The Medieval Murderers - Hill of Bones

Katherine came to stand beside me. She closed and latched the window.

‘I was in a hurry when I left,’ she said, turning aside and putting the candle on top of the chest. ‘I saw you on stage and straightaway I thought you looked and sounded very like Cousin William. My… scheme… was brewing in my head all the while I watched but I did not pluck up the courage to write you a note until the performance was over and you were all doing your little dance. There was so little time then, if I was to catch you before you left.’

‘So you wrote the note but had nothing to say,’ I said. My mood was an odd mixture of anger and sadness, and a return of the itch that had driven me through the yard of the Bear.

‘All I could think of was that way of addressing you on the cover of the letter, putting three words.’

‘“A privy message”,’ I said. ‘It certainly got my attention.’

‘I ran down and round, and handed it to some lad in the inn. I gave him a coin to pass it to “To him who plays the Duke”. Then I waited until you emerged, as I knew you would.’

‘Well, madam, I think my business here is done.’

But I did not move. I did not even wonder why she had led me upstairs rather than back to the ground floor. I knew why.

‘You have brought comfort to a dying man, Nicholas,’ she said. ‘Your deed will surely be noted in heaven.’

Maybe it was her words that made me think of the dying man’s Bible in my doublet pocket. I made to retrieve it but was distracted by Katherine’s next move. She licked her fingers and with a decisive motion snuffed the candle she’d placed on the chest. Then she started forward and kissed me full on the lips and pressed herself against me. We descended, almost tumbled, onto the narrow bedstead, and she fumbled with my hose even as I struggled to undo my doublet with one hand and raise her skirts with the other. The smell of the snuffed candle lingered in the room.

In the beginning of what followed, with one tiny corner of my mind, I wondered whether this deed that we were about to perform was also one to be noted in heaven. Yet she was eager and grateful, and now I was more than glad to be here, in the house of a dying man, with his niece. Then all my discomfort and scruples disappeared. Everything vanished in the moonlit delights of the summer night.

When I woke, the sky was turning pale. I didn’t know where I was. Soon the details of last night began to return, slow at first and then all at once. My part as the wicked Duke Peccato in A House Divided , the note with its teasing superscription, the nocturnal meeting with Katherine, the mission of mercy to the dying man, the pretence that I was his returned son, William. Then Katherine Hawkins and I afterwards, up here in this little chamber with the gable window, and the bed, which now seemed small and hard. Katherine had gone. I was a little disappointed but couldn’t blame her. Whether it was remorse or second thoughts or the straightforward desire for her own bed, she’d left me.

I must have fallen asleep once more for I came to with a start, woken by some noise outside. Almost dashing my head against a ceiling beam, I went to the window. Down below in the inn yard were a couple of travellers taking charge of their horses from the ostler. These early leavers mounted up and clattered out of the yard where we’d played the previous evening. It seemed like a signal that I should leave too. There was no noise from the rest of the house. I wanted to sneak out even if no one was up yet. Especially if no one was up yet. I recalled that the key to the door was hanging on a hook beside it. I wouldn’t have minded seeing Katherine again – indeed, had it been later in the day, and had my stomach been full and my senses sharper, I would definitely have wanted to see her again – but I was reluctant to encounter the old retainer Hannah or, God forbid, to come anywhere near the dying Uncle Christopher once more. I laced and fastened my garments and put on my doublet. An unfamiliar weight to one side made me remember old Christopher’s Bible, the volume which I’d stuffed in a pocket. ‘Take – it – William’, he’d gasped to me, and I had obeyed his words.

I took it out of my pocket and straight away saw what hadn’t been apparent to me in the heat and confusion of the previous evening: namely, that it wasn’t a Bible at all. Rather, it was a notebook or a commonplace book, handsomely bound in black leather, and full of scribblings and comments, together with some longer stretches of writing and even the odd sketch, each labelled with letters and arrows. I puzzled over the mechanisms depicted in the sketches before realising, from their general shape and the rollers and pedals, that they were weavers’ looms. Perhaps Christopher Hawkins was designing a more efficient machinery for his trade. Elsewhere in the book were remarks and quotations that he liked sufficiently to note down. ‘Age and wedlock tames man and beast’ and ‘Neither a borrower, nor a lender be’ – that sort of thing, cautious sayings as befitted a merchant.

There were several pages of verse, which I guessed had been written by Hawkins himself rather than copied from another’s work, since the lines were blotted with crossings-out and at first glance appeared somewhat feeble.

Their fame and renown these knights so far did spread

By deeds and valour that scarce may be uttered.

Their names will live for ever scribed in stone

Long after we mortals are nothing more than bone.

et cetera.

I was about to put the book down on the chest, where it might be found later by a servant, or perhaps by Katherine herself, when it came to me that this was a careless, disrespectful way to treat a dying man’s property. After all, he had urged me to take the thing even if he was under the misapprehension that I was his son. It must be important to him since he was clutching it with his cold, dry hand. I should not abandon it in this upstairs chamber. But nor did I want to look for a member of the household to whom I could hand back the book since I planned to slip away unseen.

So I tucked the commonplace book inside my doublet, took one last look around the little bedchamber, unlatched the door, listened for sounds from below, heard nothing, trod silently downstairs to the first floor where the dying man’s room was located, together with the other larger bedrooms, heard nothing here either, stole down to ground level and out into the lobby, listened to the clack of pans from the kitchen quarter of the house, plucked the key from the hook by the front door – turned key in lock – opened door – replaced key on hook – stepped out into Vicarage Lane – closed door behind me – all as quiet as could be.

I was still carrying Christopher Hawkins’ notebook. I had no intention of taking it away for good. Rather, I thought it would give me an excuse for returning to the house and seeing Katherine again. The King’s Men had two more days and nights in Bath before we travelled on to Bristol. I should be able to squeeze out a spare hour or two for Katherine.

It was a bright summer morning. I emerged into Cheap Street and was straight away reminded that this city, for all its health-giving waters and handsome new buildings, is a market town. A herd of brindled cows was trotting unwillingly along, urged by a drover to their rear, and churning up the muck in the street still further. I approached the town centre to see pigs at liberty and rootling around the stocks and pillory, which were set between the Guild Hall and the great church. It had never occurred to me before that the rubbish flung at the malefactors in the pillory – rotten apples, dead cats and the like – would make natural picking for pigs.

Hungry in my stomach and tired in my limbs, but with the bounce that comes from a good night well spent, I walked up the slight incline towards the North Gate and Mother Treadwell’s. In the lodging house I found my fellows still half asleep round the breakfast table but suddenly all alert and talkative when they realised I’d come back. I parried their questions and salacious remarks with casual understatement. Naturally, I said nothing at all of the way I’d impersonated a dying man’s son. Yes, I had passed a very pleasant night. No, she is a lady, well bred, not one of the women of the streets you usually consort with. Her name? Is she married? None of your business, Laurence Savage.