The Cardinal's Court Read online

  ‘Everyone knows that James Butler shot that arrow through the man.’

  ‘It will be impossible to have a fair trial if the serjeant in charge of the case has already announced his views to all and sundry.’ It was perhaps an unfair shot; I had sent the ball into the tambour and it rolled along the floor, unreturnable by him.

  ‘I didn’t …’ he began, but then was interrupted.

  ‘Excuse me, Master,’ murmured one of the gentlemen ushers to me, ‘Her Grace, the queen, wishes to speak with you.’

  I smiled with triumph at the serjeant. ‘I must go; Her Grace is very interested in James Butler. It’s only natural, I suppose, since she was so fond of the late Earl of Ormond.’ Anne Boleyn was nearer in blood to the late chamberlain than James, of course, but I could see that that serjeant was slightly shaken by this so I left him quickly. He would have noticed, the whole table would have noticed, my lengthy conversation with the queen during supper. The king’s serjeant could easily find himself in the wrong if the queen complained of him.

  ‘Your Grace!’ I snatched off my cap and bowed low. She was talking to a tall man of about my own age and height, no darker than I. The queen introduced him as Doctor Ramirez.

  ‘I have been in your country for seven years, Master,’ he said in careful English when I greeted him in Spanish. ‘And have studied at Oxford University.’ And then a smile broke up the severity of his thin, clever-looking face. ‘But do take the opportunity to practise your Spanish, if you wish, Master Brehon,’ he said.

  I laughed a little at that. ‘I think we might get on better in English,’ I said. ‘My Spanish is limited to negotiating for good barrels of wine at the harbour of New Ross in Ireland. We get lots of Spanish ships there.’

  ‘I am speaking to Doctor Ramirez about this sad and terrible affair,’ said the queen, ignoring this frivolity. ‘It’s been such a dreadful business for the poor, poor cardinal.’

  ‘And not too nice for the man who was shot, also,’ said Dr Ramirez and I found myself warming to him. We exchanged grins.

  ‘So you talk together, both of you and you work out what has happened.’ The queen’s voice made an order out of her statement and we both bowed as she turned away and greeted Lord Abergavenny, enquiring after his younger brother, the king’s friend, Sir Edward Neville.

  ‘I hear that the cardinal mistook him for the king, when they were both masked,’ she was saying, laughingly, as we moved away and I wondered how such a serious and intelligent woman could put up with all the silly and childish games that the king spent his evenings playing. Still that was none of my business and I turned my attention to this Spanish physician who was looking at me with interest.

  ‘You are a lawyer, yes? You have studied the law, is that right?’

  ‘Since I was five years old,’ I replied and he bowed respectfully, but with a glint in his eye which amused me.

  ‘And this death? I have just this evening come here to Hampton Court. My wife has been delivered of a child, safely, and I come to ask Her Grace to so graciously condescend to be a godmother to the little girl. She will be called Katherine. So of this death, I know nothing.’

  ‘Happened in the hall, yesterday evening during the Shrove Tuesday Pageant,’ I explained. ‘The body of a man was found the following morning, this morning and he had an arrow stuck in his chest. He had fallen behind the arras.’ I searched for the Spanish word. ‘Tapiz,’ I said doubtfully and he smiled with a flash of white teeth.

  ‘They think that he was killed some time during the pageant because the body was completely stiff when it was found at ten o’clock the following morning,’ I explained and he nodded thoughtfully, suddenly grave again.

  ‘I can see the body?’ he enquired and once again I warmed to him. He did not waste time asking questions or making explanations. I had a poor opinion of the cardinal’s doctor who seemed to me to spout a lot of nonsense about humours and phases of the moon. He had been fairly perfunctory about his pronouncement on the time of death. Could he really be so sure?

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I said briskly in reply to his request. ‘Come with me.’ I led him down through the room and towards the table where the sweetmeats and the wine of Hippocras were set out. He knew nobody in that assembly, I noticed. People greeted me and then looked at him without recognition.

  The serjeant had a tasty, very thin wafer in his hand when we approached.

  ‘Her Grace would like Doctor Ramirez to view the body of the dead man,’ I said briskly and waited while the serjeant snapped the wafer in half and then placed both pieces into his mouth. He drained the hot spiced wine from the silver cup, holding it, not by its stem, or even by its base, but wrapping his fingers around the waisted centre of the vessel, almost as though he needed to conceal his face for a moment. He was thinking hard; I knew that, but I waited confidently. There was no way that he could disobey an order from the queen herself, and even if he went to check with the cardinal, if he had the temerity to do that, well, he risked a severe reprimand if I were speaking the truth. He didn’t trust me though. We had played too many games of tennis against each other to have any illusions about our partners.

  ‘The body,’ he said slowly, lowering his cup back down onto the table. ‘I don’t think that I should …’

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said briskly. I saw his eyes go towards John Rushe and watched him decide not to involve the cardinal’s man.

  ‘I’m not sure …’ he began.

  ‘Shall I ask Master Rushe where it has been stored?’ I enquired, though I knew where the body had been placed. My servant, Colm, had told me that the body was, by the cardinal’s orders, placed in the underground cellar of the fish house. The wood yard workers cut ice from the moat every winter and stored it beneath the fish house, within layers of sawdust, readily available to keep valuable fish, such as salmon, cool until cooked. No doubt the coroner had been informed, but probably told to come on Monday when enquiries would have been made. Cardinal Wolsey was not a man that any coroner could gainsay. I waited confidently. The serjeant gazed at us for a few long moments, defiantly took two more wafers, but then led the way towards the door to the yards in silence. Dr Ramirez followed and I stuck close to him.

  There were several lanterns placed on the table near to the door and I took a taper and lit three of them. Like everything else at Hampton Court, they were fine lanterns, made in the new style, six-sided with panes of glass rather than the old-fashioned horn. In silence the serjeant and the doctor took up their lanterns and we went outside, braving the weather and, in my case, swallowing down the nausea induced by the thought of having to inspect a dead body.

  And then I thought of James, alone and desperate, wandering the dangerous streets of Westminster as the snow fell and I resolved to make sure that this Spanish doctor had a chance to help.

  7

  There was a harsh chill to the night air and it hit us as soon as the door was opened. I recoiled momentarily when the north wind, whistling through the buildings, robbed me of my breath for a second. It was no night to be out-of-doors. There were no moon or stars to be seen and the torches, stuck into their iron holders outside the kitchens and the sculleries, flickered wildly in the freezing snow-laden gusts that swept down the narrow passageway between the buildings. How was James faring?

  ‘Hurry up,’ said Master Gibson roughly. ‘Let’s get this over and done with.’

  I held up a hand to shelter the candle inside my lantern and felt my feet slip slightly on the icy surface of the pavement. I deliberately slowed down. Let him break his leg if he wanted to. I allowed him to go ahead of us until he reached the place where the fish was stored.

  ‘Friendly sort of man,’ said Dr Ramirez to me in an undertone as the serjeant, with a muttered oath, put down his lantern, produced a large key and inserted it into the door of the fish house. He went in first, made room for us, and we waited while he locked the door behind us. There were plenty of boxes piled up in the fish house, filling the shelves on th
e walls, all of them full of fish, ready for tomorrow’s Lenten cooking. I wasn’t keen on the smell of fish in the best of times, but this place was so cold that there was very little odour apparent. Master Beasley, I knew, was very particular that his fish should be fresh. He would not tolerate fish that had begun to smell. There would be trout, lobster, crayfish and salmon for the cardinal’s table and for the yeoman and the servants there would be plentiful supplies of cod, ling and eels.

  And downstairs, beneath all these foodstuffs, lay the body of a man.

  The cold was intense and the sawdust beneath our feet in the cellar was frozen into hard lumps, as though the dust had been transmuted into its original wooden substance. There was no smell. I held up my lantern. Stone walls, whitewashed with lime, piles of sawn ice blocks heaped one on top of the other around the sides of the walls. In the centre were two trestles and on them the body of the dead man, the instructor of Cardinal Wolsey’s wards, lay stretched on a marble slab. Not as handsome as a silver-scaled salmon, but looking remarkably lifelike, though his short beard was more unkempt than in life and his ruddy cheeks were bleached to the colour of parchment. He was wearing, I noticed, his best apparel. It was mulberry in colour, as befitted a member of Cardinal Wolsey’s household, but his doublet and jerkin were made from silk velvet and his hose were woven from the finest wool. I gazed down on him. In the light from our four lanterns every detail showed. In the centre of his jerkin was a flat, dark patch of dried blood.

  ‘You say that the man had been examined by the cardinal’s doctor.’ Ramirez’s voice sounded puzzled and his Spanish accent was stronger than usual. I turned to look at him. He had placed his lantern on the marble slab, close to the dead man’s chest.

  ‘That’s right. Well, he declared him dead. Said he had been dead for over twelve hours. Rigor Mortis that’s what he called it. He said that the man must have been killed during the pageant as it would take twelve hours for him to stiffen like that.’

  ‘But didn’t he examine him? Look, the man is in his clothes.’

  ‘Well, as I was telling you, he was stiff as board when we picked him up. Nothing could be done with him then. We had to get him out of the hall. Feel him. He’s still stiff.’ The serjeant put down his lantern by the feet, then tentatively gripped the dead man’s sleeve and tried to raise the arm.

  ‘Jesu!’ Dr Ramirez made the exclamation with an air of a man barely keeping grip on his patience. He drew his knife from his belt, grabbed a handful of the dead man’s clothes, just where the frilled collar of his fine linen shirt showed above his doublet. He brandished the knife and with one quick slash ripped the layers from neck to waist. Impatiently he tugged at one side and I shifted Master Gibson out of my way and folded back the other side. The fabric was stiff with frost and it remained open, almost as though it were a door set ajar. The doctor gazed intently for a moment and then rapidly drew his knife down the dead man’s chest. The flesh parted reluctantly and there was a gleam of bone.

  ‘I need a better knife, some more knives. Fetch some from the kitchen. Good strong knives. Sharp. Get the cook to sharpen them.’ He snapped out his orders without looking around. The king’s serjeant turned his head towards me, but I ignored him. Master Beasley, the cook, normally went early to bed so that he was up and waiting for the fresh food deliveries before six in the morning. He would not be happy to be roused from his first sleep. In any case, although I owed it to James to try to find out as much as possible, I had no obligation to assist the serjeant. And I wanted to have a private moment with this Spanish doctor. There was something strange about that small hole in the middle of the man’s chest; it confirmed what had occurred to me earlier, but I might be wrong and I didn’t want to say any more, in the presence of the king’s serjeant, the man who was already convinced that he knew who the murderer was. I kept my lips closed until he had left.

  ‘The arrow was bodkin-tipped,’ I said tentatively when the serjeant’s footsteps on the cellar steps had ceased to echo. I heard the door slam and the sound of the key turning. He had locked us in, or locked others out. A cautious man.

  ‘Arrow, where is the arrow?’ The doctor glanced around in a slightly theatrical fashion.

  ‘He was shot with an arrow,’ I said.

  ‘And where is the arrow?’ he asked the same question, but in a different tone of voice, more like a teacher instructing a pupil. I smiled to myself. I had not mistaken my man.

  ‘It fell out when they went to pick up the man.’ I watched his expression carefully. ‘So I was told,’ I added. ‘I was not there. I heard about it later. The cook had been called into the hall to be publically thanked by the cardinal for the magnificent supper that he put on for the king and his court and then when he was going out, he noticed a shoe sticking out from behind the arras and when they lifted the body, then the arrow …’

  ‘Yes, yes. And the man was stiff.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Ramirez looked at me. ‘My friend,’ he said gently, ‘you are not stupid. I hear you are a lawyer. Tell me again what happened.’

  I grinned with pure pleasure. ‘Me dice,’ I said in Spanish. ‘Muchos, muchos testigos.’

  His stern face puckered to a smile. ‘How many?’

  I pictured the hall and the crowd who would have been dining there, the men who would have been serving.

  ‘About a hundred witnesses,’ I said aloud.

  He held up two fingers and counted solemnly on them. ‘One: a hundred peoples lie,’ he said bending back his forefinger. ‘Or two,’ he bent the middle finger, ‘the dead body lies.’

  I laughed. ‘A hundred peoples lie – dead men do not lie.’ I pointed to his second finger and he grinned, his eyes gleaming and his teeth flashing in the light from my lantern.

  ‘But we wait,’ he said, lifting a cautionary finger. ‘We wait. No guesses. Just facts. It’s science we need, my friend, Master Brehon.’

  ‘Call me Hugh,’ I said. ‘Everyone calls me Hugh, even the cardinal. And when I am back home in Ireland there are so many of the Mac Egan clan, all of them lawyers, that I am always Hugh. And this isn’t the first time that I’ve been involved in solving a secret murder. I know all about gathering the facts.’

  ‘You have investigated murders? You do work like that in your own country?’

  I nodded. ‘A Brehon is like a mixture of a serjeant-at-arms and a judge. We hear witnesses, investigate the circumstances of the crime and then we pass sentence. But,’ I said very firmly, ‘we don’t hang men or behead them or hang, draw and quarter them. We give them a chance to become a good member of the community again. They pay a fine, a very big fine, lots of silver, or many cows, mostly with the help of their family or even the whole of their clan.’ I struggled with the explanation. Soon I would see the look of scepticism on his face. Then would come the exclamations: ‘But what stops people murdering again! Doesn’t the Bible tell us: “A life for a life”? Surely a fine is not a proper compensation for a life!’ but, to my surprise, Ramirez just said crisply:

  ‘Good. What’s the point of two deaths? And a sorrowing widow left penniless.’ And then he went back to cross-questioning me. It occurred to me then, that, though our professions were different, we shared a liking to accumulate as many facts as possible and to get them straight before making any guesses.

  And so, in the event, I asked no questions, just patiently gave as many details as I could. The body, I related, was discovered in the Great Hall, lying behind the thick screen of the arras or tapestry. The time of discovery, if it were at the end of dinner, was probably about almost eleven o’clock in the morning. Yes, there would have been a fire in the hall at that time. No, it did not burn all night. The dangers of fire were too great. It might be left banked down and smouldering, but certainly not blazing. And in the morning one of the wood boys or a kitchen worker would wheel in the wood from the kitchen and get the fire going in plenty of time for the first dinner sitting at ten o’clock in the morning. The hall, I told him, co
uld get very cool if the fires were not kept up. It was a big room.

  ‘Why the kitchen?’ He was a man who liked to get all the details straight and I explained about the damp in the wood yard and how the bundles of faggots and of talshides were left overnight in the main kitchen so that they would be warm and dry for relighting the fires in the morning.

  ‘And so the hall would have stayed warm, but not very warm all night.’ He was talking more to himself than to me.

  ‘Not too warm, more cool,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘It’s a very big room. I remember the first time that I came to Hampton Court, last autumn, James showed me the hall – it was a few hours after supper and it had already cooled down. It’s got all those windows and that high roof. I can see what you mean. It helps with fixing the time of death. In cool air the body would not stiffen too quickly.’

  ‘This pageant, what time it was?’

  ‘About six o’clock,’ I said promptly. ‘Supper was at half past four as usual and then they started to get ready the hall, the carpenters were bringing in the walls of the castle as soon as the tables were cleared away. I went into the small chamber beside the hall and I was busy writing, but I could hear all the voices, the music and thuds, of oranges, I suppose.’ I opened my mouth to ask a question, but then shut it again. This was a man of science.

  ‘And the onlookers?’

  It was not really a question, but I knew what was in his mind.

  ‘I’d say that most of them would have been looking at the king and his courtiers who were making the most noise, throwing the oranges and dates and comfits,’ I said. ‘They were wearing masks, but of course everyone knew who the king was, so most people would have been looking at him. Some may have been looking at the ladies, peeping over the turrets of the castle. They looked very pretty with their lace gowns and white lace scarves. But as for James and his fellow wards, I don’t suppose anyone much looked at them. They had been warned to fire their arrows – just little twig-like things – at the floor, although I don’t think they would have harmed a fly – just leather mâché, you know. Now that I come to think of it, I believe that I noticed the fire was very low when I peered in. With all the people there, the steward or one of the gentlemen ushers probably gave orders to allow it to die down in case the hall got too hot. The king, they say, feels the heat.’