The Opening Night Murder (5 page)

“I imagine his thought is to learn my mind first, then ask about you.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. Then again, it may be his only wish is to have something more from you.”

“Piers!”

He only shrugged and looked away. She wanted to tell him that Daniel loved him, but she couldn’t know whether it were true, and in fact she rather doubted it. He’d never met his son, and had never shown any interest in doing so. First the war, then nine years on the Continent. Not one letter from him since leaving England. And now a note from him so soon after his return. It seemed odd. A dim hope rose. “I must go see him.”

“You must retain your dignity.” Piers’s voice was hard and angry, and his young voice cracked with the stress.

“I’m afraid any dignity I ever had was whipped out of me by my father twenty and thirty years ago. And William certainly
never had any respect to spare for me, or anyone but himself, for that matter.” The familiar clenching tightened in her chest.

“He respects St. Paul, I think. Truth be told, I think he would bugger St. Paul if he had the chance.”

Suzanne struggled to suppress a grin, and she drew a deep breath to clear her thinking.

Piers leaned toward her, one elbow on the table, his voice a low growl. “Then allow me to win back some respect for the both of us. Let me go to work and earn our keep. I wish to support you, and never mind the king’s man my father.”

She laid a hand on his arm and said gently, “You will, son. But just now I need to learn what he wants and hope he wants to lend some support. Even for the interim.”

Piers only grunted again, neither approving nor disapproving, but at least he didn’t pull his arm away.

Suzanne returned to her breakfast, and her mind turned to work through the problem of what to wear to the old meeting place on Bank Side.

S
uzanne’s choice for the day was an elderly dove-gray dress with lace at the sleeves and a bodice that was so old as to be nearly Elizabethan. It was something she’d bought second- or thirdhand during her search for a patron to better herself, testimony to fashion before Cromwell. The costumes she’d worn as a prostitute and an actress had all been cheap, and of course were long gone. Nothing she’d acquired during her tenure with William was any color other than black, and though the fabrics were sometimes silken, all were plain Puritan style, with long sleeves, high necklines, and white collars that on occasion brushed the earlobes. Daniel had just come from the Continent, accustomed to the latest French fashions, so though the gray dress was hopelessly out of style for any country, at least it wasn’t unadorned, funereal black. For hair dressing she robbed an old hat of some feathers and pinned them securely over her right ear.

At the door she had Sheila strap on her pattens, drew on her cloak and gloves against the spring breezes, placed the holder of her vizard between her teeth, and stepped out into the neighborhood, headed for Bank Side.

Horse Shoe Alley, where Suzanne’s rented town house stood, was a place of bawd houses and pubs, where the streets teemed with the working and criminal classes. It was cheap and out of the way, suitable for the mistress of a Puritan who needed to hide his hypocrisy, but not so filthy as some other areas of London. Suzanne was a longtime resident and knew who her neighbors were, but a stranger shouldn’t care to be out and about these streets late at night.

Off down Maid Lane stood the great old Elizabethan structure of the Globe Theatre, closed these past sixteen years. Beyond that towered the even older bear and bull baiting arenas, just as empty as all the theatres during the interregnum, when most forms of entertainment had been outlawed and the majority of theatres had been torn down. The neighborhood was hardly fashionable, even during the Commonwealth when the very idea of fashion was unfashionable and enjoyment of anything was a sin and evil to contemplate. Unforgivable sin apparently, since confession and absolution had been heresy for about a century and a half. Suzanne wasn’t Catholic, nor a particularly religious person, but even she was made jumpy by the idea that one could go to hell for wearing the wrong dress or stopping to watch a play. Even worse, to be arrested and incarcerated for it, for that was immediate misery. She longed for the days when those things hadn’t even been a question and one had been free to enjoy life.

In any case, though the neighborhood she had lived in for the past two decades was rather dodgy, the house she lived in was sturdy, proof to the weather, not too terribly overrun with
rats, and it boasted a kitchen roomy enough to please Sheila as well as southern-facing windows to let in whatever light could be had from the street. Today the sun was out, but still spring-thin and almost watery as it moved toward summer. The gentle warmth on her shoulders helped her think the meeting with Daniel could be a pleasant one. The neighborhood had a glow about it today, which could only mean good fortune. She didn’t need to consult her astrologer to know the stars were aligned well today. She could almost smell the hope drifting in the air.

At the north end of the alley a narrow passage let out onto the Bank Side, which ran along the Thames between the Skin Market and the Bank End Stairs. Whenever the wind came from the west, the tannery stench of the Skin Market overpowered even the sewage-filled Thames with a reek that only the most seasoned residents could ignore. Fortunately today was not such a day, and only the ordinary smells of street food, horses, garbage, and dank river were evident during Suzanne’s walk from Horse Shoe Alley.

Children played in the street, ones belonging to families in the house next to hers named Andrews and Williams. They kicked around an inflated pig’s bladder in an enthusiastic though unskilled game of football involving goals known only to the players. Most of the children were barefoot, though a couple wore ill-fitting shoes and one boasted a rag tied around one foot, which had probably been injured, though no limp was evident as she tore this way and that after the ball. They dodged the occasional horse rider and the even more rare carriage, and their laughing and hollering echoed from the surrounding buildings.

Other, more industrious children hawked wares of prepared foods, the odor of edibles mingling with the stench of filthy
muck underfoot. Johnny Kirk and his sister Annie offered their usual pasties and sheep’s feet, but Suzanne declined today, having just eaten breakfast. The smells should have been unpleasant, but Suzanne had lived here so long it all now smelled of home to her.

On Bank Side at the far end of the passage, Big Willie Waterman stood in his usual spot with his fiddle, dancing up a storm and playing the same lively tunes he’d been scratching at for the ten years she’d known him. Just as a large man might have been called “Tiny,” Big Willie was so named because he was very small and gaunt, even smaller than Suzanne, who weighed very little. Suzanne greeted him and dropped a farthing into his hat.

“New stitches, I see,” she said. His remarkably white shirt had no discernible holes and sported all its ties, though few of them were actually tied. His breeches were old, but she could see they were fresher and less frayed than those he’d worn last she’d seen him.

“Found ’em just this morning. Finders, keepers, say I, milady.” His grin was mostly toothless, but sincere, and his tune became just a little more lively for the cash. To him any woman who dropped money for him was “milady” and all the men “milord,” no matter how humble the actual circumstance. Children sometimes liked to toss him farthings just to hear him say “Thankee, little lord.”

“Found them on a clothesline, did you?”

Willie’s grin widened, and his eyebrows went up in feigned innocence. “I never steal, milady. Never! They was a-lying on the ground when I picked ’em up, they was! I swear it! And I’ll tell you for a fact, I was forever a-shaking that line. I thought they’d never fall. But I swear I never touched ’em on the line!”

Suzanne laughed and turned eastward toward the bridge.

Bank End Stairs had always been the meeting place for her and Daniel, as far back as when she had still lived in her father’s house. Back in the days before the war, when the world held bright color and hope. In the days before she’d learned how the world really worked. Today she went to meet Daniel once again, at the very spot where she’d seen him last more than half a lifetime ago, now to learn whether he’d changed as much as she had.

At the top of the stairs, standing on the stone embankment, she gazed across the river at the jumble of old buildings and cobbled streets teeming with people. The spire of St. Paul’s Cathedral rose above the nearest structures, a tall, thin spire pointing the way to heaven. To the east the bridge squatted on the river, looking more like a spit of land than a bridge, so built up as it was with houses and offices. Crossing that bridge was little different from walking down any other street.

From where she stood she couldn’t tell whether there were any new heads on the spikes at this end, but she assumed there would be a sufficiency before long, once the king caught up with those who had murdered his father. Oh yes, there were always executions whenever somebody new took the reins of power, and London would surely have public and bloody executions and rotting bits of nobility on display before the first day of summer. None of them would be William, to his disappointment, but for a brief moment she held a fantasy he could be among the dead. Then she shook off the evil thought and sought a more pleasant theme for her musing.

It shifted from the king to the war, then to Daniel and the last time she’d seen him in this very spot, so that when his voice came to her it was nearly as if it had originated in her imagination. It gave her a start.

“I’m surprised you came after all,” he said.

Her heart leapt, and she had to restrain herself from spinning on her heel to greet him with a big, stupid grin. Her own excitement shocked her, for she’d convinced herself long ago his hold on her heart had failed. She’d thought the thing in her that made her pulse race at the sound of this man’s—or any man’s—voice was long dead, and there should have been no girlish smile nor excited greeting in a voice an entire octave too high. But today her body betrayed her and she forced herself to wait a beat, then turn slowly. Graceful. Self-possessed. Dignified, in spite of what she’d told Piers earlier. She held the edge of her vizard in one gloved hand so she could speak without the button between her teeth. “Daniel.”

“I’m happy you came. We’ve much to say.”

The sun was at his back, and she stepped aside so she could see him without his face in shadow. He turned with her, a tiny smile at the corners of his mouth as he realized what she was doing. He reached out and gently removed her vizard from her face to gaze at her. With one flick of the wrist he flung it, spinning, over the bank, where it floated down to the river like an autumn leaf. There it danced and bobbed on the glittering surface of the Thames, making its way toward the sea. She watched it go and thought of the shilling it would cost to replace the thing. Then she regarded Daniel thoughtfully.

He’d changed more than she’d ever imagined he could. After so long, he seemed even older than he should. Too thin, too gray, too…weary. His long limbs and lanky body took an insouciant stance, hipshot, casual, in the eternal boyish pretense of superiority that had once impressed her as actual superiority. But now she saw it for the immature bluff it was, a posture cultivated by those on the defensive, and understood that the intervening years had not been kind to him.

Nevertheless he wore a cheerful countenance that lifted her heart. Plainly he was happy to see her, and his smile appeared genuine. She wondered whether she should also be glad to see him, and she remembered the events leading up to the meeting on that terrible night eighteen years ago, when she was but seventeen and her life changed so horribly.

S
UZANNE
stood before her father in the ’tiring room of his house, her heart thudding in her chest so hard it seemed her stays must bulge in time with it and her lace collar lift with each beat. Her fingers knotted together behind her at her waist, bloodless and slippery with perspiration. A suitor stood near the archway, who had that look of hope which sickened her for its weakness.

Why her father wanted her to marry someone so needy and spineless was a dark mystery to her. One that put a crease in her brow such as her father could never quite beat out of her. This one was a coal merchant named Stephen Farthingworth, not terribly much older than herself, whose father mined and transported coal from Newcastle. His entire family for two generations had mined and sold coal to the London nobility and had become quite wealthy from it. Not overwhelmingly rich, but well off enough, considering their background involved nobody of significant rank even at a distance and their money did not come from land. Father was quite taken with him, and Suzanne knew where that must lead. She also knew she could never marry Farthingworth. Ever. Nor anyone else, for that. The baby within her had quickened, and she knew it was far too late to pass it off as his.