Titcomb knew he was playing a dangerous game. He withdrew the pistol and held it out. One pistol and one ball. What good was that against so many surrounding him?
Something passed over his face. Just for a fleeting moment but the woman saw it. She said, “Upstairs. First on the left. Don’t hurt her, mister.”
“I have no intention to do that, mistress.”
The door to her room stood at a crazy angle. William knocked, then pushed it open. Mary was kneeling on the floor, hands clasped in prayer. The fireplace was empty and the room was freezing. The wind whistled through the broken window with a keen wildness. She wore a plain shawl across her shoulders, her hair was tucked beneath a cap, but despite the cold her face was soaked with sweat. She looked around when William entered. There were dark circles under her eyes, as though she hadn’t slept for some time.
“Come to arrest me, then?” Her voice was just above a whisper. “Took your time, eh?”
William put away the pistol, carefully lowering the hammer. He walked into the room and stood in front of her. “No,” he said.
She began to weep. She put her arms around her and began to rock back and forth. “My baby,” she said. “My baby, my baby.”
He let her cry herself out and compose herself. She rose to her feet and slumped in the chair and talked.
“They said I was a loose woman. His father and the vicar both said that I’d got pregnant to force Joseph to marry me. They even said that the bastard belonged to another man. But it’s not true. I loved him and he said he loved me. He wanted to marry me but his father would have none of it. They forced Joseph not to see me anymore.”
William did not find it strange at all that Mary spoke perfectly easily to him. Yet he was in the absurd position that Slade’s murder had been attributed to Syndercombe. But the man was dead. He had been imprisoned in the Tower but had taken his own life rather than face being hung, drawn and quartered. John Thurloe was content that the murderer had been caught. But William couldn’t let it rest there.
“They even told my employer that I carried a bastard child and they dismissed me. What had I now? An unmarried mother, no job, and no home. What employment could I gain with a character reference?”
“Couldn’t you have gone to your parents?” William asked.
“And bring shame on them? No.”
“And Joseph wouldn’t marry you against his father’s wishes?”
“He was married three months before our baby was born,” she said, simply.
He knew from her face that she was troubled by this. Her life was ruined. William looked about him.
“The baby, Mary. Where is the baby?”
There was no sign of the child. In fact, no sign at all that a child’s presence. No cot, no clothes, the room was devoid of anything to do with a baby.
She saw William staring at her. She raised her arm and pointed to the window.
“Oh, God. No, Mary.”
“That’s what he said. He found me. Told me he’d been looking for me. Said that his marriage was a farce and that he wanted to be with me and the baby. He said he’d come into some good fortune and had money. That he wanted us to be a family. I told him that there was no family. He didn’t understand. I told him about the baby.”
She hadn’t meant to kill him. He’d rushed at her, putting his hand roughly about her. He was crushing her, screaming what had she done with his child. He was hurting her. She hated him. He made her kill their baby. With every thrust of the knife she took her anger out on him.
In this room she had taken the life of both father and son.
On cold winter nights when the wind blew fiercely, it would come back to him. Sometimes just snatched images of the room, or the smell or sound. Other times he remembered everything clearly. When it was quite like this, William Titcomb lay next to his wife, feeling the warmth of her body against his and remembered Mary Lewington.
THE PALATABLE TRUTH
CAROL ANNE DAVIS
After all of the dark and murderous stories we have had it seems timely for a little light relief. Anything I say about the following story is likely to give the game away so I shall say nothing other than that it was in 1657, during Cromwell’s Commonwealth, that a Frenchman opened the first ever shop in London for a certain commodity.
Carol Anne Davis (b. 1961) has been dubbed the “Queen of Noir” by Booklist. Her books deal with the dark and violent underbelly of crime, both in fact and fiction. Her first book, Shrouded (1997), was about a necrophiliac, whilst one of her more recent true-crime books is Children Who Kill (2004). No wonder she also needs some light relief.
Everyone was pragmatical of thought when Lady Hardwick of Mellankoly House collapsed and had to be carried insensible to her bed-chamber. Bella the cook thought that partaking of too much olive pie had made Madam slack of digestion, whilst several of the serving girls were convinced that staring at the clowds for halfe an hower that very afternoon was to blame. A hastily summoned physician declared that it was merely a case of the windy vapours, but when Lady Hardwick died that very evening, he decided that the guilt lay with a particularly outrageous spell instead.
Mr Jeffreys the silversmith was given the news when he arrived at the house to give the good lady her latest coffee pot. He had spent the previous days fashioning a particularly neat one embossed with the Hardwick motto which matched the silver chocolate pot she’d recently purchased from him.
“I shall not intrude on your grief, ladies,” the silversmith said to Lady Hardwick’s three ugly sisters – who had come all the way from Scotland to attend her burial – though, truth to tell, they did not strike him as particularly grief-stricken or particularly ladylike.
“Give us the merchandise,” the largest one said crossly and Mr Jeffreys handed over the coffee pot and was duly paid.
Just then the head nurseryman rushed in looking exceeding perplexed: “Someone has had an excess of my fig trees and sat on my lovage,” he said crossly.
“Noisome boys to blame, no doubt,” the oldest Hardwick murmured, though all present would later swear that she brushed some lovage flowers from her dress and removed a fig seed from between her teeth.
A stranger to the ways of plants and fruits, Mr Jeffreys returned to his workshop and made another kettle, as – the wealthy Lady Hardwick excepting – there still wasn’t much call for chocolate pots. After all, chocolate cost thirty shillings per pound, three times the cost of the silver chocolate pot in which it was served. No, the middling classes had to make do with a Turkish coffa dish or a plate of Chinese Tcha, whilst the poor had to be content with their vivid imaginations or a glass of Adam’s wine.
He was hard at work on a pewter chamber pot – as there was a recession looming – for a local merchant when he was next summoned to Mellankoly House. “I’ve moved in here now and would like a grater for the chocolate as cook grinds it exceeding rough,” the youngest Hardwick sister said.
Jefferson looked longingly at the chunk of chocolate on the table. “I shall fashion one tonight.”
Just then, Cook busied in with sallets, fricase, boyled meats and gilded salmon. The mammoth sister fell on the feast as if twere a wonderous novelty. “You can oh,” she said to Jefferson through a mouth filled with fish and fowl. Assuming that he had been dismissed, he made for the door.
“Wha fu afters?” he heard her bark at one of the serving staff. To the silversmith’s surprise, she seemed able to interpret the woman’s mumblings. Leastways she replied “Quinces, ma’am, and comfits and wafer cakes, roasted pears and wine.”
“No florentines?” shouted the lady and Jefferson winced as the slap she gave to the hapless girl resounded throughout the hall.
No one was surprised when Madam was stricken with a dead palsie later that very evening, though – palsies fast going out of fashion – the physician gave the official cause of her demise as being strangled with apoplexies.
By now, the neighbours were taking more than their fair share of interest in
Mellankoly House, and one of the braver – and one must assume more educated – of the local wags put a sign saying Inveterate Moral Contagion on the door.
But the local apothecary remained unconvinced that there was any such pox in the air, and encouraged the third sister to move in and stake her claim to the mansion. He told her to avoid Colchester oysters and to purchase a large bottle of surfeit water, something he conveniently happened to have about his person and that was for sale. Cook was equally reassuring and suggested that the lady avoid milk vapours if she wanted to forgo polyps of the heart.
Everyone offered the best advice, and everyone was extraordinarily wrong for within the hour the new homeowner was taken by a rebellious distemper. Never a woman who could refuse a lobster or a chine of beef, some say she swelled overnight to twice her original size.
Even before the funeral could be arranged, the remaining sister had moved in and whipped the chambermaid, flogged the stables lad and slapped the butler. And some said that the very dogs and cats in the neighbourhood ran and hid when she flexed her mighty arms.
The following morning, the mighty-armed one took a nostril’s worth of Angelick snuff, guaranteed to ward off the plague (or so said the sellers) but it had the opposite effect and she was soon on her way to meet the angelick hordes.
By now the townsfolk had decided that the very building had a hex on it and they swore that they would raze it to the ground – but first common sense commanded that they spirit away its many treasures. And so every impoverished man, woman, child, dog and cat in the location set off in the direction of Mellankoly House.
Somewhat to their surprise, Jeffreys the silversmith headed the race – and some say he achieved the four minute mile though this was clearly an impossibility. Despite his spindly legs, he rushed ahead and was seen to claim his silver chocolate pot, molinquets and assorted paraphernalia, though only an inquisitive dog saw him bury them in the Mellankoly garden, digging deeper than a young mole with a price on its head can go.
Re-entering the dining room, Mr Jeffreys watched as the blacksmith took the best table and chairs whilst the toymaker helped himself to the kettles and porringers. Meanwhile a flower-seller made off with one of his best-wrought low-looped silver teapots, the one with the handle set at a right angle to the spout. Someone even stole the sack of tea, rumoured by travelling medicine men to be a chimical quintessence, though not one which prevented them dying in droves.
The hungry fell upon the hams and capons whilst the thirsty partook of the sack and elsterrune, each drink strangely making them thirstier still.
For himself, Mr Jeffreys only wanted one thing – several large chunks of the purest chocolate. He stowed the confection in his bag, his pockets and even under his best feathery hat. Back home, he grated some of the sweet perfection and had soon made himself a pot of that most marvellous concoction. He quaffed down the brown nectar then helped himself to a second cup and a third. By now he was happier than he had been on his wedding night, for, in truth, the late Mrs Jeffreys had been fonder of eating cake than of conjugal bliss.
The chocolate was everything he’d remembered and more, from the time when he’d brought Lady Hardwick her first ever chocolate pot. She’d tried it out in his presence and a thin stream had dripped from the moulinet onto the cloth. Without thinking, he’d scooped it up with his finger and licked it off and the caramel-coloured bittersweetness had flowed around his mouth and down his throat, waking his senses like no other essence. “If I might have a cup, madam?” he’d ventured shyly, and she’d flicked at his hand as if it was a pestilence.
“It’s not for the likes of you,” she’d said, mindless of the fact that he’d made her the best silverware in the whole of Christendom, that he was the hardest working man in the neighbourhood.
Mr Jeffreys had gone sadly back to his widower’s accommodation and had brooded on the injustice – on a lifetime of injustice. He gave and gave and gave others took and took. He’d given his life to his craft, and as a result his eyesight was failing and his hands were rheumy. He’d eventually have to give up work and might end up in that most discreditable of endings, a pauper’s grave.
The quiet silversmith had thought bitterly of his end but had thought longer and harder about the wondrous new drink of chocolate. And by the time he went to his lonely bed that night, he knew what he must do. After all, if he – a hard working craftsman who never overcharged for his wares – was never to enjoy the exquisite sweetness on his tongue again, why should the lazy rich?
He’d waited until Lady Hardwick gave him her next order for a chocolate set then had coated the inner surface of the pot and every one of the matching silver cups with powdered white mercury. For good measure, he had added some to the sugar bowl when the cook’s back was turned. And after the Lady’s premature death, when one of her sisters had asked for a grinding machine, he’d coated it with the same deadly poison, dipping the molinquets into an equally lethal dose.
Revenge was literally sweet and Mr Jeffreys was proud that he’d rid society of four cruel harridans and created an end which had never been known before – Death By Chocolate.
THE COMEDY THAT BECAME A TRAGEDY
F. FRANKFORT MOORE
The following is the only reprint story in this anthology and is set just after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. And if Charles II is now king, can Nell Gwyn be far behind?
The story first appeared in a series called “Nell Gwyn, Comedian” which ran in Pearson’s Magazine in 1899 and was later collected as Nell Gwyn (1900). The author, Francis Frankfort Moore (1855–1931), was a noted Irish journalist who had been writing for many years and who eventually met with success with The Jessamy Bride (1897), a historical romance involving the Georgian theatre and society. His series about Nell Gwyn was an attempt to repeat that success and in the process he produced the following pioneer historical murder mystery.
“My good creature,” said Mr Killigrew, the Master of the Revels and the Manager of the King’s Playhouse, Drury Lane, “my good creature, ’twere vain to deny the truth of all that you have said so eloquently with your voice and so entrancingly with your eyes – on the subject of William Shakespeare. I have always held that he was a dramatist of the highest rank. His Grace the Duke of Buckingham goes still further, and avers that Shakespeare was the Buckingham of his day.”
“His Grace’s flattery is overwhelming,” said Mrs Hughes, with only the least little curl of her lip.
“Ay; but ’tis in your mind, my good woman, that ’tis the Duke of Buckingham whom he flatters, not William Shakespeare,” said Killigrew, who had noted with his customary care the little expression of disdain on the very pretty face before him.
“Nay, Mr Killigrew, I will not deny that I hold William Shakespeare to have been the greatest man that ever lived, while I know that the Duke of Buckingham is – is – the most impudent – there, I have said it, Mr Killigrew,” cried the actress.
“Nay, now ’tis you who are flattering overmuch to His Grace,” said Killigrew. “In these evil days in which it is our good fortune to live, Mrs Hughes, the impudent fellows are held in the highest esteem. Even I myself, though the manager of the King’s Playhouse, have but an indifferent reputation for impudence. Did not I once try to kiss you, Mrs Hughes?”
“I have a short memory in such matters, sir,” said the actress with a flush and a laugh.
Just at this point in the conversation the half-open door of the green room was pushed to the wall and there danced in a gorgeously dressed and very beautiful young woman. She was Nell Gwyn.
“What is the subject of your pointless discourse, good people? I have come to find a new dress for our masque at Hampton Court, but I can wait.”
“The beautiful Mrs Hughes hath been asking an impossibility,” said Killigrew.
“What, hath she been looking for Tom Killigrew to tell her the truth?” cried Nell.
“Nay, Nelly, I have but asked him to let ‘Othello’ be played, so as to give me a c
hance of appearing as Desdemona – the part hath never yet been played by a woman, and ’tis plain to me that it could never be faithfully played by one of the boys,” said Mrs Hughes eagerly.
“And I say that while the playgoers might stand the strangling of one of the boys –”
“By the lud, Tom, they will stand such a strain upon their tenderness without flinching,” cried Nell, interrupting the manager. “I’ll swear that I could e’en strangle some of them myself, they play the women’s parts so vilely.”
“That is my contention,” said Killigrew. “The playgoers will tolerate the deadly slaughter of a boy in a night smock, and still smile; but they will speedily hustle off the stage any black negro man who would go about the murder of a young woman who is a young woman, and a very lovely young woman into the bargain.”
“And what is this play you are talking about?” asked Nell. “’Tis sure not ‘The Indian Prince’?”
“Nay, the play is ‘Othello!’” said Mrs Hughes.
“An early work of Mr Dryden’s,” suggested Nell.
“Good lud, no; ’tis by William Shakespeare,” said Mrs Hughes.
“Oh, the grand-uncle of Tom Betterton of the Duke’s House?” said Nell.
“The same,” replied Mrs Hughes.
“Ah, that accounts for my knowing naught about it,” said Nell. “I have often heard of William Shakespeare, but, ‘snails, sir, however much one may like Tom Betterton, one cannot be expected to spell through a doleful tragedy simply because it was writ by his grand-uncle. Nay, the heartiest friendship hath its limits.”
“William Shakespeare hath some claim to be read, quite apart from his relationship to Mr Betterton,” said Mrs Hughes. “And as for his tragedy of ‘Othello’ – well, I do not believe that Mr Dryden at his best hath ever writ anything more elevating.”
“Elevating!” shrieked Nell. “Oh, lud! the notion of me reading aught that is elevating! Look ye, Caroline Hughes, for a play to be elevating is a step beyond a play being dull. Now, Mr Dryden is often dull, but his worst enemies could never accuse him of being elevating. But come, Mr Killigrew, tell us what this play in dispute is about, and I will decide if Mrs Hughes should be permitted to have her own way in regard to it.”
The Mammoth Book of Jacobean Whodunnits Page 38