by L. C. Tyler
I crouch beside the body, any thoughts of my mother’s reproaches deferred, and examine the wound more closely. A clean cut with a very sharp knife – probably made with a single, skilful movement of the arm. The killer would have approached him from behind, seized him, pulling his head back, and cut quickly from right to left. The cut is deeper on the right, where the knife entered the flesh. I re-enact the deed in my mind and frown. He would have been held firmly by a strong man, unless . . . I check the dead man’s wrists. No, there is no sign of chafing from a rope. So he would have died suddenly and probably much to his wonder. But he died in another place, not here. I look around to see if I can tell where he died, but I cannot, which is passing strange. Passing strange indeed, my masters. He has travelled some way since he breathed his last.
I place my hand under one shoulder and lift him a little to peer at the ground beneath him. The man’s head twists slightly as I do so, as if he is reluctant to look me in the eye. He guards his secrets still. But I know one more thing about him – the ground is wet underneath the body, so he must have arrived here after dewfall.
While I am pondering all this, Ben Bowman appears from the direction of the inn on some early-morning errand of his own. He smiles as if to chide me for enriching him last night. Then he sees the corpse, and he stops and shakes his head.
‘So, the silly fool got his throat cut, did he? Well, that’s not much of a surprise, is it now?’
I Am Introduced to Death – 1646 or Thereabouts
I had seen death before in its many colourful forms.
I blame my mother, of course, for this and much else. It was she who introduced me to the dead, though she in turn might have justifiably blamed my father. For this and much else.
My father, Matthew Grey, was, during the late wars between the King and Parliament, a surgeon in the Royalist army. Being more inclined to wield a knife than a pen, he sent letters to his family occasionally at best, and any rumour of troops on the march would have us packing bags and saddling horses to ride and enquire whether my father was living or no. There must have been less arduous ways of answering the same question, but my mother preferred to travel. Perhaps it was the thought of finding my father dead on some bloody field that kept her so cheerful through that long civil war.
Thus I saw the aftermath of many fights, but we were rarely the only ones picking our way amongst the debris. The dead – or at least those who meet a violent end in conflicts – have many friends. Those friends who arrive first relieve the dead of their burdensome purses and rings. A little afterwards others come for their slightly less portable but still very desirable swords, pistols, muskets, helmets and breastplates. Later still come those who would like a pair of boots or a good buff coat as a memento. Often the dead were reluctant to give up these last few trifles, willingly though they had surrendered their gold. Removing a pair of breeches from a five-day-old corpse is not as easy as you might think.
In crossing and recrossing the battlefield, my mother tended to avoid the more obvious freebooters, since they were sometimes careless as to whether they took the purses of the living or the deceased, and by midday they were usually well armed. She proceeded discreetly and without drawing much attention to herself. I, marvelling at the novelty of it all, escaped her apron strings as often as I could and found much to amuse me.
Perhaps it was because my father was a surgeon, and I was used to the sight of blood and the many gleaming instruments that can be employed to produce it, that I accepted whatever I found on the battlefield with no more horror than if I had been visiting the butcher’s shop at home. Thus it was that in the year 1646 (or thereabouts) in the sunny Oxfordshire countryside you might have seen a small boy giving a wounded soldier water from his flask while politely questioning him on how he came by the wound and how many hours it was since his companion, now stiff and cold, breathed his last. You could say that I learned a great deal in a short time, and I might have become a surgeon myself had my mother not taken an aversion to that or anything else connected with my father and decided that a strong stomach would assist me every bit as much in the practice of Law.
After the war, the men started to return to the village, but not my father. Ifnot Davies returned from fighting for Parliament with a permanent limp but with his blacksmith’s strength otherwise unimpaired. And at least he had been on the winning side. Sir Felix Clifford, who had joined the King’s army on the first day of the war, returned to discover that he was ruined and that his wife had packed her bags and left. He had, it is true, been doing his best to bankrupt himself for some years before the Civil War and might well have completed the task unaided. But the voluntary loans that he had been obliged to pay to the King and the fines that he had later had to pay Parliament for ‘malignancy’ – that is to say for not minding being owed money by the King – had speeded the process more than a little. The Cliffords’ days as lords of the manor were numbered. What remained of their estate was sold to a London banker to pay the last of the fines, and the banker sold it on at a speedy but substantial profit – the market for large houses proving better than Sir Felix had been given to believe – to one Joshua Payne, formerly Colonel of Infantry in the Parliamentary army, who took up residence in what had always been known in the village simply as the Big House.
Thus, in the space of less than a paragraph, the Cliffords learned the useful lesson that they should have placed their trust in neither kings nor bankers. Colonel Payne agreed to let the previous owner live in the Steward’s cottage on the edge of the Park – for which Sir Felix was charged, but never actually paid, a nominal sum on each quarter day. Sir Felix’s daughter, Aminta, also returned to live with him, but his son, Marius, like my father, remained absent and unaccounted for. As did Lady Clifford.
Any question of my father’s return passed imperceptibly into the realms of vague conjecture. My mother dismissed all of our servants except Martha and Nathaniel, who was too old to go anywhere and hadn’t seen a penny in wages from her since Lady Day 1647, and settled down at the New House to a life of genteel poverty, neighbourly slander and preserving fruit. I, in due course, was entered for Magdalene College at the University of Cambridge, with the intention that I should study there for my BA before completing my legal education at Lincoln’s Inn in London.
It was during my first Long Vacation that I said to my mother: ‘I often wonder at which battle my father died.’
‘Battle?’ she spat back at me. ‘He went off with Bess Clifford.’
‘Sir Felix’s wife?’
‘Of course it was Sir Felix’s wife. Lord! How many Bess Cliffords are there in this village?’
‘None at all,’ I said.
Morning, June 1657
I stand up and brush the pale dust off my hands and then, with more or less clean palms, from the knees of my new green velvet breeches. Sadly, they look a little less new than before, and I have not yet paid for them.
‘You know him then?’ I say to Ben.
‘I saw him at the inn,’ says Ben. He clearly expects better of his customers than that they should fall victim to footpads. ‘Flashing his money about. Doesn’t do. Not that folk are dishonest in these parts – but it still doesn’t do to show your purse too openly. In these troubled times, John Grey, wise men hide their money in their boot when they are on the road.’
‘If everyone hid their money in their boot,’ I say, ‘the stratagem would deceive nobody.’
Ben has no reply, as is not uncommon with him. He tries a dismissive look, but his smooth, pink face isn’t quite up to the mark.
‘We’ll need to report this to the Magistrate,’ I say. ‘Then he’ll have to inform the Coroner. No point in telling the Constable – he won’t be up for an hour or two yet.’
It’s a quiet village. There’s not much work for the Magistrate to do. Or the Constable. (The inn’s busy, though, and so is the midwife.) The Magistrate is Colonel Payne – that’s something that comes with owning the Big House. Will Cobley is
the currently slumbering Constable. He’ll be cross he’s missed a murder.
Ben and I look at the stranger again. He is not a tall man, and our angle of view foreshortens him further. Whoever he is, he is not the impatient rider I saw last night. One further detail immediately strikes me: he has an old scar on his chin. Maybe it’s not the first time he’s come off worst in a scrap. He is, I should add, a little plump and more than a little bald. No hat of any sort.
‘I suppose he didn’t tell you his name when he was at the inn.’
‘Not that I can recall,’ says Ben. He scratches his head as if to encourage thought. There’s a first time for everything.
‘There could be papers on him that would identify him,’ I say.
‘I’d leave that to the Colonel,’ says Ben, pulling a face. ‘Best not touch, eh?’
‘No, I’ll check now,’ I say.
I kneel down again. I hope that it will be worth recoating my knees with dust. The dead man is dressed in black breeches secured with greenish, frayed ribbon, and an old-fashioned black doublet tailored from good-quality woollen cloth, now sadly worn and shiny. The buttons are silver and are all in place, except where a loose thread bears witness to the loss of one.
I pat the clothing politely, working from his shoulders downwards. There is no jingle of coins or rustle of papers until I reach his breeches pockets. I put my hand carefully into the right pocket and withdraw a worn leather purse. On examination it contains twenty-two shillings and a few pennies.
‘He was not murdered for his money then,’ I say.
Ben shakes his head sadly. This has not been done well. He really ought to have been murdered for his money.
‘So, why was he killed?’ I say.
‘He also had a ring,’ says Ben as if with sudden inspiration. ‘A gold one.’ Perhaps the thieves will have failed in their duty here too, but Ben need not have feared. I check his fingers. I feel again inside both pockets; there is no ring. Ben nods approvingly. That’s better.
‘You see, he was flashing the ring about too,’ says Ben. I think I have heard Ben on this subject before. If I let him, he will probably conclude by saying that the ring should have been hidden in his boot.
Of course, a well-made boot with a broad, flapping top to it is a handy place for keeping things. The inside of a hat is good too, but our man has none. Boots it is then. I slide my hand as far as I can down the side of each in turn. Ben watches anxiously; he doesn’t think I should be doing this. Perhaps he’s right. Again, I am quickly rewarded for my efforts, but not quite as I foresaw. I draw out not a ring but a sheet of thin paper, folded several times into a compact though rather grubby little wad.
‘What’s that then?’ asks Ben. The unexpected always worries him. You’d think he’d never seen paper before in his life.
I open out the document carefully, because it seems much used and it is not only grey but rather thin at the edges. I frown at the contents.
‘It’s some sort of cipher,’ I say, showing the page to Ben. There are three rows of letters and matching numbers. I notice that A is represented by 7 and by 14 and 15. E is represented by 1 and 9 and 16 and 23 and 49. All of the other letters, in fact, seem to have at least two numbers assigned to them. There are also numbers for whole words. General Monck – who is he exactly? – is allocated 101, and General Harrison is 999. This is no simple substitution cipher; a word like ‘the’ or ‘and’ could be coded in a completely different way every time it was used in a message.
‘A man with secrets, it would seem,’ says Ben. He is less impressed than I am at the sophistication of the system. But at least he now knows that the paper won’t bite him.
‘Had he been flashing this around too?’ I ask.
Ben looks at me sideways, unsure whether I am making fun of him. If he is really in doubt, then I’ll need to make my sarcasm a touch less subtle in future. He settles on slightly wounded dignity for his reply. ‘No, just the purse . . . and the ring, like I say. And the idiots clearly took the ring.’
I nod. The silver could have been spent in any inn on the road, but the ring will be difficult to dispose of at anything like its true value. Our man has had the misfortune to be killed by stupid people.
‘Footpads,’ says Ben, shaking his head. ‘Suffolk men like as not. Nobody from the village would do a thing like this. Whoever it was will be long gone, I’m thinking.’
I’m thinking that too, but it strikes me that I might just have seen the murderer – indeed, I may have his shilling in my purse. ‘What about the stranger on horseback?’ I ask.
‘Stranger?’ asks Ben.
‘The one in the dark clothing and cloak. Big, broad hat. He was riding a lame grey. Arrived from the direction of London a bit after midnight. Went to your inn.’ That should narrow things down for him.
Ben shakes his head. ‘Nobody like that came anywhere near the inn.’
‘Yes, he did. I saw him. He asked me the way.’
Ben’s look says it all.
‘I was not drunk, Ben,’ I say. ‘Well, not completely. Anyway, when I saw him, he had only a few yards to ride. He can’t possibly have got lost. Why would he say he was going to the inn if he wasn’t?’
‘Not having had a chance to discuss it with him, I couldn’t rightly say,’ says Ben.
‘But here’s his shilling,’ I say, taking it out of my purse. ‘He gave it to me.’
Ben looks at it. I can see that it is not in itself conclusive of anything.
‘Now then, Master John,’ says Ben, ‘what are we to do with a dead man on a fine summer morning?’
I frown at Ben, but he seems to have said all he is going to say about my horseman. Of course, what we do with the gentleman in front of us is a pressing matter.
My first thought is to leave the body where it is and to fetch the Colonel, but two of the village dogs are already showing an unfortunate interest, albeit from a distance at present. They imply they’d like a taste when we’ve finished with him. ‘We should take the body across the fields to the church, where it may rest with some dignity. Then I shall go and inform Colonel Payne.’ I am pleased with my tone of authority. Perhaps there was some point in studying Law after all.
‘I’ll get Harry Hardy to give us a hand,’ says Ben. ‘There’s a wisp of bright new smoke from his chimney, so he’ll be up and doing.’
We carry the stranger on one of Harry’s newer hurdles over the fields to St Peter’s. Once or twice Harry tries to ask us questions, but each time Ben hushes him and says we must maintain a respectful silence. In this regard he shows an unusual delicacy of feeling, and I do not protest. For a while the only sound is the tramp of three pairs of feet and the swish of the long grass against our legs. Indeed, not another word passes our lips until we have reached the Rector’s house, hard by the church. Ben and Harry feel that explaining away a bloody corpse on a hurdle is rightly lawyer’s work, so I tell the Rector what little I know and leave the others to proceed in a decorous manner to the crypt, where the body is to be laid for the time being. Harry is also to let my mother know that I will be a little later than planned. It may be that a small part of her wrath will descend on his broad shoulders and not on mine.
Thus it is that I take the road alone eastwards to the Big House with the purse and the strange paper securely about my person, and with a story to tell that I expect will surprise the Colonel a great deal.
‘You did right to report this to me first, John,’ says Colonel Payne. He’s a brisk, neat little man. His hair is short even for a Roundhead and is, I notice, now almost entirely grey. He strokes his closely shaven chin, newly scraped this hour, and his piercing blue eyes look out of the window into his Park. In the distance, beyond the trees, is the Steward’s Lodge, where Sir Felix lives cheaply. ‘I can contact the Coroner later, after I have viewed the body myself. The poor fellow is still lying where he fell?’
‘We put him in the crypt at St Peter’s,’ I say. ‘The chill there will stop him stinking. And the dogs
were looking for a free meal. Ben Bowman and Harry Hardy helped me carry him thither on a hurdle.’
‘I should perhaps give them some money for their trouble?’ For Colonel Payne, being Lord of the Manor remains a burden and a puzzlement. Sir Felix would have known the right thing to do, what was customary, how much they might expect. The new Lord of the Manor looks at me quizzically in case I also know the right thing to do, what is customary, how much to expect. He hopes I will tell him.
‘If you wish,’ I say.
‘I’ll consider the matter later,’ he says with a sigh. He runs a small hand over his grey head. There’s no spare flesh on those fingers or anywhere else on the Colonel. The skin is taut and pale over his cheekbones and lined above from much frowning. He is frowning now. Anyone who spent five minutes with the Colonel would realise that he is a man of military briskness and determination. But another five minutes in his company would reveal the doubt that so often follows each of his decisions, and the gentle drift back to where he started or to some other comfortable place. There was a time when Colonel Payne had seemed destined for greatness – a respected soldier and a close friend of both Cromwell and my Lord Fairfax – but he lacked the guile to be any more than that. Peace has undone him every bit as much as the war undid Sir Felix.
It’s a while since I was last at the Big House. I’d forgotten that time seems to run more slowly in these echoing oak-panelled rooms, or how the light slants in through the tall leaded windows. I watch the gleaming motes of dust hanging in the still air.
‘You think the dead man was a spy then?’ the Colonel says eventually, sinking onto a hard wooden chair. He seems tired. He thought that he had bought a pleasant country house in which he could live at his ease. Nobody warned him about the possibility of dead Royalist agents.
‘Surely the cipher he was carrying proves it?’ I say.