“Besides,” she continued, “it couldn’t have been a robbery. Look.” She gestured to the ground where the body had lain. There, soaked in blood, was the shapeless lump of Larchford’s purse. It appeared to contain a number of coins, outlined in the wet silk. “He wasn’t robbed at all, and never mind whether he knew his attacker.”
Pepper grunted, apparently in agreement. “There seems to be a substantial amount of money there.”
Suzanne wondered where all that cash would end up, but decided it wasn’t her concern. She reached down to pull the sword from its scabbard. It came easily, the gold and silver hilt glinting in the morning sun. By its marking, the blade was Toledo steel and kept well sharpened and cleaned. Suzanne was certain it never left its scabbard except for maintenance. She handed the weapon off to Pepper, then drew the dagger from its scabbard.
Larchford’s dagger was a different story. Most folks carried knives to eat with and for general utility, but for a nobleman such as this, a dagger wouldn’t get so much use as one belonging to a commoner. These days the very rich used special cutlery for eating, including forks and such, made of silver or gold like their plate. Larchford’s dagger should have been as much for show as his sword. But it plainly was not.
Fancy though it was, unlike the sword, this dagger was filthy. It bore streaks of something brown along its gutter, and a line of it circled the blade at the hilt. “Look here,” she said to Pepper, and handed him the knife. “He’s been cutting something with this besides food.”
Pepper turned the dagger this way and that to examine the substance on the blade. “Looks like food to me. Gravy?”
“Smell it.”
He did so, and wrinkled his nose. “I say, not food.”
“Blood. You’ve seen old blood more than once, I imagine.”
He nodded. Then with a thumbnail he scraped at a bit of the brown residue and it came off in tiny flakes. “You may be right.”
“Taste it.”
To her astonishment, he took a flake and set it on his tongue. She couldn’t help making a sour face, but quickly straightened it with a forced smile. Then he nodded. “Yes. Blood.”
“What could he have been cutting that there’s so much blood on his dagger?”
“Rare meat?”
She shook her head.
“Very rare meat?”
Again she shook her head. “There would be grease on the blade. There isn’t any here at all. Unless he was dressing an animal himself, which I daresay is not like him to do himself with his own dagger. Nor like any nobleman in the present day, even one who enjoys hunting. So very messy.”
“Oh, some still do dress their own game.”
“But not very many, and least of all Larchford. He was not a hunter to speak of.”
“I thought you said you didn’t know him.”
“I know someone who does, and I’ve heard enough about him myself.”
“Then perhaps you could put me in touch with this friend of yours. I have some questions for him.”
Such eagerness from the constable! There must already be pressure to solve this. Suzanne shook her head, and never considered putting Pepper in touch with Daniel. “I’ll question him myself.”
“But the king will want me to do it.”
And Pepper would want praise from the king for doing it, but would certainly botch the interview and annoy Daniel in the process. “Don’t worry, Constable. The king will be pleased with your work in this. But I must talk to my friend myself.” Suzanne disliked the idea of coming to Charles’s attention for this sort of thing, and even more disliked involving Daniel in a public way, so she was perfectly happy to let Pepper take whatever credit was to be had when they should find the killer. If they even did find the killer.
He narrowed his eyes at her, skeptical, then said, “Very well. Come to me when you’ve spoken to this friend of yours, and tell me what he says.”
“I’ll do that.” Maybe.
A rectangular outline in one of Larchford’s jacket pockets caught Suzanne’s eye, and she leaned down to have a look. “There’s something in there.” Her hand twitched to reach for it, but then curled back away from the dead body.
Pepper didn’t require urging. He reached into the pocket with two fingers and tugged from it a piece of paper folded into a small packet. He straightened and unfolded it. A corner of it had been stained with blood, and when opened there was a dark brownish-red rose at the center. Pepper grunted as he read the thing.
“What does it say?”
He frowned and didn’t reply.
“Here, let me read it.”
He handed it over. “Be my guest. Let me know if you make anything of it.”
It was a note, on paper edged in gilt, with an elaborate, stylized fleur-de-lis at the bottom, but as she tried to read it she realized it was nothing more than a series of meaningless letters. No spaces, just three lines of characters. Some of them were symbols of various kinds.
“Well?”
“It’s a note.”
“Even I can tell that.”
“It’s in code.”
Pepper stepped close, to look at it over her shoulder. “A code, you say?”
“Well, it doesn’t appear to be a foreign language. Certainly not Latin, Spanish, or French. I know enough of those languages to recognize them when I see them. This is not them.”
“What, then?”
She shrugged.
“Let me have it, then, and I’ll study it.” Pepper reached for it, but Suzanne flicked the paper away from his fingers.
“I’ll take it to my friend. Perhaps he knows something about Larchford’s doings and why he might need to write in code.”
Pepper considered that for a moment, then nodded.
Suzanne peered at the paper, overcome by curiosity and wanting terribly to know what this message was.
Chapter Eight
For days Suzanne spent every spare moment gazing at that paper, struggling to see a pattern in the letters that might tell her the key to the code. But nothing. All she accomplished was to give herself a headache.
The New Globe Players’ production of Macbeth opened the following Friday, amid as much hoopla as the company could muster for it. Bills were posted in every spot in Southwark available for them, and some across the river in several of the newer neighborhoods. Not too close to the new theatre, but enough to bring some common folk over the bridge for a look. A large notice went up in front of the theatre entrance several days before the opening, the play title a single word across the top in enormous black letters. MACBETH. Not “The Scottish Play,” nor “The Bard’s Play.” The public wasn’t generally cognizant of the superstition regarding Shakespeare’s Scottish play, but enough were that Suzanne wished to prevent any rumors that the troupe might be in trouble, either from bad luck or from desperation. She would keep the minds of the public away from the superstition and everyone thinking that it was one of Shakespeare’s best and most popular. Macbeth.
Suzanne’s excitement made her breathless as she waited to make her first stage entrance in more than a decade. She told herself she’d put on a performance of some sort nearly every day of her life, and this was just more public. Rehearsals had been inspired, and she nearly grinned to play a true madwoman.
The performance was delicious. Ramsay’s lust for her as Macbeth and his terror for his soul fed the madness in her. The ambition of Lady Macbeth drove her onward, and as she scrubbed and scrubbed imaginary blood from her hands she very nearly saw it there. The audience, usually eager to comment on the action or chat with each other about nothing, was at that moment silent. Breathless. But it was only afterward she realized it, for at that moment she was the madwoman Lady Macbeth, her soul lost to ambition, the mortal sin of pride.
Afterward, as she sat at the makeup table in the green room to clean her face of the paint that defined her features to the third-gallery audience, Ramsay came to praise her performance. Suzanne received his compliments with giddy elat
ion. Such a pleasure to be onstage again! She couldn’t help the joyful smile she turned to him as he knelt beside her, and nearly bounced in her seat.
“They received us well, didn’t they?” he said.
She embraced him in a big, exuberant hug worthy of a girl half her age. “Oh, they did!”
“You were magnificent. I couldn’t have chosen a more fascinating Lady Macbeth.”
She drew a deep breath, and let it out slowly through puffed-out cheeks, unable to reply.
“And you’ll be as fine tomorrow . . . and tomorrow . . . and . . . tomorrow . . .”
That brought a helpless laugh that left her leaning on the table before her. “Oh, I look forward to it!”
“When the weekend is done, you must come with me to see the Duke’s Men play Molière. All next week they’ll be putting on a play called The Ridiculous Précieuses. It’s about two very silly French girls. They say it’s side-splitting. You will enjoy it, I swear it.”
Just then Suzanne was in such a good mood, so drunk from applause, she might have agreed to accompany him to the moon. “Very well, if you want it so much. Let’s go see what the competition is up to.”
Not that The New Globe Players would ever be any competition for the royal players. There was far too much money funneled into the royal troupes for anyone in London to even compare any of the commons theatres. But Suzanne was in a very good mood and imagined for a moment her troupe might compare favorably.
On the other hand, Daniel’s reaction to that afternoon’s performance was less enthusiastic. At her invitation he joined her for supper in her quarters before he would go home to his wife, and his demeanor was somewhat sullen and subdued.
“Well, what did you think of the play?” Suzanne was still elated, and so hungry she forgot her hard-won manners and tore into the rabbit and Irish bread Sheila had just served. But the joy in her lost its edge when Daniel only shrugged one shoulder and nibbled at a shred of meat.
“It went well, I suppose,” he said.
“You didn’t think I was good?”
“Of course, you were good. I can’t imagine you doing anything without doing it well.” His emphasis of the word “good” suggested he really meant “not good enough.”
“But you think it was just ordinary.”
He shrugged again. “As I said, you always do well. This is just another one of those things.”
It seemed nothing she ever did was exceptional to him, not because she didn’t do such things but because she wasn’t exceptional herself. She gazed at him, wondering whether to pry a real compliment out of him or take this as if it were one. In the end she sighed and said, “Well, I enjoyed it if nobody else did. I’ve missed being on the stage.”
“I can’t say as I particularly like seeing women on the stage. It seems a man’s occupation, I think.” He picked up a leg piece and bit into it, pretending his remark was casual and inconsequential, rather than the blow it felt to her.
“I disagree.” Suzanne took a substantial bite from a bit of the rabbit, and thought how very tasty it was today. The entire world seemed brighter. It smelled better. It offered a better future. But Daniel was dampening it all just by being himself, and she realized he was like this often. She looked across the table at him, and wondered what she’d seen in him all those years ago. Then she pulled off a bit of Sheila’s bread and popped it into her mouth. As she savored it, ignoring Daniel’s sulk, there came a knock at the door.
Sheila hurried from the kitchen to answer it, and in stepped Arturo. He made a slight bow to Suzanne, then a deeper one to the earl. He addressed Suzanne.
“Mistress Suzanne, I heard you were summoned to the corpse of the dead earl some days ago.”
“I was.”
“And you talked to Constable Pepper on the subject of who done the deed.”
She shrugged. “Not really. For the most part we discussed how he died rather than who did it.”
“Well, you know, I think ’twas Ramsay done it.”
She sat back, knowing what she was about to hear, but she asked the expected question anyway. “Why do you think that?”
“Well, they all knew each other.”
“Who did?”
“Larchford, Angus, and the Spaniard.”
Suzanne’s eyebrows went up. “Indeed?”
“I seen ’em before, all meeting at the Goat and Boar.”
“When was this?”
“Some months past, I’d say. Weeks, at least.”
“Before Ramsay arrived from Scotland.”
Arturo nodded, as if that had no bearing on his theory at all. “Yes, it were.”
“How does Ramsay, then, become suspect?”
“Because they couldn’t have killed each other. Someone else must have.”
“And so it must have been Ramsay?”
Arturo shrugged. “He’s the most likely.”
Suzanne pretended to consider that for a moment, then said, “Thank you, Arturo. I’ll take this under advisement.”
He nodded, then bowed to the earl again and left.
Suzanne rolled her eyes and picked up her piece of rabbit. “That Arturo just does not like Ramsay. He’d love to see him taken away and hung.”
“I confess I would tend to agree. I think the man is trouble.”
“All men are trouble. But not all are murderers. I suppose you’ve heard about Larchford.”
“All of London has heard. There have been criers up and down everywhere for days, and all you hear from every lip on every Londoner is that the Earl of Larchford was beaten to a bloody, unrecognizable pulp in Southwark.” He took a tone of disgust, as if he were speaking of slugs. “It’s as if they were all taking joy in it. As if they had all done it vicariously and reveled in the deed.”
“You were friends?”
Daniel gave her a sideways glance. “Friends? With Larchford? Hardly.”
“You seem particularly bothered by the public reaction to his death.”
“I’m annoyed that there’s so much glee over the hideously brutal beating of a nobleman.”
“By all accounts he wasn’t well liked.”
“I doubt he had even one friend anywhere, not even at court.”
“But you knew him.”
He grimaced and shrugged. “I must admit knowing him, but not well. He had his allies, but I was never one of them. I can’t say as I’m perturbed . . . or even surprised, really, that he’s dead at the hands of a Southwark ruffian.”
“Why not surprised?”
“The man was a horse’s ass, not to put too fine a point on it, and never gave much thought as to whom he offended. Except the king, of course. He wasn’t an idiot, after all. But neither was he one to trust even so far as one might ordinarily trust a courtier.”
“Such as yourself.”
“Yes, just as myself. Though I can’t claim to be entirely selfless, I, at least, have my limitations for intrigue and a certain respect for the property of others. Larchford had a reputation for money-grubbing beyond the pale, and if there were a loose penny about he would have it in his pocket in an instant no matter whose it was. I wouldn’t care to do business with him, for he had no honor to speak of. He’s a Parliamentarian, you know.”
“No, I didn’t know that.” She certainly couldn’t have guessed by his dress.
“He is. But you’d never know it from the way he talks now.”
“Talked. He’s dead now.”
“Oh. Right.”
“Well, in any case, I don’t imagine many men near the king these days talk much of how friendly they were with Cromwell. Which would explain Larchford’s extravagant dress.”
Daniel shrugged. “Some are less disingenuous than others on it.”
“Do you know what his business ventures have been lately? If I remember correctly, his lands are not so extensive or prosperous that his income would impress anyone at court.” Suzanne was intrigued by the new information from Arturo that Larchford and Santiago were somehow connecte
d.
“One would think so, but by the look of him this past year one would have to think he was pouring every bit of his money into keeping up appearances. For months, on any given day he has sported more gold and silver in his attire than I have in my entire household. I vow, sometimes he fairly clanked with it.”
That made Suzanne giggle, but she brought herself under control by remembering the man had been brutally put to death in a manner one couldn’t wish on a dog. She said, “So, if his lands provide a lackluster income, how did he acquire such riches?”
“Well, there have been rumors he dabbled in mercantile activity.”
“Mercantile?”
“Buying and selling. Very low. And only rumors. Of course he would never admit to it, but some have whispered they’ve heard whispers that he was seen on the docks, associating with merchants and such.”
“A man is free to go where he pleases.”
“And he is certainly free to buy here and sell there as he pleases. But it is nevertheless unseemly for a nobleman to engage in that sort of thing, don’t you think?”
“I shouldn’t think I would have an opinion about what is seemly or unseemly for the nobility. I’ve too often seen them at their least seemly.”
“Well, it is.”
“Times, however, have changed.”
He looked over at her. “I’m an old man, then?”
“Old fashioned, perhaps.”
He grunted and put another shred of meat into his mouth.
Suzanne thought to ask about the dried blood found on Larchford’s dagger. “Have you ever known him to hunt?”
Daniel frowned. “Hunt? You mean, animals?”
“I hope animals.”
“No. Why do you ask?”
“No reason. Was he very strong?”
“More than he appeared, by all accounts. He was something of a horseman. He had a great many of them, and liked to train them himself. So I suppose he had to have some strength.” He peered at her. “What are you getting at?”
“Nothing. Just thinking.” She sat back, no longer hungry as her mind sifted through scattered facts and found nothing useful.
Then she remembered the paper she’d found on Larchford’s body. She leapt up from her seat, saying, “Oh! Wait here for a moment!” as she hurried through her rooms to the bedroom. Tucked into an alcove behind the chimney was a table she used for a writing desk, and on it was the odd encoded note. She snatched it up and hurried back to the sitting room, where she handed the paper to Daniel as she slipped back into her seat.
The Scottish Play Murder (A Restoration Mystery) Page 11