The Queen's man

Chapter Eighteen

Shakespeare stood in the rubble-strewn chamber of the Angel house. The room was lit by a dozen tallow candles. Audrey was at his side. She had not wept yet; it had always been her way to show strength and stoicism, but her tears would come soon enough, when she was alone. Their eyes were both fixed on the serene face of her son, Benedict, whose body had been laid out on the only surviving piece of furniture, a bed, broken but pieced together as well as could be managed.

‘Do you think he is in heaven, John? With his father?’

‘We must pray it is so.’

A picture entered his head of a boy of thirteen, back in the year fifteen seventy-one, soon after the widow and her children came to Shottery. Benedict’s hair had been lighter then. All the boys were outside the schoolhouse, enjoying a warm summer’s day, eating the bread and cheese their parents had given them to get through the long dawn-to-dusk school day. The sun had came out from behind a cloud and framed Benedict’s head like a halo.

Because of his name — but also because of his fervour — the other boys called him Archangel or, sometimes, Gabriel. The names were used in jest, but there was an edge of unpleasant mockery in them, too. In truth, they did not like him, partly because he was an incomer, but also because of his stern religion. While they played, he prayed.

He had always been too devout, too close to Mr Hunt, the new schoolmaster. Hunt was indiscreet in his defiant Catholicism and did not disguise his preference for the boys whom he knew to share his faith. Benedict Angel and Robert Dibdale, a year his senior, were chief among them. At times, they stayed in school at the end of the day for extra tuition with Hunt. It was said, too, that the pair of them had gone to a secret mass with Mr Hunt on more than one occasion.

Benedict Angel had the reckless abandon of youth. As he became ever more zealous, he told some of the other boys that their families would burn in hellfire for conforming to the new Church. His classmates were appalled and, in the end, they shunned him. Dibdale had been much more discreet, and he never lost the other boys’ friendship. It was a curious thing that Benedict and Robert had never seemed close to each other.

No one was surprised, least of all Shakespeare, when a few weeks before Angel’s seventeenth birthday, word reached Stratford that he had gone away to join the Catholic seminary for young Englishmen in Douai. It was rumoured that he had been lured there by Simon Hunt, who had left Stratford and had fled into exile some months earlier. Dibdale followed them a few months later.

The question that Shakespeare could not answer adequately was this: had Benedict Angel been a saint-in-the-making — or a treacherous dupe? Shakespeare was happy to admit he had found him difficult to like; he had the unbending self-assurance of many men of the cloth and could not accept the smallest possibility that his version of the Gospels could be open to doubt or misinterpretation. Benedict Angel was the sort of zealot who would die for his beliefs or kill for them.

But that gave no man the right to murder him.

So who had killed him, and why? One possibility had to be Lucy’s band of pursuivants, perhaps with the connivance of higher authorities.

But Shakespeare could not put out of mind the thought that there could be some connection to the events at Sheffield and the mission he had been ordered to undertake by Walsingham and Leicester. In the brief time he had worked for the Principal Secretary he had learnt enough to know that there was no such thing as a coincidence in his war of secrets.

Or did the motive lie closer to home? What, indeed, was the meaning of the brief conversation he had overheard suggesting that farmer Rench might not be distressed by the killing? Another poke of the stick. .

‘There is no word of Florence,’ Audrey said at last, as though she had forgotten until this moment that her daughter was still missing.

‘Perhaps that is a good sign. It means there is hope.’

‘I will not think it good until she is home safe.’

François Leloup stopped at the edge of the town and pulled his threadbare copy of La Guide des Chemins d’Angleterre from his packsaddle. His eye traced the course that had been set for him and then looked up at the spire and chimneys of the town. Yes, he was certain: this was Warwick. He stowed the map, kicked his spurs into the horse’s flanks and managed to persuade the obstinate animal to limp on into the town.

Around his shoulders, he wore a capacious cloak, so that none should notice his missing arm. At the inn, he dismounted, handed the reins to a groom, and then ordered an ostler to bring in his heavy saddlebags.

Making his way into the well-appointed hostelry, he spent a few minutes talking amiably to the landlord about his life as a travelling merchant in French wines, haggled perfunctorily over the price of a decent — though not the most opulent — chamber, and ordered a splendid meal of English roasts to be brought to his room. He was about to go there when he held back.

‘It is possible there is a letter for me, innkeeper.’

‘Ah yes, Monsieur Seguin. I recall a courier brought it two days since. Let me fetch it for you, sir.’

‘Instructions from my masters in Paris. Have I found buyers for next year’s vintage? Can I acquire English woollen stuffs rather than silver? Have I bargained a good price? How they drive an old man in their quest for profit! I tell you, innkeeper, they are harder taskmasters than any wife could be. Should they not give me a pension and allow me to live out my days in peace among my vines and books?’

The landlord produced the letter. The Frenchman glanced at it casually to see the seal was unbroken, then bestowed a little bow upon his host and placed it within his doublet. ‘I shall take it to my chamber to read in mine own good time. My body is not what it was and I must take my rest.’

His hand curled around the silver pomander of musk and ambergris that he wore on a chain about his neck, and he breathed deeply of its exquisite scents.

‘And, innkeper, have my meats served properly rare. It pleases me to see and taste the blood.’

Joshua Peace arrived at the farm shortly before midnight. Audrey Angel had fallen asleep on her knees, her tears still unwept. Shakespeare had had no supper and no rest, and yet he could not leave this place, not yet. At last Thomas Hathaway appeared in the doorway with a young man, bright-eyed, with short, thinning hair.

‘This is Mr Joshua Peace,’ Thomas said.

‘Thank you, Tom. Go home now. You have done more than enough this evening.’ Shakespeare turned towards the newcomer and shook his hand. ‘Mr Peace, thank you for coming this far. It is a pleasure to meet you.’

‘And you, Mr Shakespeare. I am told you are an officer of the crown.’

‘Indeed.’ He indicated the inner room. ‘The corpse is through there, in the chamber.’

‘Then let us get to work.’

‘I can tell you this: at first sight it appeared to me that he had been choked.’

‘I will look at him myself, if it please you, sir. I prefer not to have preconceptions when I view a cadaver.’

Shakespeare looked at Peace with surprise. He was taken aback by his brisk manner. Such an attitude was rare in the countryside, where time tended to drift by with the indolence of the stars in the heavens.

‘And shall I have beer brought to you, Mr Peace?’

‘I would prefer wine, but beer will do if it is all you have.’

‘I shall see what Mistress Angel can provide.’

‘There is no haste. I will wait until after I have made my initial examination.’

Peace stood back from his work, stretched his narrow shoulders and breathed deeply, as though stifling a yawn. He had been studying the body for more than an hour, sniffing and prodding it. ‘I will have that wine now.’

Shakespeare handed him the goblet with the dregs of the wine that the pursuivants had not succeeded in drinking or pouring away. Joshua Peace took a sip, grimaced, shrugged, then sipped again.

‘You will see, Mr Shakespeare, that the rigor of death is at its most intense. Try to move an arm. It is stiff as though it had been frozen solid in ice.’

‘Which means he has been dead how long?’

‘Some time between twenty hours and twelve hours past. It is one o’clock in the morning now, so I would suggest he died last night, an hour or two before dawn. I make that calculation on the assumption that he was murdered somewhere else then left in the place you found him. I doubt many murderers would go about their business in the open air on a bright morning. Especially a murderer such as this one, who had time to place the body just so, fold the arms across the chest and tie a rosary around the neck.’

‘Are you suggesting the rosary was placed there after death? Was it not the murder weapon?’

Joshua Peace picked up the black-beaded rosary, gripped it between both his hands and tugged sharply. The cord split and beads flew across the floor. Peace laughed. ‘That answers that one, I think. You would not be able to strangle a kitten with it. Anyway, look at the neck.’

Shakespeare held a candle close to the dead man and gazed at the neck. ‘What am I looking for?’

‘Do you see any indentations that might have been caused by rosary beads?’

‘I see marks, certainly.’

‘But not bead marks. What you see is the unmistakable spiralling of good English hemp. Any hangman in the land will tell you that this man was choked to death with a narrow rope.’

‘So he was hanged? Was that the other cord? The one attached to the rosary.’

‘No, no. Look under the jaw, beneath the right ear. You see the bruising and discoloration there? The rope was wound tight around a stick — a garrotte as the Spaniards call it. They use it much in their executions and assassinations.’

‘Are you suggesting a Spaniard did this?’

Peace laughed, but not unkindly. ‘You range far ahead of the facts, Mr Shakespeare. Though this method of killing is common in Spain, that certainly does not mean they have a monopoly on its use.’

‘Forgive me. You must think me a fool.’

‘Not at all, sir. It is late at night and we are both tired. What I think is that you were very wise to have called me out so promptly. The more a body is allowed to decay, the more the evidence disappears. You might be astounded to know how often I — and my mother before me — have been called to view a body two or three days after the discovery of a carcass. Sometimes longer.’

‘Well, I am pleased you came.’

Peace put his hand into his apron pocket and produced a portion of some sort of paste. He held it up to show Shakespeare.

‘What is it?’

‘I found it in the mouth. I rather suspect it is unleavened bread, the host, as used in the Roman mass, for I also smelt wine. And as every attentive schoolboy knows, the word “host” is derived from the Latin hostia — which can be translated as sacrificial victim. I found that rather interesting. What about you, Mr Shakespeare?’

‘I think I probably agree, Mr Peace. But that does not get me any closer to finding a motive for his death, nor the murderer.’

‘What most interests me, though, Mr Shakespeare, is that I believe the murderer must have put the bread and wine in Mr Angel’s mouth, post mortem. For if it had been taken voluntarily during the Eucharist, it would surely have been swallowed almost instantly.’