The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits Volume 2 (The Mammoth Book Series)

by Mike Ashley

  Dick Colop, all of twelve years old and neither poor nor a priest, had place here, first, by his father’s thought that he might make a scholar or even a priest and anyway would not be harmed by more schooling, and then by the help of his uncle John Colop who had persuaded the priests to take on an able boy to run their errands and help the servants in return for his keep and lessons in Latin and penmanship – “Useful if he goes on to university or to be a lawyer or even, God willing, a priest,” his uncle had said.

  “And useful anyway,” his father had said, “if all he does is follow me into the trade.” Which was the making of books – Books Fine and Plain said the sign over his father’s shop in Fryda Street.

  Therefore Dick was here and mostly glad to be, since he enjoyed learning and books, and the College’s priests, required by its charter to be learned men, provided both. The only steady blight on his life was the Almshouse’s poor folk. They seemed to think he was their servant, which he was not, and never saw him without demanding he do one thing or another for them. So as he dodged into Paternoster Passage he was reckoning his chance of skimming past the Almshouse without being caught and didn’t think there was much chance. Nor was there, he saw as he came into the paved yard. The morning being more fair than not, the pensioners were lined like jays on the benches in front of the Almshouse, facing south into the sun, old Henry thumping his cane on the stones and saying something at deaf Stephen but breaking off to call, “Hai! Boy!” at Dick but too late. Dick had veered aside to the nearby side door into the church, was through it and closing it even as old Henry shouted and able to pretend he hadn’t heard.

  Mostly he didn’t do that but just now he needed time to gather himself and the church was his surest place to do it. This was the quiet while of the day – after morning Mass and between early and midday prayers – and he moved into the choir end of the church, hoping one else would be there but unhappily discomfited to find Sire Pecock, one of the College’s priests, was.

  Not that Sire Pecock in himself was a trouble. He was newest-come to the College and so far was the least demanding of the priests, never thinking of something for Dick to do simply to have him doing something. Sometimes he even made a jest over Latin lessons, and if he had been in prayer here, he would have been no problem now either, because when Sire Pecock prayed he prayed deeply and would have ignored Dick. But he wasn’t praying; he was sitting in his particular choir stall gazing somewhat towards the raftered roof with the furrow between his eyes that always brought Sire Thomas to say, “He’s gone off again.” Not in a fit but with thinking. Even for someone who had his degree from Oxford, Sire Pecock seemed given over much to thinking, Dick thought; he could do it for longer at a stretch than anyone Dick had ever seen. But he stopped now, turned his gaze from the rafters to Dick, and asked, “What’s the matter, young Richard?”

  Since his thick, wooden-rimmed spectacles were lying in his lap and he was exceedingly short-sighted without them, his question made Dick, a full ten feet beyond where Sire Pecock could see him clearly, ask back, startled, “What makes you think aught is the matter?”

  “Because, faithful though you are to your prayers, I’ve never noted you come to them panting with eagerness. Yet you’re here and panting . . .” Dick tried uselessly to steady his quick breathing. “. . . And that suggests the possibility of that something is the matter.” Sire Pecock picked up his spectacles and put them on, looping around his ears the ribbons that kept the frame astraddle his nose while going on, “So what is the matter? Come and sit down and tell me.”

  Dick went, pulled down the hinged seat in the choir stall next to Sire Pecock’s, and sat with a deep heave of breath but no words.

  “Go on,” Sire Pecock encouraged. “Say it and maybe it won’t weigh so much. Ah.” The priest leaned a little forward, peering at Dick’s face. “You’ve been out and about, being part of this stir, and you’re feeling the pain of stay-at-home? Is that it?”

  “No,” Dick said, sharp with self-defence.

  Sire Pecock’s eyebrows – they were very impressive eyebrows – lifted questioningly, the way they did in lessons when he was doubting Dick fully understood what he was saying.

  “It isn’t!” Dick insisted. “I didn’t go on purpose to see any of it anyway. Sire John sent me to St Lawrence Jewry with that book he’d borrowed and I couldn’t help but see, going across Cheapside.” Where the London men going to join the Duke of Gloucester’s army against the rebelling Lollard heretics in Oxfordshire had been gathering before going to their muster in Moorgate Field outside the walls. The men’s talk had been loud and overbold, the crowd around them loud and ready to cheer them on their way, and at first Dick had felt the way Sire Pecock had said. To go back to lessons and the church’s quiet and the old men’s talk had seemed a miserable thing compared to hanging a sword on his hip, shouldering a pack, and setting off on a bright spring day to see the world with a great many others in high, good spirits. But then he had seen a woman crying, a baby on her hip, and a man trying to tell her goodbye while she clung to his sleeve; and an old woman staring into the crowd after someone, her whole face bleak with the fear she’d never see him again; and after that Dick had seen more and more of the sorrowing amid all the noise and eagerness and his own eagerness had gone out of him. But he couldn’t say all that to Sire Pecock, could only manage, “It was just that I had this thought that if there’s fighting, some of the men there might never come back.”

  “They’d be killed, you mean.”

  Dick nodded.

  Sire Pecock tapped him firmly on the knee. “If that’s what you mean, then say it. Always say straight out what you mean, because words are the only way we have to reach each other in this life and if we’re false to them we’re all too likely to be false to one another. Still, you’ve moved past seeing only the surface seeming to what lies behind – in this case past the pleasure people take in the glories of war to the plain truth that those glories require killing and that those killed may include men on one’s own side as well as on the other. Now . . .”

  Knowing that Sire Pecock tended to turn any talk into a long-sentenced lecture unless stopped, Dick interrupted him – almost everyone did and Sire Pecock never took offence – with, miserably, “The trouble is, I don’t think I much want anyone to be killed on the other side either.”

  “Young Richard,” Sire Pecock said sternly, “the other side are heretics. Are you saying you don’t want heretics killed?”

  Dick sat up straight with indignation, “I’ve heard you say in talk with my uncle and with Master Carpenter that you think it’s better to reason with heretics instead of killing them. That someone who’s not saved before he dies is damned afterwards and that it’s better to save a man’s soul than send it to Hell. I’ve heard you!”

  Sire Pecock’s laugh was rich and full with pleasure and approval. “Well said. I wondered if you ever heeded when we talked.”

  “Of course I heeded.” Dick was still indignant.

  “And, better than heeding, you understand and, moreover . . .”

  He would be away at lecturing again in another moment, and before he could be, Dick said, “There was something else, too. I saw a dead man in Watling Street when I was coming back.”

  Behind his spectacles’ thick glass Sire Pecock’s eyes widened. “Just lying there in the street with no one heeding him?”

  “Oh! No. There were people all around and Father Alard from St Mary Aldermary and a sheriff’s man came as I was leaving.” In truth, after sidling and weaving his way through the crowd to come close enough to see the man crumpled down in a spread of his own blood on the paving under an inn gateway, he had had time for only one long look before the sheriff’s man was ordering the crowd back but by then Dick had gone gratefully because he had never seen someone dead like that before, all sprawled in his own blood. Where so many people lived so close together as in the middle of London, with everyone knowing everyone else’s business for three streets and more in
every direction, someone dead was not an uncommon matter; but the dead that Dick had seen in his few years had always been laid neatly out on their beds with family and friends gathered mourning around them. Not like the dead man in the gateway with his arms and legs flung careless around him and his head a-loll, with people crowded around staring and jabbering as if at a Corpus Christi show. “But I knew him. He was Master Furseney.”

  “The scrivener with a house in St Mildred Close?” Sire Pecock asked, and at Dick’s nod, he started to rise.

  Dick caught hold of the side of his dark gown. In the short while Sire Pecock had been at the College, he had taken it on himself to learn St Michael Paternoster parish fairly well and a goodly portion of London beyond it but he didn’t know everything and Dick said quickly, by way of warning, “His wife and he, they’re not much for coming to church. There’s talk . . .” Dick dropped his voice to almost a whisper: “. . . that they’re Lollards.”

  The same as were in revolt in Oxfordshire, heretics who claimed they knew God’s meaning in the Bible better than any priest could and that the time was come to put down the rich clergy in favour of poor men, if rumors and their pamphlets to be found in London these past few weeks were anything to go by. They were both stubborn in their beliefs – one of them had been burned at Smithfield last year for his – and dangerous, as their present rebellion showed.

  But Sire Pecock twitched loose of Dick’s hold and kept going, saying, “Talk is talk but deeds are deeds and duty is duty and whether he was heretic or not makes no difference in my duty. Come you, too. I’ll maybe need you.”

  Dick made after him, both willing and unwilling and trying, “Father Alard will have done all there can be done for him.”

  “Very like, but he was still of our parish and one of us should be there, too.”

  At least, going with Sire Pecock, there was no trouble in passing the Almshouse. The men called out greetings to Sire Pecock and he gave them a smile and signed the cross in the air for blessing towards them without losing stride, and a quick stride it was, considering the first grey was showing in his dark hair around the tonsure. Dick had to trot to keep at his heels as they went up the street, where everything was the familiar busyness of a London morning. There were housewives and servant-women, alone and hurrying or in pairs and talking, some with children holding to their skirts and almost all with their market baskets on their arms, with the day’s purchases of new bread from the baker and maybe a cut of meat from the butcher and whatever the greengrocer might have in this early in the growing year, along with anything else needed for the day’s running of their households. An apprentice from the draper’s shop in Thames Street was cheerily whistling along, trading nods with another apprentice going somewhere else with a bundle in his arms. At the foot of the street the water carrier was rounding the corner with his daily cry of “Water, water, clean and cool” and his cart and its clanking load of water cans, while the ale-seller at the other end of the street was letting down his shutter to turn his shop’s front window into the counter of his stall for the day, singing loudly and off his tune that summer was a-coming in.

  It was all as if everything was as it always was and that unsettled Dick the more, because things weren’t as they always were and it wasn’t right for them to seem so. There were heretics in rebellion and men going off to fight them and a man dead who hadn’t been an hour ago . . .

  “Good,” Sire Pecock said when they reached Watling Street and sight of the small gathering of men outside the gateway to the Rising Sun tavern’s yard. “They’ve not gone.” Undoubtedly meaning those to whom Master Furseney’s death was their business – the undercrowner and his clerk, the sheriff’s man with a clerk of his own, and Father Alard – not the few men and women left from the crowd there had been, a dozen or so folk who really did have nothing better to do than stand around watching other people at a sorrow. They were keeping well back now, on orders from the sheriff’s man, surely, and not in Sire Pecock’s way as he joined the small group around the body.

  Dick went with him not very eagerly. Master Furseney’s body had been moved aside, out of the welter of his own blood, on to a length of rough cloth for carrying away. It had been straightened, too, been laid out on his back and though his mouth still gaped, his eyes closed by someone, making it easier for Dick to look at him, if only in a brief glance and away. No one else was looking, their business with him apparently done, the undercrowner telling his clerk, “Go let Master Drury know we’re having the man taken away now. He can have his gateway back. Good morning, Sire Pecock. A sad business.”

  Good mornings and agreement to that were exchanged all around before Father Alard said, “Sire Pecock, by your leave I’ll go with the body. I know the family and his wife wants him at home before he’s buried.”

  “That’s most reasonable,” Sire Pecock assured him. “I’m very new here. I leave it all to you.” Making it clear he wasn’t going to quarrel over the body and the pence for the prayers over it. But as Father Alard moved away, to find men among the onlookers to carry the body, he went to stand over it and look down into the dead man’s slack face. Dick, somewhat ashamed of his unease, kept with him and made himself look, too, and was as surprised as he always was by how little was left when someone was dead. Only a body and it no longer seemed to matter much. But then Master Furseney had never seemed to matter much when he was alive. From the little Dick had ever seen of him, he had been a vague man – vaguely there, vaguely busy, vaguely competent – and he wasn’t even that. He was just dead, his body there and everything else about him gone. In a day or so his body would be buried into London ground, displacing the bones of someone buried there before him, and later, when his little stretch of ground was needed for someone else, his bones would be moved in their turn into the churchyard charnel house, to keep company with all the others waiting there for resurrection on Judgment Day.

  “What happened?” Sire Pecock asked at the undercrowner who was just starting to turn away.

  The man – Dick could not remember his name but he was presently the deputy of the king’s crowner for London, required to be called in to any unexpected death – stopped with a shrug. “There was some sort of brawl in the tavern yard. One of those sudden things. Mostly fists but someone used a knife and . . .” He tipped his head toward the body: “. . . there he is. Stabbed in the back.”

  “Is it known who did it?”

  “From all anyone has said, they were all strangers here but him. Likely they were Kentish men, mustering to the duke of Gloucester’s army. These days it seems there’s five times as many strangers around as men I know and most of them quarrelsome, I swear. This lot took off, are surely somewhere back with the army by now and lying low. We’ll not find them.” He shrugged again. “He picked the wrong men to brawl with is all.”

  The man moved away, his clerk with him, and before Sire Pecock could do the same an elderly man from among the onlookers sidled over and said low-voiced to Sire Pecock’s back, “That’s all wrong, you know.”

  Sire Pecock turned to him. “What is?”

  “About Furseney being done that way. Couldn’t have happened.”

  “No?”

  “I’ve known William Furseney as boy and man and he was never in a brawl in his life.”

  “You were here?”

  “Wasn’t,” the man said. “But I know him. He was never a tavern brawler. Was never a brawler at all, was William Furseney.”

  “You’ve said so to the undercrowner or the sheriff’s man?” Sire Pecock asked.

  “Tried. They don’t want to hear it. It’s enough he’s dead and they can say why and be done with it.”

  While he was saying so, a woman with a full market-basket on her arm but no haste to be home joined them. “He has the right of it there,” she said. “There’s too much else a-foot these days to worry over somebody like William Furseney being dead. He wasn’t anybody.”

  “Not in the world’s eyes maybe,” Sire Pecock s
aid firmly, “but in God’s eyes he was as much as you and I, good wife. Were you here when they were brawling?”

  “I came at the end of it. Not in time to see much.” Her regret for that was open.

  “Did you see Master Furseney fighting?”

  “That I didn’t. I’d just come up, was on the edge of everyone crowded into the gateway to watch and just asking Mistress Emmys what was toward, when the men that were fighting – you know how they are, not paying any heed, just all clotted together and hitting at each other and yelling – lurched right into crowd and set us a-scrambling to be out of the way. Then somebody started yelling about somebody being stabbed. ‘He’s stabbed,’ I heard someone yell that.”

  “Aye, so did I,” said another woman who had come close, a servingman behind her, and been all ears with listening. “Somebody said that and all of a sudden most everybody was scattering . . .”

  “The men who had been fighting,” Sire Pecock said.

  “Them and some who’d only been watching and should have been somewhere else anyway,” the first woman said with a sniff.

  “Those as had been fighting, they took to their heels,” her servingman said.

  He was a gangling youth, tall enough to have seen over heads better than most, and Sire Pecock asked him, “Did you know any of them?”

  The youth shook his head that he didn’t.

  “How many were there?”

  “Five or six, like.”

  “They were away before anyone could think to stop them,” his mistress said.

  “And some other folk disappeared up and down the street,” said the first woman. “Such as didn’t want the bother once the fun was over. But I stayed, on the chance there’d be questions asked.” Making a virtue of it.