Revenger

by Rory Clements

  “And what if the person seemed to be going mad, seeing strange flying creatures with lights in their wings?”

  “Interesting. Wolfsbane poisoning can bring on strange imaginings and disturbances of the mind. It is accompanied by a tickling or burning sensation in the tongue, perhaps. And sickness and pain.”

  Shakespeare nodded slowly. He felt a chill, his suspicions seemingly confirmed.

  “I see from your face that I am the harbinger of bad news, John.”

  Shakespeare grimaced. “Indeed. But, Joshua, how might one counteract this?”

  “Remove the intended victim from those that would kill him. Ensure that all food and drink is prepared by one you trust, and pray to God that no damage has already been done.”

  Well, that was now in the hands of Sir Robert Cecil. He should have the means to save her. In the meantime, Shakespeare would send urgent word of this conversation.

  Peace stayed him with his hand. “Before you go, John, it is interesting that you talk of poison, for the two bodies on the slab in the crypt were thought to have killed themselves with poison. It was believed by the constable and sheriff and those that knew the young girl that they took their lives by arsenic because they could not be together.”

  “A sad story, Joshua.”

  “But untrue. Someone has gone to a lot of trouble to make it seem that they killed themselves.”

  “Well, then, you have a mystery to solve.”

  “And an extremely interesting one, for the girl is Amy Le Neve, daughter of Sir Toby Le Neve.”

  The name brought Shakespeare up with a start. Sir Toby Le Neve was known as a fine general, had been an aide-de-camp to Essex on his recent expedition to bolster Henri of Navarre in northern France. More than that, he had been present at the summer revel at Essex House.

  Shakespeare sat down again. “Joshua, tell me more. What are the circumstances of these deaths?”

  “They were found by a stream in the forest of Waltham out by Wanstead in Essex. Not my jurisdiction, but the Essex coroner is an old friend from Cambridge days. He was unhappy about the deaths and came to ask me to take a further look at the bodies. I had them brought here along with the flagon that was found with them. It has a large quantity of arsenic in it-enough to kill a dray horse-mixed with wine. There was also some arsenic in their mouths. It is nasty stuff. No scent, no taste.”

  “Then how do you know it is arsenic?”

  Joshua Peace gave the guilty smile of a schoolboy. “I fed a little to my neighbor’s cat. It was a wretched brindled animal, infected with mange, and would have been done for by the plague men soon enough anyway. It is undoubtedly arsenic.”

  “So why do you not think it was the poison that killed them?”

  Peace downed the last of his ale. “If you can bear to come to the crypt with me, I will show you.”

  As they walked back toward the cathedral crypt, Shakespeare saw a woman selling pomanders. “Herbs and blooms to ward off the pest,” the woman cried. “Pest pomanders a penny.”

  Shakespeare bought one and held it close beneath his nose as they entered the crypt. It was of limited use, but gave him just enough strength to stave off the nausea that threatened to overwhelm him. Peace pulled back the shrouds and Shakespeare gazed on the two bodies. They were covered with injuries and bite marks. In their faces were bloody pulps where once sat bright, hopeful eyes. Yet even in death, bruised and snapped at by vermin, the girl’s face retained its youthful innocence. The boy’s naked body did not even have the pallor of death. His muscles had tone and the skin that was not torn glowed with a healthy tan that almost made him seem alive.

  “Do you know who the boy is?” Shakespeare said, and immediately regretted speaking, because the bile rose in his throat and he brought up an acid wash of ale over the stone floor.

  Peace laughed. “Do not concern yourself, John. I have worse eruptions to contend with here. And yes, the boy’s name is Jaggard. Joe Jaggard. More than that, I have no idea who he is. I examine bodies, nothing more.”

  Being sick eased Shakespeare’s discomfort. He still held the sweet-smelling pomander close to his face and stepped nearer the bodies. “So how did they die?”

  With his left hand, Peace gently raised the girl’s head from the slab and held it forward so that they could both see the back, which was thickly matted with blood. Peace pushed the three middle fingers of his right hand into the hair and Shakespeare saw that beneath the blood was a deep indentation in the skull.

  “Could that not have happened when she fell? Could an animal not have done that to her after death?”

  “There would have been no bleeding after death. Now, look at this.” He lay the head back on the slab, then walked around to the left side of the boy’s head. His temple was caved in. Peace put the same three fingers into the bowl-shaped hole. “Almost identical to the girl’s injury. This is what killed them or, at least, rendered them unconscious so that arsenic could be forced into their mouths. I still don’t believe the poison killed them, however, for there would have been signs that their bowels had been purged-and there was none. They were both bludgeoned once with a club with a very heavy, rounded head. These wounds could not have been self-inflicted. If they did not die immediately, then they must have been left unconscious and died within two or three hours. No one could survive such blows. I would venture to say that whoever did this must have come upon them and surprised them. They probably did not even see their killer. The poison is an inept afterthought, a desperate attempt to make it seem they took their own lives.”

  “Why did the constable and sheriff not note these head injuries?”

  “There are many injuries on the bodies. The corpses had become carrion. Their flesh was clawed and bitten. And the girl’s thick hair disguised the true nature of her head wound. With the presence of the arsenic flagon, they simply didn’t look any further. More than that, I believe her parents wanted no ado. They wanted her buried and forgotten. Perhaps they were ashamed-either at her being found naked with this boy or because they felt dishonored by her self-destruction.”

  “What of their clothes?”

  “No sign of them. Either the killer took them, or they might have been stolen away by a vagabond. The girl’s gown would have been of fine quality. Such items are worth much gold.”

  Shakespeare was thinking fast. This was nothing to do with him; he was already neglecting the Roanoke inquiry and needed to get word to Cecil about the wolfsbane. Yet these killings worried him. There was the link to Essex and there was something else, jangling in his mind. The name Joe Jaggard. Arthur Gregory had spoken of a murdered boy named Jaggard. Not just any boy, but a lad with connection to Charlie McGunn. A boy who had been seeking Eleanor Dare on his behalf.

  He knew what Walsingham would have said: leave no dunghill unforked. He looked once more on the tableau of death in the wintry crypt. “Whoever did this must have been a man of immense power, to kill them with one blow each.”

  “I don’t think so,” Peace said. “Given the right weapon, any man or woman of reasonable strength could have inflicted these injuries. These two young people had been swiving. It is not beyond the bounds of likelihood that on a warm summer’s day it made them nod off to sleep, which would be why they were left so open to attack. Certainly if they had not been caught unawares, that lad would have been strong enough to defend himself against most men. He had the build of a pugilist.”

  “Thank you, Joshua. I must go.”

  “One more thing. If your friend is being poisoned with wolfsbane and if he or she is already having vivid imaginings, it might already be too late…”

  Chapter 16

  T HE ENTRANCE TO HOGSDEN TRENT’S BREWERY and cooperage in Gully Hole, Southwark, was littered with hoops and staves. The thick walls of the old stone building were permeated with the smell of fermenting barley and the bitter tang of hops. It was a scene that would never cease to give Boltfoot an uneasy feeling. He had spent many years as a cooper, both by land and
sea, and had no desire to return to that life.

  Boltfoot looked about him. There was some good craftsmanship here; he would have been proud of this work himself in the old days when he sailed the world. A couple of men wandered past in open-necked shirts and rolled-up sleeves, with leather tool-aprons about their waists. One of them stopped.

  “Can I help you?” He was sixty or so, with short-cropped white hair and welcoming eyes. “I’m Ralph Hogsden.”

  “I’m looking for a man called Davy.”

  “Davy Kerk? Dutch Davy? Yes, he’s here somewhere. Come in and I’ll find him.”

  They found Davy in the yard, sawing long staves for puncheon casks. Boltfoot watched a moment, admiring the work. Davy finished his cut, ran his palm along the edge to feel the smoothness, then looked around at Hogsden and the newcomer.

  “Davy, this fellow was after talking with you.”

  The cooper dusted down his hands. “And why would that be?”

  Davy was a man in his mid-forties, but well kept. He stood an inch or two taller than Boltfoot, his face partially obscured by a long carpet of graying hair that hung about his head like a helmet. He had the same salt-weathered lines to his face as Boltfoot-the look of a man who has been to sea for many years. His nose-or what you could see of it beneath all that hair-was long and hooked down sharply at the tip. His ears, which protruded through his mane, were large and festooned with bristly hair like a man twice his age. It seemed to Boltfoot that if the man ever bothered visiting a barber, he might be fair-looking. His accent was broad and foreign, but his voice betrayed no animosity. He met Boltfoot’s eye and held it.

  “My name is Boltfoot Cooper. I’d like to talk with you awhile, about a voyage.”

  Boltfoot thought Davy stiffened, but the man said evenly, “A voyage? I’ve been on a few voyages in my time; what voyage would that be?”

  “Aboard the Lion to the island of Roanoke in the New World.”

  “And why would you be interested in that?”

  “Do you want to speak here?”

  “I’ve got no secrets.”

  “As you wish. I am here on the orders of Mr. John Shakespeare, an intelligencer working for the Earl of Essex.”

  Davy put down the saw. “You’ll have to tell me more than that.”

  Ralph Hogsden was watching the proceedings with a keen interest. “Well, Mr. Cooper? What exactly is the great Earl’s interest in Davy’s seafarings?”

  Questioning wasn’t what Boltfoot did. He was good with his cutlass and deadly with his caliver, but he had always been a man of few words; interrogation was for men like Shakespeare, not him. But he had never shirked a task in his life. “All right, I’ll tell you true,” he said brusquely. “There’s one as says that a so-called lost colonist has been spotted, here in Southwark. I’m looking for her on Essex’s orders. Don’t ask me why. I do what I’m told. And I do believe you were on the voyage that took them all there.”

  Davy Kerk frowned, then he looked toward Hogsden, and both men broke out laughing as one.

  “Is it true or isn’t it, Mr. Kerk? Were you on the Lion?” Boltfoot persisted.

  “Well, Dutch Davy,” Hogsden said, “were you?”

  “Yes, course I was. So were a hundred others. What’s any of this faffling nonsense got to do with me?” Kerk had stopped laughing and was starting to look angry.

  “Tell me about it, then. Tell me about the voyage and the people on it. Or come with me to John Shakespeare at Dowgate and tell him.”

  “I’m not going anywhere, Mr. Cooper. I have work to do to put food on my table.”

  “Then tell me what you know. Answer a few questions and that’s it.”

  “And what if I don’t?”

  “Then I shall return with a warrant.”

  Kerk did not look concerned. “And what charge would that be? Refusing to talk to a stump of a man with a clubfoot asking me questions that mean bugger all to anyone, with some cat’s-piss notion of lost colonists turning up? Is that a new crime in England?”

  Boltfoot felt the weight of the caliver slung about his back and the cutlass at his belt. Something in the movement of his body gave away his thoughts.

  “Shoot me, will you? Or cut me down?” Davy Kerk bared his teeth aggressively, but then softened as quickly as the heat had risen in him. “Come on, then, Mr. Cooper, let us have done with it. Of course I remember the Lion. ”

  “Thank you, Mr. Kerk. I am most glad to hear it. Now, as I have been told, the settlers were mostly Puritans, and given to sermonizing.”

  “God’s blood, but that was a voyage of the doomed. They preached and ranted and got in the way of good, honest privateering. Made us travel away from the Carib Sea up the coast of Florida to that forsaken lump of land Roanoke. It is a place I would not have stayed for all the gold in the Spanish Main, a place of murder and evil. Bleaker than the Waddenzee in winter.”

  “Murder?”

  “Aye. Poor George Howe, cut down by Indians with arrows and axes while fishing. He was one of the better fellows. When you were there, on the island, you found yourself thinking those savages were behind every tree. Standing there or crouching, watching you, waiting until you crept out to the pit for a shit in the night. Never have I seen darker nights.”

  The three men stood silent as if imagining a black night on the farthest of shores, knowing that you were observed by a hundred eyes. It was a feeling Boltfoot remembered all too well. There had been times ashore, on coral strands and the coast of Peru and in the Spice Islands, when he, too, had felt open to sudden death.

  “There was one name,” Boltfoot said, breaking the spell. “Eleanor, daughter of John White, wife of Ananias Dare. Do you recall her?”

  “Of course. She did give birth to the first child there, named for your virgin Queen. If the child is alive, she must be nigh on five now.”

  “ My virgin Queen, Mr. Kerk?”

  “I am not English, Mr. Cooper. She is no Queen of mine.”

  “So why is a Dutchman here in England, Mr. Kerk?”

  “Escaping, Mr. Cooper, like every other stranger in this city of strangers.”

  “So you’re a Protestant, are you?”

  “Would I be here if I were not?”

  Boltfoot noted that Davy spoke good English, probably better English than most Englishmen spoke, albeit with a Dutch accent. There were plenty such men here in London, fugitives from the horrors of war in the Low Countries, a conflict that seemed to have been raging forever.

  “Tell me more. What do you recall of Eleanor?”

  “She was fair, blue-eyed, I’d say. A pretty young lass. Wasted on that sanctimonious Ananias Dare.”

  “It is said she is alive and here in England.”

  “Then that is good news. Did someone find her and bring her home?”

  “Not that is known. But she was seen, not far from here in Southwark.”

  “If she is here, then someone must have brought her. Or perchance, the settlers built a boat and sailed home. Either that or she sprouted faerie wings and flew the Western Sea.”

  “You sound doubtful, Mr. Kerk.”

  He rubbed a hand across the back of his tousled mane of sand-gray hair. “You are making merry at my expense, Mr. Cooper. Yes, I have heard the tales and the gossip the same as you about what happened to those settlers. The truth? She’s dead. They are all dead, done for by the savages. What chance do you think they stood-a hundred or so men, women, and children surrounded by thousands of natives who had fallen out of patience with them? We didn’t like leaving them there, for we all feared that they were to have a miserable fate in that godless land. On the last day, when we said our goodbyes, there was many a tear shed, and not just by the womenfolk. The settlers’ faces on the shore as we pulled away were drained and terrified, Mr. Cooper. They looked at us as a man on the scaffold looks at the block, for we were leaving them to a dreadful fate and everyone knew it.”

  “So you do not believe she is here in London?”

 
; “No, Mr. Cooper, I do not. Is that enough for you? May I now return to the sawing of my staves before Mr. Hogsden deducts a groat from my pay for idling the day away in chatter?”

  “One last question, sir, and I will myself give you a groat for your time.”

  “Go on, Mr. Cooper.”

  “Do you know of anyone else now in these parts who was on the Lion voyage with you, someone else with memories that I might inquire of?”

  “And why would I tell you if there was such a one? I do not think any man would thank me for it.”

  Boltfoot said nothing; Davy was right. As he turned to leave, however, the Dutchman stayed him.

  “There is one, though-a Portuguese gentleman, by name of Fernandez, commander of the expedition. And for that groat you promised me, I shall tell you where you might find him.”

  U SING The Profitable Art of Gardening, Shakespeare scraped a short coded message with quill, ink, and paper and handed it, sealed, to his servant Jack Butler. He instructed him to take it to Greenwich Palace and place it in the hand of Sir Robert personally, and to no one else. No one must see him going there, no one must ever know that he had gone.

  Jack Butler had been with Shakespeare five years. He was a big man, six inches taller than his master, with strong arms beneath his frieze jerkin. Now, high on his large bay steed, he towered over Shakespeare.

  “You have the letter safe, Jack?”

  Butler patted his pack-saddle.

  “Wait to see if there is a reply. And God speed.”

  Butler grinned. “Have no fears on my account, master.”

  Shakespeare slapped the horse’s flank and watched Butler disappear. He thought of the message he had written and wondered how it would be received by Cecil. It contained two points: one was the confirmation that the Countess of Essex was being poisoned, almost certainly with wolfsbane, and was probably now at a critical stage; the other was the mysterious death of Amy Le Neve, the daughter of Essex’s aide-de-camp and associate, and the worrying possibility of a connection to McGunn.