Sir John drew his dagger. “You rogue, you killed her!” I grabbed his arm, but there was no force in the blow, I held him. Quinzy sat shaking, Cambalaine’s hands pressed firmly on his shoulders.
Francis poured a cup and pushed it at the gamekeeper. “Tell us what happened.”
Quinzy drained it in one. “In Old Wood I was. Badgers. Some jobs best done by night. My musket with me.”
“And a shovel, you fiend!” cried Sir John, but I kept his dagger hid. “Call the village watchman, lock him away. He’ll hang before week’s end.”
“I can’t believe ’tis Quinzy!” wept Lady Eliza, more than half hysterical. “No, no, ’tis the monster.”
All this was getting a little much for me. I looked from one grief-stricken face to the other, and then at young Bart who arrived in his nightshirt. “It was Jack,” he cried from the stair. “He loved her and she rejected him like before.”
“We get ahead of ourselves,” Francis said coolly. “The girl convalesces in Weymouth, yet lies dead in Old Wood – if the body, which we haven’t seen, really is Ann’s. This may be Quinzy’s mistake, the body of some vagrant woman mistook when he dropped his lamp.” He added, “You did have a lamp, Quinzy?”
“Yes sir, made by myself, of a wooden box with a hole on top, a tallow candle burning inside, and a small window of bottle-bottom glass.”
“How did you come by the shovel?”
“I don’t use a shovel, sir, unless I got dogs with me, for digging out setts. By night I uses wire traps or musket. That shovel, I fell over it when I dropped the lamp. It was horrible, sir. I saw her poor face, the lamp went out, I tripped backwards, and in the dark my hand found the shovel. Must have picked it up without thought when I ran. Old Wood’s thick, like a warren it is, a maze. God knows how I got out in the dark. Only when I reached the house did I see, by the lights –” He covered his mouth.
Francis fetched the shovel, the blade matted with red blood and hair. Sir John covered his wife’s eyes. Francis said, “Perfectly fresh. No clotting. No longer ago than dark this afternoon, I’d say.” He pulled out a sticky strand of hair. “Chestnut.” Even Sir John turned his face away.
“Yes, my lord,” Cambalaine said calmly. “Mistress Ann’s.”
“God preserve us!” cried Lady Eliza. “It’s His will.” And fainted again.
“I think it best,” Francis said, “if, rather than stumble around such a deep woodland in the dark, we endure a sleepless night and await dawn before an excursion.”
“Questions, Toby,” Francis whispered my real name because of Cambalaine’s presence, “occur to me.” Late it was, very late; black beyond the windows.
“Like what day to hang Quinzy on,” murmured Cambalaine. We spoke so quiet around the table because Sir John and Lady Eliza paced the room, or sat in chairs, or stared at the dark outside, not sleeping a wink.
“A murderer does not usually run to report his crime whilst brandishing the murder weapon,” Francis said. Quinzy, still protesting his innocence, was locked in the pantry for safety.
“Then it was Jack,” I murmured. “I know what young men are like. After he left us he met the girl travelling home unannounced from Weymouth with her health fully recovered, pressed his passionate feelings too ardently, she screamed, he went too far silencing her.”
“There’s a difference between putting a hand over someone’s mouth and clubbing them to death with a shovel,” Francis pointed out. He asked Cambalaine, “Where are the shovels kept?”
“Outhouse.”
“Locked?”
“No, but young gentleman Jack wouldn’t even know what a shovel was.”
“But you do.”
“I served you all evening, my lord.”
“Hmm. Any monsters round here?” Francis nodded at Lady Eliza. “She means vagrants, itinerants, tinkers?” Cambalaine shook his head, recalling none. “Any thieving lately, or strangers about?”
“Not recently, sir.” He stopped. “Now it occurs to me, about a month or two back, we did lose a shovel.”
“This shovel?”
“I don’t know sir, a shovel’s a shovel to me.”
Francis scratched his head. “An extraordinarily premeditated murder for the murderer to steal his weapon months before his crime.” He added, “Or her.”
We looked at Lady Eliza, then stared at each other, shocked at ourselves. For a mother to kill her daughter is unthinkable. Yet these ancient Greek plays have been discovered in which such behaviour, and worse, seems almost commonplace. I cleared my throat.
“Sir John Tyrambel has a nervous manner,” I whispered.
“He dotes on his daughter,” Francis said dismissively. “I remember his pride when Ann was born. Once or twice they rode to my house, father and child, she on her own pony. Never was a father prouder.” He lowered his voice. “What, is he an actor? I have known actors.” Francis has indeed, in more senses than one, and if ever they disturb a certain grave in Stratford-upon-Avon they will find in the bone-dust a brass plaque inscribed F. Bacon fecit. F. Bacon made him. Not just the plays but the man too, and his silly name. I digress merely to show that Francis has a deep understanding of acting and actors. “Sir John is acting just as you’d expect of a man who fears he’s lost his daughter but cannot face up to it.”
“Absolutely,” I agreed, which is best with Francis.
“In any event,” Francis said, “everyone in the house has an alibi, for we were here. And anyone not here, like Quinzy alone in the dark, or Jack, does not.”
Somewhere a clock gonged. The hours until dawn were very long.
The morn was clear and we were out before the sun rose, trudging across wet lawns in the clean grey light of a new day. Yet almost at once we came upon strangeness, and a sense of old sins still doing their work; of course we men in our mercy had left Lady Eliza behind, sleeping at last, but now her scream rent the air and the poor woman came running from the house. “No, I must come! I must see!”
“We don’t know there’s anything to see,” Francis said gently. “Best to wait behind, the vicar is sent for, to pray with him.”
But she pointed. “Look.”
Indeed strange, for the snow had mostly melted overnight, and the landscape we’d grown used to snow-white was dull and wet. We stood (with a few curious house-boys) by the place Cambalaine, who pushed the empty barrow chained to poor shaking Quinzy, called Long Ditch. The fields stretched out black with mud. Sir John set off to walk around the edge, but Francis pulled a thread from a gorse bush. “Come my lord,” I whispered lasciviously, “you’ll prick yourself.”
He held it up. No thread, a hair. He hummed, “What does this mean?”
“It’s a hair,” I said. “Heads are covered with them. So are animals.”
“A chestnut hair.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Exactly,” he said. “So, what does it mean?”
“Nothing to me.”
He said, “I have a theory which I call inductive logic, based on elimination.”
“Great God, Francis, these people are suffering! Their hearts cry out for their daughter. Your cold theories say nothing to the complex heat of human emotion.”
Francis called them. “She came this way.” He showed Sir John the hair. “A matter of observation, of fact. Inductive logic –”
“Perhaps it blew,” Sir John said. “It could have been caught there for months, years.”
Francis pointed. Across the muddy ploughed field, footprints showed. “From here she ran across the field.” He walked out, careless of the clay weighting his boots, following her footsteps. “Someone ran after her.” More footprints, not quite on the same line, weaving.
“Her pursuer was drunk!” I said.
“Perhaps,” said Francis. He bent, picking a girl’s red shoe from the mud. Lady Eliza snatched it at once and clutched the muddy pathetic thing to her bosom, weeping.
“Perhaps drunk,” Francis murmured, “or perhaps he hardly saw her because it
was dark.”
I closed my eyes, appalled. “This happened while we ate and made merry. The poor girl. It hardly bears thinking about.”
“Yet we must think about it.” Francis looked round carefully but saw nothing. He strode to Old Wood then stopped for Quinzy to be our guide.
Within the wood snow still lay in patches, pocked, grey. “Left,” Quinzy said. “Deeper in. Much deeper.”
“This is a cursed wood,” Sir John said; the trees so close you believed you turned in circles. First one glade, now another.
She lay beneath an oak tree.
“My heart!” Sir John ran on.
Dressed only in soaked petticoats, black with mud below the knee. He crouched and I thought he stroked something from her hair, crumpled it in his pocket, but I forgot for Lady Eliza pushed hard past me. She lifted her daughter’s body in her arms and rocked like a mother giving milk to her baby, weeping.
“Little remains of the face,” Francis whispered. “Beaten to death. The shovel.”
“I’ll hang Quinzy myself,” choked Sir John.
Quinzy’s lamp lay on the grass among the first blue violets. The outline of the girl’s barefoot body was drawn in ice on the ground, melting as we watched. Her arm, raised as if warding off a blow, flopped against her mother’s shoulder as her body thawed.
Lady Eliza stroked her daughter’s hair, then looked up to her husband, but not in a loving wifely way. Her face changed. “Tell them or I will.”
Sir John shuddered, then turned to us. “We know who murdered her. Only let me kill him, let me have justice, and I’ll gladly swing for it.”
“The monster?” Francis, still kneeling, fixed Lady Eliza’s chin so she must look into his eyes. “The contagion from the village?”
“His name’s Joabin,” she spat. “Give us justice!”
Francis stood. He nodded to Cambalaine. A boy was sent running to the village, but not before Francis had scribbled a note, folded it and on the flap wrote JOABIN, before slipping it in the boy’s pocket.
“We’ve seen enough here,” Francis said. “We return to the house.”
Cambalaine, helped by two house-boys, lay the poor body in the barrow. Sir John covered it with his cloak. A long slow walk home; the wheel squeaked and stuck often in the mud, so the two boys lifted at the front while Cambalaine pushed at the back. I spoke to Francis in a low voice. “What makes you think Joabin will obey your summons?”
“If he does it tells us much, and if he does not, it tells us much.”
“What did your note say?”
“I promised the monster’s safety.”
“All agree he’s guilty.”
“Yet,” Francis said, “her footprints run away from the house.”
“But nobody left the house.”
“Running towards the monster’s village, not away from it.”
“Francis, you make my head hurt!”
He added, “Barefoot, partially undressed. Where’s her dress, her other shoe?”
“Do you believe she was . . . violated?”
“I believe,” he said, reaching into his pocket and handing me the foot-rule, “that you should make a measurement of every footprint you find in mud and snow.” He finished kindly, “Ignoring our own, of course.”
“I am Joabin.”
I gasped when I saw him, not because I knew who he was, but what. His clothes were good but glossy, of deliberately foreign look. His hair, too, marked him apart, long black curls dangling in front of his ears. On the crown of his head, where a monk’s tonsure would be, he wore a small black cap. He was indeed a monster. He was a Jew.
And no older than the girl who lay dead downstairs.
Francis, who remained in the front room with the body, had left orders that the monster be shown up here to the library where the light was good. Joabin sat at the long table with his hands resting on the wood, calm, tense, businesslike, the tall gallery windows illuminating his pale intelligent face and large brown eyes. Sir John sat at the far end, staring. Had he a pistol, he’d have used it. Cambalaine and I stood between them.
‘You dare show your face in my house, you cur,” Sir John swore.
The youth opened his hands. “I’ve nothing to hide, Sir John.” His manner was mature beyond his years, and steady. But so foreign! His nails long and his teeth good.
“Christ-killer!” Sir John shouted. Francis, in the interest of fairness, would have pointed out that our Lord was also a Jew, yet Pilate a Gentile.
Joabin turned to me. “What is this about? Do you need money?”
“We’ll wait until my lord arrives.”
“Why is Lady Eliza weeping?” Joabin swallowed. “Is there bad news from Weymouth?” Lady Eliza huddled in the padded chair by the stair-top. Francis had pulled her from her daughter’s body and sent her up. She couldn’t stop weeping. Her noise wore out the nerves of all of us.
“Joabin pretends not to know why!” cried Sir John. “He’s clever, the devil.”
We heard Francis on the stairs. He stood with his back to the windows so his face was dark, Joabin to the left of his shadow in full daylight, so the sun showed any lie. “You are Joabin?”
“Yes, son of Tirsan.”
“You live with your father in the village?”
“We do our business in the town.”
“Business?”
“In March my father lends sowing-money to be paid back at harvest. In autumn he lends enough to see people through the winter.”
“You work for your father as a moneylender?”
“Yes. And in London, at the ‘Change.”
“To whom do you lend?”
“Merchants. Aristocrats. Landed gentry.”
“Like Sir John?”
“Like Sir John, but not him. He has . . .” Joabin’s lips almost formed the word bribes, which is how lawyers and judges (and Lord Chancellors) must make a living, but the word he said was, “income. Income from Law as well as fields. He’s more fortunate than most of his neighbours.”
Francis said coolly, for he was to his neck in debt, “Moneylenders have an unpopular reputation.”
“Some do.”
“Some are considered monsters.”
“I have never been called that. We charge thirty per cent, which is reasonable given our risk.”
“Thirty per cent,” Francis said, impressed.
“Better to have good debts than bad ones.” Joabin raised his voice. “Enough. It’s no secret that Sir John regards me as an enemy. Is Ann well? Has she asked for me?”
“Why, Joabin? Why should she?”
“Because I love her, and she loves me.” He looked confused. ‘Has Sir John not told you?”
“Liar!” shouted Lady Eliza. Sir John went on, “She never loved you, could never love you, Jew, blood-sucker, abomination. God scattered your people to the winds for your sins!”
Francis let a few moments tick by while Lady Eliza wept.
“Joabin,” he asked, “where were you last night, after dark?”
“At home with my father, mother, and five brothers.”
“That’s no alibi,” Sir John sneered. “Jews lie to save each other’s skins.”
Then Francis said a very strange thing. “Joabin, where were you last Christ’s-Mass?”
“In London, on business, in a Christian lodging-house by the ‘Change, run by Mrs Day. She invited me to the feast with her other lodgers, and I accepted. Along with perhaps a dozen Christians whose names will be in her register, a Moor, and a Puritan, Master Nathaniel Wallington, who stuck his head in to order us to stop our noise.”
“That’s sufficient,” Francis said.
“Then, together with other lenders, I represented my father at Whitehall Palace with Prince Honoré II of Monaco, the Lord Mayor of London, and Prince Charles, Duke of York.” We stared. He explained, “His art collection is large and not cheaply bought.”
“A perfect alibi,” Francis purred. He nodded and I poured a cup of brandy. “Joabin,
it hurts me to tell you this. Ann’s body was found in the woods last night.”
Joabin, pale-faced already, went white as chalk. I pushed the cup into his hands. He drank, choked. “But she can’t be dead, not here. Sir John forbade me to see her again and sent her away.”
“When was this?”
“Before Christ’s-Mass. No.” He corrected himself. “It was after. I had returned from London with some difficulty because of the snow. My father had been sent a message that Sir John wished to see me. Because the snow was so deep two of my brothers came with me for safety.”
“Lucky for you,” Francis said, with a glance at Sir John.
“Sir John made it clear he’d forbidden his daughter’s ‘false’ affection for me and if I ever tried to see or contact her again, ever, he’d see me dead and burn my house.”
“I’d do it, and more.” Sir John, pouring a brandy, drank it in one.
Francis said, “Did you see her again?”
“Never.”
“Or contact her?”
Joabin gave Sir John a wary look. “It would not be the first time they tried to part us. I wrote to Weymouth, to Aunt Salomana’s house, under a different name, but one she’d have understood.” He tried to make us comprehend. “We are – were – so very, very much in love.”
“I know,” Francis said. “Ann was pregnant.”
In the shocked silence Lady Eliza gave a great scream. She fell forward on the boards. Cambalaine went to her. She covered her face. Sir John watched her, then turned back to us.
“She didn’t know,” Francis said. “But you did. Ann told you. This was not one murder but two.”
Sir John lunged suddenly along the table at Joabin, but I’d kept his dagger, and stuck the point to his throat. He slid back along the wood unblinking, then sat stiff, but anyway I kept it handy under his chin.
“You were here last night yourself, my lord.” Sir John’s eye acquired a cunning light. “You know I remained here.”
“Last night, yes,” Francis agreed. “But Joabin has the perfect alibi for when the murder was committed.”
Even Cambalaine looked startled. “But she was killed last night! The body’s fresh as a daisy, the blood still red with life, wet. There’s not a sniff of rot on her.”
The Mammoth Book of Jacobean Whodunnits Page 26