A Murder by Any Name

by Suzanne M. Wolfe

  Handing the lanterns to Nick and the scribe, the guard unhooked a huge ring of keys from his belt, selected one, and fitted it into the lock. “I’ll have to lock you in, I’m afraid,” he told them. “Orders.”

  Ducking his head under the low lintel, Nick entered the cell.

  The first thing that met him was the noisome stench from an overflowing bucket in the corner that served as the prisoner’s privy. Holding the lantern higher, Nick made out a shape in the corner, which, as his eyes grew accustomed to the dim light, gradually resolved itself into a human form.

  The Countess of Berwick was hunched on a low stool next to a filthy straw pallet—the stool and primitive bed the extent of the luxury the Queen was prepared to concede to the age of such a despised felon. Behind him, Nick heard the scribe quietly setting up his writing equipment, followed by a soft scraping as he sharpened his quill. Nick placed his own stool a short distance from the countess, sat down, and put the lantern on the floor between them. The countess blinked at the unaccustomed brightness, the first sign of life she had given. Then she spoke.

  “You,” she said.

  Nick had been prepared to see a change in the countess’s appearance since he had apprehended her at the house on Cockspur Street two days ago, but nothing as radical as this. Dressed in the gray, coarse dress given to female prisoners to preserve a modicum of decency, her hair tangled and matted, her face begrimed and with a livid swelling under one eye from the blow he had given her, he hardly recognized her for the great lady she had once been. Gone the rich brocades and jewels, the haughty carriage of the head, the air of authority; gone the veneer of the court with its meaningless courtesies and the semblance, at least, of goodwill.

  The countess drew herself up, her manner as imperious as if she were receiving him at court instead of in a reeking, squalid cell deep within the bowels of the Tower. “You can be sure the Queen will hear of this, young man. The way I am being treated is an outrage. Conduct me to her at once.” She made as if to rise.

  “Sit down,” Nick said. “You are here by express order of the Queen.”

  The countess sank back on her stool. Then, visibly rallying, she said, “There must be some mistake.”

  “No mistake.” A quick glance over his shoulder told Nick the scribe was ready with quill poised. A small, taciturn man, he looked completely at ease, as if he took notes every day in squalid cells thick with the choking miasma of human suffering. Perhaps he did, Nick reflected.

  “I don’t understand,” the countess said. “You have arrested my nephew for the crimes. Why am I here?”

  “You know why.”

  The countess just looked at him.

  “I know everything, Countess,” Nick said. “I know how you planned the murders; I know how you carried them out. I know that you forced your nephew to be your unwilling accomplice in covering up Perkin’s murder. I even know it was you who killed Sir Christopher’s dog. I have made my report to the Queen, and she is satisfied that you are guilty. As am I. So let’s not beat about the bush, shall we? All I want to know is why. Why did Cecily and Mary have to die? Perkin, I understand; somehow he found out and had to be silenced. But the ladies?”

  “The first mistake you made,” said the countess, ignoring his question, “was to assume that Cecily and Mary had been killed by a man.” She smiled. “Like most men, you underestimate women. You think us weak, but that is because you are afraid of us. Compared to us, men are as weak as ditch water is to wine.”

  Nick had to own that, generally speaking, he agreed with her, but did not give her the satisfaction of saying so out loud.

  “I was right about one thing,” Nick said. “The note Cecily received was written by a man. A left-handed man. Your nephew, Sir Christopher.” He had seen Sir Christopher holding the dagger in his left hand.

  “He fancied himself in love with Cecily,” the countess sneered. “After only one dance. Infatuated fool. I was watching from the dais and saw how repulsed she was, how she shrank from those clammy hands of his. The dance was barely over, the last notes of the lute still hanging in the air, when she made good her escape. She forgot all about him, I can tell you.”

  Not so Sir Christopher. Nick could picture him walking home to Cheapside in a daze of romantic longing, convinced he had found his one true love, penning his pathetic note as soon as he reached the house, thinking it a masterpiece of passionate prose instead of a chilly and peremptory summons.

  “It was you who slipped Cecily the note,” Nick said.

  “Of course. I put it in Cecily’s pocket that morning in chapel after service. It was easy.”

  “If you disapproved of your nephew and Cecily so much, Countess, why did you pass on the note?”

  She gave him a pitying look, as if to a village idiot. “To test her, of course. If she had not gone to the chapel that night, I would have let her live.” She shrugged. “It was her own fault.”

  Nick wanted to fasten his fingers around her fat neck and squeeze until her face turned black and her eyes bulged in their sockets. He looked away until he got himself under control. He felt a contagion of evil and unhappiness leeching into his bones, wrapping itself around his heart and squeezing. His sudden, overwhelming rage, he fancied, was a sickness caught from the very stones of this place, a plague that ate away at all that was good and true and beautiful.

  “Evil must be purged,” the countess said, drawing herself up with a dignity that was grotesque; it was as if they were having a chat in one of the sumptuous palace parlors. “The court must be cleansed.”

  “By you?”

  The countess looked surprised. “Of course,” she said. “I am the Queen’s protector.”

  Nick laughed. He couldn’t help it.

  “A slur against me is a slur against the Queen,” the countess said. “It is rank treason. You would do well to remember that, young man, before you mock me again.”

  “Why Cecily?”

  “I would have thought that was obvious.”

  “Humor me.”

  “I have been with Her Majesty a long time,” she said. “The ladies who wait on the Queen have come and gone; only I have remained.” Smugly, the countess folded her hands in her lap. “Over time, I have noticed a marked deterioration in the morals of the court.”

  As if Henry VIII was such an upstanding character.

  “Adultery. Fornication. Immodesty of dress. Coarse language. Lasciviousness of all kinds,” the countess said.

  Nick watched with fascination as this woman, dressed in rags and living in her own filth, capable of plotting and carrying out cold-blooded murder, prated about the world going to hell in a handbasket.

  “When Cecily came to court, I thought, ‘Now here is someone unsullied, someone pure. Here is a girl I can train to one day take my place.’ ” The countess peered at Nick. “I am not deluded, young man. I know I will grow old and infirm. The Queen will need someone young when that day comes.”

  The countess was talking as if the Queen were immortal, exempt from the ravages of time. In reality, Elizabeth and the countess were the same age. Like a Catholic’s devotion to Our Lady, the countess had adored and worshipped the Virgin Queen, her royal person the shrine she dressed each morning and put to bed each night. Nick remembered how he had dismissed the countess as a fussy old woman, a battle-ax, a mere stage nurse, fit only to be derided and then ignored. He had failed to see the fatal obsession in her behavior, had been blind to the insanity of her hero-worship, a worship that bordered on religious mania.

  “It was at the Accession Day Ball that I realized Cecily was like all the rest,” the countess said. “She had become friendly with that little whore.”

  “Mary.”

  The countess had a faraway look in her eyes, as if reliving the moment. “Always giggling together. Running instead of walking. Sneaking off when there was work to be done. Her clumsiness I could have mended,” the countess said. “Her soul I could not. Then I saw her dancing with my nephew.” Her eyes
narrowed. “She ensnared him, caught him in her wiles. And when my nephew told me he was in love with her and gave me the note, I knew what I had to do.”

  “Sir Christopher said he was with you around midnight that night,” Nick said. “That was true. You were together, but I did not consider to ask where.”

  “The chapel,” the countess confirmed. “I knew he would be there mooning about, waiting for that slut to arrive. I gave Cecily some extra work to do to delay her and I came myself.”

  “Matty overheard you.”

  “Who?”

  “Matty, the cinders at the palace,” Nick said.

  The countess shrugged as if the idea of a lowly servant testifying against her was too outlandish to entertain.

  “How did you persuade Sir Christopher to leave before Cecily arrived?”

  “I told him the girl was not coming, that I had overheard her telling Mary he was pigeon-livered and lacked gall. I told him he made her sick to look on.”

  The cruelty of it took Nick’s breath away. He could imagine Sir Christopher’s heartbreak, his shame and terrible sense of betrayal. His dreams in ruins. Never mind that he might have discovered his aunt was lying if only he had remembered that Cecily had not known who wrote the note because it bore no signature. A lifetime of doing exactly what the countess told him to do had overridden his judgment. If Sir Christopher had been weak and foolish, the countess had made him so.

  “So you were waiting for Cecily when she arrived,” Nick said. “Somehow you got close to her without her suspecting.”

  “When I revealed the identity of her precious suitor, she burst into tears,” the countess said. “When I approached her, she thought I was going to offer comfort.”

  Swallowing down his revulsion and aware that the scribe was recording every word, Nick forced himself to continue. “You stabbed her through the heart and then lifted her body onto the altar.”

  “Light as a feather,” the countess confirmed.

  “Why pose her?” Nick asked. This was one of the aspects of the murders that had puzzled him the most and led him and the Queen to suspect a religious and political motive. In a sense they had been correct; the countess saw herself as a holy scourge driving out the evil of the court.

  “She was an offering to the Queen, of course. A sacrifice.”

  Hearing a soft gasp behind him, Nick saw the scribe sitting white-faced, pen poised motionless above the page. Up to now, the man had been writing with the impassive face of a bored bureaucrat, as if the appalling confession entered his ears and flowed straight to his hand, bypassing his soul on the way. But even he, it seemed, had reached the limit of his endurance.

  “We’ll take a break,” Nick said.

  Ignoring the countess’s protests, Nick banged on the door for the guard to let them out.

  Both Nick and the scribe instinctively made for the stairs and the daylight above. Once outside, Nick leaned against the Bell Tower’s outer wall and drew in great cleansing breaths of cold air. He felt like Lazarus newly emerged from the tomb, the memory of the countess’s words the winding cloths that bound him still.

  “You all right?” the guard asked. He had followed them out after locking the cell door.

  Nick managed to nod. The scribe came out and scuttled past, making for the guards’ privy on the other side of the inner court.

  * * *

  Returning to the dungeon was one of the hardest things Nick could remember ever having to do. He had to force his feet to take the stairs down into the darkness, as if he knew that, once there, he would never reemerge into the light.

  The countess was sitting on her stool in exactly the same position, as though no time had elapsed at all.

  “Mary,” Nick said without preamble. “You saw her leave the palace to keep her assignation with Sir Hugh.”

  “She was regular as clockwork in her sluttish ways,” the countess admitted. “I’ll give her that.”

  “You saw her come back into the palace and go down into the cellar.”

  The countess nodded. “Regular in her thieving too.”

  The rest Nick knew from the state of Mary’s body. He had been right about the difference between Mary’s murder and Cecily’s but wrong about assuming there were two killers. Mary’s death had not been a crime of passion so much as a crime of opportunity. The countess confirmed this. “I had marked her out to die the same way Cecily had. In the chapel. But God put her in my way as a sign.”

  “A sign?”

  “That I was doing His holy work, of course.”

  “And you would have continued to kill?”

  The countess wagged a finger at him. “Except you sent all the others away.”

  Thank Christ for that, Nick thought. It was the only wise thing he had done in this whole tragic business.

  “I had words with the Queen about that, told her not to send her ladies home, that it was not fitting for her to be left untended. She insisted.”

  Nick recalled Codpiece telling him that he had overheard the Queen and the countess quarreling after Mary’s death. The countess might delude herself that her objection was based on concern for the Queen’s state, but the countess had obviously been enraged at being deprived of further victims.

  Nick was now desperate to bring the interview to a close. He had long since abandoned his stool and was pacing up and down, unable to keep still, the lanterns throwing lurid shadows on the walls, a restless demon mimicking his every move.

  “And then there was Perkin; he found out somehow and was blackmailing you.”

  “He was always loitering outside doors, eavesdropping,” the countess said. “He overheard my nephew accusing me of murdering Cecily the same day you came to the house to interview us. At first I paid him off, but I knew, of course, that he would never stop, that he would have to be silenced. I asked him to reach something down for me from the dresser in the kitchen, and when he turned his back, I stabbed him with one of the kitchen knives.” The countess shrugged. “It was easy. The hard part was shifting the body and shutting up that bloody dog.”

  Nick had maligned Sir Christopher, thinking he had killed his own dog. Until Sir Christopher had met Cecily, the dog was probably the only living thing that he had ever truly loved. But, like Cecily, even his own dog had not loved him in return. Nick recalled the hatred in its eyes when Sir Christopher had been holding it. Nick may have intensely disliked Sir Christopher, but the loveless sterility of the man’s existence almost made him weep. So too Perkin’s brief, miserable life, untimely taken.

  “That lack-wit of a nephew couldn’t even get rid of the body properly,” the countess said. “I told him to throw it in the Thames, where the currents would have taken it away. Instead, he chose the Fleet and was seen by that urchin. Useless.” Then she looked at Nick, and a cunning look came into her eyes. “What we have been talking about is all speculation, you know. A pretty fiction. There is no proof. Without that, you have no case.” She rose to her feet, smoothing down the rags of her skirts as if she were about to parade into the Great Hall of Whitehall Palace behind the Queen. “Escort me hence,” she said imperiously, holding out her hand in order to lean on Nick’s arm. “The Queen must hear of how her loyal subjects are treated.”

  “A moment,” Nick said, taking something out of the inside of his doublet. He held it up. “Do you recognize this?”

  The countess squinted in the gloom. “Never seen it before.”

  But Nick had seen her face change in recognition. In his hand was the long hairpin he had found in the countess’s jewel casket in the house in Cheapside the day he had gone in pursuit of Sir Christopher, after Wat had identified Perkin’s body. Putting back the jewels, he had found the wickedly sharp needle. It had reminded him of similar hairpins his mother owned, now considered old-fashioned. No longer did women wear headdresses made of boxlike frames draped with veils, a Spanish fashion that Henry’s first wife, Katherine of Aragon, had brought to England. The countess’s hairpin had been designed to hold
a precious stone at its tip, but the stone was missing. When Nick had fitted the topaz into the hole, he had found it to be a perfect fit.

  As soon as he saw it, he realized that he’d found the weapon used to kill Cecily. Not an assassin’s stiletto but a woman’s hairpin. When he had run to Cockspur Street, he had known the countess was Cecily’s killer. After Sir Christopher confessed that same night, Nick knew that the countess was also responsible for Mary’s and Perkin’s deaths.

  * * *

  Dusk had fallen by the time Nick left the Tower and trudged back through the streets of Petty Wales toward London Bridge. A great cloud of starlings swooped above the rooftops, making their harsh calls as they gathered and settled for the night in the ancient elms hard by Tower Green.

  The Queen was expecting him to make his report on the interview, but he didn’t have the heart. Let the scribe give her the official verbatim account to read. After Nick’s arrest of the countess in Cockspur Street, he had given the Queen an initial briefing, but he had decided to delay making his official report until after the countess’s execution. That was to take place two days hence. If this irritated Good Queen Bess, so be it.

  He had caught a killer, but at what cost? Cecily’s death could not have been prevented, but he would always blame himself for the deaths of Mary and Perkin. At least he had been able to save Sir Christopher.

  If Nick had not brought the beggar girl to the Cheapside house, Sir Christopher would not have panicked and fled to Cockspur Street. Up to this point, Sir Christopher had been prepared to keep silent in return for possession of the countess’s will, which named him as her sole heir. When John searched Sir Christopher’s house the day of the arrest, he had discovered the document hidden behind a panel in the walls of Sir Christopher’s study. The name of the Queen had been crossed out and the nephew’s written in. If not for Sir Christopher’s hold over his aunt, he would have inherited nothing.

  As soon as she set eyes on him at the house on Cockspur Street, the countess would have known her nephew had to die; he was too dangerous to be allowed to live. A bare hour later and Nick was certain he would have found Sir Christopher’s body, a dagger clutched in his hand as if he had killed himself out of remorse. A confession of his crimes would have been found conveniently to hand. But for Nick’s discovery of the hairpin and his prevention of Sir Christopher’s murder, the countess would have escaped justice.