The Mammoth Book of Jacobean Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley (ed)

  “My dear Pocahontas: forgive the liberty, but that is the name by which I have read of you,” the earl began. “Speaking as a man, I am intrigued by your grace and beauty. Speaking as a scientist, I am intrigued by your earrings. They are white mussel, I see: a rare species, unknown to England’s shores. As my deafness grows steadily, I have come to perceive the human ears as useful chiefly for ornamentation. I have much leisure time here. Would you do me the kindness of lending me those earrings? I would mount them in silver bands, as a tribute to your beauty.”

  The maiden glanced at her husband, who nodded his assent. Swiftly, Rebecca Rolfe unhooked the graceful shells from her pierced lobes, and gave the earrings to the earl, who bowed as he accepted them.

  “Thank you, precious lady,” said Henry Percy. “Today marks the beginning of the eleventh year of my imprisonment in this tower, so you have brightened this dark anniversary. I will have my servant Harriot return these earrings to you, freshly silvered.”

  Harriot bowed, indicating a bundle of books beneath his arm. “Will my lord excuse me? Your friend Ralegh has requested some books as well. While you converse, I will take them to his cell across the way, in Brick Tower . . .”

  Twelfth Night, 6 January 1616/7 (Old Style)

  Banqueting House, Whitehall Palace

  The rituals are clear in their particulars: the antimasque precedes the masque. ’Tis accustomed that the antimasque will boast of grotesque costumes and elaborate dances, whilst the costumes of the masque are traditionally lighter and less cumbersome. So, professional masquers perform the antimasque, whilst the king’s favourites perform the masque afterward.

  King James’s current favourite was his gentleman of the bedchamber, George Villiers, whom the king had only recently – yester-noon, in fact – elevated to the title of the Earl of Buckingham. It was widely known in the court that King James had little passion for heavy dramas or low comedies, oft declaimed by English actors in accents which the Scots-born king was slow in apprehending. The monarch favoured masques which afforded opportunities for lithe young men in elegant hose and tight-fitting bullions to display their graceful limbs as they capered in sprightly dances. Of a certainty, the Earl of Buckingham would figure prominently in tonight’s masque, and all would be engined to suit the king’s tastes.

  The Banqueting House – the tallest building in this modern London – is architected as a doubled cube, precisely twice as wide as it is broad and high. The two long sides, east and west, are tiered with high rows of benches for the spectation of His Majesty’s guests. The choicest seats – at the southern end, favouring the best view of the stage on the hall’s northern side – were of course on the royal dais, reserved for King James and his retinue. A seat on the king’s left was reserved for his Danish queen Anne, but at present she was at the centre of the hall, dancing with the Earl of Montgomery . . . although she was a-hobbled by her gouty foot, and her movements consisted largely of waving her plumed fan. Queen Anne’s overdress was of silk, in the sky-blue colour known as watchett, which set off her bright auburn hair. The other gentlefolk upon the green baize carpet of the dance-floor took caution to give the queen wide berth for her footings, but in truth there was room for all the company. King James had forbade all ladies at Banqueting House to wear the farthingale– “that impertinent garment”, he called it – as such selfish skirts filled the whole floor, and so left less room for dancing. In the east balcony, twelve French musicians played a brisk galliard, whilst their leader Alfonso Ferrabosco kept the time with his viola. Eightscore beeswax candles shed their gleam against the gilded balls and silvered pyramids of the wall-sconces.

  To the left of the king sat his son Charles, invested the Prince of Wales this recent November. Aside from the monarch himself, the place of honour was in the alcove of seats at the king’s right hand, in the niche which King James in his Scots accent referred to as “the great Neech”. As the musicians struck the first notes of the antimasque, it was remarked that two seats in the Neech tarried empty, for guests yet unarrived.

  “A-hall! A-hall” announced the footmen. This call notified any guests on the dance floor to return to their seats, and leave the way clear for the performers of the entertainment.

  The antimasque had begun. Its title was “Phantasms”, and the dancers personated the ghosts of poets murdered for their art. They wore grotesque skull-faced masks, and their costumes were of tight-fitting black stockingette, strategically daubed in white paint to represent the bones of the human anatomy. The makeshift skeletons capered and leapt across the green baize carpet, new-laid for dancing. The counterfeit skeletons’ weird movements seemed weirder in the flickering gleam of the braziers that illumined the hall. The leader of the masquers’ company, personating Lord Death, recited the antimasque’s verses while his bony courtesans beckoned and swerved, wielding pikestaffs and tridents. Although Lord Death was masked, his face concealed in a vizard, his athletic form was sheathed in a costume which encased him so tightly that it served to reveal his identity rather than obscure it. Recognizing Lord Death as the king’s favourite, the audience of the masque applauded. Lord Death removed his vizard, revealing the long black hair and beardless face of George Villiers, new-made Earl of Buckingham. He gave a kiss-sign to his applauding admirers, while his long graceful limbs danced a saraband.

  From the wings of the stage came a many-legged she-monster, who now squatted and gave birth to six pups, which proceeded to suckle at her paps whilst they danced in their turn. Truly, an ingenious stagecraft. The scene transformed to the bower of Zephyrus, where Peace sang of myriad pleasures. The next tableau depicted the revels of Aurora, as a chiaroscuro moon descended from above the stage.

  Of a sudden, the lights went out, as footmen snuffed the braziers. In the darkness, all the guests along the tiered benches gasped and then applauded . . . for the white paint of the dancers’ costumes and masks now showed a phosphorescence, causing the ribs and skulls and capering bones of the dancing skeletons to glow in the darkness while the musicians played on.

  As the footmen brought tapers to relight the braziers, the oaken double doors at the far end of Banqueting Hall opened, and a trio of latecomers arrived. A servant stepped forth in the dark blue velvet livery of a huisher – King James preferred this Scottish term to “usher” – and now John Rolfe and his wife and the heathen Tomacomo were ushered to the great Neech at the king’s right hand.

  Throughout the hall, there was a murmuring, a huzzbuzz, as the newcomers made their way across the wide hall. Rolfe heard the muttered name “Pocahontas” several times. More darkly, he heard someone whisper “Powhatan” . . . and then a word that might have been “killers”. He glanced quickly into the crowd of Twelfth Night revellers along the benches, yet he could not be certain of the whisper’s source. Beside him, his wife coughed: from nervousness, no doubt.

  In the centre of a cleared area at the far end of the hall, King James bade his guests to approach. “We meet again, Rolfe. And is this your wife, the legended Pocahontas?”

  Rolfe bowed deeply, averting his gaze. “If it please Your Majesty, my wife is churched and baptized with a Christian name. She is rightly the Lady Rebecca.”

  “Yet Pocahontas is so musical a name,” said the king, admiring the garb of the tawny woman. He had expected Rebecca Rolfe to arrive clad in feathers and animal skins, and was faintly disappointed to find her dressed as a fashionable Englishwoman: in crimson bodice, scarlet cloak, and an olive skirt with a dark grey underskirt. A white lace whisk encircled her throat, along with a pearl necklace, and she nervously clutched a high-crowned beaver hat. The most unusual aspects of her costume were the long plaits of her lustrous black hair, and the exquisite diadems at her ears: the jewelled ornaments, whatever they were, gleamed asilver in the light of the braziers.

  The king beckoned to a guest seated behind Prince Charles: a brawny man, above forty years old, who looked quite undistinguished . . . yet who clearly held some importance, as he was permitted to
sit in the king’s presence. Among the gaudy revellers of Twelfth Night, this man wore a plain black jerkin and sported a short chestnut beard tinged with grey. “We present to you, Rolfe,” said the king, languidly, “the author of tonight’s entertainments: our court poet, Ben Jonson.”

  The bearded man bowed to Rolfe’s wife, and then shook Rolfe’s hand. As he did so, Rolfe noticed a long T-shaped scar at the base of Ben Jonson’s left thumb. “I am pleased to meet you, sir,” said Ben Jonson, “and pleased the more to meet your wife . . . for I write about foreign continents and alien shores . . . and you, good lady, are the first genuine else-born whom it has ever been my honour to encounter.” The daughter of Powhatan simpered at this fulsome praise, turning aside from Jonson while she stifled a cough. Her earrings glittered anew as the candlelight found a fresh angle.

  “Your earrings, dear woman,” said Jonson. “Might I scrutiny them?” She nodded, seating herself with her head turned sidelong so that Ben Jonson might have the best view of her left-side earlobe while her own gaze favoured His Majesty.

  Ben Jonson studied Pocahontas’s earrings with keen interest now. Each earring consisted of a matched pair of white mussel shells, girdled by a double hoop of fine silver. “The metal, I observe, is newly worked,” said Jonson. “Yet the shells betray their age and tarnish.”

  Rebecca Rolfe nodded, her earrings bobbing slightly in the candle-gleam. “His grace the Earl of Northumberland hooped them for me, in his prison workshop. My husband and I are his guests at Syon House, and . . .” she broke off suddenly, noticing the sour expression on the king’s face.

  “Northumberland! Bah!” King James gestured derisively, while close to hand the skeletons capered and danced. “His father and mine were both murdered, yet he has taken nothing from the lesson. His kinsman tried to bombard my Parliament!” The king’s countenance shifted, gentling his face. “But the music is sweet, hear you? Let us savour the masque.”

  Rebecca Rolfe most gratefully made curtsey; she had no desire to discuss politics in this place. A matched pair of liveried huishers gave haste to seat her and Tomacomo in two chairs in the Neech, near the king’s hand. John Rolfe, intending to sit beside his wife, found no third chair waiting. One of the huishers pointed discreetly upward and afar, to a seat in the balcony near Ferrabosco’s violinists. Rolfe grimaced; to be seated amongst French fiddlers and flautists was a clear insult, but he knew that the whims of the king were to be indulged. The foreign-born Lady Rebecca Rolfe and her father’s counsellor Tomacomo were alien and exotic, and therefore King James was eager to display them to his court. John Rolfe, for all his dealings in exotic tobacco-leaf, was merely a common-born Englishman . . . and so he was exiled to sit among French pipers. With a bow to the king, as Queen Anne seated herself and placed her gouted foot upon a hassock, Rolfe withdrew to the upstairs alcove.

  The antimasque had ended, the masque had begun. A curtain dropped from the fly-lofts, to reveal the cunning stage-design of Inigo Jones: a series of buildings ingeniously fashioned in perspective, so as to make a whole vast city seem presented on the brief stage. In sequence from the rear to the foreground, Inigo Jones’s counterfeit edifices consisted of a tower, a scaffolded house, a church, a colonnade, and lastly a triumphal arch.

  As the audience gasped and applauded, now began Ben Jonson’s masque “The Vision of Delight”. Actresses personating the roles of Delight, Love, Harmony – escorted by actors portraying Revel, Sport, Laughter – now bestrode the stage, declaiming verse.

  The lights dimmed, and Night emerged in her winged chariot bespangled with phosphorescent stars. Assisted by some unseen apparatus, Night and her attendant the Moon rose into the fly-lofts, to the gasps and applause of all present. The lamps brightened, and a single figure took the stage: an actress in the role of Fantasy, clutching a bag which – she proudly declaimed – held all manner of dreams.

  As sweet Fantasy began to list the dream-bag’s contents, a courtier approached the king’s bench with a tray of quaking-pudding and some spiced comfort-bread for the guests. As Rebecca Rolfe saw these sweetmeats, she bent towards it and away from the stage, while Fantasy spoke:

  “. . . dreams that have wings,

  And dreams that have honey, and dreams that have STINGS!”

  A sudden movement at the edge of the stage. One of the creatures in the antimasque – a dancing skeleton – entering a-sudden from the wings, clutching a pikestaff and creeping stealthily towards the king’s bench. In his seat behind the Prince of Wales, Ben Jonson stiffened. “Who is that actor? His entrance is not in my script . . . and I wrote it.”

  “Pocahontas!” rasped a voice beneath the skeleton’s mask.

  “Oh!” A gasp. In the balcony, John Rolfe leapt to his feet. Ben Jonson turned just in time to see the skull-masked skeleton moving away from Rebecca Rolfe. The dancer’s pikestaff had jabbed her just above her female privities, where her overskirt and bodice met. John Rolfe shouted, and moved towards the balcony’s edge . . . but just as hastily, the masked figure melted into the bony throng of the suddenly returning skeleton chorus. Rolfe stared into the whirl of masquers: with their weird costumes and masked faces, it was impossible for him to perceive which of the disguised dancers had jabbed his wife.

  He hastened to the Neech, where Ben Jonson had borrowed Queen Anne’s ostrich-plume fan, and was fanning Lady Rebecca. As Rolfe arrived, he quickly asked: “Wife, are you injured?”

  “Scantly a pricking, it was. Nearly nothing.” Rebecca Rolfe smiled weakly, then coughed. She seemed suddenly faint. Her husband glanced along the tiered walls, wondering if a casement might be opened.

  At that instant, there came a fanfaronade of trumpets as the scenery on the stage shifted again. There was a clattering of wooden shutters as two courtiers slid aside the backdrop of the Night’s chariot . . . replacing this with a series of forestscapes, in forced perspective, beseeming the woods of Arcadia.

  For a moment, John Rolfe was dazzled by this bold effect. Then his wife moaned, and he looked to her. She seemed definitely ill. Nearby, a courtier muttered: “See there? The red woman Pocahontas. Daughter of the murderous Powhatan.”

  Rebecca Rolfe swooned. Her husband caught her as she fell, and two huishers rushed to give assistance . . .

  21 March 1617

  Christopher Inn,

  Gravesend, Kent

  Pocahontas was dying.

  She had sickened on the night of the masque, and ever since Twelfth Night her health had steadily worsened. Now the ague was upon her, and a fit of coughing and shivering.

  John Rolfe had made plans to transport his wife and their son back to Virginia, and a fleet had been mustered for the voyage: Samuel Argall in command of the George, Ralph Hamor captaining the Treasurer, and a pinnace besides. They had sailed downriver from London, intending to reach open sea before the winds lost their favour. But Rebecca Rolfe’s ague had ripened and grown, and Rolfe had reluctantly taken his wife ashore here at Gravesend. Now the ships lay anchored in Erith Reach, by the hithe, whilst Rolfe and two sailors had brought his sickened wife to the Christopher – as its name betokened, an inn that welcomed travellers – and made her as eased as possible.

  The master of the Christopher Inn – all unwitting of the ill health of Rolfe’s wife – had greeted their arrival at the Gravesend hostel with a jest that was popular hereabouts: “All men come to Grave’s End soon enough.” Then, discovering the Lady Rebecca’s distress, he swiftly apologized and withdrew.

  A physician was summoned: Josiah Goldstone, who had examined Rebecca Rolfe in London when her ague first announced its presence, following the Twelfth Night masque. He had come swiftly downriver after consulting with his colleague William Harvey, and clutching a new copy of Pharmacopoeia Londinensis, typeset in galley-proof but not yet published. Even the faithful Tomacomo had performed some heathen ritual with a bone-rattle and the burning of herbs: a pagan ceremony which Rolfe would have welcomed if it did any good.

  Doctor Goldstone assured John Rol
fe that his wife’s flesh was unbroken, showing no sign of injury from without nor tumour from within. Yet she steadily sickened . . .

  John Rolfe had summoned other assistance: the reverend Nicholas Frankwell, rector of Saint George’s parish church, just uphill from the Thameside hithe. It was clear to Rolfe that his wife was past the aid of physicians and apothecaries, and that it would be best to ready her for her final journey.

  A floor-board creaked. In his grief, Rolfe looked up and saw Josiah Goldstone, fitting his physician’s instruments back into their segmented case. The look on Goldstone’s countenance told John Rolfe what the nature of the doctor’s words would be. Goldstone closed his medical satchel, his fingers nervously clutching his copy of Pharmacopoeia Londinensis while it lay open to its frontispiece illustration of the crowned lion and the unicorn.

  “I will speak plainly, sir,” said Goldstone. “The Lady Rebecca is in her last hours. She is not yet expired, yet her body is strangely cold.”

  So it was true, then. Pocahontas was dying. True, she had forsaken the false god Okeus of her pagan breed, and been confessed an honest Christian when she took her baptismal name Rebecca. But John Rolfe knew the ways of Englishmen, and the habits of fickle history. He had no doubt that, if his wife Rebecca were remembered at all, she would be known forever by her heathen nickname.

  And now Pocahontas was dying . . .

  28 March 1617

  Blackfriars

  Ben Jonson’s residence, in the Blackfriars parish of Saint Anne’s, was close by Fleet River, the tributary emptying into the Thames. Such closeness – a closeness in more than one sense – lent both convenience and inconvenience. A constant stench in Jonson’s nostrils reminded him that all the residents of Bowyer Row and Ludgate emptied their chamber-pots and cess-pits into the Fleet. As well, the Fleet River was where the butchers and slaughtermen of the Smithfield stockyards drowned the rancid offal they were unable to sell. By daylight, the surface of the Fleet as far as Holborn was crammed with barges and canal-boats filled with raucous watermen. Fleet Prison, on the river’s eastern bank – the side nearer Jonson’s house – supplied its own uniquely vomitous perfume, especially at cock-crow when the inmates were permitted to slop out their cells. There was, however, one attribute of the neighbourhood which had aroused Jonson to settle in Blackfriars in the first place.