“I’m so sorry,” he said.
Lady Carew turned to Nick, eyes unfocused, hair disheveled, completely changed from the beautiful woman he had known. “She loved flowers,” she said. “But there are no flowers in winter.” Suddenly, hideously, she began to laugh.
Her ladies led her to a carriage with drawn curtains, half-carrying her up the steps, the sound of that terrible laughter muted but still audible from within. Nick turned to his friend and grasped his hand with both his own. “Edward,” he said. “What can I do?”
Sir Edward looked at him a long time and then gave a strange smile, mirthless and cruel—a silent echo of his wife’s despair. “Do what the Queen commanded you to do, Nick. Find her killer,” he said. “And bring him to me. Alive.” Then he turned and mounted a black-caparisoned horse, his movements stiff like those of an old man.
“Do you hear, Nick?” he shouted. “Alive!” Then he spurred his horse, and the procession set off, bridles and hooves muffled so no jingle, no jolly clash of metal on metal disturbed the still, cold air. Only the low rumble of the wheels as the cart bore Cecily on her last journey home.
From a window in the palace, Nick saw the Queen watching, her presence a silent valediction to the girl who had served her so briefly. Beside her, the small plump figure of Cecily’s friend, Mary, the white flash of a handkerchief as she dabbed her eyes. Not much of a send-off, Nick thought, but the Queen had ordered that the manner of death and obsequies be kept quiet.
CHAPTER 10
The Palace of Whitehall
Once the cart had passed under the Court Gate and turned down King’s Street, Nick turned to Robert, who was dressed for travel in thigh-high boots, with a sword buckled to his belt and a thick cloak, long enough to drape over the horse’s withers, slit down the sides to allow easy access to his weapon. The roads were plagued by roving bands of beggars who attacked strangers passing through. Usually armed with cudgels, occasionally primitive bows and arrows, they would think twice if they saw a sword and a man who looked as if he could use it, especially a man on horseback who could easily run them down. Nick thought it unlikely a funeral cortege would be attacked: even thieves respected the dead or, if not respected, at least feared the fires of hell. Nearby a groom was holding the bridle of a large bay, Robert’s stallion, Neptune, its flanks steaming in the cold air.
“I’ll catch up with them on the way,” Robert said.
Nick nodded. The cart, with its sad burden, would move at a snail’s pace, taking more than a fortnight to reach the Carew estate in Herefordshire, longer if the weather turned to rain and the roads became muddy.
“I’ll go home after the funeral,” Robert added.
Nick could tell Cecily’s death and the grief of her parents had deeply disturbed Robert, who had recently lost a child himself that spring. Usually present at court during Advent and the Christmas festivities, Nick knew his brother needed to be with Elise and the children at this time, to reassure himself they were safe and in good health. Both were aware that death could strike suddenly and without warning: one day a person could be hale and hearty; the next, sweating with fever and being prayed over by a priest. That was one reason why this murder was so terrible. There was death aplenty in the world through disease and mishap, so a deliberate snuffing out of the young and healthy seemed particularly heinous.
The brothers embraced. Robert mounted his horse, lifted a gloved hand in farewell, and rode off. Nick watched him go with a heavy heart before turning back to the palace. He didn’t envy Robert the bitter, endless miles, with plenty of time to meditate on the brevity of life, the arbitrariness of death, the possibility that justice would never be served. Nick much preferred to be up and doing, seeking out the man who had ruined so many lives, not least that of an innocent young girl. The fact that this death was not arbitrary, but planned, gave him a small hope that justice would prevail, but only if he could uncover the killer’s mind, walk that labyrinth of tortured logic that had made the killing of a young girl a rational act; only then would Nick discover his identity. He passed the guard on duty at the gate. The man said nothing, perhaps out of respect for Nick’s sadness, perhaps out of indifference.
* * *
On his way back to the room, Nick reflected that he was going about this all wrong. Instead of looking for the suspect among the court, he decided to start interviewing servants, who were the most likely to have noticed something unusual, the ones whose duties consisted of working long after the rest of the court had gone to bed, people like the night watchmen, pages, kitchen maids, pot boys—those at the lowest level of the palace food chain. If that drew a blank, the only thing he could do—and he shuddered at the thought—was to wait for another murder.
When Nick entered the room, he found John talking to a thin, waiflike girl perched on the very edge of one of the chairs, as if she feared it would collapse beneath her at any moment; or perhaps she had never sat on one before, knowing only stools and the floor. She jumped up when Nick entered, her eyes wide with terror, as if he had caught her filching the family silver. Nick waved her back down and, crossing the room, took a platter of bread and cheese off a sideboard and handed it to her. She looked up at him as if he had offered her the Crown Jewels.
“Go on,” he said. “Tuck in.”
He watched as she carefully placed the platter in her lap and picked up a hunk of bread, tearing into it with small pointed teeth like a woodland animal famished from the long winter months. She hunched over the food, sticklike arms encircling the plate, in the way of the starving, as though she feared Nick would change his mind and snatch it away.
“This is Matty,” John said. “Her job is to light the fires.”
Nick had already figured out that Matty was a cinders; her skin had the corpse-like pallor of an underfed, overworked indoor servant. Aptly named, her hair was matted and looked as if it had never been introduced to water and lye. The charcoal smudges on her hands, face, and clothes proclaimed her a cinders, the lowest of the low and precisely the type of person he should have interviewed in the first place. Her task was to light the fires in the small hours of the night before dawn, so the bedchambers lucky enough to have a fireplace would at least be tolerable for those who were fortunate enough to sleep until the sun nudged over the horizon or even as late as when it reached its zenith. The name of her lowly station came from raking out the burned remnants of fires all day long and hauling the cinders to the midden heap. Judging from the twigs and wood shavings in her hair, Nick suspected Matty slept curled in the woodpile next to the kitchen fire. It hurt his heart to look at her. She looked the same age as Agnes but had none of the apple-cheeked radiance of his well-fed niece. Instead, she had more in common with the beggar girl on the steps of St. Paul’s Cross the day before. It was even possible Matty and the beggar girl were as old as eleven or twelve but looked younger due to the malnutrition that had stunted their growth. As far as Nick could see, the only advantage Matty had over the beggar was that she worked indoors out of the bitter winter cold.
“Hello, Matty,” Nick said. He perched on the edge of a table a few feet away, deliberately making his movements casual, less intimidating. He ordered Hector to lie down under the same table: he had seen how her eyes had danced with terror when she saw the dog.
Both men waited until she had cleared the bread and started in on the cheese. Nick was pleased to see a little color had come to her cheeks. He looked at John to signal he should take the lead, as he seemed to have built up a rapport with the girl.
“Matty,” John said. “Tell my friend Nick what you told me.”
She gulped down a last mouthful. “I heard him.”
“Who?”
“Him.”
Nick sighed inwardly.
“The gent what offed the lady,” Matty explained.
“Tell us,” John encouraged. He passed the girl a cup of ale so she could wash down her food and, hopefully, speak a little more clearly. Up to now she had mumbled as if unused to sp
eaking in complete sentences, as no doubt she was, Nick reflected. It was unlikely that anyone in the palace would be interested in the opinions of a lowly, illiterate, and inarticulate cinders. Perhaps this was the first proper conversation she had ever had in her young life.
“I was passing by the chapel, and I heard voices.”
“What kind of voices?” Nick asked.
“Ghosts, that’s what.” She shivered and hugged herself with her sticklike arms. “The chapel’s haunted,” she whispered. “They sleep in them graves and come out when the bell tolls midnight.”
Nick realized Matty was referring to the gravestones set flush with the floor in the central aisle.
“Everybody knows that,” she said, looking a little stunned at the delivery of this long sentence.
Because servants such as Matty were invisible, Nick knew. People assumed their fires, food, and their neatly brushed and folded clothes laid out in readiness on the chest in the morning all occurred as if by magic, as if invisible spirits attended them. They seldom saw the human faces behind such ministrations, unless the servant became ill and their bath water was cold or their porridge burnt. Not everyone treated their servants this way; Robert and Elise certainly did not, nor did the Carews. But Robert and Edward ran country estates where servants had been with families time out of mind and were treated almost as if they were extended family themselves. Witness his brother’s steward, Simon Stockton, trained by his father the old earl’s steward. But here in London, and especially at court, servants were anonymous, rootless, mere tools of convenience for those who could afford them. He thought of how shabbily Perkin had been dressed in comparison to his master, Sir Christopher.
Keeping his voice patient, Nick asked: “Ghosts of men? Women?” No response. “One of each?” he tried again, a little desperately.
“Yeah,” Matty said, eyes lighting up. “That’s it. A gent and a maid. Must have been sweethearts before they croaked.”
Matty must have overheard the killer and Cecily talking. Finally, a witness.
“Why do you say that?” John put in. “Why sweethearts, Matty?”
Now it was John’s turn to be subjected to a pitying look. “They was whispering is why.”
Nick suspected that Matty’s notion of love between the sexes was comprised solely of witnessing secret assignations where adulterous husbands and faithless wives met their lovers in deserted corridors and corners to whisper, snatch passionate kisses, and more. God only knew what she had seen on her nightly rounds of the palace. Creeping silently down the endless hallways, turning her little white face to the furtive sights of the bedchamber, Matty was far more of a ghost than the spirits she imagined haunted the chapel.
“So you couldn’t hear what they were saying?” Nick tried to keep the disappointment out of his voice.
Matty shook her head. “Nay.”
During the next half hour, John and Nick patiently and gently extracted all that Matty was capable of telling them: that a “gent” (gruff voice) and a “maid” (higher voice) were whispering together in the chapel at midnight. Matty was quite precise about the time, as the signal for her night shift to begin was the chapel bell tolling twelve times. She counted the chimes carefully, she said, as it was more than her life was worth to leave any fire unlit, the “housekeeper being a right stickler.” Raking and laying out the fires in all the bedchambers of the “toffs,” in readiness for lighting just before dawn, took her all night. Nick had a vision of her as a little mouse scurrying down corridors and tiptoeing into bedchambers while the occupants were sleeping, her mousy hair and slight stature only serving to reinforce this impression. When asked what she was doing in the passageway outside the chapel on the ground floor, when all the best bedchambers were located on upper floors, she explained it was a shortcut from the kitchens she always took, that it was the quickest way to the rooms next to “the pretty garden” where she always started—she meant the royal apartments that were located in the east wing across from the Privy Garden. Nick had no reason to doubt her. In her way, Matty was the perfect witness. Not only did she have no reason to lie, but she possessed a simplicity of soul that gave her a kind of unimpeachable integrity. Nick was sure that it would not have occurred to her to make up a story, nor did he think she had the necessary imagination even if she had wanted to.
When asked if she had seen the “ghosts” leave the chapel, she grew wide-eyed, and Nick realized at once he had asked a foolish question. It wasn’t likely that someone as timid as Matty would wait for the ghosts to emerge. She would have been terrified enough just hearing them, and according to her, she was fearful of getting behind in her tasks.
After painstakingly going through her story and extracting nothing new, Matty’s eyelids were beginning to droop in the relative warmth of the room and from the novelty of a chair to sit on. Nick chided himself for not remembering that she was accustomed to sleeping during the day so she could work through the night.
“Is there anything else you can tell us before you go?” he asked.
“The gent ghost had a cold.”
“How do you know?”
“He sneezed.”
Nick thanked her, telling her quite truthfully that she had given them better information than anyone else.
Her wan face lit up. “You think so?”
“No question.”
She lifted her rancid skirts between thumb and forefinger and gave an awkward curtsey, the courtesy of her gesture strangely moving.
“And Matty?” Nick said as she was leaving.
“Yeah?”
“Don’t tell anyone you’ve spoken to us, all right?”
She studied Nick for a moment as if she hadn’t heard him correctly. Then her bladelike shoulders lifted up and down in a shrug. “Who am I going to tell?” Casting one last longing look at the empty platter and the fire crackling merrily in the grate, she was gone.
Nick paced restlessly about the room, then sat in the chair Matty had vacated and stared into the fire, the fire Matty had no doubt laid for him while he had slept, oblivious, in his nice warm bed that morning. He was no better than anyone else; he took servants for granted, didn’t even notice their existence half the time. It was disturbing to think that Matty and others like her would spend their whole lives drifting around a palace filled with laughing, striving, luxuriously dressed people while they themselves went hungry and were clothed in rags. The thought made him profoundly depressed. Rivkah had once said that what was needed was a home for street children, most of them orphans, where they would be clothed and fed and taught useful and respectable trades. Oddly enough, Kat agreed with her, and the two women had huddled together discussing it at The Black Sheep. Nick didn’t know if anything would come of their idea of a home for orphans, but it was a novel idea. Hitherto, the monasteries and convents had provided food and shelter to vagabond children, but now that they had been shut down and sold up by Henry VIII, there was no place for children to go except into servitude, prostitution, or criminal gangs. He supposed Matty was more fortunate than most; at least she had somewhere to sleep at night and regular food, even though it consisted of scraps from the kitchens.
“You should go back to Maggie,” he told John. “She’ll have our guts for garters if you don’t put in an appearance.”
“She’ll understand,” John said. “She’s horrified about what happened to Lady Cecily.” But he stood up and began to gather his things.
“And John?” Nick said. “Be sure to warn Eli and Rivkah to keep their heads down until this is over.”
“I will,” John replied. “Never fear.”
“I’ll stay and talk to a few more people and perhaps go and see if I can talk to Hogg’s apprentice, Wat, and Sir Christopher’s servant, Perkin.” He looked out of the window and saw that the day was already waning, the shadows getting long, the sharp outlines of the buildings blurring. Too late to wander through the streets of London. “The truth is, John,” he said, “I haven’t got much to go on.
”
John put a hand on his shoulder. “You will,” he said.
CHAPTER 11
The Palace of Whitehall
Nick spent the night walking the palace, hoping to pick up clues, to see if there was something he had missed. At the very least, to get the feel of the place as the killer must have experienced it.
After the clamor and frenzy of the day, the corridors and narrow passageways were dark and eerily silent, his footsteps on stone and wood unnaturally loud, as if the palace had been stricken by the Black Death and he was the only survivor. Before midnight, he saw the faint glow of candlelight from beneath doors, heard voices whispering and laughing; cries of passion; a disheveled page hurrying by on some errand or other; maids running to and fro, carrying jugs of hot water and spiced wine. But after midnight the palace lay wholly silent and dark, as if a giant hand had thrown a black muffling coverlet over it. Only the hard glitter of a quicksilver moon in a cloudless sky conjured a ghostly world of half-perceived forms. Nick would not have been surprised to see the headless figure of the Queen’s mother, Anne Boleyn, drifting mournfully through the rooms where once she had danced, where once she had reigned supreme in King Harry’s heart, her laughter echoing in the rafters—gay, brittle, and not a little fearful, knowing, as her daughter Elizabeth knew, as Nick knew, as poor Cecily now knew, that the ceremony of life was soon done, that after the bright sunlit day came darkest night.
Nick shivered and told himself not to be fanciful. The lantern he carried was smoky and foul smelling, and he breathed in deeply to clear his head. He would have preferred not to have advertised his presence by carrying a light, but there was no other way to see where he was going, and he had no intention of breaking his neck by falling down the numerous winding stairs.
The palace kitchens were deserted, the fire banked down to a dull glow, a faint snoring emerging from the pantry’s half-open door. The royal reception rooms were equally abandoned. His footsteps were loud in the vacant air; the dais with the great, carved throne was denuded of awe without the dazzling majesty of the Queen seated there; and the room, hushed and a little melancholy without the discreet murmur of advisors, the whispers of sycophants, and the entreaties of loyal subjects high and low. When all the pomp and ceremony was done, it was just a room like any other.
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