Witness of Bones

by Leonard Tourney

  Matthew turned to go.

  “Wait,” said the voice. “Who did you say you were?”

  “Matthew Stock of Chelmsford. I serve Sir Robert Cecil. The rector of this church visited me himself just last week. At my house in Chelmsford. He begged me to come.”

  The window closed slowly and then Matthew heard an unbolting of the door. Matthew saw a young, fair-haired man in a cassock staring at him curiously. “It is impossible for Father Graham to have been in Chelmsford when you say. He was sick. At his sister’s. Only yesterday was he able to rise from his bed of affliction.”

  Matthew was taken back by the young man’s words but thought arguing the point would be futile. He had certainly seen Graham with his own eyes and it was impossible for any man to be in two places at once. “Please let me see Master Graham. My business is urgent.”

  Still the young man hesitated uncertainly.

  Matthew asked him who he was and what he did in the church.

  “Alan Hopwood, if it please you. I am Father Graham’s assistant.”

  Matthew made a stern face. “Well, Master Hopwood. Am I to see Father Graham, or must I obtain an order to do so from him whom I serve—Sir Robert Cecil?”

  Hopwood’s resistance seemed to collapse under the force of this second evocation of Cecil’s name. “Come in,” he said.

  Matthew stepped into a narrow passage beyond which he could see what appeared to be an office or study. Hopwood closed the door firmly behind Matthew and shot the bolt before leading him to the end of the corridor.

  “If you wait in here I’ll see if I can find the man you seek,” Hopwood said in a more ingratiating tone than before.

  Matthew walked into the minister’s study and sat down. It was a small room with a fireplace and a tall bookcase, and a conspicuous absence of religious adornment. Matthew remembered that Graham had identified himself as a staunch anti-Papist, which meant he was doubtiess of the Puritan persuasion, although orthodox enough to hold a living in the established church. There was no little irony in the fact that a Papist miracle had occurred in a church in which the minister was so antagonistic to that creed. Matthew wondered if Poole’s resurrection had won any converts to Rome, or merely made more enemies for the Jesuits, of whom Poole was a martyr.

  While Matthew waited for Hopwood’s return, he examined the books in the case. Those in English, mostly tracts, were sermons and discourses on Biblical topics, commentaries on the scriptures, or works of history. The majority of the books had titles in Latin or Greek, neither of which he understood, except for a handful of legal and medical terms in the former, but then what Englishman of business or public affairs did not have such a smattering? Matthew’s own schooling had been small, although he read and wrote the queen’s English with ease and although a man of plain speech and uncomplicated faith, he had accumulated in his forty years a good deal of practical knowledge of men and their ways, and of course with respect to cloth, its manufacture and sale, he was something of an expert, having been a clothier by trade practically his whole life.

  After what seemed to Matthew a goodly time to wait for

  Hopwood’s return Matthew decided to go find Graham himself. He was annoyed that having been so firmly pressed to come investigate the stealing of Poole’s body, Graham had not taken the trouble to make himself available—or at least to inform his assistant of Matthew’s expected arrival. He walked out into the corridor and noticed several other doors that led off the passage. Trying the first he found himself in a vestry. The second proved to be the door into the sanctuary itself.

  Graham’s Puritan sympathies were evident inside the sanctuary as they were in the minister’s study. In the southern facing apse a pair of stained glass windows depicting Our Lord and three of his apostles let in a variegated light and illuminated a simply furnished altar above which hung the image of the crucified Christ. The statues and hangings now decried as relics of Popery had been removed, except for a statue of the church’s namesake who keeping with his role as patron saint of shoemakers was equipped with a shoe in one hand and a cobbler’s awl in the other. Clearly, there were some traditions that even the winds of religious reform could not readily sweep away.

  Matthew stared for a few minutes at the altar, mouthed an earnest prayer for the success of his mission, and reflected briefly on how much he detested religious broils. Why could the warring sects not make peace, not follow the counsel of Him from whom they claimed to spring? Why must they be so contentious, so lacking in common charity? He had no answer.

  He walked the length of the church, looking up at the open-beam ceiling and admiring the workmanship of the church’s builders. The beams were oak, rough hewn, intricately laced, darkened by time and the smoke of candles. A structure designed to last until the Savior should come, perhaps. Along the stone walls were memorials of the church’s benefactors. Matthew noticed the dates. St. Crispin’s was indeed a venerable church.

  To the right of the church door was a winding stair Matthew supposed led up to the belfry. He started when he

  heard a noise at the front of the church and turned. Hop-wood advanced toward him, a worried expression on his face.

  “I can’t find Master Graham anywhere,” he said. “And the noon service starts very soon. There’s sure to be a multitude, there always is since Poole’s body was stolen.”

  “I was just about to go up to the belfry,” Matthew said. “Have you looked there?”

  Hopwood appeared doubtful, but agreed there was a possibility that Graham was there. Hopwood said the rector had a special interest in the bells, especially the largest of them, which was called Great Harry. “It was cast in the time of Henry VI,” Hopwood said with pride.

  Matthew started up the stairs. Behind him, he could hear Hopwood’s labored breathing and sensed the young cleric’s impatience. Matthew thought it was unlikely Graham was in the belfry too, but he was confident the tower would afford a sweeping view of the churchyard. Unsure of how much he could trust Hopwood, Matthew had decided to keep his own purpose a secret until he could get Graham’s sense of Hop-wood’s trustworthiness. As far as Matthew was concerned anyone associated with the church was suspect, expect perhaps Graham himself, whom Matthew felt would be hardly likely to initiate an investigation of his own perfidy.

  The stairs made several twists before opening into the bell chamber. There were five bells hanging there, the large one obviously Great Harry and four smaller. It was the bells, of course, that first caught Matthew’s eye. The second thing he noticed was the body slumped beneath one of the lancet windows.

  “God in heaven,” cried Hopwood, “It’s Master Graham.”

  Hopwood rushed forward and knelt down by the crumpled body. The young man made a gagging noise and turned his face away, moaned, and shielded his eyes with his hand. A man with his throat cut was no pretty sight for Matthew either but his horror was secondary to his astonishment, for the dead priest was not Stephen Graham—at least not the Stephen Graham Matthew had met in Chelmsford.

  “He’s dead . . . he’s been murdered,” Hopwood cried, looking up at Matthew, his eyes wide. “He’s been receiving threatening letters, warning him to stop preaching against the so-called miracles. The cursed Jesuits have done this. Look, there’s the weapon itself.”

  Hopwood pointed to the corner where there was a bloody knife. Matthew walked over and picked it up. He realized before he touched the haft that the knife was his own. There were no two knives alike in Christendom. It was the knife that had disappeared from his kitchen.

  In his confusion, Matthew frankly admitted that the knife was his own. He started to explain the rest—how someone claiming to be Graham had come to Chelmsford and urged his presence. But he had hardly begun his tale when Hop-wood, already pale as death himself at the horror, turned even paler, stood up, and ran down the stairs, whether in an excess of grief or fright Matthew could not tell.

  Trusting that Hopwood would return presently, Matthew decided to use the time to i
nspect the dead man. Unless Hopwood was mistaken in his identification, this was most certainly not the Stephen Graham Matthew had met. This man was older, by a good ten years, his face was round and fleshy and smooth-shaven whereas the face of Matthew’s Graham had been long with a prominent brow and well-trimmed beard. A disturbance in the dust by the window evidenced a struggle. Matthew remembered the face he had seen in the belfry just before he entered the church. Had it been Graham’s or his murderer’s?

  His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of voices and heavy footsteps on the stairs. He recognized Hopwood’s shrill treble. “He’s up here, this way!”

  Thinking that Hopwood referred to the corpse Matthew turned just as Hopwood came into view, along with two of the three officers Matthew had seen guarding the churchyard. “That’s the man, officers. He said his name was Matthew Stock and has virtually confessed to the murder.” Matthew started to protest but hardly got a word out

  before the officers rushed forward and pinned his arms behind him.

  “He admitted the knife was his own,” said Hopwood. “I left him alone in the rector’s study. He said he was here at Master Graham’s behest, said that the parson had come to Chelmsford last week, which he never did since twenty members of this parish will swear he lay too sick to go abroad nor get up. And he boldly admits the knife yonder is his own.”

  “The man who came to see me was not Father Graham,” Matthew began.

  “See, masters, now he weaves a new tale, made I warrant of stuff as false as the last. Examine him and you will surely find he is the one who threatened Master Graham with present death only last week.”

  One of the officers released Matthew to inspect the knife while the other demanded to know Matthew’s real name and origin, for he said Matthew’s dark complexion gave good evidence that he was a Spaniard or Portuguese and surely a spy, if not a Jesuit like Poole.

  “I am nothing if not an honest Englishman,” Matthew proclaimed. “A clothier and constable of Chelmsford, Essex, and employed by Sir Robert Cecil, if the truth be known.”

  “Oh, now it is Cecil he claims to serve.” Hopwood let out a hysterical laugh; his eyes were wide and glaring. “He made the same claim when I foolishly let him in the church not a half hour past. Had I had my wits about me Master Graham would be alive at this moment.”

  “No, he would not have been,” Matthew said, turning to the officer who had asked his name and of the three men seemed by his appearance and demeanor to be the most amenable to reason. “I saw someone in the tower before I entered the church. It was neither Master Hopwood here nor the dead man yonder. It must have been his murderer.”

  “That’s a bald-faced lie,” Hopwood said. “There was no other in the church but Master Graham and myself. The doors were locked to keep out the curious and to protect us from murderers. What more evidence do you need, officers?

  When I returned to the rector’s study I found him descending from the belfry—”

  “I was just about to go up,” Matthew interjected.

  “He insisted I go up with him,” Hopwood said.

  “That’s true,” Matthew said. “And why would I have invited him up to find the body of a man I killed? Why, that makes no sense at all.”

  “Aye, and perhaps you thought to blame it on Master Hopwood here,” said the taller officer.

  “Or make me the second victim,” Hopwood said, looking desperately from one of the officers to the other.

  The taller officer nodded to his companion; Matthew felt the grip tighten on his wrist and he was led downstairs and told to say nothing more if he knew what was good for him. Hopwood followed behind until they came to the church doors.

  Outside the crowd of pilgrims had swelled with the addition of other persons who had come for the noon service. In a shrill, trembling voice, Hopwood announced that the service had been canceled, the minister murdered, and the murderer taken and present before them. “You have had your way, you Popish swine,” Hopwood screamed. “But your man is taken. Here he stands. The officers have him. And I am still alive to decry your superstitious fraud.”

  Hopwood’s outburst was greeted by angry shouts, some directed against Hopwood by Catholic sympathizers, some directed against Matthew as the murderer of a Puritan hero. Matthew was almost glad to be in custody. Had it not been so, he was sure he would have been tom apart by the howling mob of true believers, now stirred to such a frenzy by Hopwood’s announcement it seemed nothing but a troop could establish order there.

  Five

  In her chamber at the Blue Boar, Joan made an effort to sleep. The light bothered her; sounds from adjoining rooms and from the street below distracted her. Somewhere nearby a dog barked and would not be stilled for all its master’s eloquent cursing. But worst was the gnawing of unease; it would give her no peace.

  She was sorry she had sent Matthew off to St. Crispin’s without her. It was not that she feared she would miss something he would not dutifully report of later. Rather, a nagging doubt about what they were doing in London would not cease plucking at her sleeve, like a tenacious beggar who will give no rest to the passerby until a coin is pressed in his palm. Her friends called Joan independent and headstrong, charges she did not deny and in which she indeed took a secret pride. She did not suffer fools gladly and could not abide flattery, which brought her to her grounds of suspicion of Stephen Graham, the man who, she had declared to Matthew, smelled more of court than cloister.

  She plainly did not trust him—not if he swore upon a stack of Bibles that every word he spoke was gospel truth.

  Not that she wasn’t mistrustful of churchmen on principle, the godly minister of her own parish church being an exception to the rule. For she deemed the breed, for all their homilies on Christian humility and charity, to be a rancorous, preening, self-serving lot, preoccupied with their livings and sinecures and neglecting their flocks to scale the slippery slopes of ecclesiastical preferment. As for the noisome debate between those of Rome and those of Geneva, Joan had no more patience than did her husband. In good standing in her own parish church and a regular attender as the law prescribed, Joan believed herself to be sufficiently a Christian woman, given that she was a mere mortal and no “saint” in any meaning of the word she could make sense of. In sum, if the established Church of England was good enough for the queen, then who was Joan Stock to find it wanting?

  It had not been Stephen Graham whose pleading had brought her to London therefore, but the mystery he described. Now that did intrigue. She believed in the resurrection of the dead as an article of faith. But it was a general resurrection the scriptures spoke of, not a particular one, and she saw no reason why a Papist priest should merit an earlier resurrection than any of her family or friends taken in death and buried in Chelmsford’s own churchyard. On that point, she and Graham were one—that the miracle of Christopher Poole was a fraud. Was it a Papist plot as Graham supposed or, as Joan thought equally possible, a Puritan scheme to put the Papists in bad odor with the authorities and produce an even greater oppression of their religion? And what, pray, did Sir Robert Cecil have to do with it all?

  Her brain so boiling with this thought and that, she got out of bed and opened the casement to better hear the hour bells. She was astonished when in a few minutes of waiting she heard five bells struck.

  Matthew had promised to return by one or two and so was very late and Joan felt suddenly worried. It was more than a nagging concern about a loved one who fails to return when promised and thereby instills a dread of misfortune. It was a sudden, gripping anxiety that enveloped her and made her believe that if she remained in their bedchamber a minute longer she would suffocate, let the window stand open as it might. Her anxiety was, she recognized even as she experienced it, a glimmering. That was what she was wont to call such seizures, which all her life she had had. Glimmerings came and went—inklings of disaster or danger—to herself or others—her full understanding of their significance often waiting upon the result.

>   Now this glimmering was of considerable force, and she sat herself down on the bed while her whole body trembled and a blackness came over her like the hangman’s hood. She knew in an instant that Matthew was in more than common difficulty.

  She prayed as hard as she might to be free of the glimmering and it passed shortly, but not her concern for her husband. A hundred perilous circumstances paraded before her eyes—the ways a man might die or be abused in a strange city. Each imagined scene was more horrible than that that went before.

  Finally, she could stand no more, neither the visions nor the waiting. Throwing her cloak about her, she went downstairs and in case Matthew should return and find her gone, she told the innkeeper that she was off to St. Crispin’s.

  “What, Mistress Stock,” the man said good-humoredly. “Church at this hour?”

  Joan gave no reply, but was out the door and into the street as his question came, hanging in the air behind her.

  Before she even saw the belfry of St. Crispin’s she heard the crowd and a clamor like that at a bearbaiting. Then she turned a corner and ran square into them, jamming the streets, necks craning to see above heads and hats and children perched upon their fathers’ or mothers’ shoulders. Joan thought that for a crowd of miracle-mongers it was an unruly crew, with much pushing and shoving and one cluster of citizens railing at another and exchanging names, few of which savored much of holiness to Joan, unless the epithets carried a sweeter odor of sanctity in London than they did in Chelmsford.

  She made her way forward through the crowd, enduring the complaints of those around her at her boldness. Once, jabbed in the ribs hard enough to make her cry out, once, nearly knocked to the ground in a fistfight between two apprentices, one Papist the other Puritan, over whether the Pope was the anti-Christ.

  Then she saw the church and churchyard behind an iron railing and a half-dozen officers vainly trying to prevent the zealots from advancing on the church porch, where several gentlemen stood, begging the crowd to disperse and no one paying any attention but pressing forward with more vigor.