The Mammoth Book of Jacobean Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley (ed)

  “Mr Laidlaw, would you step forward?”

  John Laidlaw stiffened. “You wish me to finger the corpse, coroner?”

  “My task is to leave no avenue of enquiry unexplored.”

  “And how, pray, do you suggest that I might have committed such a heinous crime?”

  “I suggest nothing, sir.”

  Laidlaw glared at the coroner and George wondered if he would refuse to obey. However, after a moment’s deliberation, he strode forward, dragging his lame leg as he always did. Bending down, he laid his palm full on the deceased’s cheek.

  There was no response. No blinking, no movement, no blood leaking from the dead man’s body.

  Laidlaw straightened his back and gave William Crozier a fierce grin of triumph.

  The coroner was not, George knew, accustomed to being bested by another. Yet his face gave no clue to what was in his mind. There was no suggestion of embarrassment. Yet the jurymen were becoming restive. George could not see their faces, but their muttered grumblings were easier to discern. They were wondering how long the coroner’s whim would require them to linger in the cold and in the presence of a noxious corpse.

  The vicar coughed and said, “I wonder, sir, if you are proposing to conclude these proceedings?”

  “Shortly,” Crozier’s tone manifested infinite calm. “We are almost done.”

  John Laidlaw turned his back on the coroner and started to limp towards the lych gate. His son moved after him.

  “Not you, Robert,” Crozier said.

  The boy stopped and looked back over his shoulder. “What do you want of me?”

  Unmoved by his insolence, Crozier said, “That you touch the deceased.”

  The flickering candlelight caught Robert Laidlaw’s face and George saw there an uncharacteristic indecision.

  “Will you touch the deceased,” Crozier repeated and George thought he detected a barely suppressed triumph in his principal’s voice.

  The youth seemed to take a breath of the cold air into his lungs, and then strode up to the corpse. He laid his fingers on the dead man’s face. As he did so, an eerie voice was heard.

  “Murderer!”

  “John Laidlaw, plainly, could not have climbed into Henry Stokoe’s bedchamber and cut his throat,” William Crozier said, as the light of dawn crept into his rooms. “It did not seem to be a woman’s crime, but at all events I doubted whether either Agnes or Mary were by temperament capable of such a savage murder. Poison would be their weapon.”

  George shook his head. “I never imagined that Robert . . .”

  Yet any doubt he might have entertained concerning the boy’s guilt had been extinguished by the foul and terrible confession that spurted from him when the voice – surely not from Henry’s corpse? – made its dreadful accusation.

  What if he had killed the wretched old man? Everyone hated Henry Stokoe. He was wickedness incarnate, a vile brute who took pleasure in tormenting even the women who cared for him. To rid the world of such a pestilence was no crime. It was an honour. His forefathers were Reivers who hated men like Henry Stokoe. They would have been proud of him.

  The onlookers froze upon hearing of the outrage. A dead man had spoken, and a murderer had proclaimed his mortal sin with pride. Only William Crozier seemed unperturbed. When Robert spat on the body and then raced away into the darkness, George had made as if to follow him, but his principal caught his arm.

  “Let him run. He will not get far. We have done what we came here to do.”

  And now, a few hours later, George was wrestling with the enormity of what he had witnessed.

  “A corpse does not have a voice,” he said at length.

  William Crozier nodded. “I admit to a subterfuge, in the interest of a greater justice. It was I who told Robert that he was a murderer.”

  “You?”

  “There is a technique for projecting the voice. It dates back many centuries. Have you never heard of belly speakers?”

  “Never.”

  “Scholars have ascertained the origins of this ancient art in the centuries before the birth of our Lord. Wise men held that, by projecting the voice, they might better communicate with the dead. Later, in Europe, there was a widely held belief that the spirits of the deceased went to the stomachs of prophets and continued to exist there. The prophets were thus able to foretell the future by the spirits who spoke from their bellies.”

  “Absurd!”

  “Indeed. There is no place for such views in the philosophy of a man of law. Yet the physical technique is a valuable one. I am a seeker-out of curiosities, as you know, and I have endeavoured to master the skill. It is known, by virtue of a Latin rendering of ‘stomach-talk’, as ventriloquism. Tonight, for the first time, I had the opportunity to utilise what I have learned in order to serve of justice.”

  “You decided that the corpse should appear to speak, with a view to wringing an admission of guilt from the boy.”

  “He is a Reiver’s son, wily and resolute. I saw no other way of contriving mattes so that he might so forget himself as to tell the truth.”

  “But why would Robert wish to kill Henry?”

  “Because Henry would never have permitted Robert to marry his daughter.”

  George stared at the coroner. “What makes you think that Mary would have wished to marry Robert?”

  “Unless I am much mistaken, he is the father of her unborn child.”

  “She is with child?” George gasped.

  “So I have surmised. At all events, the theory explains much. Her fainting, her sickness. Even the uncharacteristic roundness of a girl’s cheeks is said to be a sign of pregnancy. I have no doubt that it was Robert who cried no when Mary retched and then her aunt cried out to distract our attention from the girl’s indisposition, encouraging the belief that it was prompted by distress rather than a physical cause.”

  George put his head in his hands. “And now the father of her child will end his life on the gallows.”

  “The law requires no less. Henry Stokoe must be avenged.”

  “What of Mary? Did she know what Robert had done?”

  “Strictly between us, I might speculate that she and her aunt know a deal more about what happened than they have chosen to acknowledge thus far. They made much of being light sleepers. Did they really hear nothing on that fateful morning? Of their supposed complicity, however, I have no proof and I do not expect Robert Laidlaw to supply the deficit.”

  George looked at his principal steadily. “Will you take steps to seek out such proof?”

  William Crozier gave a shake of the head so discreet that, in the dimness of the early light, George almost failed to discern it.

  “The law must prevail, and it will. But wise men know that the law must also command respect. There is a limit to the sacrifice upon which justice insists.”

  A TASTE FOR DUCKING

  MARILYN TODD

  One of James I’s early acts had been to extend the Witchcraft regulations introduced during Elizabeth’s reign. His Act of 1604 allowed punishment by death for witchcraft without benefit of clergy and it was this law that later witchhunters, most notoriously the Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, used to their advantage. Anyone who was accused of witchcraft, often with the flimsiest of evidence, never seemed to stand a chance, showing the prejudice, superstition and above all gullibility of the age. It was a factor a real criminal could use to their advantage, as Marilyn Todd considers here.

  Marilyn Todd (b. 1958) is best known for her series featuring that cunning vixen of ancient Rome, Claudia Seferus, starting with I, Claudia (1995).

  “Duck the witch!” Clap hands. “Duck the witch!”

  Dawn was breaking cold and grey, as the procession chanted its way through the little village of Farringham in the South Downs. Hoar frost sparkled on the roof of the church. Wind rattled the tavern’s windows. The bare branches of willows reflected like cracks on the frozen duck pond. Betsy didn’t notice. The quicker this business was over
and done with the better, that was her view.

  “Duck the witch!” Clap hands. “Duck the witch!”

  With her hands tied behind her, she stumbled and slipped down the icy path – past the dairy – past the smithy – down to the miller’s place.

  “Far enough.” Parson Dale held up a hand that had turned blue at the fingers with cold. “Let the Ordeal of Innocence begin.”

  Most of the faces that had crowded round were a blur, but Betsy did notice the parson’s wife leading the clapping while Thomas Collins elbowed his way to the front for a good view. She was sorely tempted to tell him that he, a master carpenter of all people, ought to be ashamed of himself, jeering in public like this. Who was it taught him his numbers, eh? Who showed him how to tie knots in a rope? The best way to harden a conker? When this was over she’d clip his ear, that’s for sure, and never mind he was thirty-seven years old!

  “Duck the witch!”

  The clapping was constant now, fast and eager. Perhaps, she thought, the villagers needed to keep themselves warm.

  “Duck the witch, duck the witch!”

  At the front of the crowd, the hard lips of Betsy’s daughter-in-law were pursed in smugness and malice glittered from her green eyes. Betsy shook her head in bewilderment. All right, Mary wasn’t the wife she’d have chosen for her son, but, though they’d never got on, she’d accepted the girl into her family and gave way on everything Mary had asked. Trouble was, and try as she might, nothing could please her, nothing was ever enough. It had reached the point now where she slept in the kitchen and acted as a servant in her own home, yet still Mary wasn’t satisfied. She wanted Betsy out, that was the problem, and the truth was, she would have gone and willingly so – had she had some place to go.

  By her daughter-in-law’s side, Betsy’s only child fixed his gaze to his boots. Not his fault the lad was weak, she supposed. Took after his granddad on his father’s side, did poor Robbie – only soft men were always grist to a shrew’s mill. Every time Betsy tried to put her foot down, it was Robbie who caught the sharp edge of her tongue. Robbie who found no comfort in his wife’s bed for a week. Betsy couldn’t let her son pay the price for his mother’s resistance, so she gave way. Shooting him a thin smile of encouragement, she felt a pain in her heart when he didn’t once lift his eyes to meet hers.

  “Betsy Bellingham, you stand accused of unnatural compacts with Satan.” The parson’s voice droned through the February bleakness. “Of placing the Devil’s familiar at your disposal –”

  As though no one else in Farringham kept a cat!

  “– and performing whatever vile service Satan demanded of you. Betsy Bellingham, how do you plead?”

  “Not guilty, as you well know!”

  The priest’s black brows joined above the bridge of his nose in a frown. “You deny causing Farmer Preston’s bull to turn into a toad?”

  Betsy rolled her eyes at the gate that had been left open all night. “I certainly do.”

  “You deny summoning the dead last Halloween?”

  “Of course.”

  “Of making magic at the crossroads? Conjuring demons? Bringing calamity upon the mash in the brewery?”

  “Parson, Nathan Stokes has had a reputation for brewing bad beer for the past six-and-a-half years. What other nonsense do you put forward?”

  “How do you plead to the charge that you were seen riding a broomstick over Bramber Down three weeks ago last Wednesday night?”

  “With my arthritis?”

  The laughter that rippled round the crowd was quickly quelled by the glare of the priest. “Very well, if you persist in denying the charges levelled against you, we will proceed with the test.”

  Betsy heard a snip and for the first time in three days her wrists were unbound. Numb and leaden, she shook them to bring them back to life, but the action only brought fire to her hands. And it was because of this distraction that the parson had to repeat his request.

  “Strip? Naked?” The pain in her fingers was instantly forgotten. “How dare you even ask?” She scowled at the priest. “At my age, as well!”

  “You admit to the charges then?” This voice was softer. Like melted lard oozing over a ham.

  “I most certainly do not.”

  “Then I urge you to submit, the quicker we might record your innocence.”

  Sharp-featured, bearded and with his head cowled, the stranger could have been a monk with all those crosses on chains. He was not. Any time an accusation of witchcraft was bandied, the Witchfinder General sent out an agent. A brodder, whose task was to prove or disprove the allegations.

  “And if I don’t?”

  Where was the ducking stool? Betsy wondered. She’d expected it to have been wheeled down by now and hoped someone would send for it soon. Her limbs were shaking with cold.

  “If you don’t, we will hang you and bury your body in unconsecrated ground in a grave that will never be marked,” the brodder replied softly. “So why not let the Officer of the Ordeal disrobe you that we might be certain there is no mark of the Devil upon you?” He paused. “Dame Bellingham, I assure you this really is for your own good.”

  Behind his shoulder, Mary folded her hands over her chest in grim satisfaction while her mother-in-law shivered with cold and humiliation.

  “Let the record read, there is no mark of the Devil upon Betsy Bellingham.”

  Half the crowd seemed relieved. The other half itched for more entertainment. They were in luck.

  “Crouch the candidate, please.”

  The brodder’s voice was politeness itself, while Betsy’s teeth chattered too loudly for her to protest.

  “Proceed as we discussed, Parson Dale.” He might have been overseeing the trussing of a goose. “Right thumb to left toe, nice and tight, now.”

  “What about the ducking stool?” she finally managed to splutter.

  “Ducking stool?” The priest paused from blessing the mill-pond. “My dear lady, we’re ducking witches, not scolds.”

  “We need to test your innocence,” the witchfinder lisped. “For this, we throw you into the waters and if you are, as I truly believe, innocent of these vile allegations, you will sink.” A soft hand indicated two stout men standing by, stripped to the waist and ready to dive in and save her. “If, on the other hand, Satan has put lies on your tongue to deceive us, your body will reject the baptismal waters, so have faith in God, my child.” He patted her head reassuringly. “Have faith in God.”

  Betsy did. She always had. And as two pairs of strong arms lifted her over the millpond, His was the only name on her lips.

  Of course, she had no way of knowing that the distinctive tying of her bonds was the result of years of painstaking research.

  Even when her body plunged beneath the icy waters, Betsy Bellingham firmly believed that her innocence was a foregone conclusion.

  Blackestone Manor, with its chimneys and gables, wings and half-timbers, was by far the grandest building for miles. Like Drake and Raleigh, Sir Francis Blackestone had been one of the late queen’s most resourceful pirates, and even though his cut represented a mere fraction of the plundering he’d done for the Crown, it had allowed him to purchase what seemed like half the land between Chichester and Brighton and, of course, half the population who lived on it. But despite profits from his farms and forests that more than offset the profligacy of his lavish lifestyle, it was not in cold, dull England that Sir Francis Blackestone made his home. Preferring the warmer climes and even hotter native maidens, he settled in Jamaica to a routine that his only son and heir took great pride in inheriting and which, by all accounts, was set to shorten his life by approximately the same amount as it had his father’s.

  As a result, Blackestone Manor had remained unoccupied for virtually its entire existence. Occasionally, before his death, Sir Francis would come to England for a month (but no more) to sort out his affairs, gamble away the odd thousand or two and impregnate as many chambermaids as he was able, and, to his credit, his so
n even made the effort to attend the new King’s coronation. But the point is, Jamaica was the place the Blackestones called home. The Manor House was merely the mark of their success.

  So when the staff went into a flurry of airing and warming at a time of year when no Blackestone in his right mind would make the crossing, not on those seas, the curiosity in nearby Farringham was relentless. Was young Sir Roger coming home for good? Was he touting at long last for a wife? Would those lazy buggers employed at the Manor finally have to earn their damned wages? Eventually, it was the footman who told the laundress who told the parson’s wife who, in fine civic duty, passed it on to everyone else that in fact the house had been lent to a distant cousin of the Blackstones. More pertinently, it appeared that it had been lent to the young wife of that distant cousin, a certain Eleanor Dearborn, who, despite claiming she needed nothing more than a few weeks of rest and recuperation after a heavy winter’s cold, was obviously in “a certain condition”. Farringham (in the form of the parson’s wife) knew this because, dear me, the whole world knew that Geoffrey Dearborn had taken a wife thirty years younger than himself in his desperation for an heir to his fortune. Why else would the lovely Eleanor be here on her own, Mrs Dale reasoned? And since Sir Geoffrey enjoyed a reputation for fairness and honesty in these parts, Farringham rejoiced for them both.

  “Seven years is a long time to wait for the rock of the cradle,” the parson’s wife told the newcomer, waiting no time at all herself before popping round with a basket of eggs.

  “Indeed it is, Mrs Dale, indeed it is.”

  My word, the staff had had to move to get those rooms in order, the parson’s wife thought. No dust, not a speck, and with that roaring log fire you’d think the chimney had been swept every year.

  “You must have been terribly worried,” she prompted, once she’d realized that nothing else was forthcoming and that gossip doesn’t spread by itself.

  “Not at all.” The firelight shone on Eleanor’s auburn curls as she laid a hand on her visitor’s plump forearm. “I put my faith in God,” she said, squeezing gently.