The Mammoth Book of Jacobean Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley (ed)

  “You the boss?”

  A laugh sprayed spittle from the man’s rancid mouth. “Ha! That’s for certain. Hired help would drink the damned place dry in one night.” He wiped his mottled brow with the back of his hand and ran his working eye over the stranger, who looked the gypsy but spoke English like a goddamn British Lord. “What’s your poison? Gin or beer?”

  “No, the question is what’s your poison?”

  “Beer’s all right, but gin is quicker.”

  “Two gins it is.” Nando scattered several coins on the bar. One was gold.

  The boss of The Queen’s Stallion poured and withdrew only one of the coins. Not the gold piece.

  Nando approved. Greed was good but not obvious greed. Subtlety made life more pleasant. He pushed one drink back and lifted the other. “To riches.”

  “I’ll drink to that.” The man tossed off his gin.

  Nando did the same.

  “I am Vega. They call me One-Eye.” One-Eye’s nose gave a mighty twitch. He was of the belief that everyone had an axe to grind, but whether he offered the grindstone was another story. He had learned this years earlier as the proprietor of The Red Rooster, hardly more than a hut under a stand of pines at the third bend on the road to New Haarlem, but still a thriving tavern. While One-Eye worked The Queen’s Stallion at the tip of Manhattan, The Red Rooster was tended by his younger brother, Two-Eye.

  “What’s your game?” One-Eye asked.

  “Lottery. I am called Nando.”

  “Keep it straight, Nando, or you’ll end up in the river with your throat cut. I get half.”

  “I was thinking more along the lines of one-tenth.”

  “Get the hell out of my tavern,” One-Eye said pleasantly.

  “One-fifth.”

  “Step away from the bar.”

  “One-quarter.”

  “Go stand at the door.”

  “Your loss.” Nando set down his drink.

  Vega laid a meaty hand on Nando’s wrist. “If you are as hard as you are shrewd we’ll make some coin.” The tavern owner vaulted the bar and cleared a table of two snoring sots, tossing them out on the Strand.

  Nando sat and set up his opening gambit. From his purse he drew three walnut half-shells and a dried chickpea. He barely acknowledged One-Eye who set the large gin before him. Placing the chickpea on the table, Nando covered it with a half-shell and began moving the three shells around with his slender, multi-ringed fingers.

  Sure as fish swim in the sea he hooked one of his own. A large, sweating man with short yellow hair, too fat for a sailor, more likely a dockworker. The man took off his hat and fanned his dripping face.

  The heat didn’t seem to bother Nando at all.

  “What are you doing?” the yellow-haired man asked.

  “An experiment,” Nando replied. “I’m seeking to discover which is quicker. The hand or the eye. Watch.” He showed the pea going under one half-shell, then moved all three shells about the table quickly. “Where’s the pea?”

  “That’s easy.” The yellow-haired man reached out his hand.

  “Not so fast, Zinn,” another large blond man said. “The gypsy’s after your coin.”

  “He won’t get it with this child’s game,” Zinn said. “You can’t fool a cobbler. I know how to use my eyes. I know where the pea is.”

  Nando smiled. “For how much?”

  “Tuppence.”

  “Choose.”

  Zinn chose the middle shell. And much to his and his friend’s delight his selection was correct.

  Nando paid and invited the two to try again. Wonder of wonders, they won again. And again. When others joined the game, they took Nando’s money, too. Not all the time, but often enough to think the gypsy a righteous chap.

  One-Eye didn’t care. All the players were drinking. And paying.

  Nando was pleased, too. He beckoned the musician to fiddle for them. This time he put two coppers in the hunchback’s cup when he rubbed his hump.

  As he knew would happen, the denizens of the tavern were eager to keep wagering. Only when he had all the fish on the line, firmly in place, did Nando mention the lottery.

  TUESDAY

  The day began like any ordinary late July day in the year of Our Lord, 1675, in His Majesty King James’s thriving city of New-York. Four days of intense heat with little to no breeze had slowed the pace of activity. Shopkeepers along the Broad Way sat outside their doors fanning themselves. Women brought buckets of cool water to their men from the many fresh water creeks. As flies and bees circled lazily, children and four-footers dozed. No dearth of customers in the taverns, however.

  Even the sea birds were hiding, though every so often a double crested cormorant would swoop down out of nowhere and pounce on something in the water. One such sat on a piling fluttering feathers with satisfaction as it disposed of a wriggling eel.

  Two women, one plain and straw-haired with a keen eye and keener wit, and the other, an olive skinned beauty, dark of hair and eye and fiercely intelligent, had boldly tucked up their skirts and thrown off their caps. They stood, legs strong against the pull of the rushing current, in the exquisite chill of the East River, which was not really a river but a tidal estuary.

  Berry stained and dusty with flour, they washed their hands and arms, sprayed faces, hair, and throats, easing the heat. Under their watchful gaze, two sturdy boys, the older a golden-haired child of five, the other, three years, dark like his mother, but with eyes blue as his father’s, played in the water beside them, not at all hindered by the strong ropes anchoring each to the stout oak near the shore line.

  Several yards away a heron stood on one leg pondering the scene. And all the while the hypnotic currents so near the surface rushed the river ever forward into the bay at the foot of the island.

  Keeping their eyes on the boys, the women climbed onto the wooden pier called Coenties Slip and let the sun do its work on hair and clothing.

  While Racqel shook out her hair, Antje pulled in a fish from a hanging line, gutted it, and dropped it in a pail.

  Many ships lay idle in the bay, for there was little wind to fill sails, and now and then the voices of sailors – those who had watch duty and hadn’t wandered ashore to the taverns – could be heard calling out to one another. Despite the calm there were smaller vessels on the river their sails flat, nevertheless propelled by the swift current.

  “I could sleep the day away,” Racqel said, swatting at a black fly. She ran her fingers through her thick dark hair and plaited the damp strands before tucking the plait under the white ruffled cap.

  Antje Ten Eyck, never at a loss for words, would have agreed with her friend Racqel Tonneman, and she would have had more to say had she not been distracted, first by a sudden gust and surging swells that sent waves over the pier, drenching both women, and by the two-masted ship under an arresting halo of sea hawks that was bearing down on Coenties Pier.

  “Racqel!”

  “Daniel, Benjamin!” Racqel, snatched up the fish knife that lay on the dock and dropped into the river. Antje was right behind her. Fighting the new currents they reeled the boys in by their tethers, cut away their harnesses.

  They heard the ship ram against the dock they’d so recently vacated as they made for Coenties Alley and the Ten Eyck house. Almost at the same moment, the sun quickly faded under a dark cloud. Thunder rumbled north of the city.

  Antje, fearless, came forward, cupped hands to mouth and shouted, “Ahoy, you aboard ship.”

  Her answer came with what sounded like the crack of a shot. An explosion of a sort. Carried over the water, the sound could be heard by most of the citizens of New-York. The hawks screeched, dispersing, when the brigantine glanced off the dock and rested as if it had meant to moor there all along.

  The heron stirred, but waited. Antje didn’t wait. She raced up the alley to her house and joined Racqel and the boys, who were protesting having to leave the cool water. After giving each a cookie, the women stood in the alley wa
tching the excitement outside while what seemed to be the whole city came running in response to the shot. Within moments the shore line was crowded with people.

  A loud clap of thunder, then a streak of lightning scattered the curious. Thunder, like the mad bowler in the hills, rolled over the city, then a downpour so heavy, one could barely see. When the short storm was over and the sun returned, people saw the vessel in question lying still in the water nestled against Coenties Pier.

  Pieter Tonneman, riding home on the dry, dusty road after a day inspecting some of the buildings going up on land he’d purchased outside the Wall, was thinking what to do about the makeshift shacks that squatters and Indians had put up around and about outside the city. With New-York expanding as it was beyond the Wall, and three thousand souls settled here now and more coming every day, land was becoming a premium. The shacks would have to go.

  His gentle dun mare Venus snorted and Tonneman, the man whom the English still called the Dutchman, peered through the dust cloud ahead. He reined to a halt and waited for the dust to settle. A cart lay on its side in the middle of the road, having lost a wheel, while a fine looking gelding, white muzzle, black otherwise, grazed in the dry grass.

  Sitting on a boulder surrounded by bundles of goods obviously expelled when the cart lost its wheel, were two little dark haired girls, waiting patiently as their father struggled with the cartwheel. The man was clumsy at his task.

  “Hallo, do you need some assistance?”

  “That would be a fair statement.”

  Sweet Jesus, a woman. A woman in man’s clothing, sweating like a brute, a man’s hat clamped down on dark hair hanging loose over her shoulders. “You’re a woman.”

  “You might say that.” She’d responded in French to Tonneman’s English.

  Tonneman dismounted. “Permittez moi,” he said in his limited French.

  “I thank you,” she said, speaking English now but with a Frog accent.

  He made short work of rolling the wheel back onto its spoke, securing it and setting the cart upright. Catching the reins of the grazing horse, he put the animal in charge of the cart once more.

  The Dutchman removed his hat, drew his nose cloth from his pocket and mopped the dust and sweat from his face and neck, running the cloth over his cropped sand-colored hair.

  “Mistress, where is your man?” He beckoned to the girls, who appeared the age of his two young ones, then lifted them into the cart. The bundles followed.

  “My man . . .” she smiled as she said the words “. . . is a sea captain. Captain Isaya Spinoza. I am Lily Spinoza. My husband sent me to find a place for us while he brings his ship, The Portagee Spirit and its cargo into the harbour.”

  Tonneman offered the woman his hand, but she ignored it. As she climbed up on the driver’s seat of the cart, the sky darkened. “Come along to City Hall, straight down the Broad Way to Queen Street –”

  Across the city from the direction of the East River came a sharp explosive sound, like a gunshot. Tonneman prodded Venus forward. “City Hall,” he called to the strange woman. Lightning streaked, followed close on by a huge clap of thunder like the wrath of God. More lightning, torrents of rain, and suddenly as it had begun, it was over.

  Tonneman whipped off his hat, shook it out, and followed the surging throng as it pressed toward the East River dock near Coenties Slip. People milled around on the pier gesturing and mumbling. The law, Sheriff Gibb and his deputy Nessel-Vogel, were nowhere to be seen.

  The object of everyone’s attention was a two-masted vessel, square-rigged foremast with fore – and aft-rigged mainmast, that angled against the pier. Years back Tonneman’s last ship had been a brigantine such as this.

  Dismounting, Tonneman pushed through the crowd and saw that two Lookermans rascals were jumping around on the pier attempting to grasp a rope ladder that dangled from the vessel too distant for facile access. In fact, it was obvious that boarding the vessel would have to be done from the river itself.

  “Belay that, you minnow ninnies,” Tonneman called in mocking tones. “Avast, unless you want some great evil pirate to chop off your head and eat it for breakfast.” He shaded his eyes from the bright sunlight. “Sweet Jesus,” he muttered. The name of the ship was The Portagee Spirit.

  The boys laughed, but constrained themselves. They knew the former sheriff was a man of good humour, but standing eighteen hands and weighing fifteen stone, some thirty pounds more than when he was Schout of New Amsterdam, Tonneman was a formidable figure.

  “There could be pirate gold on board,” twelve-year-old Cornells Lookermans declared with authority.

  “It’s not your gold, is it?”

  And from Jacobus Lookermans, all of eleven and already a man of the world: “What if there’s a maiden in distress?”

  Tonneman scratched his chin. “Now that’s an interesting thought.” Moving well onto the pier, he inspected the vessel. He caught the thick hawser line, giving it a sharp tug. It held.

  “Ahoy! Anyone on board?”

  No answer. “Stand back,” Tonneman told the boys. The sea hawks circling over the ship did not please him.

  The crowd of on-lookers, not content being at a distance, pushed closer, calling to Tonneman, everyone talking at once, everyone offering an opinion.

  “Come no farther,” Tonneman shouted.

  “Make way, make way!” Jan Keyser, the tanner and notorious scavenger, elbowed his way through, followed by two of his sons. “What have we here, Tonneman?”

  “A ship without a captain, or crew, it would appear.”

  “I claim scavenger rights,” the tanner said. “Come, boys, we’re going aboard.”

  “Stand back, Keyser. I happen to know the ship has a captain who might not take to anyone claiming his property.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Keyser said. But he stood back.

  The ghost ship’s groan signified that the currents were harassing, rocking, urging it adrift once more. A faint eastern breeze brought a foul smell from the vessel.

  “You two, give me a hand.” Tonneman made room for the boys on the rope. “Heave,” he bellowed. The ghostly ship bumped the dock. He tied the line to a cleat, pulling the rope taut round and round, making it fast. Arse to the river, holding fast with both hands, he wrapped his legs round the rope and inched upward, hoisting himself onto the ship’s deck.

  “Halloo, anyone on board?” No response. The stench of death hung over the ship.

  The hairs on the back of Tonneman’s neck tingled. A line hung over the side. Taking note of its position he pulled the line up. It had been cut. The former lawman rubbed the back of his neck. It might have held a barge or small boat in tow. A seaman up to no good could have cut the line when he took leave.

  Tonneman tied the bow rope off with several hitches and tossed the stern line to Lodowyk Pos standing on the dock. His former deputy grinned up at him and secured that line, too. Pos was now Captain Pos, Special Deputy to the First Councillor of the City of New-York.

  “About time you got here,” Tonneman called down to the short, muscular man with the fine gray beard.

  “As Special Deputy to the First Councillor, it is my duty to look into all uncommon events that occur in our city.”

  Tonneman guffawed at Pos’s posturing. He cast an eye about the ship, slowly taking in her condition. The square-rigged foremast was trim if not tidy, but the aft mainsail and its square upper sails were in need of repair. Still, all the masts stood well. He’d hardly begun his exploration, when the ship gave an almost human groan as the currents worked to dislodge it from its mooring. The air was putrid. Tonneman called again. “Anyone aboard?”

  Only more creaking and moaning. Then a mighty splash and shout from the pier. Tonneman turned in time to see Pos’s dripping head appear from over the side as he climbed the rope ladder. Tonneman gave him a hand and, like a four-footer, Pos shook the river water from his clothing.

  “Seen anyone? Pos asked, emptying one boot after the other.
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  “Not a living soul.”

  “The stink tells me that,” Pos said.

  Tonneman moved aft, then up stairs strewn with shards of glass to the wheel deck. Finally! He reached for the knife on his belt, his only weapon. “Stand to,” he shouted at the man hunched over the wheel. Rats scattered from the body.

  Pos, who had come up behind him, spat, “Horse piss!”

  The dead man, clad only in faded blue breeches, soiled with blood, was lashed tight to the wheel. No life, only the ferocious scent of the dead.

  Pos cut away the bindings and they both stood back. What remained of the man after the rats and the hawks had feasted sank to the deck, staring up at them with hollows where his eyes had been. One eye was eaten to the bone. The other was heavily blackened with dried blood. The handle of a blade could be seen buried deep in his chest. Not a musket ball. No blood on the chest. Tonneman studied the corpse. No blood anywhere but the eye. No shattered bone, not a wound one would suffer from a pistol. But what then was the source of the shot or explosive noise?

  It was as if they’d been summoned to the site.

  Were it not for the glint caught by the sun high overhead, Tonneman might have missed it. Gold. In the dead man’s fist. Exactly what Keyser would have wanted for himself.

  Tonneman crouched and opened the flaccid hand. Not a gold piece but something familiar. A small casing in which a tiny parchment scroll was inscribed on one side with Biblical passages from Deuteronomy, and the Hebrew word for God, Shaddai, inscribed on the other. A mezuzah. He had one similar, if not as ornate, attached to his doorpost.

  He sat back on his heels. “Sweet Jesus.”

  “Like the one alongside your door,” Pos said.

  Tonneman chewed his lip and muttered, “Amen.”

  Standing, he called down to one of the Lookermans boys. “Cornelis! Run to Asser Levy’s slaughter house and tell him he’s needed. And Jacobus, go find Sheriff Gibb.”

  Pos chortled. “You’d think he’d be the first here.” He picked up a shard of glass and sniffed it. “Rum, I’d say. What a waste.” He sighed mightily and disappeared below deck.