The Mammoth Book of Jacobean Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley (ed)

  So did anyone kill Thomas Overbury, I hear you ask?

  Indeed. I killed him, dead as pork.

  I, William Reeve, apprentice to Paul de Loubell, the apothecary who made up prescriptions for Dr Mayerne.

  On the way to the Tower to give Sir Thomas an enema, I was approached by a shifty fellow – I have no idea who he was – and given a substance which I was asked to substitute for the one I was carrying. He offered me £20, more money than I could earn in years. So I did. I applied the enema right under the eyes of Weston, who had no idea what was really happening.

  Then I fled to Paris and stayed there for several years until the whole affair was over, before returning to London and setting myself up as an apothecary. I heard the whole story from my master, Paul de Loubell, just before he died, and I have set it down for you as he told it to me.

  Yet even he did not know the truth about my part in the affair. Now you alone know how I outwitted them all, even the greatest in the land. Will you find it in your heart to forgive me?

  “O, POISONOUS WEED!”

  F. GWYNPLAINE MACINTYRE

  The first English colony in the Americas was established at Roanoke, Virginia, in 1585. They were ill prepared and when food ran out the colonists returned to England, thanks to Francis Drake. However he left several men behind but these vanished and were never heard from again. One of the native Americans connected to the colony was Powhatan whose daughter, Matoaka – better known as Pocahontas – became famous when she saved the life of Captain John Smith. However Pocahontas’s death in 1617 at the age of only 21 is itself something of a mystery. F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre uses both these puzzles as the basis for the following story.

  MacIntyre (b.1948) is the author or co-author of several books, including the science-fiction novels The DNA Disaster (1991) and The Woman Between the Worlds (1994). His non-fiction has been published in The New York Daily News, Literary Review, Games Magazine and many British and US publications. In 2003, he was short-listed for the Montblanc/Spectator Award for his arts journalism.

  27 August 1587 (Old Style)

  Hatarask Island

  Cittie of Ralegh, Virginia

  “You die here, if I abandon you,” Governor White told the assemblage.

  “We perish here, if you remain,” vowed Ananias Dare. “The colony is doomed, without sufficience for the coming winter. Only you, of all our number, can persuade England’s support for our enterprise. You can convince Thomas Harriot to finance the victualling of a ship to provision our colony. If you remain here, and another of us – lacking your talents of persuasion – should return to England in your stead, our beseechings will go unanswered.”

  “Here is the compact, sir.” Dyonis Harvie stepped forth, and pressed a vellum scroll into White’s unwilling hands. “Every man of our colony has signed his name, or made his mark, to show you leave us at our urging. ’Tis no abandonment.”

  John White hesitated, rejecting the scroll.

  “Take it, father,” spoke Elenor Dare from the doorway of her hut at the southern limb of the four-pointed palisado. The wife of Ananias was giving suck to her child, birthed only nine days ago and baptized four days later. By God’s grace, Virginia Dare – John White’s grandchild – was the first Christian born in this new land. But not the last. In the next hut along the palisado, still recovering from childbirth, lay Dyonis Harvie’s wife Margery, nursing their new son Dionysus, two days old and not yet christened.

  “The tide is high, sir, and the moon is quartering,” said Nicholas Johnson. “If you leave now, you have moonlight for the first three se’n-nights of your journey back to England. If you tarry, it goes the worse for us all.”

  Reluctantly, John White accepted the scroll bearing his fellows’ signatures, testifying that his departure was at their request, and in no wise a cowardice. Sadly, he took one more look round the compound, at these goodwives and artisans assembled.

  This enterprise should have prospered. John White had selected men and women endowed with a wide range of talents and trades, to ensure this colony’s fortune. He himself was a surveyor, painter and tiler. His son-in-law Ananias Dare was a bricklayer. Nicholas Johnson and his brother Henry had been stonemasons in London: now this island Hatarask had proved to possess no stone worth the quarrying, but there was much red clay . . . and the Johnson brothers had swiftly built a kiln, to bake the clay into bricks. Ambrose Viccars and John Spendlove were tanners, James Hynde and the Wyles brothers were blacksmiths, whilst Griffen Jones was a gunsmith and cannoneer. A dozen of the men beside were skilled hunters, and the women were wise in the crafts of farming and crabbing and building fish-weirs. The nine boys of this colony – not counting newborn Dionysys, of course – were willing and true.

  To one side of the delegation stood a tall man the colour of burnished bronze, clad in a dressed leather cloak. He was a native of this savage and unchristened land, yet the proud Manteo was both an honest Christian and a nobleman into the bargain. Fourteen days ago, John White had baptized Manteo into the Protestant faith, and dubbed him Lord of Roanoke, in honour of the nearby island where his people the Croatoans dwelt.

  Now, solemnly, John White clasped each man’s hand in turn. He kissed Elenor, stroked the fine hair of her infant daughter: his first grandchild, but – God willing – not his last.

  “Farewell, father,” said Elenor Dare.

  “Not farewell,” said John White. “I will return.”

  To his son-in-law Ananias Dare – joined in marriage to Elenor on Christmas Day, two years past – Commander White spoke tersely: “You remember the token?”

  Ananias nodded. “If our colony is forced by privation to leave this fort, I will carve our destination on the gatepost. Now hasten to England, and speed your return.”

  Governor White strode across the compound, to the edge of the palisado where Manteo stood with one other red-skinned native, his manservant Towaye. “Lord Manteo,” ventured White, “I hope that your kinsmen will help protect our colony if Powhatan threatens.”

  Manteo had voyaged to England twice over, and dwelt more than eighteen months there, mastering the grammar. “My mother Mishcosk is chieftain of our Croatoans,” he said now. “If Powhatan or the warriors of Dasamongupuek move southward upon us, you may rely on my kinsmen’s aid.”

  The two men clasped arms. John White took one last look – no; it must not never be his last look – round the desperate palisado. The flyboat Peradventure awaited, but the tide would not linger. He pocketed the vellum, and hurried toward the western gate.

  With favourable winds and proper navigation – a backstaff to quarter the latitude, and a good log-line and sandglass to estimate the longitude – White was confident that his flyboat could reach Plymouth in six weeks, and another six for the return to Hatarask. He tried not to contemplate what Walter Ralegh had told him in April, before the colonists’ departure: namely, that Philip of Spain was readying for war against England. No matter how eloquently White might plead for his colony’s aid, the Queen’s admirals desired that all England’s ships be kept reserved for battle against the gathering Armada.

  And how long would that war last? John White trembled as he saw the two masts of his waiting flyboat. His return to this alien shore might be delayed for several years . . .

  18 August 1590

  Hatarask Island

  This date held grim significance, as John White well knew. As he knelt in the thwarts of the Hopewell’s tiltboat, scanning the shore for any signs of habitation, he reviewed – a thousandth time – the events of the past three years, and as well the past three days.

  As he had feared, Spain’s armada had delayed his return to Virginia. At last, freshly victualled and provisioned, White had hired the galleon Hopewell and the consort Moonlight to convey himself and his equipments to the desperate colony. Three days ago, they had anchored in five fathoms off Roanoke’s treacherous coast. Smoke was seen rising from the island, and White had felt the first stirrings of hope that his daug
hter and granddaughter might yet be alive.

  By next morning, the smoke had oddly moved south. A watch-fire? The Hopewell’s master gunner fired off chain-shot, yet received no reply from the island. Governor White anguished while the two ships’ captains commanded their men to take on fresh water, wasting a full day without relieving the colony. Yesterday, two tiltboats had made for the shore . . . but a sudden northeaster had raised huge swells against the shoals, swamping both vessels. Captain Spicer of the Moonlight, with his master’s mate Ralph Skinner, and five more men beside were swiftly drowned. Abraham Cocke, commander of the Hopewell, delayed the rescue mission another day until the northeaster subsided.

  Now, finally, blessedly, the shore was near . . . on the eighteenth of August, precisely three years to the very day since the birth of Governor White’s granddaughter Virginia Dare. He urgently bent to the oars with Cocke’s crewmen, speeding the tiltboat toward’s Hatarask’s northern shore. Now they were beached, and White seized his wheel-lock pistol as he and Cocke scrabbled upshore to the hill.

  The colony’s walled enclosure Fort Ralegh was shaped like a four-pointed star. It was a goodly fortress – with bulwarks and a surrounding barrow ditch – having been built five years ago by the soldiers of Ralegh’s first colony here: a contingent of menfolk only, under the command of Ralph Lane and Thomas Harriot. John White had taken part in that original endeavour, and he well remembered when Lane’s colonists quitted this place in June 1586. But White’s only thought as he crested the hill was: what lives and souls would he find here now?

  The palisado was overgrown with vines and shrubs. With Abraham Cocke at his heels, White circled to the western point of the star: the landward side, and so the only entrance. The gates of the fortress stood open.

  “Elenor!” shouted White. “Manteo! Dare! Johnson! Spendlove! Anyone! As you love Christ, give answer!”

  A raven cawed. The wind stirred the vines.

  The Roanoke colony was not merely deserted: it was abandoned. In the storehouse, thick with weeds, White and Cocke found a man’s skeleton.

  One man only, of one hundred and seventeen colonists?

  The huts were empty. The hearths contained no ashes. A half-built kiln stood unmortared.

  At the centre of the compound, the weeds grew blood-red. Blood? No; rust. With shouts, the arriving sailors of the Hopewell’s tiltboat discovered several articles that had lain here long neglected: a dozen iron bars, four fowlers, two pigs of lead, some quantities of sack-shot and locker-shot. All flung about as if by madmen. Or by savages?

  In the brown clayed soil beneath his own hut, White had secreted certain items against his return, buried in five wooden chests. Now, entering the weed-grown house, White found a ravaged ditch. In the hole were the remnants of the chests, all aflindered. In horror, White recognized the portions of his own suit of armour, now rusted. His precious books, his manuscripts, his sketches of this island’s fauna . . . all these lay wallowed in algae and old rainwater.

  None of the colonists, himself aside, had known that Governor White had buried these things here. Yet someone had found them, and scattered White’s most valued possessions, in search of . . . what?

  And where were his daughter and granddaughter? Or any of the colonists?

  “You told me,” said Cocke, “ of an unchristened savage whose dominion is near this place.”

  Governor White nodded, teeth clenched. ‘The native warlord, Powhatan.”

  At the gates, a sailor of the Hopewell gave shout. John White hurried forth, to see what several of the searchers were staring at.

  On a tree betwixt the landing and the fort, on the eastern side of the tree’s trunk – facing the sea – were carved in knife-cuts the letters CRO. That was all.

  Another shout. A sailor pointed. At the entrance to the compound, someone had debarked an oak tree, exposing the pale wood beneath. Five feet above the ground, across the broad flat surface of a large bole, were cut the letters CROATOAN.

  No more was found.

  3 June 1616

  Drake’s Leat, Plymouth

  “MURDERER!”

  Their ship from Virginia had harboured, safely enough, at Sutton Pool. From there, Rolfe had secured a Cockside bargeman to convey his group upriver. The journey had gone well enough, thus far. Yet now, as they neared Plymm Bridge . . .

  “Red whore!” screeched a voice. “Which of you lot is Powhatan’s daughter, then?”

  “Ignore those jackdaws,” said John Rolfe to his companions. At his side, his young wife Rebecca – scantly twenty years old – spread her cloak to enfold their infant son Thomas, fourteen months old. Rebecca Rolfe was dressed as an Englishwoman, yet the others – her sister and half-sister, three more women beside, as well as her father’s counsellor Tomacomo and four more men – were all clad in the leathers and feathers of their native land, and were an easy target for ungentle English tongues. Tomacomo especially must have made an eerie sight to Christian eyes, for his head was plucked entirely hairless, save for a single region above his left ear, where he had permitted his black hair to grow into a thick chieftain-lock reaching nearly his waist.

  “Murderer!” the screech came again. Something dropped from Plymm Bridge – or was thrown? – but it fell far astern, as the barge had already passed beneath the bridge’s stone arch.

  John Rolfe glanced northwest, towards the spire of Saint Budeux’s church. “I never expected this,” he told his wife. “Though you are baptized a Christian, and you wear an honest Bible-name, there are people here who would charge you with the deaths at Roanoke – deaths before you were born – and who call you by the red name you’ve forsaken.”

  Rebecca Rolfe nodded grimly, tugging downward the wide brim of her beaverskin hat, to go less recognized. “I wish they would learn: I am no longer Pocahontas.”

  27 November 1616

  Wakefield Tower prison

  “The Wizard Earl is at his madness again,” came the news at the watch, and all the sentries in the Tower of London were forewarned ’gainst the arrival of strange odours or explosions.

  Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland, age fifty-two, had committed no sin against the Crown. Yet he was cousin to Thomas Percy – a conspirator in the Gunpowder Plot – and had employed the bloody Thomas on his estate at Syon House. For those reasons alone, King James had seen fit to imprison the earl in the Tower of London. Upon the King’s orders to confine the earl within the multiple fortresses comprising the Tower of London, the prison’s governor had assigned him to a well-aired cell on the ground floor of Martin Tower, adjoining a garden: well-aired, so as to disperse the fumes and sulphurs of his wizardries. By dint of his wealth and influence, the earl was granted also a still-room in Wakefield Tower, containing a furnace as well as a still. This room made shift to be the laboratory for the Wizard Earl’s alchemic experimenta. Wakefield Tower has the thickest walls of any building in the Tower of London, and so ’twould be the most standfast against the Wizard Earl’s explosions and alarums. So long as he exploded no-one other than himself, his eccentric follies were tolerated.

  The earl was bent over a flaming brazier and a simmering bolt’s-head flask when the unlatched door of his still-room swung open and Thomas Harriot arrived, clutching a handkerchief across his nose and mouth. The foul phosphorus odour arising from the earl’s newest experimentum was one reason for the presence of Harriot’s handkerchief. As the earl extinguished the brazier and dispersed the fumes, the second reason for the handkerchief became more evident. When Harriot lowered the cloth and revealed his face, Percy observed that his servant’s disfigurement had worsened since their last meeting: the ulceration of Harriot’s left nostril had spread, and now his upper lip was contorted along that side.

  “My friend, ’tis well to see you,” said the earl, covering his phials and alembics. “How stands Syon House?”

  “Your estates are in good order, my lord,” said Harriot. “See you, I’ve brought the books you requested from your library, and
taken back the ones you have finished. I bring books for Ralegh as well, and the saltpetre you require.”

  “Excellent!” said the earl, eagerly accepting the proffered volumes, and a packet of saltpetre crystals. “And my visitors from America? Have you given them the comforts of my estate?”

  “Witness for yourself, my lord.” Through the open door came a tall man, thirtyish, with piercing blue eyes. He gently escorted a woman ten years younger, clad in a long black cloak and tall beaver hat. Her cheekbones were high and prominent, her eyes slightly obliqued. “My lord,” said Harriot to the earl, “I have the honour of presenting . . .”

  “You must be John Rolfe,” said Percy to the newcomer, interrupting Harriot. “And this dark-eyed lady is your wife, the famous Pocahontas.”

  Rolfe bristled slightly at this name, but his wife remained stoic. “I have never understood,” she said gently, “why that name, and not my other, is so famed in England.” The foreign-born young woman spoke with a slight tendency to lean upon hard consonants, but her English was clear. “Yes, among my blood-folk, ‘Pocahontas’ was my along-name . . . you say nickname? But my father Powhatan named me Matoaka, so that is my birth-name. And I am baptized into your church, so I pray you call me by my christen-name. I am my husband’s wife, Rebecca Rolfe.”

  As she spoke, the former Pocahontas inclined her head slightly and doffed her hat, revealing two long plaits of raven-black hair, and magnificent earrings of white mussel-shells. Harriot stiffened, and John Rolfe observed his manservant’s upper lip curling slightly in contempt . . . or was this due to the spreading ulcer at Harriot’s nose?

  “I must ask you to speak a bit louder,” said Thomas Harriot, while Henry Percy cupped a hand to his right ear. “My lord the earl is slightly deaf, in cost of the explosions which his experiments produce.”

  Now the meeting that ensued was largely of commerce. John Rolfe had done much to introduce one of America’s tobaccos – the Varina broadleaf – to England: an endeavour financed by the earl’s patronage. The terms of Lord Percy’s imprisonment allowed him nearly everything he could afford excepting his liberty, and so Harriot brought him frequent visitors. Rolfe now gave report of the success of his tobacco crops. Normally, any news of the outer world fascinated the inmate Percy, yet now he waved aside Rolfe’s comments and gazed at Rolfe’s wife as if enchanted by her alien beauty.