Ramsay sat, and she joined him. Dinner was ham left from the night before, warmed in a pan with gravy, served with baked garlic, and fresh bread baked that morning. Suzanne welcomed the substantial repast, for she was hungry from her trip to the constable’s office. Breakfast had been light, only a slice of buttered bread from yesterday and a cup of ale, and that had been hours ago.
Ramsay’s appetite was also good, and he tucked away a hefty portion of the ham and bread. As he ate, he spoke to her in a tone of utmost sincerity. Strange, for his topic seemed to her a tall tale and perhaps the product of wishful thinking.
“I thank you for inviting me to share your dinner today.”
“I enjoy the company. I’ve never been able to understand how anyone could eat alone.”
“Sure, a bit of conversation helps the digestion, I think. Particularly if the company is as enjoyable as yourself.”
“You flatter me.”
“Not at all. I mean it with all my heart. Since I first had sight of you, I’ve hoped to enjoy your company as often as you might have time for me. For I notice you’re a busy woman, accomplishing great things all on your own.”
Another woman might have taken the compliment as sarcastic criticism, but to Suzanne it was acknowledgment of the advantages she’d given to Piers and the work she’d put into the theatre. She had reason to believe he didn’t mean it as criticism. She had no cause for modesty, but her childhood training forced her to say, “I only do those things because nobody else will.”
“Don’t take me mistakenly, mo banacharaid.” Ramsay held up his palms to ward off a misunderstanding. “Where I come from, a strong woman is to be admired. My mother is the most stubborn and straightforward creature who ever lived, and her mother before her nearly so. I proudly come from a long line of women who could charge into battle had they a mind or need to, right beside the men who sired their children who were my ancestors. ’Tis that very strength that draws me to you.”
“You’re drawn to me? Seriously? And if I were to tell you I have no need of suitors?” Now she was skeptical. She’d heard that very statement too many times from clients who would flatter her into not charging them. In all her years as a whore, the ploy had never worked on her.
“Then I would press my case. I would tell you in return that every woman needs a suitor, and sometimes even when already spoken for.” He put a finger to his mouth to suck grease from it, a gesture that for a moment had Suzanne’s entire attention. Then she blinked herself back into the conversation. There was just something about Ramsay that naturally drew one’s attention.
Suzanne opened her mouth to protest that she was neither married nor engaged, and he held up another palm to keep her from it. “Aye,” he said. “I ken you have no man at present. But I tell you in all seriousness that my heart is yours for the taking and I would be pleased to pursue you were you to allow it.”
Suzanne had taken yesterday’s remarks about wanting her as nothing more than idle banter, but now he seemed serious, even sincere, and that made her more than a little uncomfortable, for she’d once been so very wrong about a man’s sincerity and had never made that mistake since. She regarded him, her head unconsciously tilting to the side, and considered her reply.
He said, “I willnae take no for an answer.”
“All that stubbornness in your heritage.”
“Aye. ’Tis in my blood.”
It would have been lovely to succumb to his charm, to believe that after a lifetime of fending for herself, here was a man who would buffer her from the world. But she was far too old and battered both emotionally and physically to think there existed a mortal, imperfect savior. She chose to sidestep the entire issue. “You’re a Highlander, by your costume and your speech, but Ramsay is a Lowland name, is it not?”
“The bulk of Ramsays live in the south, for a certainty. But my grandfather raised cattle and came with the herds to Moray one year. There he met my grandmother, who begged him to stay, and he did.”
“Just like that?”
“Her father was wealthy, and my grandfather was not. I cannae say as it must have been a difficult decision. Certainly it was a wise one, for he did well and prospered under the guidance of his father-in-law.”
“And that is why you walk around with a ruby necklace on your person?”
With a pleased smile he reached into the pocket in his doublet and drew out the ruby and gold necklace. “’Tis all I have in the world.” He handed it to her. Seen in its entirety and at leisure, the necklace was not as stunning as she’d thought at first. Her imagination had produced a heavy chain and pendulous settings bearing many large rubies, but in reality the piece turned out to be a small string of smallish red stones set in gold that was finely wrought filigree but not particularly heavy with metal. Worth a fortune, but a much smaller one than she’d at first imagined.
“You could sell it and be comfortable for the rest of your life. You don’t need this engagement with the Players.” She turned it over in her fingers.
“All the more reason for you to trust in my sincerity, wouldn’t you say?”
Suzanne, ever reluctant to trust anyone, wondered whether that was the very reason he’d shown her the necklace. She handed it back and he returned it to his pocket.
Through the high, small window that let air in from beneath the stage came voices of actors returning from their dinner break, and thuds of shoes on the stage boards above. They were Arturo, Big Willie, and Tucker, in character. Since yesterday they’d been in the habit of going about ordinary business using high, witchy voices and moving like crazed, interlinked women. Suzanne had taken it as an actor’s exercise in characterization and improvisation, the better to present a strong character and smooth interaction onstage, but at the moment the words she heard seemed extraordinary.
“Double, double, we’re in trouble,” said one who sounded like First Witch, Arturo. “The future wears us to the nubble.”
Second Witch Willie said, “Indeed, indeed, sister. A devil lurks among us we must needs purge. Should we dally, ’twill surely be our end.”
Third Witch Tucker cried, “Another body! Another body! Another body!”
“Hail!”
“Hail!”
“Hail!”
Suzanne expected a surge of belly laughs from the three, but they fell into an eerie silence that made her go pale. Then suddenly there was high, screeching, manic laughter, then the sound of scampering feet on the stage as they hurried into the ’tiring house above.
She said to Ramsay, “I’ll take your statement under advisement.” Then she returned to her dinner without committing herself to a courtship she couldn’t trust.
Chapter Six
It wasn’t until the next afternoon before the evening performance that Suzanne finally caught up with Arturo to ask detailed questions. The questioning before had come from idle curiosity, and now her curiosity had a purpose.
“Tell me, Arturo, who else was in the Goat and Boar with you that evening?” She pulled up a stool to sit next to him at the makeup table in the green room, and folded her hands between her knees. There was no use trying to hide her interest in what he might say, and she leaned forward a bit in eagerness to hear his reply, and at a volume level that might not carry to the others in the room who filled it with their own pre-performance chatter.
Arturo wasn’t nearly so eager to talk about the murder of the Spaniard as she was, and his reply was somewhat distracted. “So,” he said as he cleaned his face in preparation to paint it, “you’ve decided, then, that Ramsay should be taken to Newgate?”
“No, I’m asking you who else witnessed the fight between Ramsay and the Spaniard.”
Arturo stopped wiping his face and looked over at her. She sat still, her demeanor entirely neutral. He said, “You don’t take my word for what happened?”
“It would never occur to me you might not tell me the truth. After all, you need my good will far too much to be caught in a lie, and furthermore I
have no reason to believe you have anything to hide regarding this. My interest is in searching down other witnesses who might be able to answer questions you couldn’t. Such as, what was the gist of the argument between Ramsay and the Spaniard? Where did the Spaniard come from? Was he truly a pirate? How long had he been in London? Why was he in London? Where would he have gone, had he been alive to leave London?”
Arturo relaxed some, and wiped his face some more, slowly. He picked up a shard of an old mirror from the table before him, its edges filed down and dipped in wax to dull them, to see what he could of his face in it as he rubbed off a bit of dirt invisible to Suzanne. “Well, I know he hadn’t been here terribly long. I’d never seen him before that night. I’m certain it was his first time at the Goat and Boar, and there might not be many to know much about him.”
“I won’t know until I ask. Who else did you see there? Any of the other Players?”
Arturo shook his head. “I was the only one from the theatre that night. I believe the lot of them had gone to see the bullbaiting. ’Twas Matthew, I think, who was aquiver at the prospect of it.” He thought a moment, and slowly wiped his face some more, though it was quite clean now. Finally he said, staring into the middle distance as if gazing at a painting depicting the scene, “Angus. He was at their table. Or near it, at least. Sitting near Ramsay, as I remember. More than likely for the sake of passing time with another Scot. He would have been one to speak to Ramsay, and would have heard what passed between the two before their voices were raised.”
“I see. Has Angus told you anything about Ramsay since then?”
Arturo shook his head. “I wouldn’t expect him to. ’Tis none of my business what’s between himself and his countryman.”
“The Spaniard wasn’t his countryman.”
“And so all the more odd he should have sat at that table. In any case, although I like Angus, I don’t know him the way his fellow musicians do. I couldn’t tell you what business he could have had with a Spanish pirate.”
“Do you remember anyone else who might have been there that night?”
Arturo shook his head. “I was, after all, minding my own business and not attending to the others in the room until their conversation grew loud enough I couldn’t ignore it. I couldn’t say why Angus was there, only that he was, and I don’t remember any other faces.”
“Very well, then, Arturo. Thank you.” With that, Suzanne went to have a look for Angus.
But he wasn’t there that night, for that night’s play did not require him. So first thing the next morning she set out to visit him at home. Suzanne knew Angus only by his first name, as she did many of her longtime friends in Southwark. Nicknames were common among entertainers, and that was why she didn’t know Horatio’s real name at all. Angus was a musician from Glasgow who sometimes played for the performances at the Globe, and she thought him quite good. Most people did, she’d heard. He played the Scottish pipes, both mór and beg, and was proficient with timbrel and tabor as well. She’d seen him play both pipes and drum at once, attracting a crowd with Big Willie and his fiddle on a corner in Bank Side, which was their occupation when not busy playing their medieval repertoire for the Globe performances. She knew where he lived, and donned her cloak against the sharpening fall air to go there.
The streets in Southwark teemed always with folks of little means, intruded upon occasionally by carriages passing through, belonging to the wealthier classes from the western end of London across the river. There had been some truth to Daniel’s claim of sending away his carriage to prevent damage to it by gangs of boys out to do mischief, for the streets were thick with idlers and becoming worse every year. Street vendors competed with each other for the attention of anyone who appeared to have cash in their possession, a cacophony quite unlike the genteel quiet of the new neighborhoods closer to Whitehall. Those places had servants to cook, clean, and shop for the household, and no need to buy prepared foods cooked with someone else’s wood on someone else’s fire and eaten from someone else’s container. No need to haggle with a too-savvy child over the price of a used pair of shoes or a stolen watch, and so the byways of such neighborhoods as Pall Mall were absent of noisy commerce. Suzanne walked quickly to the tenement where lived the musician Angus in a one-room flat on the third floor. Inside the stairwell a dark smell greeted her. Moist, like spoiled rubbish and moldy wood. The building was old, and retained the stench of many tenants and their animals.
It was a long, cold walk up. A drunken woman lay splayed on the first landing, her dress shoved up and situated so that her private parts were in full view, her heels on the first step below and her snores echoing up and down the stairwell. Plainly someone had been at her, and Suzanne only hoped it had occurred before the woman had passed out and not after. She went on her way.
Up another flight, and there were shouting voices of a man and woman having a marital argument. Each threatened to kill the other, and Suzanne thought how easily such a threat was made and how difficult to carry out in earnest. She hoped that was the case with Ramsay, for though he did not strike her as particularly trustworthy, she enjoyed the game he played with her. He charmed her, and she wanted his threat to the Spaniard to have been an empty one.
She considered his request to court her. Surely it was a game, she decided, and was not to be taken seriously lest there be disappointment and embarrassment. Those things came too easily in life to suit her, and she preferred to do without. She was far too old to be seriously courted. It would be best to assume he thought so as well.
At last she came to the tenement’s third and top floor, which extended over the street by several feet, the culmination of each floor gaining space in overhang. Through the tiny-paned window in the top landing she could look out and see the building across the street nearly within arm’s reach, for it also gained space as it rose. The street below was dim in the shade of these tenements that encroached as far as they could, to gain for themselves space beyond the land on which they stood. The third floor was much larger than the ground floor, but was divided into many more apartments than the floors below. The air was close up here, hotter, the old building smell much stronger. A whitewashed hallway marked with decades of filthy hand marks and gouges led to the rear of the well, lined with doorways that indicated rooms not much larger than a monk’s cell. It was a building designed for a landlord bent on having as much rent as he could get for the space he owned.
One of the doors toward the rear was open, and Suzanne went toward it, for it was Angus’s. How lucky to find Angus in and plainly awake for visitors.
But when she came to the door and tapped on the doorframe to catch his attention, she saw he was in but not the least ready to receive. Inside the room, Angus lay in a pool of blood, his gut sliced open and his entrails spilled onto the floor.
The sight was the most gruesome she’d seen in all her life, and the smell of blood and bile turned her stomach. Her first reaction was to gasp, cover her mouth with her hand to hold back a scream, then turn and make for the stairs.
But at the top of the stairs she made herself stop. With one hand gripping the newel post hard, she forced her feet to be still. She wouldn’t flee down the stairs; she needed to pull herself together and face what had happened to Angus. It was Angus, to be sure, for she had recognized the bright red hair, which appeared orange next to his body covered in purplish-red blood.
She looked back at the open door, and took a deep breath to steel herself. Now she recognized the dank smell of the building as the stink of Angus’s body creeping through it. The air in the top landing was so thick with the metallic smell of blood she could almost taste it now. Slowly she released her grip on the newel post, and moved toward Angus’s room. At the door, once again in view of the corpse, a sob escaped her. She’d liked Angus, and to see him like this broke her heart. Screwing up her courage, she stepped into the room.
It was tiny. Just large enough to hold a narrow bed, a small table with two chairs, a trunk, and
a washstand, with enough floor space for one or two people to move between them. Atop the trunk lay the case in which he carried his pipes; on the washstand stood a bowl, ewer, and one wadded-up towel; and the table bore a wooden cup and plate, a knife, a wooden spoon, and a stoneware jug. On the bed were a single linen sheet, a woolen blanket, and a feather pillow of blue ticking.
Angus lay half on the mattress, his upper body splayed across it, and the lower half of him was on the floor, as if he were in the process of sliding off the bed to sit on his heels. The enormous slit in his belly gaped red, his various innards spilled out onto the lap made by his bent legs. They were of varying colors: red, blue, gray . . . and black bile oozed from holes nicked by the knife. They glistened with wetness. There had not been enough time since their exposure to air for them to have dried. The murder had happened not long ago at all. She looked to the door, half-fearing the killer might still be lurking about.
She drew a deep breath and told herself to stop being a frightened little girl. Her mind calmed as she made herself think of this as a problem to be solved and not a threat to herself. Someone had murdered Angus, and it was possible she might be equipped to learn who it was. That thought brought steel to her spine and settled her stomach so she could think clearly. She began to examine the room closely to see what she could see.
The floor was bare of covering of any kind. No reed mats, nor even loose reeds. In fact, it was remarkable how clean Angus had kept this place, though everyone knew he was a tidy man. The blood from the body had flowed over about half of the open floor near the bed, which stood beneath the window, at the end of the room opposite the door. Suzanne saw footprints across the near end of the room. She raised the hem of her cloak and stepped over to examine them closely.
The maker of the prints had been standing fairly close to Angus, where the blood surrounded the body, then walked out of the puddle toward the trunk. Apparently there had been no rummaging through the cabinet inside the washstand, for the prints stopped only at the trunk, the toes pointing directly at it, then faint marks indicated a retreat straight out the door. Those marks faded until they ended just inside. The killer surely hadn’t stayed very long, for the bloody prints had not time to dry to black since the stop at the trunk. A shiver shook her spine as she realized she must have just missed him. Perhaps she’d even passed him on the street coming in. The thought left her breathless.
The Scottish Play Murder (A Restoration Mystery) Page 7