A Murder by Any Name

by Suzanne M. Wolfe

  Except for their eyes, which tracked him whenever he passed, the guards paid him no heed. Hector kept close as if he too were affected by this dreamlike state, padding noiselessly at his master’s side.

  At four in the morning, Nick gave up and returned to his room. Chilled to the bone, he was overjoyed to see the fire in his room had been lit.

  “Bless you, Matty,” he said softly.

  Perhaps this was her way of thanking him for the bread and cheese or, more likely, the way he and John had talked with her as if she were a human being capable of thinking and feeling, of experiencing sorrow and joy.

  Undressing, he crawled under the icy, clammy sheets. Although he didn’t make a habit of it, for Hector took up too much room for Nick to sleep comfortably, this night he patted the bed for Hector to jump up. Lifting up the covers, Nick allowed the dog to burrow under and settle by his side. Soon the bed was warm, the sound of Hector’s breathing the last thing Nick knew.

  * * *

  He was running down a corridor blazing with thousands of torches set in sconces on the walls. The stones radiated heat like an oven; his breath was stifling in his chest; and sweat ran down his back and face, stinging his eyes. He wasn’t running away from something, but toward it, trying to stop something from happening at the end of the corridor, but the corridor never seemed to end, twisting and turning, stretching on and on and on without end. Just when he felt he could run no more, his breath coming in great heaving gasps, his heart pounding as if it would fly from his chest, the corridor straightened, and in the distance he saw a pale, shimmering figure of a woman hovering above the ground. Nearing her, he saw that her hair was golden and floated nimbus-like around her head, as if she were suspended in water. She was dressed in crimson brocade, and he thought her the most beautiful woman he had ever beheld. Cecily, but not Cecily. Or rather, Cecily as she would have become if she had lived—a ravishing, alluring woman. She was holding out her arms invitingly. With a groan, he reached for her and bent to kiss her mouth but instantly recoiled. Her lips were cold as marble, her body not warm and pliant, but freezing to the touch, as if he had plunged his hands into a snowdrift. Looking down, he saw his palms were red. At first he thought the dye from her dress was running, that she had been out in the snow. Except that it was too cold for snow. His mind labored to understand.

  “I’m yours,” she whispered.

  Raising his eyes, Nick saw that she was changing, her face melting, rearranging itself until she resembled Rivkah, her hair no longer fair, but black; her eyes brown, not blue. He opened his mouth to speak, to ask her what she was doing wandering all alone in the palace at night.

  “Shh,” she said, putting a finger to her lips.

  He looked down again at his hands and realized that the stain was not dye, but blood, and that it was gushing from a great hole over her heart. And now he could hear sounds other than his labored breathing, voices hissing, murmuring, building to a roar that hurt his ears.

  “Dirty Jew. Dirty Jew. Dirty Jew.” Nick tried to close Rivkah’s wound with his hands, but the blood just spurted faster, squirting between his fingers into his face, his hair, his mouth, until it was shooting out like water between the starlings of London Bridge, a torrent of blood coursing down the corridor, swirling at his feet, mounting higher and higher, to his ankles, then his knees, then his thighs. He was going to drown in blood, he thought. Rivkah’s blood. And all the while she was looking at him as if he were a stranger.

  “No, no, no, no,” he sobbed.

  Then a great scream tore the air, a woman’s, although Rivkah’s finger was still pressed against her lips, her mouth closed.

  From somewhere far off, he heard Hector barking, and Nick awoke, writhing and clawing at the covers, chest laboring, his face wet with tears. “Mother of God!”

  He sat up. A faint lightening in the room, the merest outline of furniture beginning to emerge from the darkness, told him dawn was not far off. Hector was not lying next to him, but pawing at the door, barking. From the corridor outside, he heard running, then someone was hammering on his door.

  Nick leapt out of bed and started pulling on his clothes. “Enter,” he yelled.

  A guard burst in, the lantern he was holding swinging crazily from his hand and throwing writhing shadows on the walls of the room. “You have to come,” he panted. “There’s been another one.”

  With Hector coursing ahead of them as if he knew exactly where to go, Nick followed the guard. As he ran, Nick felt he was still trapped in his dream, his stomach twisting with dread, his mouth filling with the bitter taste of iron. Irrationally, he thought Rivkah had come to the palace looking for him and that something terrible had happened to her. He followed the guard along the corridor, past the chapel, to the door leading to the royal wine cellar. At the steps leading down into the cellar, the guard stopped.

  “Down there,” he said, pointing a shaking finger.

  A knot of servants were crowding the corridor outside the cellar door, talking in hushed voices. As Nick shouldered his way through, he recognized the royal cook, resplendent in a snowy apron, surrounded by his kitchen staff. This early in the day, only the kitchens would be busy, the bakehouse ovens long since lit, the first batch of loaves already cooling on the great stone hearth in preparation for the royal breakfast.

  Mixed in among the kitchen staff were men muffled against the cold in scarves and cloaks, tradesmen making early morning deliveries to the great kitchens, mostly country folk from outlying areas, on their way to the London markets along Cornhill and Cheapside for flowers and vegetables, or Newgate Street for meat. Their carts would have entered the palace through the Court Gate and drawn up beside the entrance to the vast pantry that opened onto the palace’s inner court. Nick could hear the horse harnesses jingling and chickens clucking miserably in the freezing air. By the sound of it, one cart was full of squealing piglets. Women with cloth-covered baskets over their arms were sobbing, and men who looked like farmers muttered gruffly among themselves; used though they were to the harshness of life, they were visibly shaken, their usually ruddy faces drained of color. Nick saw a few make the sign of the cross on their breasts, heedless of the Royal Guards standing nearby. Nobody cared about forbidden religious practices that morning.

  “Let me through,” Nick ordered as some, presumably in shock, refused to move aside.

  Nick descended into the cellar. He came out into a cavernous stone room stretching far under the palace, and stacked between the stone pillars holding up the vast stone ceiling stretched row upon row of casks of wine, barrels of ale, and firkins of small beer, as far as the eye could see. A guard was standing at the base of the steps, holding a lantern; another stood beside a large cask set against a pillar opposite the stairs. At his feet was a crumpled form. The cellar reeked of spilt wine and blood. Steeling himself, a muttered prayer that it not be Rivkah rising unbidden to his lips, Nick stepped forward and looked down. Lying on her back, hands crossed on her breast in the now familiar pose, lay Mary, Cecily’s best friend. The first thing he noticed was that she was not fully dressed as Cecily had been, but was lying only in her shift. On her feet were soft kid slippers of the kind that ladies wore indoors. Judging from her state of undress, she had been meeting a lover before she returned to the palace and was killed.

  “Secure the stairs,” Nick ordered. “No one is to be admitted except the Queen. Round up any witnesses, and take them to the Guard House. I want to talk to the person who found the body. Separate the others so they can’t talk with one another.” Conversation between witnesses would only muddy their recollections even more. Even kept apart, Nick knew that eyewitnesses were notoriously unreliable, that two people who saw the same thing would nonetheless have different stories to relate. It was a curious trick of the mind that people only saw what they wanted to see. Eli had told him that the human mind could only interpret events according to the experience of the viewer, that anything outside that experience was altered and made to fit accordin
gly. And the amazing thing, he said, was that it was done in complete innocence with no thought of deception. “We can tell ourselves anything,” he said, “and believe it.” That was why Nick did not hold with torture. In his experience, a man would say anything to stop the pain, believing that every word he uttered was gospel.

  The soldiers silently moved to do his bidding, leaving Nick a lantern. A stub of candle lay near the body, its wick extinguished in the pool of blood and wine. Perhaps Mary had taken it from one of the nearby storerooms, the way he had seen Codpiece do, in order to light her way. He had noticed a lantern missing from the hook beside the cellar door when he arrived; now he wondered if the killer had taken it. Searching for it in other parts of the palace would be hopeless, as all the lanterns were of the same design. Sadly, Nick looked at the pathetic heap of clothes and humanity that had once been a living girl who, only a short while ago, had wept tears of grief as her friend’s coffin was carried from the palace. Soon Mary would make the same journey home. As if sharing his grief, Hector gave a single, mournful howl and then padded to the steps, where he silently lay down, his ears pricked, his immense body still, but coiled for action.

  Holding up the lantern, Nick crouched by the body, careful not to disturb it. The first thing he noticed was that, unlike with Cecily, there was a lot of blood, a pool of it spreading in a circle around Mary’s head like a crimson halo. Her face was undamaged, but when he gently turned her head to the side, he saw that halfway between the nape of the neck and the crown, the back of her skull was caved in, splinters of bone poking through the matted hair and torn flesh. Someone had hit her with a heavy object, using enormous force. A large mallet used for hammering in the bungs in the casks lay in full sight beside the body, casually discarded after it had done its gruesome work. He used one himself at The Black Sheep and knew just how lethal it could be if swung with force. An empty flagon lay, partially concealed, beneath the tap of the cask. From the smell of the wine, Mary had been in the process of siphoning some off into a jug when the killer came upon her. Crouched down with her back to the stairs, perhaps too intent on her task, she would not have noticed another light descending the stairs behind her, especially if the killer shuttered it, and would have had no chance to defend herself. A tremendous blow to the back of the head with a weapon that was conveniently to hand would have rendered her immediately unconscious. She would have fallen forward in an untidy heap, her eyes still open. Not content with dealing her a deathblow, the murderer had then taken time to lay Mary on her back, with her arms crossed over her breast like an effigy on a tomb. The exact same positioning as Cecily’s body. The murderer had also taken the time to turn off the tap in the cask so that the entire contents did not flood the floor. Even so, the back of Mary’s shift from the hips down was soaked with wine, and her upper back was red with blood from the terrible head wound.

  The great quantity of blood beneath her head told Nick that Mary had not died right away. After the blow had felled her, she had lain bleeding on the floor until her heart stopped. Probably, Nick decided, she had been unaware of what was happening to her and would not have known she was dying. A small mercy, he thought. Nick frowned: this was a completely different type of killing than the murder of Cecily, but the body was laid out in the same way. Generally, a murderer stuck to the same method of killing; Nick knew that some professional killers swore by the garrote, whereas others favored the stiletto. The difference in the method of the murders of Cecily and Mary suggested two separate men, but the way the body was posed suggested that the killer was the same. Nick touched her eyelids; there was a slight sign of stiffening, but her arms were still limp. From Eli he knew that rigor mortis began between two and six hours after death in the eyelids, neck, and jaw and slowly progressed down the body. She had been killed a few hours ago while he slept. On the right side of her neck, he noticed bruising, as if she had been grabbed in an attempt to subdue her. This could not have happened in the cellar, because there was no sign of a struggle, no overturned table, no bloody handprints; besides, she would have been unconscious as soon as she was struck. And it could not have happened immediately before she was struck because she would hardly turn her back on a man she had just fended off violently enough for her to have sustained injuries. So the fight and Mary’s death, Nick reasoned, must be two discrete events and have occurred in two separate locations. The motive, however, looked the same—an argument with a jealous lover ending in a crime of passion.

  He noted that the linen of her shift was ripped in several places at the neck and stained with tiny spots of blood. When Nick moved aside the fabric, he saw several scratches on her chest, as if someone had grasped the collar in a struggle. Next Nick examined Mary’s nails: they were torn and bloody, underscoring his theory about the argument. Mary had put up a valiant fight. Nick swallowed. He remembered her cheeky face, the humor in her eyes, and her passionate grief for her friend.

  Nick noticed that the soles of Mary’s slippers were wet and grass-stained. She had clearly been outside just prior to her death, but her cloak was missing. He went to the bottom of the cellar steps and called the guard, instructing him to tell his captain to dispatch some men to search the palace grounds for a woman’s cloak. Given the cold, Mary would not have ventured outside without one, especially as the deep hood would have served to disguise her identity as she made her way to the rendezvous.

  Nick returned to the body and hunkered down beside it again. Like the chapel, the cellar was a perfect location in which to kill and escape undetected. Both places stood empty at night; above all, both places were hidden from the gaze of nighttime servants and guards who patrolled the corridors and grounds. It was possible that one of the kitchen staff might have seen either Mary or the killer entering the cellar, but Nick was not very hopeful. Despite being located off the same corridor, the entrance to the kitchens was around a dogleg bend, with no direct line of sight to the cellar door. Only someone making a delivery from a cart drawn up outside might have witnessed something, as they would have had to walk past the cellar and make a right turn to get to the kitchens.

  A warning growl from Hector drew Nick out of his reverie; he became aware of someone standing next to him. Glancing up, he saw the Queen looking as if she had come straight from bed, with a fur-lined cloak thrown over what looked like a nightdress and a deep, ermine-trimmed hood pulled over her head so that her face was in shadow. The countess was with her and, unlike the Queen, had taken time to fling on her clothes for propriety’s sake. When it came to the sudden death of one her ladies, the Queen, Nick knew, did not give a fig for propriety. Nick made as if to rise, but Elizabeth waved him down.

  “No ceremony, man,” she said in a gruff voice. She sounded as if she were fighting back tears. “The same killer,” she said, indicating Mary’s pose.

  Nick did not reply, as the Queen had not asked a question. Personally, he was not sure—the method used to kill Mary was completely different from that used to kill Cecily, despite the identical staging of the bodies. And the emotion behind each murder felt completely at odds: Cecily had been killed with surgical detachment; Mary, in a fit of hot rage. If Mary’s murderer had been present in the chapel when Cecily’s body was found, then he would have seen how Cecily was laid out. Posing Mary in the same way could be a ploy to throw Nick off the scent, make him believe that the same man had murdered both women. Nick kept his mouth shut; it was too soon to voice his doubts out loud.

  Hector was still growling. “Quiet,” Nick ordered.

  The Queen stood motionless, looking down at Mary. “Her cloak is missing,” she said.

  “I have asked the guards to search for it in the grounds.”

  Elizabeth nodded approvingly. “She was outside.” So the Queen had noticed the wet slippers. “She must have left the palace to meet someone.”

  “She was always a loose one,” the countess muttered.

  “Now, now, Eleanor,” the Queen said. “Let us not speak ill of the dead.”

>   “She was stealing your wine, Majesty. A thief as well as a whore.”

  “Enough!” the Queen barked. “Leave us!”

  Nick saw the countess redden as if she knew she had gone too far. Then she curtsied and made her way back up the steps. Not for the first time, Nick wondered how the Queen could abide the company of such a miserable old bat.

  “She’s getting worse,” the Queen muttered to herself. Then to Nick: “Remove the body. We can’t leave the poor girl lying here for all and sundry to gape at.”

  Nick marveled that even at a time like this, Elizabeth’s mind continued to work: Both Cecily and Mary had been killed in the heart of the palace, near to the royal apartments, and both had been displayed for the court to see. The death of yet another of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting, coming only five days on the heels of the first, would not remain a secret. News of the murders would be the only topic of conversation in the taverns that night and in the inns along the London roads. For all its size, London was like a large village when it came to rumor and gossip. What happened one day was known the next, and the news flowed outward into the countryside beyond the city walls in an ever increasing circle like the ripples on a pond when a stone is thrown in.

  “Majesty,” Nick said. “I need you to order a complete lockdown of the palace. No one is to enter or leave.”

  Elizabeth nodded.

  “I also need you to order every male between the age of eighteen and forty to assemble in the Great Hall. I will need parchment, ink, and quills.” This was something he should have done before—test everyone’s writing, see if he could match it to the note found on Cecily’s body. Despite the difference in the way the murders were committed, if the killer was the same, then Mary would have received a similar note, and Nick was determined to find it. He had already ascertained that such a note was not on the body. “I’ll come as soon as I can.”