A Murder by Any Name

by Suzanne M. Wolfe

  “The Honorable Nicholas Holt,” the countess proclaimed, as if she were announcing him at a ball.

  Two of the women curtsied out of reflex, but the rest just looked at him.

  “Countess,” Nick said, giving a small bow. “If you could wait outside while I speak to your ladies.” He indicated the door and gave her his most winning smile.

  The countess puffed out her bosom like a pouter pigeon. “I insist on remaining,” she said. “It’s not decent.”

  Sick at heart as he was, Nick almost laughed. A murderer was running around the court killing her ladies-in-waiting, and the old harridan was actually worried he might lay siege to their virtue. “Nevertheless,” he said.

  The countess glared. “Most irregular,” she said, sailing past him. “I shall inform Her Majesty immediately.”

  Nick shut the door firmly behind her. Immediately the tension in the room relaxed like a crossbow released. He sat down on one of the beds, signaling that he was the opposite of the bossy, inquisitorial countess and that they could now speak their minds.

  “The Queen has tasked me to find the man who murdered Mary and Cecily,” he said. At the bald naming of the crime, several women flinched and covered their mouths with their hands. Only the girl by the window did not react.

  “I need you to tell me if you saw or heard anything out of the ordinary last night. Anything at all.” Nick waited for his words to sink in, for the women to collect themselves. One plucked up a cloak and threw it about her as if she suddenly realized she was half naked. Another smoothed back her hair and pinched her cheeks as if she were about to step through a door into a public reception room and wanted to look her best.

  Unlike Elizabeth, these women had not been tempered to unbreakable steel by a life spent negotiating the treacherous currents of the court. Of noble birth, they had spent their childhoods on pleasant country estates, shielded from the worst of human nature, their soft rounded faces bespeaking lives of relative ease and happiness, their main tribulations putting up with the countess and finding a suitable husband. All except for one. Nick’s eyes kept going to the girl by the window. Only she seemed to be feeling the weight of grief; the others were more concerned for their own safety. He would speak to the others as a group, he decided, then speak to the girl alone. He seemed to recall from his previous interviews that her name was Lady Alice de Montfort.

  The women could only tell him what he had already worked out for himself: that Mary was “easygoing” and full of life. He correctly identified this as code for a good-time girl who was relatively free with her sexual favors. He asked if there was a particular man, and the room fell silent, but five pairs of eyes slid to the silent figure at the window, then returned to Nick almost as quickly. He filed this away and changed the subject. What had Mary’s day been like yesterday? When had she retired for the night?

  One girl snorted. “Mary seldom ‘retired’ for the night,” she said. Then, appalled, covered her mouth with her hand. “I didn’t mean …” She began to cry.

  “It’s all right,” Nick said gently. “So Mary used to see men at night?”

  The women nodded mutely.

  “And last night?”

  “She was going to meet someone,” a wan-looking girl said. She looked to the others for confirmation. They nodded. “But she wouldn’t say who.”

  “She said she’d bring back some wine,” one girl chimed in.

  “Did she often do that?” Nick asked. “Raid the cellar?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the pantry,” the same girl added.

  So stealing wine would have been a regular thing, and the killer might have known that, Nick thought.

  “Did she receive a note?” he asked.

  “She wasn’t one for book learning,” another girl said.

  Nick took that to mean Mary could hardly read or write. “But she did receive a note?” he pressed.

  “Yes.”

  So whoever it was knew that Mary was barely literate. Interesting, Nick thought. Yet another confirmation the killer was someone who moved in the Queen’s inner circle or knew someone who did.

  “Through a servant or in person?” Nick asked.

  They shrugged.

  “Do you know when she was approached?”

  “Must have been after chapel yesterday,” the girl who had been pinning up her hair said. “We were busy all day after that.”

  “Repairing dresses,” someone chimed in irrelevantly. “It took forever. The countess kept making us unpick everything and start again.” There was a general muttering and rolling of eyes at this.

  But Nick was thinking of the chapel. A logical gathering place of the inner court before the day’s duties scattered everyone, the only place the killer could be sure all the ladies-in-waiting on duty would be present. Did he sit there during the service and watch them, deciding who was going to live and who would die? Or was his choice more haphazard, based more on whom he could safely approach without being noticed? But the difference between the murders kept niggling at him. The kind of man who would coolly sit in a holy place of worship and select a victim, who was not afraid of either being detected by the authorities or struck down by the Almighty, was a far different character from the man who had savagely bludgeoned Mary to death. Mary’s murder was opportunistic, Nick was sure, whereas Cecily’s had been meticulously planned. Nick couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling that he had missed something crucial, that he had made a fundamental error somewhere in his line of reasoning, but for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out what it was.

  “Everyone knows who she was meeting,” the girl at the window said in a low, hard voice, which nevertheless seemed to echo around the room, so vehement and charged with emotion were her words. For the first time she turned around, and Nick saw that her face was not pale from grief, but from jealousy.

  “Mary was a whore,” the girl said. There was a collective gasp from the others. The girl shot them a withering look. “She was,” she said. “We all knew it. No point in pretending otherwise.” The others looked at the floor as if the sight of the girl’s suffering was too much to bear. Interestingly, none of them contradicted her.

  “Lady Alice, isn’t it?” Nick said. The girl nodded. He turned to the others. “Finish your packing,” he said, “then you can go. You stay,” he informed the girl.

  The women finished dressing and packed quickly now that the countess wasn’t there to get in their way by criticizing and making them refold things. They threw garments into chests willy-nilly and gathered up armfuls of trinkets and scarves and stockings, stuffing them into bags.

  While they were doing this, Nick searched through Mary’s belongings, picking up each item of clothing and running his hands over it to see if it concealed hidden notes in the seams. When he slit the bodice of her two dresses to search between the velvet and the silk lining, there was a collective moan of horror as if he had committed blasphemy. He ignored it. Aside from a goblet under the bed, sticky with old wine lees—proof of Mary’s habitual pilfering from the cellars—he found nothing of interest, so he stripped the sheets back from the bed she had shared with Cecily, down to the straw-stuffed mattress slung on ropes. Again, nothing. He was about to give up when he noticed a tiny slit in the ticking of the mattress, too neat to be a tear, more like a cut with a sharp knife. He widened it with his own knife and poked around inside. His fingers met the crackle of paper and he carefully withdrew a small rolled piece of parchment. With his back to the room, he unfurled it and saw a picture of a heart and a crude outline of a large oblong with a cross marked along one of the short sides next to a circle with a triangle in the middle of it. The Roman numeral II was written on the outer edge of the circle.

  Nick crossed the room and stuck his head outside the door. “Find the captain of the Guard and tell him to search the Privy Garden,” he said. “Then return here.” The guard looked puzzled but hurried off.

  * * *

  Nick sat down on the bed and looke
d at the note again. It was signed with the letter H. The formation of the letter was bold, confident, and gave no indication whether penned by a right or left hand, aside from a slight smudging at the top of each upright stroke as if the wet ink had been brushed by a hand moving from left to right. The slant of the handwriting looked similar to the writing on Cecily’s note, but Nick thought it disappointingly inconclusive; the method used in the schoolroom to teach handwriting was fairly standard, the resulting script reasonably uniform. Besides, children were taught to write with their right hands even if they were naturally left-handed. In addition, a single letter was impossible to use for comparison with the other, more extensive, note to Cecily. What he could deduce was that the man who had sent the note knew very well that Mary could not read well and so had drawn a diagram as if for a child. Even the use of Roman numerals was like tally marks on a stick used by illiterate farmers when counting cattle or sheep or barrels of apples. Total illiteracy among nobles was rare, even for a woman. Most could read or write in English; they were expected to keep an eagle eye on their steward’s accounting of household goods and expenses. Whoever had drawn this came from the court very close to the Queen. More than ever, Nick was convinced the killer came from her inner circle. It made his skin crawl to think that someone he saw every day was laughing over Nick’s bungling, gloating over his own successes with Cecily and Mary, and—worst of all—selecting his next victim and planning her murder. Thank God he had now ordered the ladies-in-waiting to be sent away from court.

  At last the room was empty except for Nick and Alice. She had not moved from the window, but stood facing him, backlit so it was difficult to make out her face. Nick motioned for her to come sit down on the bed beside him. She did so reluctantly, perching on the end near the wall, as far from him as possible, and folding her hands in her lap, a model of a well-bred young lady except for the way her fingers whitened at the knuckles with the force of her grip.

  He studied her in silence for a moment, letting her know that he meant to have the truth and was prepared to wait till Doomsday to get it. If she had been happier, she would have been pretty, but her face was pinched with misery, and two unhealthy spots of color burned in her cheeks. Her fair hair was severely scraped back, and he could see it pulling at her scalp. A pulse in her throat raced. She looked at him defiantly, her chin tipped up.

  “Alice,” he said, “tell me about Mary and Sir Hugh.”

  She flinched at her lover’s name, then regained her composure and sat up straighter. “She was a whore and he’s a whoreson,” she said, her words all the more shocking for the quiet matter-of-fact way in which they were uttered, as if her anger and jealousy had burned out, and only the ashes of despair and disillusionment remained. If she had dreamed of Mary’s death, she was now learning that revenge was not sweet at all, but sad and oddly disappointing. He felt a sudden deep pity for her.

  “You and Sir Hugh were engaged,” he pressed gently.

  Alice looked surprised that he didn’t phrase it as a question, then nodded and lowered her head, but not before Nick saw the glint of tears, the first he had seen.

  “We were going to be married after Christmas.” She swiped at her eyes with her sleeve and raised her head. The tears were gone: she had successfully regained control of herself, and Nick could not help admiring her strength. He rather liked Lady Alice. Plenty of pluck, his mother would have said.

  “We were betrothed when we were children. We were always meant for each other.” This last said with utter forlornness.

  Nick looked down so she would not see his anger and think it was directed at her. He understood why most marriages were arranged, especially between noble families. A marriage was not just a private agreement between two lovers, but a complicated, far-reaching treaty between two families and their respective dynasties, often with huge sums of money and vast swathes of land at stake. He understood that. What he could not stomach was the still common practice of betrothing minor children to each other, children not only too young to give their consent, which was, the last time he checked, an absolute prerequisite for a valid marriage, but too young to even understand what marriage was, let alone sex. He had heard of infants in the cradle being pledged to each other by their ambitious fathers. There was something deeply distasteful about two men bartering and selling their children like chattel, especially girls. In Bankside, men and women were not sentimental about marriage—plenty of people married as a way of cementing a business partnership—but it was an arrangement agreed upon by the parties involved, the man and woman themselves, with the understanding that it was for mutual benefit. Master Baker, Nick knew, had married his wife because she was reputed to be the best pastry-maker in all of Southwark. Mistress Baker had known this and consented. As far as Nick could tell, and if the quality of their confections and bread was anything to go by, they were as happy as any married couple could expect to be. Sir Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, and the rest of their poetic, Platonic ilk might witter on about fairie queenes, nymphs, and pining swains and shepherdesses, but he for one preferred a real flesh-and-blood woman who could give as good as she got, both in witty conversation as well as in bed. Rivkah and Kat flashed into his mind—uneasy bedfellows. His metaphor made him wince, and he guiltily banished the image that had risen unbidden in his head.

  “When did you suspect Sir Hugh was having an affair with Mary?”

  “On Accession Day,” Alice said. “I saw Mary flirting with him in the stands at the jousting. Cecily and I had just come back from getting some ale. They didn’t see us. I saw Mary whisper something to him that made him blush.”

  As well he might, Nick thought. He could all too plainly imagine what Mary had whispered in Hugh’s ear.

  “He didn’t stand a chance,” Alice blurted out passionately. “He’s a complete innocent.”

  Nick noted her use of the present tense as if, even now, she thought her fiancé unsullied by lust and infidelity. He thought of his own escapades with willing milkmaids in the barn at home and strongly doubted Hugh had been a virgin before succumbing to Mary’s charms. He suddenly remembered seeing Sir Hugh at the Accession Day Ball, flirting and chatting with Mary; Nick had even seen him dance once with Cecily. He kicked himself for not remembering this before.

  “Mary was a whore,” Alice repeated. “Always giving the glad eye to men. She was a terrible influence on Cecily too; they were always giggling about something. Cecily was so naïve.”

  As were you, Nick thought to himself, once upon a time.

  There was a difference between a tease and a whore, but Nick suspected Alice was right. Like a dog instinctively alerting to a bitch in heat, he himself had not been insensible to Mary’s come-hither sexuality, especially as it suggested tangible benefits and not just the promise of them, endlessly postponed.

  It was odd, he had always thought, how a scorned woman always shifted the blame to the “other woman” instead of the man who had betrayed her. Men also blamed women, of course, citing the shopworn frailty-of-Eve argument, but this was just spinelessness. His mother was fond of pointing out that not only did Adam eagerly eat of the apple, but then he had the unmitigated gall to blame Eve for it when God came calling.

  Nick had always been puzzled when women used the same argument. He expected them to stand by their own sex, and was amazed they could not see they were endorsing a belief in the very assumptions they railed against in other circumstances. Kat had always complained that women were the worst critics of other women.

  “Not men?” he had asked, surprised.

  Her lips had curved upward in a slow, lazy smile. “Men,” she’d said with a fondness she reserved for Hector and all dumb beasts. “Women can handle men. Like lambs to wolves by comparison.”

  But Hugh was no lamb, Nick thought. Lady Alice’s betrothed showed every sign of being a predatory wolf when it came to women.

  Mary had realized this too. Did that make her dangerous? Given time, would she have worked out who had ki
lled her friend? Was she murdered to silence her or for some other reason?

  “Hugh started acting differently,” Alice was saying, “kept making excuses not to meet, said he was too busy. Hah!” she exclaimed bitterly. “He was busy all right! Fucking Mary!”

  The coarseness of her comment struck him as out of character. Before her betrayal, Alice must have been much like Cecily, dreaming of Hugh in her virginal bed as if he were a celestial being and not some randy youth. Now she deliberately used the language of the gutter in order to conceal the deep disillusionment that her intended was composed of no more or less than frail human flesh. Every gesture, every expression that passed over her face bespoke a profound and crippling embarrassment at having been made such a fool of. How to tell her that although it didn’t excuse his faithlessness, Hugh was like any other man—willing to enjoy a woman’s body without giving her his soul. Guiltily, Nick thought of Kat. But Alice was in no state to receive such advice, much less from him. Let her mother sort her out when she returned home.

  “I prayed she would die,” Alice said. “But I didn’t really mean …” And all at once her brittle composure cracked, and she fell into a storm of weeping, bending over at the waist with arms clasped tightly around her as if she were trying to hold herself in, to stop herself bursting asunder with the weight of her guilt.

  Nick took her in his arms, shushing her as he had often done with his nieces when they had a minor childhood mishap, a scraped knee or the loss of a treasured toy, the smallness of the event dwarfed by their huge grief. But Mary’s death was no small thing that could be remedied with a sweetmeat and a few soothing words, nor was Alice a child. Perhaps for the first time in her young privileged life, she was faced with genuine tragedy, with something that could not be remedied. It would mark her for life, of this Nick was sure, but whether that scar would become a sign of strength, a token of a battle survived if not won, or a tragic and irredeemable disfigurement, only time would tell.