Just imagine – “I am the Protestant whore!”’

  ‘Where did you say this took place?’ Luke asked.

  ‘Just by the end of Turl Street, ’twas said.’ At this, he felt a throb of ice through his veins. An image of Cate, in her kitchen at the back of The Mitre, sprang unbidden to his mind’s eye. How many yards was that from the hate and fury of the mob, during the incident his wife was pleased to recount as an amusing anecdote? Ten, at the most.

  With an effort, Luke changed the subject, and turned to Ed.

  ‘When Robshaw came to knock us up the other night, after we’d had supper, you said you happened to glance at the new clock, in the hall. Can you remember what time it said?’

  ‘Yes, surely: five-and-twenty before ten. Why?’

  Luke pulled a face.

  ‘Wind changes, you’ll stick like that, Luke Sandys,’ his wife remarked. ‘Pray tell – what’s on your mind?’

  ‘Why, ’tis the case, my dear – the one against Trooper Gregory, from Ed’s regiment, for the murder of that MP the other night.’

  ‘What of it?’ his brother asked.

  ‘Well, if that was the time when Robshaw called, then I’m pretty sure it’s just collapsed,’ he said wearily.

  Ed pricked up his ears.

  ‘Really? How come?’

  Luke briefly outlined Radcliffe’s story. If he’d been walking towards the house on Goat’s Head Yard at nine o’clock, starting from Holywell Street, he would have arrived at perhaps five past the hour. The body was not there when the porter locked up at Christ Church, bang on nine, so Gregory would not have had time to get back from there before Radcliffe turned up. The physician reckoned to have been with the men for about twenty minutes. Robshaw’s estimate of the time that elapsed between the knock on his own door from the proctors and his arrival on Magpie Lane was ten minutes; so, if that was at five-and-twenty to ten, the body must have been discovered at around five-and-twenty past. There was simply no way for Gregory to have been at the tavern on Fish Street at the time the murder must have been committed.

  Chapter 30

  Solace in the Workshop

  Luke rose early from a disturbed sleep. Taking care not to wake Elizabeth, he put on the same dry clothes he’d chosen the previous evening after returning home damp from the riot, and peered in the looking-glass at the bandage on his head. Dr Radcliffe had done a characteristically neat job: it would hold for another day. He licked his fingers and smoothed down a stray lock of thick, dark hair, which had been displaced by the dressing. Were there a few more flecks of grey? Perhaps. Angling the mirror downwards, Luke took a moment to s
tep back and scrutinise his outline, checking off the still-flat stomach, and – if he said so himself – rather fine calves, well displayed below the knee-straps of his new breeches.

  In the kitchen, he found Joan, the ancient cook-maid, plucking disconsolately at a capon that would form the basis of a boiled dinner for the household.

  ‘Why’s everybody getting up at sparrow-fart?’ she demanded. ‘I’ve already had to fetch breakfast for Master Ed.’ The regiment was to escort the King to the races at Burford for the day, which necessitated starting at first light.

  ‘Well, you know, Joan, early to bed…’ As an attempt to leaven her mood, it was misguided.

  ‘And dead, you mean?’ she snapped back.

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Aye – ’twas what my Ma used to say. The English don’t know how to sleep in, of a morning – they’re always wanting to be up and about, and it kills ’em. “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise” – that’s what you think. Only turn it around – early to rise and early to bed, in the end makes ’em all dead.’

  Luke pondered this homespun wisdom as he kindled the meagre fire she had set in the kitchen grate. The daughter of a slave girl who’d absconded from a Portuguese boat in London and fallen into the strong arms of an Irish labourer, Joan possessed both a choice vocabulary and her own distinctive outlook on life, which Luke had learned to treasure through upbringing and experience.

  ‘Well, if you’ll let me have some bread and a cup of milk, Joan, I’ll get some of those dried figs from the jar and leave you to it.’ Thus provisioned, he walked through to the back of the house, into the capacious workshop his father had installed when it was built, decades earlier.

  When his chance of a college Fellowship was stymied by Elizabeth’s pregnancy with Jane and their hasty marriage, Luke was bound instead to old Samuel Sandys as an apprentice furniture-maker. As it turned out, Providence had blessed him with nimble fingers and a steady hand to go with the virtues of patience and concentration he’d cultivated over years of scholarship. Before long, the father began steering him towards the finer work for which his own ageing faculties were now less suited.