“There is a reliable witness, who will swear to it if necessary.”
“Good, good. Doubtless the lawyers will want proof.”
After an awkward silence Gerbier said, “I was just asking Mistress Heythrop if she knew who might have been responsible for this crime.”
“Whoever it was has spared me the task.” Thomas stared unblinking at his visitor. “Do I shock you, Monsieur? Then, perhaps I should tell you a few things about my brother and the torment he inflicted on those closest to him.”
Margaret looked up at her brother-in-law and reached out a hand to his. It was not difficult for Gerbier to read from their expressions the feelings these two had for each other. He listened with growing sadness to the tale of domestic misery that Thomas unfolded.
William had inherited Polham from his father five years before and it had soon become clear that his only interest in the estate was to milk it for the money needed to fund his own pleasures. Despite Thomas’s protests William had mortgaged several parcels of land so that the estate was soon struggling to meet the repayments. There was nothing to spare for repairs to farm buildings, and tenants’ dwellings and what had once been a well-run property was soon in rapid decline. Yet, despite his poor reputation as a landlord, William had managed to have himself elected as an MP for Reading in 1628.
“Bribery and hypocrisy, Monsieur Gerbier. That’s how he managed it. Persuaded some of the burgesses that he’d stand up for them against the king’s illegal taxes. Those he couldn’t convince he paid to vote for him.”
“That’s not quite fair, Tom. Will was honestly opposed to the king’s wars and the forced loan.”
Thomas nodded. “True enough, Meg, though you should be the last person finding excuses for him. Anyway, my dear brother went off to parliament last year and became a great speechifier. He was always good at putting on an act. At least with him away we could make a start on pulling the estate back together.”
Thomas explained how they had heard very little from the head of the family. Even when parliament was not in session he had spent most of his time London. Then, out of the blue, a letter had arrived from a man called Shearman. In it the writer accused William Heythrop of having seduced his wife and urged his friends and family to take him in hand. If they failed to do so Shearman vowed that he would deal with the matter himself.
Then, late one evening in mid-March William had returned unexpectedly to Polham in a state of great agitation. He arrived on a lathered horse and immediately ordered the servants to bag up the family plate and all the money they could find. Then he went to his wife’s room and pocketed her jewellery.
“That was too much, even for sweet Meg.” Thomas continued. “She stood up to him and there was a violent quarrel.”
“He was in a terrible state,” Margaret added. “He said he was going straight away and there was nothing I could do to stop him.”
“Meg was clinging to him as he left her room. He struck her repeatedly. Then when she still refused to let go, he picked her up and threw her down the stairs. You can see the result, Monsieur Gerbier.” Thomas’s face was scarlet with rage as he recalled the events of that terrible evening. “He would have left her there, Monsieur, not caring whether she died or lived. He actually called for his horse and was at the door when I arrived. I’d been in the village and hurried home as soon as one of the servants came to find me. Would to God I had got here sooner. Still, I stopped him,” he added grimly.
Thomas had laid out his brother with a single blow. Then he had tied him up and locked him in his room while he and the servants tended Margaret. When the two brothers confronted each other the next day William ranted and swore. He said his life was in danger and he dared not stay.
“Did he say who he was afraid of?”
“No, we assumed it was Shearman. It was some days before we heard about the battle between the king and the Commons. You’ll have heard all about that.”
Gerbier nodded. Everyone knew about the bad blood between Charles and the lower house of parliament. He had tried to put a stop to its discussions but angry members had held the Speaker in his chair while votes were taken against royal policies. The quarrel had ended up with the dissident MPs scattering and nine of them being thrown into prison.
“We wondered whether the king’s men were after William, especially when we heard other reports which suggested that he was a marked man. Well, days passed and nothing happened. I was more concerned about Meg. She was very ill and the doctors talked about removing her right leg. But, praise God, she recovered – or, at least, she lived.”
“And William?”
“Stayed home for a couple of weeks. Then, suddenly, one day he was gone. That was in April and we’ve heard nothing from him since.”
“You didn’t try looking for him?”
“I’d only have looked for him, Monsieur, if I wanted to find him. But, God’s my witness, I devoutly hoped never to see him again. And now I’ll never have to. Between us,” he squeezed Margaret’s hand, “we can return prosperity and peace to Polham.”
Gerbier smiled. “And in that I wish you every success – both of you.”
Margaret returned his smile. “You’re very kind, Monsieur. Thank you for taking so much trouble to bring us this news.”
The Heythrops prevailed on Gerbier to stay for dinner and, it being by then too late to reach London by daylight, it was the next morning before he was back on the road.
He ambled his way eastward. Now there was even more to think about. He was no nearer to discovering Heythrop’s killer. Shearman? Some zealous servant of the king? An aggrieved tenant? Or an angry, vengeful brother in love with his sibling’s wife? Gerbier wanted very much to believe Thomas’s version of events and was inclined to accept that it was substantially true. But why had the young man lied about not going to London in search of William? And if William had simply disappeared as the couple at Polham claimed, how did Thomas know that his brother had returned to the capital? If danger lurked for him there it might have been thought that he would give the city a wide berth. For mile after quiet country mile Gerbier turned over in his mind all the facts he had unearthed. At last he abandoned the effort of trying to reach a conclusion. After all, what did it matter? William Heythrop was dead and his demise was no loss to anyone. The man had been a traitor to all who had a call on his loyalty – king, wife, family and everyone who looked to landowners like the Heythrops as the very substance of English rural society. Gerbier decided to concern himself no more in a business which promised no profit.
He had just come within sight of the castle at Windsor when he heard the sound of galloping horsemen on the road behind him. The highway was wide and traffic was very light but he steered his horse into the side to let the hurrying travellers pass. They did not pass. They reined in as they drew level and one edged in front blocking his path. Quickly, Gerbier reached down for the pistol in his saddle holster. Before his hand closed over the stock something heavy and hard struck the back of his head. He fell across the horse’s neck, tried to right himself but ended up slithering sideways. His shoulder struck the flinty ruts with a jarring jolt. Head swimming he looked up at his attackers.
Thee were three of them, all in dark riding cloaks. Gerbier tried to make his eyes focus but the faces staring down at him were little more than a blur.
Someone said, “Frogs should stay in their own pond and keep out of other men’s gardens.”
Then one of the assailants hit him again and he plunged into a black void.
What followed was a confusion of images and sensations. Sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious, Gerbier felt juddering motions and sensed the smell of animals. He heard street noises – horses, wagons, people. Yet, terrifyingly, he could see nothing, nor could he call out for aid. But at last the darkness did lift and the pain in his head had subsided to a dull throbbing. When he opened his eyes he saw the familiar sight of his own bed hangings and the anxious faces of his wife and a cluster of children a
nd servants. Somehow, heaven knew how, he had reached home safely.
It was two days before the concussion lifted and Gerbier was able to sit in an armed chair by the window. There were still gaps in his memory but with the aid of servants who had found him on his own doorstep the chain of events became reasonably clear. His attackers had bound and gagged him and stuffed him inside a sack. He had then been brought back on a farm cart to his own house at dead of night. When he had been untrussed a note had been discovered pinned to the collar of his cloak: He lives. If he meddles further with the Heythrop business he will not be so fortunate. Since Gerbier had told her nothing about his investigation Debora was both bewildered and frightened. He tried to calm her and assured her – which was the truth – that he had no intention of pursuing his enquiries. Not until Rubens came and sat with him did he unburden himself and try to make sense of his misadventure.
“A pox on the whole Heythrop clan!” he muttered. “They all have deviousness and violence in their blood.”
Rubens suppressed a smile. “You are sure that it was they who mishandled you?”
“It must have been. That plausible rogue Thomas Heythrop was afraid that I might not swallow his lie about not following his brother to London, so he sent his men after me to frighten me into silence.”
“Hm, possibly.” The artist looked dubious.
“What other explanation could there be?”
“Well, it just occurs to me if Thomas Heythrop was a deliberate and skilful murderer he would not have balked at having you despatched and leaving your body at the roadside, apparently the victim of highway robbers.
“That’s as may be.”
“And then there’s the problem of delivery.”
Gerbier wrinkled his brow in a frown. “My friend, please don’t speak in riddles. My head is still buzzing.”
“I mean that if you did not give your address to Thomas Heythrop how could his paid ruffians know where to bring you?”
Gerbier took a sip from a glass of some livid green herbal decoction and winced at the astringent taste. “The same objection must apply to everyone involved in this affair.”
“Possibly.” Ruben’s face was expressionless.
Gerbier stared at him. “Do you know something you are not telling me?”
Rubens stood and moved towards the door. “I know that these English are phlegmatic by nature but unpredictable when roused. I know that it is unwise to become involved in their quarrels. And I know that you, my friend, need to rest and put these troublesome events behind you. I’ll come and see you again tomorrow.” He left, closing the door quietly behind him.
He climbed to his studio, where a young apprentice was, with intense concentration, working at the foliage sections of a large allegorical landscape. It was the view of the Thames from the painter’s chamber window and Rubens was pleased to have found a subject worthy of the peaceful, sylvan scene. It was the king, himself, who had suggested it. He wished to be portrayed as St George freeing his people from the bondage of war abroad and discord at home. In this idyllic scene, men, women and babes in arms rejoiced to be led into a sunlit world of peace and harmony and raised their hands in praise of the saint who had slain the dragon. And what was the dragon, if not the visible metaphor of an evil, unruly parliament, a body of men who had set themselves against the Lord and his anointed? It was a beast that had to be eradicated and the king, the great Christian champion, had destroyed it. The House of Commons was no more and the mood among Charles’ ministers and courtiers was one of unreserved glee.
Rubens dropped into an old wainscot chair and watched the young man carefully mixing and applying his pigments but his thoughts were elsewhere. He recalled the king standing before the Lamentation over the dead Christ and displaying neither surprise nor emotion at the suggestion that the model for the central figure might have been murdered. The muted suspicion that had murmured in Rubens’ inner ear then had now become a shouted certainty. The more he pondered poor Gerbier’s rough handling, the clearer it became to him that there was only one man who could be responsible. A man who had the wealth and the power to command desperadoes and assassins. A man dedicated to carrying out the wishes of his royal master, spoken and unspoken. A man well acquainted with Balthazar Gerbier and determined to deflect him from his inconvenient enquiries. Yet a man who would not wish to harm the little Frenchman seriously. For why would Lord Weston want to incapacitate a useful protege?
Yet the ultimate problem lay not with overzealous, mindlessly ambitious courtiers. It lay with politicians, whether royal demigods or radical demagogues who claimed to speak with the voice of the Almighty. For such fanatics the word “compromise” had no meaning. Rubens sighed. If England’s king and parliament could find no way to live together then it might be that they would die together. The fate of William Heythrop, God forbid, could be a portent of things to come.
A HOUSE DIVIDED
JUDITH CUTLER
The English Civil War, which erupted in 1642, was a direct result of both Charles I’s and James I’s intransigence and their total belief in their Divine right to rule. It divided not only the nation, but individual families, and that forms the basis for the following story set in the midst of battle.
Judith Cutler (b. 1946) is probably best known for her series of novels featuring Sophie Rivers who, like Cutler, was a lecturer at an inner-city college in Birmingham. That series began with Dying Fall (1995). More recently in Power on Her Own (1998), Cutler started a new series featuring Kate Power, a former Metropolitan Detective now working in Birmingham.
“My son would never run away from battle, Mistress Biddy, let me tell you that.” In his anger, Master Bulstrode smote the floor so hard with his stick I feared he would smash through the ceiling below. “And if you persist with such a foul slander, I shall have you whipped at the cart’s tail. Do I make myself clear, woman?” he bellowed, for he thought that all were as hard of hearing as he. “Speak up!”
I bobbed my curtsey, though my knees found it harder with each day. But I held to the truth, as I saw it. “I cannot lie, Master. Not though I were whipped a thousand times. Your son was wounded in the back. I have seen the evidence with my own eyes, as I washed his dear body.”
There can be nothing worse, to prepare your nursling, the child you suckled at your breast, for his funeral. The old should die first, not the young. Not that Master Thomas was young any more, I had to remind myself. He was no longer a gold-haired babe whom a painter might have used as a model for the Christ child – in those sacrilegious days of such heathen depictions. He had reached his middle years, thirty-five, when all notions of fighting should have left with the heat of his loins.
But all was topsy-turvy in this year of Our Lord 1648. God’s anointed King was now a villain. In our village his name was not mentioned without the speaker spitting into the dust. Master Bulstrode, once famed for his preaching from the pulpit of our parish church, had been one of the first to seize a labourer’s pitchfork and smash the stained glass windows of the church he had served for more then half a lifetime.
His eldest brother, Sir Peter, screamed and railed at the sight, clinging like a sailor in a shipwreck to the cross some said was built before the Conquest. In moments he was thrust away, and the heathen symbol was no more.
Would Sir Peter condole with Master Bulstrode? Both had lost their first-born, after all, though they’d fought on opposing sides. I doubted it.
But Master Bulstrode was busy with his stick once again, veins a-bulge in his forehead, as if he were like to have an apoplexy. “I saw the wounds with my own eyes, when they brought him home. A musket ball to the shoulder, his thigh cut almost to the bone by a pike. My son fought bravely.”
“I dare swear he did.” He had always had more passion than sense, young Master Thomas, whether it was climbing the highest trees or chasing the prettiest wench. “But the blow that killed him was here, sir.” I reached to the fleshy part of my shoulder, or thereabouts. “A deep knife woun
d – very deep, sir. That was what killed him. Begging your pardon, sir.” I forced my knees into another curtsey.
It was only because Master Bulstrode was such an important man in the village that they had brought his son home. I had seen the pits they dug for other men, officers and foot soldiers alike, the bodies stripped not just of their armour and weaponry, but of anything else that might have given a little dignity in death. Other women didn’t have the privilege of preparing their loved ones for a decent burial in a quiet corner of a country graveyard. Husbands, sweethearts and brothers alike – all were tumbled together like discarded playthings. And I had a home, thanks to the kindness of Master Bulstrode, who had taken me into his household when the bloody flux had carried off my husband: other women, camp followers no better than they ought to be or decent dames trying to provide a few home comforts for their soldier husbands, had nothing. Less than nothing. There were tales from both sides of the violation of women. Not just the slicing of noses to the bone, yes, and cheekbones too, but rape – men supposedly fighting for their God, rutting like animals knowing no better. And trying, God help them, to justify their bestiality.
“And where have you laid him? Until the funeral.” Master Bulstrode demanded, in tones more of accusation than grief.
“The dairy’s coolest,” I said. “I’ll watch him over night.”
“No praying for his soul! I’ll have no papish practices!” The spittle flew in his passion, though I dare swear he’d have given his own hope of salvation to save his son’s.
But I nodded. “Of course not, sir; but I wouldn’t want him lying there on his own.” Not the little lad who was always afraid of the dark. How many times had I rocked him after a nightmare, promising all would be well in the morning? Master Bulstrode had raged each time, saying his son must learn to be a man. But how could any nurse let a poor, motherless child – Mistress Bulstrode had died giving birth to him, a fact the master never let him forget – sob like that without loving him better?
The Mammoth Book of Jacobean Whodunnits Page 34