The Mammoth Book of Jacobean Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley (ed)

  “My experiences served me well,” O’Calligan finally said.

  “So I see!” Lightbourne bellowed. “Throat-cutting must come second nature to you.”

  “Randolph, this is your prejudice speaking,” Lady Foxworth chided him.

  “Is it, Hannah? Then why, pray, is O’Calligan the only one among us dressed?”

  And that was true. Everyone, with the exception of Cedric, who was back on duty in an hour anyway, wore nightgowns and slippers. O’Calligan, however, though he’d loosened his oil-black hair so that it hung past his shoulders, had only stripped to his shirt and breeches. He even wore his boots.

  In actual fact, the soldier had spent the night seated by his fire, smoking pipe after pipe as he brooded on his future in a Williamite Britain, but, unused to being questioned, he now remained stubbornly tight-lipped.

  “This is absurd, Lightbourne,” Judge Prendergast put in. “Why should O’Calligan murder the Chillertons? They were Catholics and Jacobites, like him.”

  “Maybe he viewed them as collaborators,” Lightbourne said. “Maybe he’ll view you the same way.” Lightbourne was a tall, sturdy individual, only in early middle-age but beetle-browed and angry-faced, and he gazed at the Irishman with fanatical dislike.

  Judge Prendergast’s viewpoint, however, was more measured. “Whoever’s responsible, he’ll be punished,” he stated flatly, “but might I suggest we find the miscreant first, rather than the nearest convenient scapegoat.”

  “And might I suggest we start hunting for him now,” O’Calligan added. He turned to his hostess: “Madam, I no longer have authority here, but it might be a useful thing if we searched these premises. It’s possible some vagrant has broken in, seeking shelter.”

  Lady Foxworth’s delicate cheek paled at the mere thought, but she nodded quickly. “Yes, we should search. Of course.”

  “Might I also suggest,” O’Calligan said, “that we remove the bodies to one of your outbuildings. How soon we’ll be able to summon help in this weather I don’t know, but if we keep them indoors too long, they’ll start to putrefy. Outside, the cold will preserve them until an enquiry can be made.”

  Again, Lady Foxworth nodded: “Cedric, assist Captain O’Calligan.”

  O’Calligan and the servant wrapped the bodies in sheets, and carried them downstairs. As they did, Cedric voiced a quiet opinion of his own: “If you’ll notice, captain, their throats haven’t been cut. More ripped, I’d say.”

  When they reached one of the stables, having ploughed through snow that was now knee-deep and still being driven on a sword-edged wind, O’Calligan saw the same thing for himself. By the light of a lantern, he examined the victims’ throats, and noted that, though the outer flesh and the esophagus tissue beneath had been sliced from one side to the other, the wounds were ragged edged and zig-zagging.

  “A hooked blade, maybe?” he said, baffled. “And not especially sharp. Good Lord. Whoever did this, Cedric, is a savage. A real savage.”

  For the next hour, the men, now coated and booted, and armed to the teeth, searched every nook of the great manor-house, while the women sat nervously before a rekindled hearth.

  It was no small task. As well as its central section and extensive wings, Silvercombe Hall also boasted a number of outhouses. No trace was found of an interloper, however. More to the point, no locks had been forced or windows broken. The search-party even ventured out into the landscaped gardens, though this was fruitless for different reasons: the blizzard howled, and the snow drifted to such depths that sculptures, arbors and topiary alike were all buried. Eventually they returned indoors, having agreed to meet again in the morning and discuss the affair over breakfast, though throughout this conversation Lord Lightbourne’s eagle-eye was fixed on Jack O’Calligan.

  For his own part, O’Calligan had no intention of retiring just yet, and when various bedrooms had been closed and locks thrown, he summoned Cedric back to the murder-scene. It was now ice-cold in there and pitch-black, the fire having died, the candle having been removed. Cedric produced a fresh one and lit it, and they stood there for several moments, their breath swirling vaporously around them.

  “The luggage is untouched,” O’Calligan eventually said, nodding to an open cupboard, in the foot of which two heavy portmanteaux could be seen. “Whoever did this was not trying to rob them.”

  Cedric nodded, then added: “There’s another mystery. How did the villain get in? I checked the window before. It’s fast. Not even tampered with.”

  O’Calligan crossed the room to check for himself, but found that the window was indeed securely locked. Beyond its warped panes, he saw a shelf of unbroken snow. No-one had entered by this route. “The only conclusion is that the killer was already in here when they arrived,” he finally said.

  “Then how did he get out?” Cedric asked. “The door was locked from the inside.”

  They glanced around the room, the walls of which, with the exception of a stone breastwork over the hearth, consisted of solid oaken panels. O’Calligan even glanced up the chimney, but saw a narrow brick shaft not remotely large enough for a human to pass through. He stood back, even more confused. “Cedric, you know the people gathered here very well. Better than I ever could. Did any one of them have reason to hate Lord and Lady Chillerton?”

  “None at all. The Chillertons were regarded as goodly neighbours. I mean, they had political differences with Lady Hannah, but isn’t that the way of things all over?”

  “Who else is here aside from the guests?”

  “Our cook, Agnes, who’s an elderly sort, and two chambermaids, Martha and Charlotte, and they’re bits of girls. Neither could hurt a fly.”

  O’Calligan gazed at the blood staining the floor and the bed-linen in the corner. “How wealthy were the Chillertons? Did anyone stand to gain from their deaths?”

  Cedric now regarded the soldier curiously. “Am I to understand, captain, that you’re taking some kind of investigator role here?”

  O’Calligan shrugged. “You’ve seen how the land lies. At this moment, I’m a very suitable suspect.”

  “With respect, anyone who knows you knows that that’s nonsense. You’re a proper gentleman.”

  “That’s not the way the Prince of Orange’s magistrates might see it.” O’Calligan scanned the room for the least clue. “My future hangs by a thread as it is. For all Lady Foxworth’s good will, this incident might turn that thread into a rope.”

  Cedric considered this, then said: “Well, in answer to your question, there’s no-one here like to benefit from Lord and Lady Chillerton’s deaths. They have a son at Court – a clerk in the Exchequer, I believe. He stands to inherit everything, but he’s not here. Probably wouldn’t have had long to wait for his inheritance anyway.”

  “And what’s that?” the soldier wondered. He indicated a bell suspended from a cord in a high corner. “There’s one in my room too.”

  “That’s from the old days,” Cedric explained. “The Fox-worths were always sea-folk. They were awarded Silvercombe Hall for services against the Spanish Armada. The family the house was confiscated from was Catholic. They used to hold Masses here, and shelter priests and nuns and such. A bell like that was put in each room. They could be rung from a secret place, to alert guests should the priest-hunters come by.”

  O’Calligan glanced round at him. “Does that mean there are priests’ holes as well?”

  “There were, but they’re all gone now. The whole inside of the house was refurbished by Lady Hannah’s father, thirty years ago.”

  Despite this, they spent another ten minutes making rounds of the room, tapping on each wall, but there wasn’t so much as a hollow thump to greet their knuckles.

  Not surprisingly, the Christmas Day hunt was abandoned. Even without the atrocious murders, it would have been impossible to send the hounds out. The gardens and moors were still deep under snow, while flakes continued to fall, no longer tossed by a gale, but thickly and heavily in an unrelenting cascad
e. This also prevented anyone from leaving the hall and heading the sixteen miles to Minehead, where they might summon help.

  Shortly before luncheon was served, Lord Lightbourne took it upon himself to question the domestic staff, which he did unduly harshly as far as O’Calligan was concerned. Lightbourne, the Irishman decided, was probably the sort of master who would willingly take a horsewhip to his servants. He sat the cook and her two maids in window-seats in the drawing-room, then questioned their every move on the previous night in a tone so severe that it would have done Matthew Hopkins proud. Needless to say, he reduced them to tears, but he didn’t stop there, insisting on regaling them with the ghoulish details of the murders, determined, in his own words, to “break their stubborn impudence”.

  Lightbourne, however, wasn’t the only person O’Calligan formed opinions about that morning. There was a mournful mood: people were understandably subdued, but were, all of them, shocked rather than grief-stricken. Lady Foxworth’s relationship with the Chillertons, the Irishman had learned (from himself questioning the maids that morning, albeit in a gentler manner), had not always been as amicable as old Cedric believed. There’d been disputes over land in the past, and once apparently, Lord Chillerton had invested heavily in a sea-voyage to the Foxworth family’s trading-post on the coast of Madras; the ship sank in a storm, however, and the Foxworths had refused to recompense him, which had caused a very public row. Judge Prendergast had also had issues with the Chillertons: one time he’d refused to make good on a gambling debt to them, using his period of empowerment following Monmouth’s rebellion to bully his elderly neighbours into cancelling it outright. The only person present O’Calligan had no real information about in this respect was Lady Lightbourne, though he discovered a little bit about her in a brief conversation with his hostess.

  According to Lady Foxworth, Loretta Lightbourne, formerly Loretta Wilberforce, was a rector’s daughter from Devon, who had only married her beau at the age of twenty-nine, a period in life when she might normally have been regarded as an old maid. Lady Foxworth knew nothing of the Lightbournes’ courtship and romance, except that Loretta had taken confidently to her life as wife of a country squire. She was a stern-looking woman with a stiff posture and pinched features, but she compensated for her lack of physical attractiveness with a strict and assertive attitude. She apparently ran her husband’s household efficiently, and had successfully reined in his one-time gallivanting antics. Not that she seemed to be firmly in control at this moment. As O’Calligan and Lady Foxworth surreptitiously watched her, Lady Lightbourne sent Cedric for a fourth glass of French brandy.

  “It must be the stress of circumstances,” Lady Foxworth said, still pale in the cheek herself. “I’d always thought her given to temperance.”

  “Her abrasiveness is clearly a front,” O’Calligan observed.

  “She has a temper, though. Her husband lives in fear of it, for one.”

  The Irishman glanced towards the hearth, where Lord Lightbourne stood over the flames, one hand on the mantel; following his normal instinct to be cock of the walk, he was wearing a bright blue coat that morning, trimmed down its buttonholes with gold thread, and with a lengthy, red velvet doublet underneath. His cravat was a froth of intricate lace, his shoulder-length, chestnut wig of the finest quality.

  “You’ll now be wondering if Randolph and I have ever . . . consorted?” Lady Foxworth added.

  O’Calligan pondered this. Hannah Foxworth’s scandalous behaviour and frequent affairs were a difficult matter to discount when it came to potential motives for crime. “The question had crossed my mind,” he admitted.

  She sat back in her chair, and fanned herself. Due to the snow, the house was closed up and, with every fire roaring, becoming uncomfortably hot. “I’m not sure I should answer so impertinent an enquiry from the man once charged with imprisoning me. But the situation has sufficient seriousness to perhaps put privacy aside. The answer is ‘no’, we haven’t. But even if we had, why should that spell death for Lord and Lady Chillerton?”

  O’Calligan mused. “Maybe they knew about it? They were blackmailing you? Or him. More likely him.”

  “Why more likely him?” she wondered.

  “Well, with all respect, my lady, he’d have more to lose, his spouse still being alive.”

  Lady Foxworth smiled tiredly. “The point is taken. Not that it resolves the main problem. Namely that the murders were committed inside a locked room. You’ve checked for secret entrances?”

  “I have. As has Cedric.”

  “Well, if Cedric found nothing, there is nothing. He’s been at Silvercombe since I was knee-high. He’s almost part of the furniture here.” The woman smiled wistfully. “My mother died when I was still a child and my brother, Rupert, a baby. As a result Rupert was sent to live with relatives in East Anglia, and, with my father being away at sea all the time, it fell to Cedric to raise me. Which of course you already know, having been my keeper for so long.”

  O’Calligan nodded.

  “He’s looked after me ever since,” she added. “A loyaler servant, one couldn’t find.”

  Again the Irishman considered what he knew about the Fox-worth family. Much of it was a tragic tale, especially for Lady Hannah herself. As well as losing her mother at a very early age, her father died when she was sixteen, and her husband expired from influenza when she was seventeen, during only the second year of their marriage. Four years later, in fact on the eve of her twenty-first birthday, she received news that her elder brother had drowned in Hudson Bay when his ship struck an ice-floe. More recently, during Monmouth’s abortive uprising, two of her close cousins were killed at Sedgemoor and another two hanged afterwards. Of course, as was often the way with these old baronial families, guile and fortitude had turned disaster into triumph; catastrophe had only made them stronger. On her husband’s death, Lady Foxworth had returned to her family home and readopted her maiden name. On her elder brother’s death, she’d taken over the running of all family businesses, and had made them even more profitable than before. Though a staunch Protestant and parliamentarian, she’d continued the family tradition of currying favour with the anti-Cromwellian court of Charles II by bestowing on it an endless succession of exotic gifts brought back from the East Indies: silks, spices, fabulous beasts as pets or as specimens for the royal zoological gardens. Even during her three years of house-arrest, Lady Foxworth had run her affairs admirably. The family’s mercantile empire had blossomed. They now owned considerable shares in the East India Company, a business that was booming on a world-wide scale. Now that King James himself had gone, nothing, it seemed, could prevent their rising to unprecedented prominence.

  Except, perhaps, for this hideous and inexplicable double-murder.

  O’Calligan wondered briefly if the outrage might actually have been directed at the Foxworth family rather than their ill-fated guests; an attempt to indelibly besmirch their name maybe. If this had been the case, however, Lady Foxworth wasn’t considering the possibility. In fact, she now seemed determined to put the terrible event aside until it could be dealt with by the authorities.

  “Let’s not dwell on unpleasantness,” she said, suddenly standing and clapping her hands for attention. “It is Christmas and we owe it to Our Lord to celebrate his birthday. All gather round, if you please. I have an assortment of presents for you.”

  The guests assembled uncertainly, not quite sure whether this was seemly under the circumstances. Lady Foxworth would not be deterred. On her instruction, Cedric and Charlotte brought in several gaily wrapped packages, and one by one they were distributed. To his astonishment, Captain O’Calligan received one as well.

  “You may open them now,” Lady Foxworth decreed. “I understand that it’s perhaps against tradition so early in the season, but by sad circumstances we now may have to part sooner than normal this year, and I can’t neglect my duty to my guests.”

  For Judge Prendergast, there was a tub of excellent Brazilian tobacco
, of which he approved heartily; for Lord Lightbourne, a fine silken chemise. Ordinarily, Lady Lightbourne would have scowled at so personal a gift to her husband from another woman, especially when that other woman then brazenly commented: “I hope it fits, Randolph, I had to guess your proportions,” but the mistress of Lightbourne Manor was by this stage too drunk to notice. She was too drunk, in fact, to even offer thanks for her own present, a scented pomander, which their hostess took care to tie to her wrist with a ribbon.

  O’Calligan was the last one to unwrap his gift, and was amazed to receive a handsome fighting-knife, with a stout, curved blade, and a hilt fashioned from ebony and inlaid with gems. “It was taken from a Moorish pirate,” Lady Foxworth explained. “What better item, I thought, for a man whose life is . . . how did Lord Randolph put it, clandestine warfare?”

  O’Calligan shook his head. “I’m honoured, ma’am. But also, I’m shamed. I have nothing to give you in return.”

  “I’m your hostess, captain. It is not required that you give me anything. I’d also provided for Lord and Lady Chillerton,” she sighed. “Sadly, those goods must now be passed on to their estate . . . along with their bodies.”

  At which point, with astonishing suddenness, Lady Lightbourne began to weep hysterically. For a moment everyone was transfixed with shock. The next thing, however, the normally staid countrywoman was down on her knees, beating her breast, tearing at her carefully coiffed locks.

  “Those poor people!” she wailed. “Slain in their beds! Who could do such a thing? What vile monster roams these passages?”

  Clearly, the false good cheer of that morning had put Lady Lightbourne under intolerable strain. She was a rector’s daughter, O’Calligan remembered; she’d known wealth and breeding, had been raised exclusively in a world where domestic chores and prim conversation were the highlights of the day, and suddenly this . . . two close neighbours butchered, their blood left drenching the bedroom walls. Little wonder she’d taken so readily to drink that morning.

  There was a bustle of activity in response. Lady Foxworth and her maid, Charlotte, hurried to assist the casualty to an armchair. No amount of consoling, however, no number of whiffs from a jar of restorative would bring the distraught woman round. Eventually, after several minutes of pandemonium, she was taken up to her bedroom, where she consented to lie down. Lady Foxworth took charge of the procedure, with Charlotte and Cedric’s assistance.