Revenger (26 page)

They rose at first light as the cocks crowed. The troop of thirty mounted soldiers came by in a clatter of hooves and bucklers while the family was still at breakfast. The children were all agape to see them in their helmets, with their mass of armor and armaments borne aboard thirty more packhorses behind them, ready to fight the feared Scots raiders on the northern Marches. Jane and Catherine gave ale to the soldiers. They then loaded up their sumpters, tying the baggage securely with maling cords, and stood in the courtyard waiting for the order to mount up and depart. Shakespeare hugged the children and kissed them, and made them promise to be good and God-fearing. Two lieutenants lifted Andrew and Grace into the saddle with them.

Shakespeare gave a last hug to Mary, the only one of the three children who was of his own blood. He smiled at her. “Look after your mother,” he said.

Finally it came time for Shakespeare and Catherine to take their leave. They stood bashfully before each other. He moved forward to kiss her, but her face turned from him at the last moment, and his lips only brushed her cheek. “God speed, Catherine,” he said, trying hard to smile.

“We will be fine with these troopers, John. Do not worry for us.”

Catherine mounted and Shakespeare handed up Mary to sit with her. Next to her, side-saddle on a bay palfrey, sat Jane, her swollen belly very evident.

“I will send Boltfoot to you post-haste, Jane. And Jack Butler will follow.” He turned to the commander of the troop. “Look out for them, Captain.”

The captain saluted Shakespeare, then turned his horse and led the way out of the courtyard on to the streets of London, heading for the dusty, perilous road north.

Chapter 24

A
S SHAKESPEARE RODE SLOWLY THE LAST MILE TO
the church at Wanstead, the mortbell knelled clear across the meadows. It rang just one note again and again, a deep, dread clang that could only mean a body was to be laid to rest in the cold earth.

The mourners were gathered in the graveyard close by the Le Neve house and on their land. So few were there, a mere ten or so, that a passer-by might have thought it a pauper’s bleak interment.

Shakespeare reined in his mare a hundred yards outside the churchyard wall, and watched as the little band began walking through the porch into the church. Sir Toby and Cordelia Le Neve were there, attired all in black. So were the maid, Miranda, and the sour and ancient retainer, Dodsley. A minister was speaking the plain new funeral service as they walked. On his right was another man, a wide-brimmed black felt hat held against the chest of his dark broadcloth coat. He looked straight ahead, his face stern, as though cast from iron.

At their head, four men in workmen’s leather jerkins carried the simple coffin into the church.

Cordelia Le Neve turned and saw Shakespeare. Shock crossed
her features, then anger. She touched her husband’s arm and he looked across at the intruder, too.

Miranda Salter also saw him but immediately looked away, as if ashamed for ever having spoken to him, or perhaps from shame at having betrayed their conversation to her mistress. Shakespeare dismounted and walked the mare to the church wall, where he tied her to a ring by the wrought-iron gate beside some other horses. In the yard outside the church, there were new crosses and several fresh-dug graves, and he wondered, briefly, whether the plague had begun its dread work in these parts.

He followed the mourners into the church. A hole had been dug at the eastern end of the chancel and mounds of earth piled up on either side. Sir Toby strode toward him, fury in his eyes. “You are not welcome here,” he said. “You intrude on private grief, sir, and I will not have it.”

“Sir Toby, I am inquiring into a murder. I must talk with you again. And with others.”

Le Neve’s hand was on the hilt of his sword, though he did not draw it from its scabbard. “Go, sir, go. Or I shall cut you down like a Frenchie, even in this, the Lord’s house.”

Shakespeare looked across to the man with the hat and the dark broadcloth coat. “Is that Mr. Winterberry, your daughter’s bridegroom?”

“It is no business of yours, sir. Go.”

Shakespeare ignored his entreaties and threats and walked on along the nave toward the mourning party.

“Mr. Winterberry?”

“Yes?”

The two men stood face-to-face, both tall, though Winterberry was older and his somber clothes did not hang well on his angular frame. His face was sallow and serious.

“I would speak with you, sir, about the death of your wife.”

“She was not my wife.”

“I had believed you were wed, Mr. Winterberry.”

“In church, but not in the bedchamber. In the eyes of man, but not of God, who sees all things. Now, may I ask who
you
are?”

“My name is Shakespeare. I am inquiring into the murder of Amy and the boy, Joe Jaggard.”

“And do you think this to be the meet and proper time to talk of such things?”

“It is a most heinous crime. I would have thought you would wish it solved.”

“She was frail, Mr. Shakespeare. She had the frailty and vanity of woman. The profane enemy, the minister of darkness, took her to his abominable breast. Look to the instruments of the Devil if you would know more of this death, sir.”

“I insist on talking with you, Mr. Winterberry, unless you wish me to fetch a mittimus from the justice to take you into custody for questioning.”

Winterberry stared at him hard. Whatever else he was, he was a merchant, and merchants were practical men who did deals every day. “Come to Indies Wharf by the Tower this afternoon and I will answer your questions, Mr. Shakespeare, though I can think of none that pertain to me. Now go, sir, as Sir Toby has demanded of you.”

Lady Le Neve came to Shakespeare and took his elbow and pulled him away firmly but without force. “Our daughter is being buried here alongside her forefathers and mother, Mr. Shakespeare. Have you no shame?”

“And what of the boy?”

“He took his life. He took Amy’s life. He has been buried at the crossroads. Now go.”

Shakespeare looked around at the little gathering and saw nothing but hostility. There was no more to be gained in this place today. He bowed in acknowledgment of their grief and to
honor the dead girl about to be lowered into the earth, then walked slowly out of the little church and back through the churchyard toward the gate, where his mare waited patiently.

On the brow of the incline to the west, he saw a horseman, stock-still beneath a sycamore tree. It was impossible to make out his features from this distance, but something in the way he sat, thin and wiry like a stoat, told Shakespeare the watcher was Slyguff.

Shakespeare mounted his horse, pulled the reins southerly, and spurred her into a light trot.

And still the mortbell tolled.

S
HAKESPEARE SPOKE
to Perkin Sidesman and told him that if anyone were to ask, he was to say the school would be closed down for the summer but would reopen in October. If anyone wished to speak with him, they were to leave a note or spoken message. “I badly want to hear word of Jack and Boltfoot.”

“I understand, master,” the groom said without enthusiasm. He did not look happy about the extra responsibility loaded on his shoulders, but then he rarely looked happy about anything.

Shakespeare took a wherry from the green and slimy water-stairs at the Steelyard and headed downstream. On the south bank, as he passed, he watched fishermen pulling in draftnets of salmon. The tide was with the wherry, but would soon be turning; the narrow race between the struts of London Bridge was a hazardous affair, and one which, when the current was strong, many preferred to avoid by disembarking and walking to the other side of the bridge. Shakespeare did not have time for such delicacy. He held his breath as the watermen steered the craft at speed through the churning white water.

Glad to be through and alive, he breathed again, only to catch a lungful of the stink that blew from the Billingsgate fish market.
Further downriver, Smart’s and Morris’s quays were thick with shipping, all moored alongside each other in a profusion of spars, rigging, and furled sails. The whole of the Thames here was a chaotic mass of proud-masted vessels: a hundred or more ships of all sizes riding at anchor in midstream, lying on their sides on the muddy banks, careened for the removal of barnacles and weeds, or standing at the wharves for discharge and loading of cargoes.

Past Customs House on the north bank, then the Tower and St. Katharine’s Dock, finally the watermen guided the little vessel in among the tangle of carracks, barks, and flyboats that encumbered the frontage of Indies Wharf.

Shakespeare paid the men fourpence, then stepped ashore onto the long quayside, hemmed in on one side by ships and on the other by warehouses. Gantries and tall cranes of oak and elm stretched out across the quay and river, creating a cacophony of creaking timbers.

A family of brown rats scurried along the edge of the wharf, unafraid. Shakespeare strode among them and went through an arched entrance into the largest of the warehouses. He found a foreman docker, who directed him to the countinghouse on the landward side of the warehouse.

Jacob Winterberry stood at the end of a long, well-polished table in a rich room; intricate plasterwork on the ceiling and ornate oak wainscoting on the lower portions of the walls seemed to tell much about his wealth. He still wore his funeral clothes; perhaps, thought Shakespeare, such somber dress was his daily attire.

A clerk was reading from a bill of lading. “Guinea coast. St. George del Mina, aboard the
Tempest
, carrack of six hundred tons, outward bound: two hundred pounds linen, two hundred pounds kersey, five hundred axe heads, same number hammer heads, one thousand English arrows, five hundred French bolts, one hundred fifty Flemish brass basins, assorted hats of felt,
pins, trinkets, and beads to fill two casks, two hundred each of daggers and swords …”

The clerk stopped, as if noticing for the first time that there was another man in the room.

Winterberry looked up and met the newcomer’s eyes. “Ah, yes, Mr. Shakespeare.” He said the words in a businesslike fashion, no welcoming smile or greeting hand proffered. He met his clerk’s eyes. The clerk quickly gathered together his quills, documents, and ledgers and hurried from the room, bowing low as he went. “Now, what would you ask me?”

Shakespeare noticed that a large book lay before Winterberry on the table. Winterberry followed his eyes and put his right hand squarely down on the book. “Yes, Mr. Shakespeare, it is the Holy Bible, which informs everything I do and everything I say. Every portion of my trade with the wider world is done in Christ’s name, to bring the word of God to those benighted savages still cloaked in darkness.”

“Would you like to swear on it now, that you will answer my questions truthfully?”

“I live by the Book every day of my life, Mr. Shakespeare. I do not need to prove to some lowly officer of the Searcher that I speak the truth.”

“You are a proud man, Mr. Winterberry.”

“If I am, then I do repent it and beg the Lord’s forgiveness, for pride is a deadly sin.”

Shakespeare thought he had never seen such a stern, closed face. He did not know this man, but he knew he did not like him. “You had reason to murder Amy Le Neve and Joe Jaggard.” He said the words as a statement, not a question, hoping for some reaction, some fissure in the rock of Winterberry’s features.

“You were at the funeral, Mr. Shakespeare. You heard what Sir Toby Le Neve said. The Jaggard boy murdered Amy with poison and then took his own life in like manner. That is the sheriff’s verdict and the matter is closed.”

“That is not the belief of the coroner, I understand, nor of the Searcher of the Dead.”

“Well, then, they must take up the case with the sheriff and try to have it reopened. As for me, I consider the matter now to be between those two young people and their Maker. I pray they can find salvation, though the Lord will have to be very forgiving.”

“She was your wife, Mr. Winterberry. Can you dismiss her death—her murder—so lightly?”