P. Chisholm - A Murder of Crows

Over two quarts of ale at the Cock Inn, hard by the Smithfield stock market so rank with the smell of livestock, and a very fine fish pie and pickles, Dodd lifted his tankard to Enys with an approving nod.

“Ye’re a lot better than ye were,” he said, “though I’d not fight any duels yet.”

Enys smiled and flushed. “I never thought I could be able to fight.”

“But did ye no’ fight any battles wi’ yer friends when ye were breeched and got yer ain dagger?” Dodd asked with curiosity. He remembered with clarity the great day when he had been given his first pair of breeches made for him by his mother and his dad strapped his very own dagger round his waist. He must have been about six or seven and very relieved to get away from baby’s petticoats and being bullied into playing house all the time with his sisters’ friends. After that he spent most of his time play-fighting with his brothers, cousins, and friends when he wasn’t having to go to the Reverend for schooling. Within months he had lost a front tooth in a fistfight over football and got a birching from Reverend Gilpin and several thick ears from other outraged adults for damaging things by carving them with his dagger. He still liked to whittle when he could.

Enys looked down modestly. “I was a sickly child,” he said. “I don’t think I did.”

The ale tasted wonderful when you were so dry, Dodd finished his quart in one and called for more. He shook his head. “Well, if ye keep on wi’ it and hire yerself a good swordmaster, there’s nae reason ye couldna fight yer corner if need be.”

“It’s interesting,” said Enys after he’d found a bone in a large lump of herring from the pie. “The manner of thinking for a fight that you explained to me is very similar to that needed for a courtroom-being angry without losing your temper, so you can think. Only in the case of a courtroom, of course, the weapons are words.”

“Ay?” Dodd thought Carey had said something similar about legal battles. “Surely ye need to be verra patient as well.”

“That too,” Enys agreed, “and also well-organised and thorough. But there is very little to equal the joy of disputing with a fellow lawyer and beating him to win the point. I used to greatly enjoy mooting at Gray’s Inn.”

“Ah.” The second quart was going down a treat and all Dodd’s worries about what would happen that evening started to fade away. Not his fury with Carey, though. That still nested in his gut. He could find out what mooting was later. “A man I met the day said I should give ye his compliments-he had very much the look of ye and I thocht he was ye at first, but his voice is deeper, and he’s taller and broader as well.” Enys had stopped chewing and was staring at Dodd. “Could it be yer brother that ye thought Heneage had taken?”

Enys swallowed the piece of pie whole and nodded vigorously. “Yes sir, it could indeed. May I ask where you met him?”

“He denied his name was Enys, said it was Vent, James Vent.”

Enys smiled at that. “Even so. Where was he?”

“He were at Pickering’s game, playing cards and losing.”

Enys banged his tankard down. “Almost certainly it was my brother,” he said. “I never met a man who was worse at cards nor more addicted to playing.”

Dodd nodded. “Would ye like to meet him? Ah ken where Pickering’s game is at the moment and Vent said he’d welcome a meeting wi’ the man that wis insulting him by impersonating him to be a lawyer.”

To Dodd’s surprise Enys laughed. “That’s my brother. Yes, I would. Thank God he’s not dead. I had given him up and thought he was surely at the bottom of the Thames like poor Jackson whose corpse you showed me.”

“Ay.”

“How much had he lost and was he playing for notes of debt?”

“Nay, Pickering willnae allow it, he was playing for good coin and a lot of it.”

“Oh,” Enys frowned. “How unusual for my brother.”

He looked thoughtful and pushed away the remains of his pie so Dodd polished it off and washed it down with the rest of his ale. He checked the sky for the time.

“It’s too early for Pickering’s game to start. I wantae go back to Somerset House now to…ah…do something. I can meet ye at sunset by Temple steps and we’ll take a boat?”

Enys put down the money for his part of the bill and Dodd put down his. They went companionably enough out of the alehouse and headed across London. Enys went down one of the little alleys off Fleet Street to his chambers whilst Dodd ambled along Fleet Street to the Strand, thinking hard about the damnable book code that Carey must have broken the night before. It was the only thing that explained his actions today. And Dodd didn’t have much time to solve the thing either. He had to be out of Somerset House before the trouble started.

What had Marlowe said? A commonly printed book but not predictable, therefore not the Bible. Obviously to make a code from it, you had to have it to hand…Now what was the book that Richard Tregian had had on the shelf where Dodd found the paper? Something quite common, as Dodd recalled, but a little surprising. What the hell had it been? He couldn’t quite remember it.

Not realising he was scowling so fiercely that people were taking a wide path around him as he walked down through the crowds on Fleet Street, Dodd stopped and stared unseeingly at an inn sign for the Fox amp; Hounds, a few doors up from the Cock Tavern where he and Carey usually went out of habit. He’d looked at the book, recognised it, and dismissed it as uninteresting. Damn it to hell. It had been…

The inn sign was particularly badly painted, mainly out of over-ambition on the part of the sign painter, with the fox running as it were towards the sign and the hounds in the distance behind him, so it looked as if his head made the shape of a capital letter A upside down…

The backs of Dodd’s legs actually went cold as he realised what the answer was. He blinked up at the inn sign which may have inspired the original code and almost certainly had inspired Carey to guess what it was. He cursed under his breath. Next thing he had loped along Fleet Street, past Temple Bar, knocking the beggars flying, along the Strand, and in at the gate of Somerset House which was quiet that afternoon. He went up the stairs two at a time to Carey’s chambers and sat himself down sweating and puffing slightly at Carey’s desk where he pulled Foxe’s Book of Martyrs towards himself and set to the first coded letter.

It took him a long time and at the end of the hard labour he realised he actually had one and a half letters: one was from Fr. Jackson to somebody he addressed as “your honour” explaining that the trap was ready to be sprung as most of the lands were now held by the one called Icarus. The other was from Richard Tregian and also addressed to somebody he called “your honour” explaining that he had found out why certain lands were being sold for inflated prices as full of gold ore and good sites for gold mines. He was horrified and alarmed at it and was about to…The letter was unfinished.

Dodd leaned back and stretched his aching ink-splattered fingers. He stared into space for five minutes and then gathered up his translations and the original letters, folded them all and put them in his belt-pouch along with Carey’s infuriating message. Hearing the cacophony of hounds and horses returning to the courtyard by the main gate, he stood up quickly and ran down the passageway to his own chamber where he collected his cloak and his new beaver hat that Carey had bought him a week before as a celebration of Carey’s deliverance from his creditors.

He clattered down the back stairs and into the kitchen where he quietly grabbed half a loaf of bread and a large lump of cheese, then put them back because he had nowhere to stowe them since he wasn’t on a horse and wasn’t wearing a loose comfy doublet..