Fleet Market! From the Fleet Valley to Ludgate Hill, here spanned a little universe of wonders. Each market-day when Johnson visited here, he discovered fresh amazements in the lanes and barrows of Fleet Market. Today, walking east along Fleet Street towards Ludgate, Jonson came to a book-stall in Bear Alley which he had patronized before. The stall-man’s name was Wat Collinge. Knowing Jonson’s literary tastes from previous custom, he reached beneath his counter and drew forth for Jonson’s approval a volume which he dared not display openly: Pietro Aretino’s bawdy verse-book Sixteen Postures. Jonson had mentioned this volume in his play The Alchemist, and now he seized it eagerly: “How much, then?”
“Double crown in gold, sir. Or eleven shillings in silver.”
Eleven shillings! Most Londoners would never see as much coin in a year. Jonson had several of the gold double-crown coins in his pocket now: each carried the sign of a Roman X to signify its ten-shilling coinage, but the rising price of gold in King James’s economy gave each double crown the worth of eleven silver shillings.
Opening the book of Aretino’s verses and glancing through its pages, Jonson observed that one sheet had been neatly sliced out of the book: near to the binding, where its absence would not easily be seen by someone less observant than Jonson. “The Straight Tree is wanting,” he told the book-dealer.
Collinge touched his cap respectfully, then pointed to a page near Jonson’s thumb. “It’s right there, sir.” Indeed, Aretino’s sonnet describing the sexual gambit of the Straight Tree was on this page, intact.
“Yet the illustration has been cut out,” Jonson insisted. From previous acquaintance, he knew that Aretino’s woodcut depicted a naked man standing upright while engaged in sexual congress with a woman held upside-down in his arms, wearing only a nun’s headdress. Without a complete set of woodcuts illustrating each of Aretino’s bawdy sonnets, Jonson had no desire to purchase the book. He returned it to Collinge, then asked: “Have you the volume I requested off your shelves, last market-day?”
The bookman nodded, and brought forth an octavo volume bound in green kidskin. “This is Henry Lyte’s edition, sir, translated from the French.”
Jonson glanced at its title: A Niewe Herball, or, Historie of Plantes. Thumbing its pages, he swiftly ascertained that the type-blocks were clear and legible, and – most importantly – that the woodcut illustrations of the various herbs were detailed.
“Excellent. We had agreed on fourteen shillings?” Ben Jonson handed the bookman a small gold coin bearing the likeness of King James aboard a ship, brandishing a sword and shield.
Wat Collinge’s eyes widened as he saw this coin, so seldom minted. “A spur-ryal!” He dug into his pouch, and gave Jonson two shillings and sixpence in change. Touching his cap’s brim again, the merchant asked: “If I may make as so bold, sir: why did you bid me fetch this particular book?”
Ben Jonson placed the volume in his quarter-sack. “I find myself in sudden need of knowledge.”
“Of herbs, sir?”
“Of poisons.” Jonson slung the sack across his shoulder, and moved on.
The streets were filled with their usual filth, and therefore Jonson – like most residents of this district – had strapped a set of pattens beneath his shoes upon leaving his house: these stout iron bands lifted him a few inches above the mire, as well as protecting his shoes from the cobbles.
As Jonson moved eastward past some screeching oyster-women, he practised the custom of “jostling for the wall”: each time he approached someone travelling the other way, they both competed for the privilege of passing on the side nearer to the buildings and farther from the kerb. A successful jostle kept Jonson away from the filth in the gutters, and it also gave him some protection from the garbage – usually, a chamber-pot’s treasures – that oftentimes plummeted unexpectedly from windows overhead. By good fortune, Fleet Street was less crowded this morning than usual: only three days had passed since Lady Day, when the annual rents came due, and so there were fewer loose coins a-jangle now.
At White Lion Court, Jonson’s progress was blocked by a pair of dairymaids: one carrying a milk-stool, the other a pail, and both of them leading a milch-ass while bellowing their wares: “Milk, oh! Milk, oh!” A market-woman gave signal to buy; at once, both milkmaids stopped in the midst of the street, and proceeded to milk their she-ass on that very spot.
Passing them at last, Jonson came to a halfpenny-glimpse in which a Holland sailor permitted the paying onlookers to view a wicker cage containing a live dodo-bird. In a younger time, Jonson might have paid to look upon this weird fowl of an alien land. Yet now, having met the Novo Orbe princess Pocahontas, mere birds held no interest for him.
At the foot of Ludgate Hill was Queen Hithe. Passing among the Ludgathians, halfway up the hill Jonson came to a row of stable-yards and carriage-houses, and three outdoor ovens where perspiring women readied meals for the passengers in the daily coaches. Overhead, a tavern’s signboard displayed the gaudy painted image of a red-skinned woman, naked as Eve, surrounded by bright green foliage. Below this sign was the entrance to Jonson’s destination: the Belle Sauvage Inn.
He had made previous inquiries, and so he was expected. Straight away, Jonson found himself in the presence of a large red-faced man wearing a most impromptu apron of book-muslin. “Are you the proprietor of this house?” Jonson asked.
“I am, sir. Ingram Charnock’s my name.” He did not extend his hand, being busy wiping it with the other one. “I was cautioned that you had questions of me. Question away, then. Nothing transpires beneath my roof without I have the knowledge of it.”
“Most excellent.” Ben Jonson took an instant liking to this man. “But might I speak as well with your inn’s porter? Sometimes the porter of a house knows its secrets better than the master.”
“I am landlord and chief porter, sir,” said Ingram Charnock. “Likewise the publican. And on slow days, I curry the horses.”
“It is my understanding,” said Jonson, “that your house lately afforded its comforts to Lady Rebecca Rolfe.”
“Who, sir?”
“Better named as Pocahontas.”
“Ah!” The taverner shuddered. “Now there’s a party of customers I’m not likely to forget in a sudden. Came here this half-year ago – last September, she did – with her husband and child, and a ragtag of them red-faced Indians. Savages they were, sir!” The innkeeper made a gesture as if beginning to cross himself, then interrupted this as he saw Jonson watching him intently. “Three o’ them wore feathers, mind you. And scalps! Filthy beggars; they skin their enemies, and then they wear the skins! Not like your civilized Englishman.”
“Indeed not,” agreed Ben Jonson. Glancing south and across the stable-yard as he spoke, full down the length of Ludgate Hill, Jonson had a splendid view of Tower Wharf, its gatehouse thickly bristled with pikestaffs displaying the impaled heads of felons and vagrants.
“Tell me,” he inquired casually. “While she was here, did the Lady Rebecca . . . did Pocahontas eat of the same food as her husband and your other patrons?”
“She did that, sir. Honest Christian food, as ever it was. Although I marked that she seldom ate meat.”
“And did she use the same close-stool as everyone else? Did you remark anything unusual about . . . her fewmets?”
“Lord, sir! What a one for questions you are!” It is difficult to embarrass a Ludgate innkeeper, but clearly Jonson had succeeded. Ingram Charnock reddened. “We’ve had the cess-pits cleaned just the once since she left. As for anything unusual . . . well, crying your pardon, sir . . . but one person’s turds are much the same coinage as another’s, if you take my meaning.”
“I do,” said Jonson, not failing to notice the subtle reference to coins. “Tell me, did Pocahontas seem in any way ill while she bided here?”
“She did that, sir.” The innkeeper wiped his florid hands with his apron. “Loudly complained as how she couldn’t stomach the smells from Fleet Valley.”
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p; Jonson felt his senses quickening. “Now this is important, if you please. Did the lady seem genuinely blighted with disease, or merely discomforted?”
The innkeeper seemed afflicted with a sudden loss of memory. Jonson drew forth a new James shilling, and two Queen Bess silver groats. At once, Charnock brightened. “Ah, sir! I’collect now: ’twas merely distress the lady had, not disease. My tavern is no pest-house.”
“Did she cough, then? Any show of the ague?”
“No, sir,” said Ingram Charnock. Jonson gave him the coins, and the innkeeper smiled. “In early October, the lady Pocahontas and her companions moved out of my inn. Out of London entirely, they said.”
“And might you know where they went?”
“To a house name of Syon, I think, sir.”
Ben Jonson thanked the man, and bade him a good day . . . then turned, and strode back downhill towards Fleet Valley. The wind’s direction had changed: now it was coming from the south, and the stench from the Thames was overpowering.
10 April 1617
Syon House,
Isleworth, Middlesex
The odours of the garden were intoxicating. The moon was full tonight: Thomas Harriot had set up his Dutch telescope on the southern border of the mansion’s great lawn, and now – with the aid of a matita pencil from Italy – he was sketching the moon’s face as it hung inverted in the lens of his apparatus. To the west of his position, he was aware of the strong aromas of the various herbs and plants in the garden he husbanded. He worked in silence, occasionally coughing in the still night air.
Tomorrow, Harriot decided, he would bring a new supply of books to his patron the earl in the Tower of London. For now, he gave his full attention to the lunar mountain range in his eyepiece. Yet as he traced its contours, on the sudden, he heard a rustling sound among the shrubs and stalks of the garden.
“How did you do it, Harriot?” asked the intruder. “What noxious weed performed your murd’rous task?” A cloaked figure stepped forth into the moonlight. He was bearded and diskempt, in his usual accustom, and so Harriot easily recognised him.
“Greetings, Ben Jonson,” said Thomas Harriot, setting down his drawing implements.
“You know me. Good. As I know you,” said Jonson. “I have spent this past fortnight researching your achievements. Are you the Gogmagog and counsel of this Syon House? The Earl of Northumberland pays you well, does he, to manage his estate?”
“Do you think me a butler?” asked Harriot. “Henry Percy is my patron, and I am his pensioner. His grace the earl has most generously granted me a residence on Syon House’s grounds. In return, I perform some modest errands for my patron.”
“Including murder?”
“I admit nothing.”
“I was present when a masked skeleton – a costumed dancer – jabbed Pocahontas with a staff,” said Ben Jonson. “She took ill with an ague soon after, then sickened and died. Yet I have questioned Doctor Goldstone, who attended her. There was no swelling of her privities, no puncture. So, the pikestaff did not wound her. The masked dancer was not the killer. Yet I think he wanted her to die.”
“There are many Englishmen,” said Harriot, “who wanted Pocahontas dead, in vengeance for her father Powhatan’s grim deed at Hatarask: the slaughter of Walter Ralegh’s colonists.”
Ben Jonson nodded, stroking his left thumb with the fingers of his right hand. “I have read your chapbook of the Virginia surveyance: A Briefe and True Report. Harriot, you were a partner in Ralph Lane’s first attempt to colonize Virginia. And you helped finance and victual the second attempt: the so-named Lost Colony.”
Thomas Harriot made a theatrical bow, acknowledging the honour. “The Lost Colony vanished twenty-seven years ago. You seem strangely concerned with them.”
“Not so strangely,” said Ben Jonson. “Two of the colonists were my brothers: Nicholas and Henry Johnson. Our stepfather was a bricklayer, and he taught them the trade. I shifted the spelling of my name when I became a playwright.”
At this, Thomas Harriot fell strangely silent.
“I’ll wager you’ve attended Will Shakespeare’s piece Hamlet,” said Jonson. “And it inspired you to murder your victim in the same wise as his tragedy’s Gonzago: by means of poison in the ears.”
Thomas Harriot said nothing. In the moonlight, Jonson noticed something peculiar about Harriot’s nostrils . . . or the tonnels of his face, to use the term which Jonson preferred. Thomas Harriot’s left nostril was severly ulcerated, and the ulcer had ripened and spread along that side of his upper lip.
As if resenting Jonson’s scrutiny, Harriot now turned suddenly aside. The scientist took up his matita, and resumed sketching a lunar mountain range, as if Jonson were elsewhere.
Ben Jonson strode through the hedgerows of Syon House’s garden, pausing at each plant in its turn. “The Wizard Earl has been prisoner in Wakefield Tower for eleven years; these plants show only a few years’ growth, so he cannot have sown them. What did you choose, Harriot?” Jonson paused in front of a plant with furred leaves and small bright flowers. “You grow henbane here, I see.” Jonson moved past this to a tall plant with a high brush of deep purple blossoms, just beginning to blossom in mid-April. “And here is monk’s hood, as well.” Jonson strode past the bush of monk’s hood, careful to thrust it aside with the elbow of his jerkin, so as not to touch it with his bare flesh. Now he noticed a small inconspicuous tuber, its bushy head barely visible amid a circlet of dark green erect pointed leaves. “Here is what you used, I think.” Jonson knelt, seized the plant by its head, and tore it from the earth. The night air was pierced by a sound like a whispered scream, as if the plant protested its uprooting. Jonson brandished the tuber: a brown root, nearly two feet long, forking out at its base and then forking again higher up, as the legs and arms might branch out from the body of a homunculus.
Ben Jonson brought forth from his quarter-sack a sheet of paper, bearing a sketch which he had copied from a woodcut in Lyte’s Niewe Herball. He compared this to the object in his other hand. “Mandrake root,” said Jonson, nodding. “Known to the Levantines as Satan’s apple . . . for the poisonous fruits of the mandrake carry the scent of apples.”
“As well their taste,” said Thomas Harriot. “Though on this point I must rely upon the experience of others.”
“I have questioned the physician who attended Pocahontas, concerning the ill humours that foresaw her death.” Ben Jonson turned over his sketch of the mandrake root, and consulted a handwritten list on the sheet’s other side. “Josiah Goldstone attested that Pocahontas had a strange coldness in her form and limbs, yet she was feverous in her head. As well paralysis, stomach pain, erratickal pulse and slowed breathing. Each toxin has its countersign, and those – I have learnt – are the symptoms of mandrake poisoning.”
Harriot seemed unmoved.
Ben Jonson flung the mandrake to the ground. “Harriot! Rogue, you are the courier who conveys books and goods from the outer world to the Wizard Earl’s prison in the tower, and you are the selfsame go-between from the prisoned earl to the world beyond. Pocahontas was healthy enough when she dwelt at the Belle Sauvage in London. But her coughing had already begun when I met her at Whitehall Palace, on Twelfth Night. By then, she was living here at Syon House. When the Earl of Northumberland applied silver bands to the seashell earrings of Pocahontas, it was you who brought them back to her. But you applied a pulp of mandrake root between seashell and silver. Over the weeks and months, the poison seeped gradually into her body . . . through her ears. Thus you had your revenge for the deaths of the Lost Colony.”
Throughout this encounter, Thomas Harriot’s face had remained a stoic mask. Now he permitted of a faint smile . . . and the left side of his face was contorted by the ulcer that deformed his nostril and lip. “Here at last you are mistaken, Jonson. Yes, I murdered Pocahontas, but the method you have named is too theatrical.”
“How so?”
Harriot stifled a grin that threatened to crack his pocked
mouth. “Poison in the ears! With such fanciful ideas, man, are your plays as bad as Shakespeare’s? Here at Syon House, I have access to the kitchens. While John Rolfe and his wife stayed here as the earl’s guests, I took pains to sophisticate the meals prepared for Pocahontas. I fed her mandrake-flavoured sillibubs, with heavy cream to mask the pois’nous spice. Truly, Jonson: the ears? The human mouth, I’ll warrant, is a far more efficient viaduct to the organs within. As the savage princess was unfamiliar with English food, she did not remark on the flavour of my extra ingredients.”
Jonson’s mouth tightened. “So you poisoned her, rogue . . . to square the account for her father’s slaughter of my brothers and all the Lost Colony.”
“Aye, ’twas in revenge.” Harriot nodded. “But not upon the Lost Colony’s account.”
“For whose vengeance, then?”
“Mine own.” Harriot pointed to his ulcerous face. “When I journeyed to Virginia in 1585, it was Powhatan and his savages who persuaded me to take up their custom of inhaling the smoke of a plant they cultivated for burning: the tobacco broadleaf.” Harriot convulsed. “O, poisonous weed! I am become addicted to its fumes.” Now he barely suppressed a cough. “The tobacco has poisoned my lungs, my throat, my very tongue. Yet still I yearn for another pipe-bowl of the stuff. I feel a strange hunger for its seductive poison.”
The Mammoth Book of Jacobean Whodunnits Page 22