The First Murder

by The Medieval Murderers

  Alan Dole treated the returned manuscript of The Play of Adam with great care.

  Unlike his brother, he did not study its contents carefully, let alone make use of them. But he did read several times over the warning penned by Alan of Walsingham, the Prior of Ely, wondering how Christopher could have neglected it. The bookseller was sufficiently alarmed to contemplate sealing the document up again. But the broken seal seemed like a broken egg, something that could not be restored to its former state. Nor could he bring himself to destroy the document, however dangerous it might be. He had too much reverence for the word, whether hand-written or printed, sacred or profane. Instead, he caused The Play of Adam to be bound into a book and put away, for good.

  It is not quite true to say that Nick Revill gained nothing from the business. He acquired a new friend when he returned to Mrs Atkins’ house, where the unfortunate Christopher Dole had lodged. There he found that Sara Atkins, who was indeed a widow, was happy to salve more than the wounds inflicted by her son. Stephen he could not persuade himself to like, but the attractions of his mother were sufficient to make Nick move north of the river. He did not live up in the garret but in a more spacious chamber close to Mrs Atkins’ own. Sara offered Nick bed and board. The board was at a mutually agreed rate. The bed was free.

  London, July 1821

  Joe Malinferno peered at the lozenge-shaped figure again. The images wobbled in the flickering, yellow light of the single candle set on the surface that doubled as his desk and dining table. His eyes swam and his head ached. What did it mean, this little procession of pictures? He could make out the seated lion, the feather, and the two birds. Even the stylised palm of a hand was discernible. But what were all the other shapes for? And what did they all signify? He wrung out the wet cloth that had been soaking in a bowl of water at his elbow, and applied the cold poultice to his forehead. It eased the fevered ache, but did not bring enlightenment. A warm hand touched his hunched shoulder, and he looked up. It was Doll Pocket, a shawl wrapped around her bare shoulders and partly covering her high-bodiced muslin dress.

  ‘Time for bed, Joe. You’ll never figure it out, the state you’re in.’

  He patted her hand, and sighed deeply. ‘I’ll never figure it out anyway.’

  Malinferno had set himself up as an Egyptological expert a number of years ago in the wake of the fashionable fervour for all things to do with that far-off land. Of course, it had been England’s old enemy Napoleon Bonaparte who had started the craze after his expedition to Egypt in 1798. But that mattered not to London society, and soon there was a fashion amongst the wealthy for owning obelisks and statues plundered from the ancient past. Then more recently there grew a vogue for ‘unrolling’ mummies. At aristocratic soirées, Egyptian mummies that had lain untouched by grave-robbers for thousands of years were unceremoniously unravelling from their bindings. Their innermost secrets were exposed to the curious but ignorant stares of English lord and ladies in the name of entertainment. Malinferno had cashed in on the trend by selling his services as an expert ‘unroller’ to the élite. His decision to do so had not been entirely motivated by greed, though he did appropriate for himself some of the gems and scarabs hidden in the bandages wrapped round the mummies. He justified his actions by telling himself that someone less sensitive to the antiquarian value of the unrolling would destroy valuable finds on the altar of gross curiosity. He had recently found, in the process of unrolling three mummies, several small papyrus texts with Egyptian hieroglyphs on them, and salvaged them in the interests of scholarship. These curious symbols were inscribed on papyrus, carved on upright stones, and on walls and tombs all over Egypt. Malinferno, along with many other scholars and savants of the day, was fascinated by their mystery. It had become his fervent wish to be the first to unlock the mystery of these images. But two years of fevered thinking had brought him exactly nowhere.

  Doll unwound the cold compress from his head, and stroked his damp and chilly brow.

  ‘Don’t despair, Joe. You’ll get there.’ She squatted before his hunched figure. ‘Shall we go to Montagu House again, and see the stone?’

  Malinferno knew that Doll was referring to the famous stone classified as EA24 – Egyptian Antiquity 24 – that resided in the British Museum. Currently located in Montagu House, the museum had possession of the remarkable stone stolen from the French twenty years earlier. It was otherwise known as the Rosetta Stone. There was a text written in three languages on its broken surface, one of them being Greek, one an unknown language, and one being the mysterious hieroglyphs of the Egyptians. Over the years, many scholars had tried to decipher the pictograms found on Egyptian monuments and papyruses, and the Rosetta Stone was seen as the key. The physician and mathematician Thomas Young was the latest scholar in England to try his luck, but even he was struggling. Now Malinferno was beginning to wonder why he had had the temerity to imagine he could do it.

  He looked down at Doll’s remarkable cleavage, and shook his aching head.

  ‘I think not, Doll. It will do me no good. This is a waste of time.’

  He pushed the crackling papyruses on the table to one side. Though the sun was coming up through the dusty bow window of his rented rooms in Creechurch Lane, London, he realised Doll had only just returned home.

  ‘Let’s go and find a chop-house that’s open and, over breakfast, you can tell me what kept you out all night.’

  Doll Pocket looked away guiltily from his gaze.

  ‘It was business, Joe. Honest.’

  Malinferno hoped it was not Doll’s old business that she was referring to. He wouldn’t want that, even if they were stony-broke again. He had first met her in Madame de Trou’s bawdy house in Petticoat Lane. A gold sovereign had been burning a hole in his pocket, and he had a similar heat in his breeches. But having been introduced to Doll, whose blonde tresses had been covered up by a black wig, he had lost track of his carnal desires. She had been fascinated by something more alluring about Joe than his privates, and it had all been his fault. Before getting down to business, he could not resist showing off his erudition concerning Egyptology. The night had flown by as this raven-haired doxy absorbed all he knew about the subject. Doll was what one might call a rabid autodidact, not only absorbing knowledge from whom she could, but interpreting it in the process. That night, she finally pulled off her wig, shook out her natural hair, and revealed her true self. From that moment, Doll’s retirement from the business, and their friendship, was agreed. It was not long before she outstripped Malinferno in her understanding of many subjects, though she herself laughed at his description of her as a savant.

  ‘An idiot-savant more like,’ she once said, unfortunately mangling the French pronunciation. But he knew she was a natural talent, and indulged her. She refused to expose her erudition to anyone other than Joe, however, preferring to pass for a dumb-headed doxy in a male world that was only too eager to treat her as one.

  Now she could see what was on Joe’s mind, and came clean about what she had been doing all night.

  ‘I was doing as you suggested a while ago, and trying to get a part in The Taming of the Shrew at Drury Lane. I met Kean himself.’

  Malinferno gasped at Doll’s audacity. Though he had expressed admiration at her ability to imitate the manners of the nobility in more than one of their escapades, she had had no theatrical training. And here she was approaching the great actor Edmund Kean, currently celebrated for his interpretation of Shylock, to ask for a part in a Shakespearean comedy. Malinferno hesitated before daring to ask Doll what the master’s reply was to her enquiry. She grimaced, an unfamiliar blush appearing on her cheeks.

  ‘I . . . er . . . persuaded the stage doorman to let me backstage after the play finished.’

  Malinferno looked at her charming figure, and could easily guess how she had achieved that. His silence urged her to continue.

  ‘I caught Mr Kean in his dressing room, and offered to clean the slap from his face.’ She paused. ‘That is the
word we actors use for make-up, you know. Slap.’ Her blush spread down her neck at this mild exaggeration of her experience to date. ‘He allowed me to do so, and I wiped away the dark colouring of Shylock and teased the false beard from his chin. Of course I had to straddle his . . . thighs to achieve this, and as he was in a state of déshabillé, I found myself in some intimacy with him.’

  By now the roseate blush had spread to Doll’s bosom, and Joe marvelled at the unfamiliar effect. He was also curious as to the result of her Herculean efforts.

  ‘And was your ploy successful?’

  Doll pulled a face, and wrapped her shawl around her exposed flesh.

  ‘Nah. The bastard took me for that type of actress who is no better than a bawd. He groped me, and so I stuck my knee in his groin and beat a retreat.’ She sighed. ‘My days of being laced mutton are well and truly over.’

  Malinferno burst out laughing, imagining the great tragedian turning an unusual shade of green and clutching his privates in agony. Perhaps the experience of exquisite pain could be drawn on when next he performed King Lear. But Doll Pocket was clearly in no mood to laugh.

  ‘And that’s my days as an actress over too. And before they’d even started. What am I going to do, Joe?’

  Malinferno stifled his laughter and sympathised, stroking Doll’s shoulder.

  ‘There will be other parts, Doll.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I could be a mountebank, and go bareback trick riding in Astley’s Amphitheatre.’

  Picturing her in that famous circus bouncing along on the back of a horse, it was an image that Malinferno found irresistible. But he knew Doll was not of the same opinion. She so wanted to be a legitimate actress in one of the great theatres – either Drury Lane or Covent Garden. But it seemed the most she could hope for was to feature in one of the unlicensed theatres that had sprung up all around London.

  Disconsolate, she idly leafed through the papyrus sheets that Malinferno had been poring over so unsuccessfully. She turned her head as though trying to see them another way than how Joe had been construing them. She stared, and then twisted the paper round.

  ‘Which way do you look at these, Joe?’

  Malinferno’s stomach was beginning to rumble at the thought of a chop for breakfast, and tried to divert Doll’s attention from the puzzle on the papyrus.

  ‘Upside down, if you wish. Now, what about the chop-house?’

  Doll airily waved her hand, and sat down in the chair Joe had been occupying.

  ‘You go, Joe. I am not at all hungry.’

  He sighed, knowing that, when her attention had been captured by something, Doll Pocket would not be moved by simple considerations of food and drink. He decided to let her be distracted from her disappointment about play-acting for a while. He was ravenous, if she was not. So, leaving her to gaze at the hieroglyphs, he grabbed his garrick, pulled the shabby but serviceable overcoat on, and went in search of food.

  He eventually found himself trudging past the stench of Billingsgate fish market, and over the river at London Bridge. He had in his mind that he might find his old friend Augustus Bromhead at an unpretentious chop-house in Unicorn Passage just off Tooley Street, south of the Thames. Bromhead lived in a rickety tenement house in Bermondsey, and knew all the best eating houses on the south bank of the mighty river. He had introduced Malinferno to this establishment a year or two ago, but Joe had not been back since. He would not have walked so far, but was suddenly eager to conjoin good food with stimulating conversation.

  On entering the low-ceilinged, smoky chop-house, he saw he was in luck. A curiously shaped fellow, resembling a tadpole because of his large, leonine head and stubby body, was perched on a high stool at the back of the premises. Augustus Bromhead was apparently breaking his fast with a steaming plate of well-cooked chops and boiled potatoes. Malinferno shimmied his way through the crowded room without disturbing the stolid transfer of food to the mouths of the numerous diners, and slid on to the bench opposite to his friend. The little man acknowledged his arrival with just a nod of his oversize head. His jaw was occupied with the mastication of his meal. When he finally swallowed, he wiped his lips with a stained napkin, and spoke.

  ‘Giuseppe . . .’ he always used Joe’s proper name, reminding him of his Italian origins, ‘. . . dear boy, you look as though you have been burning the midnight oils. I have not seen such baleful, red eyes since I stared into the awful face of Ben Crouch of the Borough Gang.’

  He was referring to the notorious resurrection man and leader of a gang of body-snatchers who had nearly done for him and Malinferno both. Malinferno shuddered at being reminded of the incident.

  ‘I have been working on the Egyptian hieroglyphs in my possession. All to no avail, I fear.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Malinferno could hear in the brief monosyllable the sound of Bromhead’s disapproval. Augustus was an antiquarian of some repute, but his obsession was British history. He considered this unseemly fad for the artefacts and symbols of a far-distant land a temporary aberration and complete waste of time. He had told Malinferno so several times, attempting to bring him back to the right and proper course of study by pointing him in the direction of British history, particularly King Arthur and his putative bones, on more than one occasion. Bromhead was deprecating about the significance of the Egyptian pictorial images, and now said so.

  ‘Take it from me they are no more than a rebus. A puzzle in pictures.’

  ‘That is not what Champollion thinks.’

  Bromhead snorted in derision.

  ‘That upstart Frenchie? He knows nothing. And besides, has he not gone quiet the last few years?’

  Malinferno had to admit that Champollion did seem to have disappeared off the face of scholarship after a brief blaze of early glory. Most English scholars now thought he had gone down a blind alley and, having failed miserably, hidden himself away in shame. The torch was now being carried in England by Thomas Young.

  A waiter in a dirty long white apron, which betrayed the signs of several lost battles with the gravy on the plates he served, came and took Malinferno’s order. Both men were silent as the waiter cleared Augustus’ empty plate from the table. After he had gone, Bromhead reached down from his high stool, on which he had to sit to reach the level of the table, and groped for a leather satchel on the floor. When his outstretched fingers failed to reach it, Malinferno took pity. He lifted it up, noting how heavy it was.

  ‘What do you have in there, Gus? It feels like a whole library of books.’

  Bromhead ignored his companion’s deliberate shortening of his first name. He hated being called Gus, and Malinferno knew it. And he knew it was said just to provoke him, so he kept calm. He stroked the battered leather satchel.

  ‘You are not far wrong there, my friend. It is a whole series of plays in one, in fact.’

  Bromhead lifted the flap of the satchel, and extracted a dusty tome from its interior. The leather was dry and cracked, and so old as to be of an indeterminate hue. He reverently tipped the book on its back and laid it on the table, carefully avoiding the wet ring left from the base of his ale mug. He brushed more dust from the book’s surface.

  ‘I found it in a poky little bookshop in a lane leading off Paternoster Row close by St Paul’s Cathedral. I had never seen the passage before as it was so narrow. And it was only out of curiosity that I ventured down it this time. The only shop open in the lane was a dingy affair that looked as though it had not changed since Jacobean times. The sign over the door read Dole’s Printers, and guessing that there might be some gems mouldering away inside the shop, I went in. The interior was a jumble of pamphlets and badly printed books, overseen by an old man who looked as antique as the shop itself. Indeed he blended so well into his surroundings that I did not see him until I had raised some dust by lifting a few tomes up. It caused him to cough like some diseased sheep. A sort of cross between a bleat and a death-rattle. I apologised and moved to the back of the shop, further away from his ink-
stained desk. It was there I found this.’

  He placed his hand on the book before them, patting it affectionately like the head of some favoured grandchild. Malinferno could bear the suspense no longer.

  ‘But what is it that makes you value it so much?’

  There were no words embossed on the front of the book or the spine to give away its secret. And Bromhead was clearly determined to keep his companion in suspense a little longer. He was also keen to impress Malinferno with the marvellous bargain he had come across, so he ignored the question and continued his tale.

  ‘I could tell from the edges of the pages that it was old, because they are not made of paper but of vellum. Sheets of vellum stitched together at the edge, and bound in leather. I knew it would be something rare, but did not wish to reveal my interest to the old man in the shop. However, I could not resist a peep. I idly lifted the cover, and looked inside.’

  He mimicked his action in the shop for Malinferno’s benefit. But as Malinferno bent down to examine the contents thus half-revealed, Augustus snapped the cover shut again. A little puff of dust flew out from the edge of the tome, causing Malinferno to sneeze. Apparently, he was to be kept in suspense a while longer.

  ‘What I saw convinced me I had to purchase the book. I lifted it up, aware for the first time of its weight, and walked across to the old man, who sat on his bench at the door like the guardian of Hell. When he saw what I had found, he sniffed disdainfully.

  ‘“Why should you want that old thing? It’s only some original manuscript for a set of plays my forebears printed off years ago. I was even told that bad luck follows those who enact the plays, especially that of ‘Cain and Abel’. However, I can sell you a fair copy of the eleventh edition set in Baskerville. Here, I will find it for you.”