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The Mammoth Book of Jacobean Whodunnits

Page 31

by Mike Ashley (ed)


  “Can I go back now, ma’am?” Mary asked.

  “Soon.” And even though the smile was warm and reassuring, the hand that clamped her upper arm was like a vice. “Only there’s something we need to do first.”

  Mary looked at the nightgown Eleanor pulled out from under her own furs. “I-I think I’ll turn back, miss, if it’s all the same with you.”

  “But it is not all the same to me, Mary.” The voice had an edge to it. “You see, by accusing Betsy of turning a prize bull into a toad, you thought you’d found a way to drive your mother-in-law out of the house. Her house, I might add.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Because even though you knew she hadn’t done it, you also knew that allegations of witchcraft are always taken seriously. But just to be on the safe side, I’m sure you dropped a word in the parson’s wife’s ear that you’d heard Betsy cursing the brewer’s mash, and wasn’t it a coincidence that it was around the same time the parson got toothache?”

  It only took one drip of malice for the poison to take root. Mrs Dale was a glutton for gossip, and in no time the carpenter’s megrims and someone’s sick cow had turned into a full-scale blight on the village.

  “You’re a sensible girl, Mary Bellingham. Have you ever come across rheumatics, or for that matter ulcers, that come on overnight? And I wonder who planted the notion in Kitty the dairymaid’s head that her cramps were caused by something other than the onset of her menstruals?”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mary said defiantly. “Betsy confessed to everything, the parson heard her and the brodder wrote it down.”

  “What would you expect from an old woman who’d been stripped naked in front of the entire village then trussed up in such a way that sinking’s impossible.”

  Bastards.

  Green eyes narrowed. “What do you mean, impossible?”

  “Exactly what it sounds like,” Eleanor said. “And because of one selfish bitch’s bid to turn an old woman out, tragedy rippled right across this village, causing pain, distress and hardship to more people than anyone could imagine.”

  “It’s not my fault.” She tossed her head. “I thought ducking the witch meant using the ducking stool. Betsy thought so as well.”

  “Of course, it’s your fault! All of this is your fault!” Eleanor’s eyes flashed in fury. “And don’t tell me what you thought, because the only thing you thought about was yourself, and dammit, you revelled in Betsy’s humiliation. When she was stripped naked, you laughed, and when she was tossed into a freezing cold millpond and floated, you wallowed in satisfaction. Ah, here we are.”

  She held up the lantern to reveal a freshly turned mound in which a shroud glowed below in the moonlight.

  “Betsy’s grave.”

  Mary stared. “You’re mad, you are. You ought to be in one of them asylum places.”

  “Even when the woman who welcomed you into her family was tied in a sack that the brodder strung over the gallows tree, you didn’t think about Betsy. You didn’t once stop to wonder what fear was in her heart when the god she believed in rejected her body on waters that had been blessed by the priest. Shame on you.”

  “I thought she’d be found innocent,” Mary protested.

  “If you tell me once more what you thought,” Eleanor hissed, “so help me I will leave your body in this grave and no one will be any the wiser.”

  Imagine the terror of being tied in a sack, knowing it was to swing from the gallows. The knowledge of innocence mixed with holy rejection when the brodder set the sack swinging. Swinging and swinging, back and forth, back and forth, imagine what it must have been like . . .

  The rocking motion causes disorientation.

  The victim vomits but has no room to move.

  She’s gagging, but trapped in her own vile stench.

  And still the sack keeps on swinging –

  “How long did you stand there laughing at her, Mary? How many hours did you watch an old woman struggle for breath and for dignity, until she finally confessed to her sins?”

  The brodder had recorded it in delicate detail, insisting the witch give up the name of her accomplice, who in turn, of course, gave up the names of others.

  “They call it the witch’s cradle and, just like the tying of bonds for ducking the witch, it was designed with great care,” she told Mary. “The dice are suitably loaded.”

  Often the victim suffers hallucinations as well, which was how Lucy Hewitt, eighty-two years old, admitted convening with the coven at the crossroads at midnight, conjuring the dead round the compass of death as they copulated with Satan in turn.

  “That’s not all.”

  Anger was rising like a rip tide inside her. She could no more hold it back than turn push back the sun.

  “Before hanging, it is the witchfinder’s solemn duty to wash away corruption and redeem the soul, and do you know how he does that? Do you, Mary? The brodder ties his victim to the boards naked – oh yes, naked, he’s vicious to his core – and then he pinches their nose until they can stand it no more, and when they frantically open their mouth to gasp for air he stuffs a funnel in it and pours scalding water down their throat.”

  Mary gulped but quickly recovered. “All right, I admit it got out of hand, but I don’t see what this has to do with you –”

  “No? Well, that’s the interesting part, Mary. You see, if you’re going to accuse someone of witchcraft, you really ought to know who and what you are dealing with.” Eleanor smiled. “Me, Mary. I’m the real thing.”

  Her face went white and her mouth dropped. “Dear God in heaven!”

  “Somehow I doubt that. In the same way that I can’t accept cloven-hoofed monsters prancing around waving pitchforks, I find it difficult to believe in a god who idly stands by while decent women suffer the most abominable torture in his name, either.”

  “So –” For the first time, Mary was worried. “Are you going to make a wax image of me and burn it slowly to twist up my body and make me suffer pain?”

  “Worse,” Eleanor said, because there was no point in telling the girl that witchcraft had nothing whatsoever to do with the black arts, but revolved around health and wellbeing. “My curse upon you is a conscience. Every day for the rest of your life, Mary Bellingham, you will wake up with a body every bit as sturdy as it is today, and every day you will relive Betsy’s torment, your role in it and the tragedy you brought upon not just thirteen innocent women, those who had loved and depended on them.”

  For as the brodder himself proved, if you plant an idea in a gullible brain, that idea will quickly take hold. And now that Mary had been told she’d be fit and healthy for the rest of her life, as a result, she probably would be. The stronger to relive and repent the wickedness she had done. The damage she had done to them all.

  “Now get down into that grave, and wrap the poor woman in a decent shroud,” she told Mary.

  Aunt Betsy had always had a fondness for violets.

  What is witchcraft? Is it the worship of evil for evil’s own sake? Is it flying on broomsticks, cooking toads in their blood, whispering spells of cruelty and malice?

  In the eyes of King James, witches served the Devil’s apprenticeship, causing harm by unnatural means. Through their dark magic and Satanic rites, he saw them conjuring demons and inflicting disease, mixing sorcery that couldn’t just bring on death, but was capable of raising the dead. To be fair, his obsession was rooted in personal acquaintance. When the ship on which he was bringing home his Danish wife was caught in a storm, he didn’t stop to question how a group of ordinary people could possibly have conjured a tempest, much less what their reasoning might be. He simply attended their trial, believed what he’d heard, then promptly set about protecting himself and his kingdom through the simple expedience of wiping out witchcraft.

  Poor James. An intellectual, yet he couldn’t see that saintly relics were no different from protective amulets. A scholar, yet he didn
’t comprehend how the Church was manipulating paganism by propagating tales of demons and witchcraft to deliberately instil fear for its own ends.

  Or did he?

  If people turned to the Church for support in such dark, turbulent times (and eventually became dependent on it), would the same not be true of the King? That by extending the law to make witchcraft a capital offence – especially without benefit of clergy – might his own influence not grow, too?

  But how does one define it? Certainly, Geoffrey Dearborn’s wealth and influence could have secured him a wife among the landed gentry, yet it was the full-breasted, auburn-haired daughter of his tailor that he had chosen and adored from that day onward. Bewitched? Possibly, for the feeling was far from mutual; and poor Geoffrey: seven years and still no sign of an heir. But then the rhizomes of water lilies had that effect, even if he didn’t know.

  A long night of drinking.

  A wife who sighs the next morning, tells him he was remarkable.

  Oh, no, Geoffrey would never denounce his red-headed love, even if the thought crossed Mary’s mind later.

  “I’m sorry, but you simply can’t keep going round accusing witches, people will think you’re a laughing stock,” Eleanor tutted, as they wheeled Betsy’s corpse down the hill to the undertaker’s workshop. “And if my own cousin didn’t recognize me, who’ll believe you, and trust me, the brodder won’t be pointing his bodkin in my direction, I assure you.”

  The one thing about money is that it can buy you just about anything. Alibis actually rate pretty low on the scale.

  “Go back to the stone you crawled under from, Mary.” With a soft click, the padlock on the door of the workshop sprang open. “And may you have a long life with the husband who backed you over his mother.”

  Now both parties get what they deserve.

  Prising the lid off a cheap wooden coffin, Eleanor thought back to the tiny kitchen behind the tailor’s shop, stitching her violets to hoots of laughter from her aunt, who sang songs and baked bread while her sister-in-law rested from giving birth to the twins, and taking time out between washing and scrubbing to teach the young Eleanor her letters. Covering Betsy’s face with her violet kerchief, she hoped that Seth Mabbett, whose coffin this was, didn’t mind sharing, but it was important Betsy Bellingham was laid to rest in hallowed ground and the fact that her niece had no faith in God didn’t matter.

  Betsy had, that was the point.

  Blackestone Manor had only just got used to having visitors under its roof before Eleanor was packing her bags, and wasn’t it a scandal that the parson’s wife had raised poor Sir Geoffrey’s hopes by suggesting it was more than convalescence after a cold? Where did she get the idea from, that’s what people wanted to know, and now they thought about it, wasn’t Mrs Dale always exaggerating?

  Dear me, she’d even hinted that she’d been deliberately held back at the Manor in time to catch her death from the storm, but why should Sir Geoffrey’s wife do a wicked thing like that? It was nothing but a cover for poisoning her husband, if you asked them. Accidental, of course, but all the same. Fewer callers knocked on the parson’s wife.

  “That was the old man who lived over the road from the witch,” a voice said, as Eleanor paused in the lych gate.

  “Which one?” she asked. “That one?”

  “Not graves. The funeral you were watching before I arrived.”

  “I was admiring the church steeple.”

  “Unusual to find the gentry with such a keen interest in gargoyles,” Tom Jordan replied, crossing his arms. “Lucky you.”

  She said nothing. He made no move to leave. The smell of pinecones and hay hung between them.

  “Did you hear about the brodder?” he asked after a while. “They found him dead at the table, slumped over his crosses and chains.”

  Eleanor looked round sharply. “Did they indeed.”

  “Drank too much, ate too much, it was bound to catch up with him in the end, I suppose.”

  “More than likely,” she said, though it was strange that bane-berries were often used as rat poison, and that the rat-catcher had been setting traps in Milord’s courthouse at exactly the same time as the parson was checking the records. Just as he had been eliminating vermin from the brodder’s personal quarters –

  She looked at his long, craggy face and prematurely white hair, and his words floated back across time.

  Another two days I give him, no more.

  They had been discussing the witchfinder’s imminent departure for Stoughton, to root out the truth of the accusations over there.

  The King’s agent is nothing, if not thorough.

  James might have an obsession with demonology, she reflected, but Parliament wasn’t so sure. And since too many allegations were going round for their liking, other agents were also dispatched in the King’s name. Men who followed the witchprickers/brodders/call them what you will, to ensure that fair play was done . . .

  “It’s too early for them to be plentiful yet, but I thought somehow you might like these.”

  As the funeral procession stopped at the graveside, he pressed a posy of violets into her hand. By the time the mist had cleared from Eleanor’s eyes, he was gone, but there was something else with the flowers, she noticed.

  A bodkin.

  Yes indeed, she thought shivering. The King’s agent was nothing if not thorough.

  And in the lych gate stood an empty cage.

  DEATH KNOWS NO COMPROMISE

  DEREK WILSON

  I had forgotten until reminded by Derek Wilson that the great Flemish painter, Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) was also a noted diplomat, first under Philip III of Spain in 1605 and later under Philip IV. In 1629 he was appointed envoy to Charles I in the latest peace negotiations between England and Spain, during which time he undertook several paintings, including the famous one of Charles I and his wife Henrietta Maria.

  Rubens’ period in England is the setting for the following story. Derek Wilson (b. 1935) is a noted historian and biographer who has written books about Henry VIII, Charles I, Francis Drake and the Earl of Leicester – the latter also featured in the novels Feast in the Morning (1975) and A Time to Lose (1976). His mystery novels include the Tim Lacy series of art thrillers, starting with The Triarchs (1994) plus several historical mysteries, including The Swarm of Heaven (2001) involving that great schemer Niccolo Machiavelli.

  “They brought me a body.”

  The writer paused and laid aside his pen. He pictured his fastidious correspondent, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, in his charming house among the vines and groves of Aix-en-Provence. Rubens smiled. Perhaps he would spare the elegant Frenchman the details of the corpse he had spent much of the day sketching. Even in the cool Westminster cellar where the vagrant had been laid out for his inspection decomposition had set in quickly. Long before the onset of the July evening Rubens had been glad to pack away his sketchbook, carbons and brushes and escape into the fresh air of the waterfront. No, he would not share with his old friend his thoughts about the curious aspects of the dead vagrant’s appearance.

  The artist cast his eyes over the last lines he had written.

  “I have now been here almost a month and the time has passed rapidly and agreeably. Everyone at court treats me with the utmost civility. The day after my arrival the king summoned me to Greenwich Palace (this pleasant residence a little way down river from the capital is where he prefers to spend the months of high summer) and spoke with me in camera for more than an hour. Several friends had warned me that I should find his majesty shy and reserved but his manner could not have been more open and friendly. He spoke freely of his feelings about the Spanish and French courts and I have much cause to hope that I shall successfully complete my mission for his Catholic Majesty. He promised me some commissions and asked if there was any way he could assist me in my work. The resources of his court, he said, were at my disposal. I regarded this as princely civility and thought little more of it. It was, therefore
, a great surprise when two men in royal livery called at my lodging yesterday. They brought me a body.”

  Peter Paul Rubens took up his quill again and dipped it in the inkpot.

  “I have been working since my arrival on an altarpiece for the Brothers of the Holy Cross in Seville – Lamentations over the Dead Christ. I must have mentioned to King Charles certain technical problems I was experiencing in the representation of lifeless form – a live model is never quite right. His majesty obviously remembered my difficulty. He gave orders that when an unclaimed body became available it should be brought to me. Thus, when the corpse of a vagabond suicide was dragged from the Thames, it was delivered to me. So, you see, my dear Nicolas-Claude, how thoughtful this king is. All his subjects are at my disposal – even dead ones.”

  Rubens finished the letter with a flourish of personal pleasantries. He rose from the table and walked to the window of his spacious first floor lodgings in Balthazar Gerbier’s house. The modest mansion was set on a rise above the Thames no more than a mile from the summer palace and was flanked by clumps of woodland. The painter gazed down an “avenue” through the trees to where the lowering sun made the river into a curving ribbon of burnished brass reaching towards distant London. The details of the view fixed themselves in his mind and Rubens knew that he must paint it. All that was needed was a suitable allegorical subject worthy of this subtly soft English landscape.

  As he contemplated the serene Thames his thoughts went back to the body which had been collected in late afternoon and was doubtless, by now, already unceremoniously interred in a pauper’s grave. How many poor wretches, he wondered, drowned every year in London’s river? Except that his wretch had not drowned and all the evidence suggested that he had not been poor. Rubens was still standing deep in thought when there was a discreet tap at the door and his host entered.

  The adjective that came most readily to the mind by someone encountering Balthazar Gerbier for the first time was “wary”. The tasteful clothes, well-trimmed moustache and little black tongue of beard spoke of someone who understood fashion and was no stranger to royal courts but his small, dark eyes were seldom at rest and his hands seemed always in search of objects to touch, move or pick up. Now those eyes roved over the sheets of sketch paper laid out on the bed, the empty easel in the corner, the sanded letter, as yet unfolded on the table and the portly, black-clad figure by the window.

 

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