A Murder by Any Name

by Suzanne M. Wolfe

  He held the parchment to Hector’s nose. “Seek,” he commanded.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Palace of Whitehall

  Nick and Cecil followed a few steps behind as the dog nosed around the floor of the chapel, up the aisle, back again, in and out of the pews, then suddenly made a beeline to one of the choir stalls, where he stood, tail wagging.

  Nick peered over the front of the stall and saw something white protruding from under the seat.

  “What is it?” Cecil asked.

  “Not sure.” Leaning over, Nick extended his arm as far as it would reach and picked it up. A bleached linen handkerchief, reasonably clean. No embroidery or lace or helpful initials sewn into the corner—it could belong to either a man or a woman. But one thing he did know: it belonged to someone at court. Only a courtier could have picked up the French fashion for handkerchiefs; the common folk outside the walls of the palace still used their sleeves.

  Nick put the square of linen to his nose and inhaled: no flowery perfume such as a woman might use, but a strong odor of garlic and something else he couldn’t identify but which made his eyes water. Now all he had to do was find someone with a bad cold, he thought ruefully, which included just about everyone from the Queen down to the lowest scullion who cleaned the jakes. He could safely rule out the Queen and illiterate servants. And probably women. Not only did it take strength to lift a dead body, and he could detect no sign of drag marks on the chapel floor, but the selection of the victim—a beautiful, virginal girl—bespoke a lust for desecration that, in his opinion, only a man could harbor. The killing was motivated, at the very least, by a kind of twisted hatred, and Nick made a mental note to ask Kat, the madam of a Bankside brothel and a friend, if she had ever heard of such a thing before. Crimes of passion were not uncommon, especially against women, but this was different. In the absence of any sign of the victim’s struggle—torn fingernails, scratches or bruises to the body, disheveled clothing—this crime did not burn hot and fierce with the fires of any passion Nick recognized, but burned blue like ice. Dante had been right to bury Satan up to his chest in ice in his Inferno, rather than having him writhe in the flames of torment the way so many medieval painters had depicted him. Ice immobilized, numbed, held you in an unbreakable grip, and turned the heart to stone. Most disturbing of all, Dante’s Satan wept frozen tears as if he grieved for paradise lost, morally aware of his evil, yet utterly unable to change. A recent friend of Nick, a young man called Will Shakespeare, mad for acting, who kept body and soul together stabling horses for a local theater, had once shyly confided during a late night drinking session at The Black Sheep that he hoped one day to write a play with a hero modeled on Dante’s Satan. Nick had almost fallen off the bench laughing. He couldn’t imagine such a man being called a hero and said as much. More like a monster.

  “But that’s the point,” Will said, excitedly waving his beaker about so that ale slopped onto his doublet. “A monster is a beast and thus has no conscience. It takes a man to do unspeakable things while knowing they are evil. He can even suffer remorse and still go on.”

  “Then it is not remorse,” Nick said, “for he would stop.”

  “Ah, my innocent friend,” Will said, “have you never regretted a sin you could not stop committing?”

  At that Nick had gone quiet. He thought of Kat and all the times he had vowed never to see her again and all the times he had failed. He thought of his work for Cecil and how he hated the lies and deception it involved—a life from which he was powerless to break free.

  * * *

  Nick folded the handkerchief and put it with the scrap of paper in his pocket. It would be useless now to give the handkerchief to Hector, as the trail of the killer would have been long since destroyed by the crowd milling about the corridor outside the chapel. He would give him a good whiff of it later and pray that Hector would recognize its owner as Nick hunted the killer. He moved the torch back and forth above the choir stall, carefully scanning for more evidence that the killer, and perhaps Cecily, had sat here. He almost missed it: winking like a small ruby in the light of the torch was a single spot of blood on the armrest that separated two stalls. He rubbed at it and studied his finger. Definitely blood. She had been stabbed here and then carried to the altar, where she had been posed. Stiletto thrusts bled very little; most likely the spot of blood was made when the dagger was withdrawn and a drop fell from its tip.

  Nick beckoned one of the guards over. “Who discovered the body?”

  “One of the choir boys,” the man replied.

  That would have been the lad he saw being sick, Nick thought. “Bring him to me,” he instructed. “Not here,” he added. “Can you find me another chamber?”

  The guard nodded and went off.

  “Any ideas?” Cecil asked.

  Nick shook his head. “Not yet. But I’ll have to interview everyone who was in the chapel this morning.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “Choristers, altar boys, chaplain—whoever accompanied the Queen.”

  Cecil nodded. “I’ll see to it.” He left the chapel.

  Nick looked after him thoughtfully, marveling anew at how calm Cecil was. Even Nick was shaken by the staged nature of the crime, despite having seen many a body on the battlefield and in the alleys and stews of Bankside, a notoriously dangerous place to roam after dark. Cecil, however, had spent his life safely indoors, shuffling paper, far from the dangerous world of espionage. Like a grandmaster, he moved his pieces on a chessboard as if each move were an academic problem and not the life—and frequently death—of a man. There was something missing inside him, Nick concluded. If Eli cut him open, he would find a great gap where the man’s heart should be.

  At that moment, he saw Eli enter the chapel. A small, slight man, dressed in the long black robe and skullcap of a physician, his attire having nothing to do with his religion, but rather, as he had told Nick, affording a perfect disguise. Carrying a leather satchel over his shoulder, Eli moved quickly and gracefully, his shoulder-length black hair tied back with a leather thong, his dark eyes already riveted on the body on the altar, with never a glance at Nick.

  Nick joined Eli at the altar and watched as his friend began a close examination of the body. Gently opening her mouth, Eli leaned over and sniffed several times.

  “No wine or potions,” he said softly, as if to himself. Next he examined the wound below her left breast. Like Nick, he prodded the opening. “The killer had to be close,” he said.

  “Someone she trusted,” Nick agreed.

  “It takes a steady hand to insert a stiletto,” Eli said. “The placement has to be just right. There was no hesitation.”

  “Not drunk then.”

  “Ice-cold sober,” Eli agreed. “This is as neat a murder as I have seen.” This lack of passion disturbed Nick the most. Most murders were fueled by lust or liquor, envy, greed, or anger. Occasionally fear. But this murder was strangely dispassionate, impersonal, as if Cecily had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yet the note proved she had been carefully selected. It didn’t make sense. And then there was the placement of the body, almost as if laid out as a sacrifice. It reminded Nick of the religious rites in ancient times, when virgins were offered to the gods.

  “Can you tell if she was raped?” Nick asked.

  Eli lifted her skirts. “Not that I can see,” he said. “Her underclothes are undisturbed. Any chance I can examine her more closely?”

  He meant, Nick knew, cut her up. A practice that was illegal but, he admitted, often yielded valuable results. Eli had told him that the doctors in Salamanca dissected corpses, as he called it, and made highly detailed sketches of human organs, veins, and bones. Thirty years before, Eli said, the great physician Andreas Vesalius had been investigated, at the command of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, for being a great proponent and practitioner of dissection. Acquitted of moral turpitude and of being in violation of the teachings of Holy Mother Church, stipulations had since been made that onl
y the corpses of beggars and whores could be “abominated” in this way. Nick had to admit that he found dissection repellant but could not deny its usefulness in determining how someone had died, especially if the person had been poisoned. Eli’s religion, like the Christian faith, forbade such a practice, but his curiosity about the human body and his bitter hatred of ignorance were greater than his fear of Jehovah’s wrath.

  “No,” Nick replied. “The Queen has taken a personal interest in this.”

  Eli nodded. The body would be washed and laid out before traveling in a funeral procession to her home in Herefordshire, where she would be given a lavish Christian burial service in the family chapel before being interred beneath its stones. The few corpses Eli had dissected had been those of paupers. The rich took care of their own—living or dead.

  Eli drew down Cecily’s skirts and stood back. “At least she died quickly,” he murmured. “She would have known no fear.”

  Nick crouched down to where Hector was stretched out, nose between his paws, and ruffled the dog’s head. The warmth of the fur and the way the dog’s sides rose and fell like a great bellows, helped the sorrow pass. But the relative painlessness of her death was scant comfort. It was as if the cold, everlasting stillness of the girl’s body and her manner of dying had laid an icy finger on his heart, and he must touch something living or else die a little himself. It was as he expected when he first examined her body: somehow this was a type of lust killing, but not a sex killing. Another thing that didn’t make sense.

  “She was as chaste as the goddess Diana,” Nick murmured to himself, thinking of his glimpse of her swimming in the river.

  “Any idea when she was killed?” he asked out loud.

  “Six to eight hours is my guess,” Eli replied. “Around midnight.” He lifted her skirts again, rolled her over on her side, and pointed to a dark discoloration on the back of her thighs and buttocks. “The blood sinks to its lowest point,” he explained. “The longer the body lies, the darker the stain.” He turned and smiled for the first time since he had entered the chapel. “Which is why Rivkah insisted you sit up all night after you were wounded. To prevent bleeding from your neck.”

  Grateful for this reminder that friendship and hospitality existed in a world where young, innocent girls were butchered, Nick laughed, the sound a little thready. “She could have explained that at the time,” he said. “I’m not as stupid as she thinks.”

  “Or look,” Eli said. Then suddenly serious: “I’m finished here. I’ll write down a few notes. Come by later?”

  Nick nodded and clasped his friend’s shoulder. “Take care. Some are already saying your people are to blame for this.”

  Sorrow darkened Eli’s eyes. “So it has always been,” he said. “We are ever history’s scapegoats.”

  “Go with God, my friend.”

  “Shalom.”

  CHAPTER 3

  The Palace of Whitehall

  While he waited for the first witness in the room the Queen had ordered to be at his disposal for the duration of the investigation, Nick pondered the implications of the rumor that the Jews were responsible for Cecily’s murder. As Eli had said, the Jews were always convenient scapegoats. He recalled that in times of plague—a common occurrence in the summer months—people muttered that the Jews had brought a curse on London. Nick had once thrown a customer out of The Black Sheep—not a local, but a sailor from one of the ships moored at Bankside—for his hateful diatribe against the Jews. In his cups, the sailor had ranted they were “limbs of Satan” and had many colorful and brutal suggestions for what he would do to them were he in charge. The local patrons trooped after Nick as he hauled the sailor out of the tavern by the hair and tossed him into the stinking water of the Thames. Then they applauded and trooped back, cheerfully leaving the man to sink or swim. Many of them were patients of Eli and Rivkah, who were well known in Bankside not only for being excellent physicians but also for refusing to take payment from the poor.

  Nick smiled to himself, remembering what Rivkah, Eli’s sister, had said: “Unless you’re sick or dead, Eli has no time for you.”

  “Not true, Mouse,” Eli had replied, pulling on her braid.

  “Hah,” she had said, flouncing off, then ruining the effect by sticking her tongue out.

  Nick sometimes felt a pang when he watched Eli and Rivkah together. Nick had no sisters, two having died in infancy, and sometimes longed for that easy and affectionate familiarity with the opposite sex. His relationships with women were always complicated.

  Eli and Rivkah had a closeness he envied, one that had been forged in adversity. Forced to flee Salamanca in northeastern Spain four years earlier, after their parents and younger siblings had been burned to death in their home by a rioting populace, they had fled to England and sought anonymity in the teeming backstreets of Bankside. Never again would they live in a ghetto, Eli vowed. They were too easy a target for persecution, clustered all together. The Christians always knew where to find them.

  London was a place of relative safety, but also one of exile. Eli had attended the University of Salamanca’s renowned medical school, practicing at the Hospital del Estudio on the Patio de Escuelas where the Doctors of the Queen lived, famous in all of Europe for their healing arts. Now Eli practiced in the stews and alleys of Bankside, delivering babies to whores and cleaning and stitching the wounds of criminals, pimps, and those travelers unlucky enough to wander unsuspecting into the fetid warren that lined the south bank of the Thames. He never complained, saying that a sick or wounded body was the same in England as in Spain, highborn or low; man, woman, or child, but Nick came to see that Eli’s skill far surpassed the needs of his patients. Rivkah herself was as skilled and knowledgeable in medicine as her brother, but as a woman, she had been barred from formal training. The way her mouth would quirk up in a tiny bitter smile when Eli spoke of the greatness of Salamanca’s medical school told Nick how much she grieved for her exclusion.

  “I studied at the University of Eli,” Rivkah would say, smiling at her brother. “The best in the world.”

  Nick had met them by chance over a year ago when he was wounded in an alley near a tavern. Nick had been careless. He had witnessed a meeting between a court clerk and a Spanish captain and had seen documents change hands. When he left the tavern to follow the captain back to his ship, he had been jumped by two men waiting in an alley nearby. He had managed to fight them off, but was discovered, bleeding profusely, by Eli as the doctor made his way home after delivering a baby in the one of the neighborhood hovels. The wound was a serious one, as one of his assailants had intended to cut Nick’s throat (Nick had managed to stab the other man in the shoulder of his sword arm, disabling him). As he swerved aside just in time, the blade had caught Nick under the right side of his chin and glanced upward over his jawbone and cheek, barely missing his eye. But it had nicked an artery, and he was in danger of bleeding to death.

  Eli helped him into a tiny two-up two-down timber house, sat him on a rickety stool, lit some candles, then ran up a ladder to what Nick assumed were sleeping chambers above. Through a haze of pain and blood, he heard a low conversation, then Eli’s steps on the ladder, followed by feet in emerald felt slippers, carefully descending rung by rung.

  “Can you heat some water, Mouse?” the man said. The girl nodded, her face hidden by a curtain of black hair. Under a hastily thrown-on cloak, Nick glimpsed a linen nightgown. She had been sleeping, but her movements were calm and precise, as if her husband brought back bleeding strangers every night of the week. “And I’ll need a needle and thread.” Then Eli folded a square of clean linen into a thick pad and, placing it in Nick’s hand, said, “I suggest you press this as hard as you can against your neck if you don’t want to bleed to death all over my sister’s nice clean floor.”

  Nick’s heart did a little flip when he realized the girl was not Eli’s wife, then gave a giant lurch when he caught sight of her face as she carried a bowl of steaming water to the tab
le. She looked just like Eli—dark eyes below thick brows, small straight nose, jutting cheekbones, wide mouth. The only difference he could see was her hair, as dark as her brother’s but falling in waves over her shoulders down to her waist. He knew there were other, more interesting, differences, but these were hidden by a billowing dark-colored cloak she must have hastily slung around her shoulders when Eli awakened her and which she now held protectively about her body. As if resentful of his astonished gaze, she gathered up her mass of hair in both hands, twisted it into a knot at the back of her neck and secured it with a quill pen she picked up from the table. He caught a glimpse of the lace on the plunging neckline of her gown before she wrapped the cloak around herself again.

  “We’re twins,” she explained unnecessarily.

  “I can see that,” Nick replied, in a voice that sounded surprisingly croaky. He saw again the small twin mounds pushing out the front of her shift.

  The girl scowled. Nick thought this made her look even more beautiful. Tendrils of hair had escaped her makeshift knot and were wafting against her smooth pale cheeks as she moved around the table, setting out clean napkins, a jar of some ointment, and a needle and thread, which she first dunked in boiling water with tongs and then set carefully on a clean strip of linen. A strand of hair had caught in the corner of her mouth, and he longed to lift it away with his finger and hook it over her ear.

  “He’s obviously delirious,” the girl said, addressing her brother. “Not enough blood to the brain. Perhaps we should purge him, relieve the pressure on his … extremities.” Nick blanched as she lifted a razor from the table and smiled sweetly.