The King's Evil

by Andrew Taylor

  ‘No, my lord.’ I heard a creak as Milcote shifted his weight beside me.

  ‘Did you see the King? Or the Duke?’

  ‘No – Mr Chiffinch gave me the warrant and sent me here.’

  Lord Clarendon sniffed. ‘Does Chiffinch often give you errands, eh?’

  ‘Sometimes – I’m also clerk to the Board of Red Cloth, and he’s one of the commissioners.’

  ‘We know what that means,’ Clarendon said tartly. ‘The Board does nothing for the salaries it receives. Its commissioners oblige the King in less official ways. And therefore so does its clerk.’ He turned to Milcote. ‘Well, George. We must cooperate, of course, which means we must give Mr Marwood all the assistance in our power. Was Alderley murdered?’

  Milcote shrugged. ‘We haven’t examined the body yet, my lord, but it’s hard to see how he could have fallen into the well of his own accord. If it was dark, he might have stumbled into it. But what was he doing there in the first place?’

  ‘How did you know him?’ Clarendon paused and glanced at Milcote; I had the sense that a silent message had passed between them.

  Milcote cleared his throat. ‘I had some acquaintance with him years ago, my lord – in the years of his prosperity.’

  ‘Before his father’s downfall, you mean. A more treacherous rogue never existed.’

  ‘Whatever his father was, Edward Alderley was kind to me then.’ Milcote cleared his throat again. ‘When I met him a few months ago, his condition was sadly altered. I believe he had tried to improve what was left of his fortunes at the tables.’

  ‘A gambler.’ Clarendon’s voice was harsh. ‘The most stupid of all mankind.’

  ‘He was trying to change his ways. He wanted to improve his condition by wiser means – he asked for my help.’

  ‘So, like the fool you are, you lent him money, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes, my lord – a little – enough to pay his most pressing debts.’

  ‘You’re too soft-hearted, George. You’ve seen the last of that.’

  Not just soft-hearted, I thought, but gullible enough to be taken in by a rogue like Edward Alderley.

  ‘He told me he was searching for some respectable form of employment,’ Milcote went on. ‘I promised to look around for him. I would have asked you, but I knew you would have no time for him.’

  ‘So you are not altogether a fool.’ Clarendon didn’t return the smile but there was a touch of warmth in his voice. ‘And what was he doing here? And in the pavilion?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘My lord,’ I said, growing a little impatient. ‘I understand that the only other person who knows of this man’s death is the servant who unlocked the pavilion this morning and found the body.’

  Clarendon looked sharply at me. He did not take kindly to those who spoke before they were spoken to. ‘First things first. Have I your word that you will be discreet? I can’t afford a scandal at this time.’

  ‘Yes, my lord.’

  ‘If the news gets out, I shall know who to blame.’ He looked steadily at me. ‘You would not like to be my enemy.’

  I refused to allow him to intimidate me. I had the King’s warrant. ‘May I have your permission to speak to the servant?’

  ‘Of course.’ Clarendon glanced at Milcote. ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Gorse, my lord.’

  ‘I don’t know him. Have him brought to me.’

  ‘Unfortunately he’s not here.’ Milcote lowered his voice. ‘The mourning rings.’

  ‘You may know,’ Clarendon said to me in a flat voice purged of emotion, ‘my wife died last month.’

  ‘Gorse is delivering mourning rings for my lady today,’ Milcote explained. ‘Mainly to former dependants and acquaintances. So he will be here and there all over London. He should be back after dinner. But I don’t know when.’

  ‘Is he trustworthy?’ Clarendon said.

  ‘I believe so, my lord – I knew him in his old place, and suggested him to the steward.’

  ‘I want this riddle solved,’ Clarendon said, still looking at me. ‘Do you understand? For my sake as well as the King’s. You may make what enquiries you need to in my house, but Milcote must accompany you at all times, inside and out.’

  I nodded. ‘As you wish, my lord.’

  ‘My late wife was fond of that pavilion,’ he went on, his voice softening. ‘It was an old banqueting hall – she remembered it fondly from her youth. I wanted to tear it down and build it anew to match everything else. But she pleaded with me, and in the end I agreed to preserve at least part of it, though I insisted on its being remodelled to match the rest of my house and garden.’ He paused, staring at me. ‘Are you married, Mr Marwood?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘No? If you ever are, you will find that it is a matter of perpetual compromise.’ His voice trailed away, and he turned his head to look out of the window.

  ‘Alderley’s body was found in the well, my lord,’ I said. ‘Was that part of the old building?’

  ‘Yes.’ He looked at me again, and his eyes were brighter than before. ‘Lady Clarendon was particularly attached to its water. She said it was always cold, even on the hottest day, and that the spring that feeds it is unusually pure. Indeed, she believed it to be the purest in London.’ His voice changed, and I knew without knowing how that he was furiously angry. ‘This body has sullied my wife’s well, Marwood. It has polluted the spring. Tell the King that I want this made clean for her sake.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  NOW CAME THE worst part, which I had been dreading from the start. Milcote and I returned to the pavilion to examine the body more closely. I postponed this unpleasant necessity by examining a wicket gate in the back wall of the garden. It was set in the temporary palisade that covered the place where the garden gates would eventually be installed. The wicket was locked and bolted. Milcote said it was rarely used, except occasionally by gardeners and the builders during the day.

  Next I went up to inspect the main apartment on the first floor of the pavilion. The work was more advanced here than it was below. The windows were glazed and barred. At the top of the stairs was the door to the viewing platform. It too was locked and bolted.

  At last I could no longer delay the inevitable. In the basement, Milcote and I stripped off Edward Alderley’s outer clothing. It was no easy matter, even with two of us, to manoeuvre his body. Alderley had always been a big, overweight man and, since I had last seen him, he had become even grosser.

  Intimate contact with the dead, I thought, this prying into the consequences of death, should be growing easier for me since the events of the last twelve months. But custom had not yet formed a callus over my squeamishness; perhaps it never would.

  ‘How did Gorse know that someone was in the well?’ I asked as we were tugging Alderley’s arms from his sleeves.

  ‘The cover was off,’ Milcote said. ‘And he stumbled on Alderley’s hat, which was on the floor. He had the wit to look down the shaft.’

  ‘Why was he in the pavilion at all at that hour? Was that usual?’

  ‘No. But Mr Hakesby was expecting a delivery of lime, and he couldn’t get here himself until later. So I sent Gorse instead. He unlocked the garden door and then he came down to the basement to open the windows. The atmosphere is damp, and we try to keep the place aired. It was still dark down here, and he had a lantern.’

  The body’s legs flopped on to the stone floor, and a long, lingering blast of wind erupted from the corpse’s belly.

  ‘God’s heart,’ Milcote said. ‘What a job is this. Does one ever get used to it?’

  ‘Probably not,’ I said curtly. How did he think I spent my days, I thought – laying out corpses?

  I noted that the body was not in that phase of rigidity that corpses pass through after death. Perhaps the coldness of the well water had delayed its onset. If only, I thought, there were an exact way of measuring temporal gradations of decay, we should be able to deduce when Alderley had drowned, or
at least to narrow down the time when it had happened. All we knew at present was that he had died between Saturday evening, when Hakesby and the builders had locked up, and this morning when Matthew Gorse had come to unlock the pavilion for the early delivery.

  I suppressed the uncomfortable thought that there was another possibility: that Cat had been there with Hakesby on Saturday, and that Alderley had died before they had gone home for the night.

  It took two of us to remove each of the boots because the leather was so saturated with water. Despite our labours, I was cold. The temperature in the basement seemed to drop lower and lower. The water chilled my hands and splashed over my clothes.

  ‘Who has a key?’ I said, panting, when Alderley’s feet were bare, exposing untrimmed nails like pale talons.

  Milcote lobbed a boot into the corner. ‘Mr Hakesby. I have a set, too – I have all the household keys. My lord has another set, though those are never used and lie locked in his closet. Then there’s the steward’s – Gorse would have used the pavilion key from there.’

  ‘And the house and garden?’

  ‘Locked as tight as a drum. We take no chances, not after those attacks on my lord. During the night, the mastiffs are loose in the garden, and watchmen make an hourly circuit. There are two porters awake in the house, and lanterns in the forecourt.’

  ‘Then how did Alderley get here?’ I asked.

  Milcote shrugged. ‘It’s a perfect mystery. Unless he came during the day, while the men were here. And he was already dead when they locked up.’

  This was an echo of my own thoughts, and it led me back to Hakesby and Cat. I turned to Alderley and unstrapped his belt. The breeches were almost as hard to remove as the boots had been.

  Death makes a man small as well as making him ridiculous. When we had stripped Alderley to his shirt, he looked shrunken and as vulnerable as a child. Milcote held up the lantern and I examined the body as best I could. There were grazes on the forearms and shoulders, and much broken skin on the fingers. They told their own grim story of a drowning man struggling in the water, enclosed by the sheer walls of the well. I felt the skull and found a bruise on the forehead.

  Had he hit his head as he was falling down the well? Or had someone hit him beforehand?

  Crouching, we rolled him on to his back again. Milcote watched closely as I turned my attention to the pockets. Alderley had been carrying a purse containing nearly thirty shillings in silver and two pounds in gold. That was a small fortune to most people; but poverty was a relative condition.

  There were also two keys on a ring. One was made of blackened iron and had a long shank. The other was much smaller, and far more delicate: it appeared to be made of silver, and had a finely wrought ring at the top that contained what looked like a monogram. I held up the second key to the light of the window, but the letters were so entwined and so clogged with delicate arabesques that I could not even distinguish whether there were two or three of them.

  Next, in an inner pocket, I found a sodden bundle of papers. I tried to separate the leaves from each other but the paper tore.

  ‘Have you a pouch or bag I could use?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’ Milcote dragged his eyes away from Alderley’s possessions. ‘A pouch?’

  ‘I’ll take these with me. I need something to put them in.’

  He nodded. ‘Of course.’

  He went away and came back with a small bag of coarse canvas, its top secured with a drawstring. ‘Will this do?’

  ‘Admirably.’

  He opened the bag, shook out its contents, a dozen or so newly forged nails, on the floor, and passed it to me. I put the papers, the key and money into it.

  ‘He used to live in Barnabas Place in Holborn,’ I said. ‘A big place – you could house an army in it. Was he still there?’

  ‘No. He had to sell it and most of the contents to pay his own debts. But he retained an interest in another house nearby, and he was living there. In Fallow Street.’

  ‘Did you ever go there?’

  Milcote shook his head. ‘We met at a tavern or he came here. He grumbled about how small his lodgings were. And it was mortgaged, too, and he’d had to let part of it to a carpenter.’ He gave me a rueful smile. ‘I think he was ashamed. He didn’t want me to see how mean his condition had become. In truth, I didn’t know him that well, but I felt sorry for him.’

  I turned back to the body. Alderley’s mouth had fallen open. I took up the sword. It was a narrow blade of fine steel. Two silk ribbons, one red and one blue, had been knotted around the hilt. Perhaps some lady had given them to him to wear as her favour. A design had been engraved on the blade just below the hilt. I held the sword up to the light and recognized the form of a pelican eating its young, the Alderley crest.

  ‘It’s an old Clemens Horn,’ Milcote said. He stretched out his hand and touched the blade with lingering respect, as a man might touch the hand of a beautiful woman who did not belong to him. ‘German. Must be nigh on fifty years old, but you won’t find a better sword.’

  ‘I should like to see the well,’ I said.

  It was a relief to move away from the body. Milcote and I lifted off the cover and laid it on the floor. It moved easily. A man could have removed it by himself, if necessary. Or, for that matter, a woman.

  Milcote crouched on the edge and held the lantern over the void. I could see nothing beyond its light. At my request, he took a rope and attached it to the ring at the top of the lantern. He lowered the light into the well. It glistened on cleanly cut masonry – the shaft was lined with stone, not brick.

  Another thought struck me – and again I kept it to myself. I liked what I had seen of Milcote but he and I served different masters.

  The lantern twisted and turned as it descended. It seemed to take weeks for it to reach the water.

  ‘Mr Hakesby measured it,’ Milcote said. ‘It’s about forty feet to the water level. And the depth of the water is another twenty feet, more or less.’

  I remembered the bruises and scrapes on Alderley’s body. Could he swim? I imagined him thrashing about in the well, desperately trying to find a handhold, a toehold, on that smooth, curved masonry. And all the time, the water drawing him down into its cold embrace.

  I could not afford these thoughts, and I seized on a distraction. ‘How did you get the body out?’ It was such an obvious question that I was ashamed that it hadn’t occurred to me before.

  ‘Gorse and I used the hoist.’ Milcote waved his free hand in the direction of the wooden framework I had noticed in the corner of the cellar behind the well, beside a pile of scaffolding. ‘It’s the masons’. They used it when they were repointing the well. Gorse went down, and he got a couple of hooks in Alderley’s belt.’

  ‘He must be a capable man,’ I said. ‘Rather him than me.’

  ‘He’s seen worse, I daresay,’ Milcote said. ‘He told me he was once apprenticed to a butcher, though he and his master did not suit. But before he left his indentures, he must have moved his fair share of carcases.’

  The lantern was swaying a few inches above the black and oily surface of the water.

  ‘Dear God,’ I cried. ‘What’s that?’

  Something was moving on the water, something dark and glistening, something alive.

  Milcote laughed. ‘It’s Alderley’s periwig, sir.’ He laughed again, and it seemed to me there was an edge of hysteria to his mirth. ‘What did you think it could be?’

  ‘I scarcely know.’

  ‘Shall I send Gorse or someone down again to fetch it?’

  ‘As far as I’m concerned, you can leave it there to rot.’

  ‘Someone will want it. It must be worth a few pounds.’

  Milcote hauled up the lantern. ‘I wonder,’ he said, turning aside to drape the coil of rope over the hoist. ‘I believe that perhaps Alderley’s death was an accident after all.’ He faced me again and went on in a low, rapid tone, ‘Suppose he came here of his own accord during the day – bribed his w
ay into the garden – and hid himself here, meaning to rob the house when all was quiet. And then in the dark, he stumbled …’

  His voice trailed away. What of the mastiffs, I thought, the night-watchmen, the bolts, the bars, locks and all the other precautions that Clarendon took to keep his palace safe from intruders?

  ‘You must know, sir,’ Milcote went on with sudden urgency, ‘Lord Clarendon has many enemies. If someone like the Duke of Buckingham heard of this, he would find ways to use it against him – perhaps even accuse him of arranging Alderley’s murder. Surely it would be better for everyone – for the King and the Duke of York, as well as my lord – if the body weren’t here?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said, my voice cold.

  ‘Lord Clarendon is the last man to wish to stand in the way of justice, but Mr Alderley is dead, and we can’t change that, either by accident or by his own design.’ He gestured at the dead man, shrouded in his long shirt. ‘Couldn’t he be found somewhere else? It would be an innocent subterfuge, which would harm no one, least of all him. Indeed, it would protect Alderley’s reputation. Otherwise men might say that he intended some knavery by coming here.’

  He held the lantern higher, trying to make out my expression, and waited for me to speak.

  ‘And it would protect Lord Clarendon, too, in this difficult time,’ he rushed on. ‘The poor man has enough troubles already without this. I wish to spare him the addition of this one. He is a good man, sir, and an honourable one, whatever his enemies say.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ I said.

  ‘All we would need do is move Alderley out of the garden and leave him in one of the market gardens near the Oxford road.’ Milcote followed me out of the basement. ‘Perhaps in a pond, to explain the water … Then it would look as if he had been robbed and murdered by thieves. No one could say any differently.’

  I said nothing. We replaced the cover on the well and climbed the stairs in silence. At the door, I waited for Milcote to find the key.

  He shook his head as if reproving himself. ‘Forgive me, sir. You must think my wits are astray. Pray forget what I said. I hardly know what I’m saying.’