A Midwinter Murder (An Elizabethan Murder Mystery) Read online

  A Midwinter Murder

  Peter Tonkin

  © Peter Tonkin 2014

  Peter Tonkin has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 2001, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2003 by Severn House Publishers

  This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd

  For Cham, Guy and Mark, as always

  Table of Contents

  One: Eve

  Two: The Lord of the North

  Three: The Bishops’ Gate

  Four: Ware Riot

  Five: The Nightmare Journey

  Six: Riding the Wall

  Seven: Fort and Farmstead

  Eight: The Castle on the Waste

  Nine: The Price of a Hand

  Ten: Hobbie Noble and the Barguest

  Eleven: The Master of the Hunt

  Twelve: The Laird of Hermitage

  Thirteen: The Kill

  Fourteen: After the Kill

  Fifteen: Plague and Poison

  Sixteen: Selkie

  Seventeen: Spate

  Eighteen: Gate

  Nineteen: Post Mortes

  Twenty: St Thomas’s Eve

  Twenty-one: Black Robert’s Invitation

  Twenty-two: The Black Smithy

  Twenty-three: Liddesdale

  Twenty-four: Hermitage

  Twenty-five: The Grave

  Twenty-six: The Waste

  Twenty-seven: The Dark Designs

  Twenty-eight: Liddesdale Ablaze

  Twenty-nine: The Barguest

  Author’s Note

  Extract from A Head for Murder by Peter Tonkin

  Black Dog monsters have been reported all over Europe, North and South America, but their origins seem to be in the British Isles. One is reported as early as 1127 in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle...

  In the North of England, the (phantom) Black Dog is known as Trash, Skryker or The Barguest...

  True Monster Stories

  One: Eve

  London, 24 December 1594

  As soon as he heard the screams, Tom Musgrave started to run towards them. At his second step his sword hissed out, its blade glimmering like quicksilver. By his fourth step he knew it was the Queen herself who must be screaming. As he ran towards the shocking sound, his mind leaped onward, questing like a well-trained hound along the thorny, twisting paths of logic. But if quick Logic bounded ahead, cool Reason nipped at his heels like a cur, always a step behind.

  Tom tore across the backstage area of the temporary stage that the Lord Chamberlain’s personal company of actors had erected at the end of the Great Hall in White Hall Palace at the direction of Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon and Lord Chamberlain, whose Men they were, against the celebration of Christmas on the morrow with the first performance of Will Shakespeare’s new play. The hall was closed by Lord Henry’s direct order to let them rehearse. In all the kingdom, few enough would dare disobey Lord Henry – and of those few, only one was a woman.

  The Queen herself, then, reasoned Tom, the Master of Logic, as he ran; but what devil had tempted Her Majesty to peek into the forbidden hall, and what in God’s name had she seen to affright her so?

  At the very point of the question, Tom tore past the heavy curtains that decorated the stage front and hurled himself down on to the floor of the hall; and there indeed, just inside the great door, with her hand to her mouth, her face utterly white and her eyes wide, stood Queen Elizabeth – Gloriana herself. Blade in the variable ward, lowest of the basic defensive positions, he skidded towards her, watching her eyes widen still further.

  With Tom’s great logical mind too far ahead and his good sense too far behind to see what a mire of danger he was sinking into here, his Good Angel took a hand. Before he could take another step towards the startled Queen he lost his footing and crashed to his knees, sliding to a stop before her even as the door behind her was torn open and a tall, slim courtier hurled himself to her aid, also reacting to her screaming; also drawn and en garde. But whereas Tom was supported only by the Chamberlain’s Men – and most of them dressed as fairies – the newcomer was backed up by several familiar, unfriendly faces. And by Her Majesty’s personal guards.

  Tom recognized the newcomer, in spite of the fact that, like the Queen’s, his face was masked in the thick white powder so fashionable at court, and his heart sank. Then, as his wild slide slowed, so he turned a little and became able to see what Her Majesty could see. On the stage past which Tom had just run, in the midst of an enchanted forest, sat young Sly, dressed as the Queen of the Fairies. Behind Sly stood Will himself, costumed as the Fairy King, agape with horror; and, saw Tom, the Master of Logic, all too late to moderate his dangerous reaction, the cause of Her Majesty’s affright knelt between them. It was Will Kempe, the Clown, the greatest and most famous of the players – Kempe in the revealing rags of Bottom the Weaver, bearing on his shoulders the great ass’s head so carefully and realistically fashioned for the magical translation scene.

  The icy point of the familiar courtier’s rapier resting on the pit of his throat turned Tom’s head back, and he tore his gaze away from the stage to look up along the gleaming length of finest Ferrara steel into the steady dark eyes of his greatest enemy.

  ‘Drawn in the Queen’s presence,’ said Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, quietly.

  ‘That means death. Even for a Master of Defence,’ added his nearest, sneering companion, as white-faced as Essex, whom Tom recognized as one de Vaux. Like his master, de Vaux was clearly enjoying the situation hugely.

  But Her Majesty was recovered now. ‘Tush, My Lord,’ she said briskly to Essex. ‘The man was running to our aid. These latter years we are not so well supplied with gallants that we can afford to despatch such valiant protectors in such a cavalier fashion. And this is the famous Master of Defence you say?’ she demanded more generally.

  ‘Thomas Musgrave, Your Majesty.’ Tom was well placed to make his own introduction, needing to do and say almost nothing more, bowing on his knees as he was.

  It was then that the door swung wider still and friends joined foes around the person of the Queen. ‘What, My Lord of Essex!’ came the blessedly familiar voice of Lord Henry, the Lord Chamberlain. ‘Drawn in the royal presence. Do you put so little value on your head, sir?’

  ‘Robin was protecting our royal person, My Lord. We give him leave. And Master Musgrave, come to that. They may stand drawn in the royal presence if occasion demands it. There cannot be two such game cocks in all our kingdom as swift with their steel or as loyal with their hearts.’

  ‘Protecting you against what, Your Majesty?’ asked Lord Henry softly.

  ‘Against an actor in an ass’s head, Henry – and good Will Kempe at that, if we are any judge in the matter. We have not been so frighted since we were a girl. By a monster jumping out of the woods! Yourself, like as not, or one of Master Shelton our guardian’s children.’ Her Majesty recalled that long-lost girl in a peal of laughter that might have graced the throat of any child. ‘By an ass’s head forsooth! Walsingham!’

  ‘Your Majesty?’ came the distant voice of Thomas Walsingham, Tom Musgrave’s closest friend at court.

  ‘Are the Shelton girls at court within your train?’

  ‘They are, Your Majesty.’

  Tom could have told the Queen the truth of that matter, for Kate, the younger of the Shelton sisters, younger daughter to one of the children who might have played with the youthful Queen, was his mistress; as Audrey, the elder, was Walsingham’s.

  ‘Good,’ said the Queen, sweeping out of the hall again, with all of the court in tow, ‘then
we can expect much amusingly lewd speculation as to whether the ass’s head might be matched by other, more private, parts – and of equal proportion.’ Laughter began to recede – laughter no longer so innocently girlish in its nature.

  ‘Course they are,’ said Will Kempe, rising as the door closed. ‘What else d’ye think gave Will the idea in the first place? "Give me the head of an ass, Will," said I, "for you know I am hung like a donkey in truth..."‘

  As the Chamberlain’s Men joined Kempe in their own peal of laughter, Tom pulled himself erect. He stood a little shakily, and it required two attempts, separated by a deep breath, to slide the long Solingen blade of his sword home again, feeling the sensitive side of his thumb rub against the reassuring roughness of the running-wolf trademark etched into the steel. He would never know whether it was the proximity of majesty, disaster or death that affected him so.

  Yet, he thought, grimly turning back towards the rudely interrupted rehearsal of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, given his intimate acquaintance with death and disaster of all sorts, it was the closeness of Her Majesty that seemed most likely to have shaken him so badly.

  Or, he came to suspect later, perhaps it was a premonition of what was coming next.

  Although Will’s new play was set in a magical forest beside ancient Athens, the actors wore the cast-off finery handed down to them from great houses – not least that of the Lord Chamberlain himself. Their costumes were contemporary, therefore, if slightly old-fashioned; and the swordplay between the lovers Demetrius and Lysander was a dangerously comic exhibition match in the new Italian style of which Tom was the undisputed master.

  Tom was putting a final polish to this dazzling piece of comic byplay when Thomas Walsingham returned and called up the length of the great Hall, ‘Tom. There’s a messenger newly arrived from the North. He’s with Lord Henry now.’

  ‘Indeed, sir,’ answered Tom. He stepped back and sheathed his sword once more. ‘Why do you condescend to bring this news to my notice?’

  ‘Because,’ said Thomas Walsingham shortly, ‘the message is for you.’

  The little reception room was on the east side of the palace and its window looked along the river towards the distant span of the bridge where Tom’s last adventure had come to its bloody end six months since. Lord Henry stood beside the casement, the glorious colour of his court costume sucking life even from the thin grey light of a midwinter’s afternoon – he alone of all the men and women Tom had seen at court this afternoon disdained the rage for powdering his face with arsenic powder – but Tom had eyes for neither the emotive view nor for his dazzling patron. The familiar figure of the messenger turned towards him and he, like the screaming Queen, was put in mind of the most frightful moments of his childhood.

  ‘Hobbie?’ he said, uncertainly, striding forward. Then the wrinkled, leathery face creased into the ghost of a grin and uncertainty fell away. ‘Hobbie,’ he said with simple certainty and enfolded the wiry old frame to his bosom. Halbert Noble, called ‘Hobbie’ through all the wild Borders, had taught him everything he had known of weaponry and survival until he had entered the Master’s School of Maestro Capo Fero at Siena some half dozen years since. Save for the matter of fighting with foil and rapier in the Italian style, even Capo Fero had been hard put to better Hobbie’s tutelage; and, as his common name implied, he knew the border country as well as one of the sure-footed tireless ponies of the place. Hobbie horses, they were called; creatures that could go, with a rider, into places a man on foot hardly dared venture. There was no track on moss, moor or fell he could not follow, no mark of bird or beast in all the North that Hobbie could not recognize.

  ‘I’ve come with hard news,’ said Hobbie forthrightly as soon as Tom released him. ‘Heavy tidings.’

  ‘Are they for me?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Then if they are mine, give them to me. Straight, man.’

  Hobbie Noble’s eyes met Tom’s, seemingly level for all that one man was wiry and bowed with age while the other stood youthfully tall. ‘It’s your brother, the Blacksmith of Bewcastle,’ he said, adding the unnecessary phrase of his title as a measure of great respect; for Tom had only one brother, John, two years his elder, and Hobbie Noble wasted nothing – certainly not words. ‘He’s dead.’

  Tom licked his lips. The news had shocked him though he had been half-expecting some such words since Thomas Walsingham had called him out of the hall. ‘Was it an accident?’ he asked. Smithing was by no means a safe trade, even for men as massive and expert as his brother and father had been.

  Hobbie’s head shook in that atom of communication which characterized that man.

  ‘A raid?’ – which was how his own mother had died, cut down by the red McGregors come reiving across the debatable land when Tom himself was scarce weaned; not killed but crippled then, doomed to linger for sixteen more years before winning her blessed relief. But Hobbie shook his head again.

  ‘Then what?’ demanded Tom.

  Hobbie’s eyes slid away. Tom looked, frowning across at the resplendent Lord Henry, who was, amongst other things, the Lord of the North, Her Majesty’s eyes on the Northern English Borders as they marched by southernmost Scotland.

  ‘Your uncle, who still signs himself the Lord of the Waste, I note, has written of the inquest he has held into the circumstances,’ said Lord Henry. ‘He reports that your brother’s body was found in the lower branches of the Great Oak that stands at the head of the Black Lyne. It is a dangerous river in a wild place, as I recall. You know it?’

  ‘And the tree, My Lord. It has stood there hard by Arthur’s Seat since the beginning of time. It must reach nigh on two hundred feet to the crown. The lowest branches must stand twelve feet above ground.’

  ‘Nigh on fifteen feet,’ agreed Hobbie.

  ‘Even so. Your brother was discovered dead on the lower branches, kneeling, looking downwards, frozen like marble.’

  ‘Frozen?’ echoed Tom. ‘He died of the cold?’

  ‘No. The Lord of the Waste reports that there is no doubt that he died of fear – of sheer, stark terror.’

  Tom laughed out loud at that. ‘There’s nothing in all the world would frighten John to death!’ he said. ‘What makes them think such a ridiculous thing?’

  A fifth figure leaned forward at that, a slight, dark-clad, gold-haired stripling lost in the shadows behind Lord Henry until this moment.

  ‘Something beyond the world,’ said a steady, cool voice. ‘Something came from another, hotter place altogether. Tell him, Hobbie.’

  ‘All around the trunk, the Great Oak was clawed,’ said Hobbie reluctantly. ‘From the grass, to near the branches themselves. The bark torn off and the live wood splintered, bleeding. Clawed like a great bear can claw a dog at the baiting. But clawed, as you said, for two full fathoms. For twelve sheer feet. And clawed clear to the heartwood beneath the blacksmith’s body.’

  ‘By a bear?’ said Tom, simply dazed. ‘Did you say a bear?’

  ‘No, lad. This was never the work of a bear.’

  ‘Then what? Hobbie, what was it?’

  ‘It was a hound, Tom. They were the marks of a monstrous hound.’

  The stripling youth stood up and closed with Tom then, and with another huge jolt of surprise he recognized her. No youth come south at Hobbie’s heels, but his own sister-in-law Eve – Eve Graham as was, when they had dallied on the heather fifteen summers since, before she had fallen in love with the slow, shy charm of his big brother, and begun the relationship that had driven Tom himself so far away from home. Eve Musgrave now, his brother John’s new-made widow.

  Eve’s still grey eyes held his gaze as fathomless as the Kielder water. ‘Don’t you see, Tom?’ she whispered. ‘It was a hound, but a hound such as no man can look on and survive. It was the Barguest, Tom. We know it now for certain, and rumour says he wasn’t the first to die. But he was the first we have found. And so it is certain now. The Barguest is out on the Borders and it has taken your brother’s
soul.’

  Two: The Lord of the North

  Ten minutes later Eve and Hobbie had gone about some undisclosed business, taking Thomas Walsingham as their guide and leaving Tom beard to beard with Lord Henry. Tom was still stunned by the awful news, but the effect of the shock on his unusual mind was to make his faculties even sharper, his logical acuity even greater. Around the awful void at the heart of his mind where his understanding of the world grappled with monster dogs the size of horses capable of reaching twelve feet up a tree and stealing away the soul of his brother, there was packed a glittering vortex of dazzling, blessedly distracting detail.

  Even in the absence of the other three the little chamber still felt crowded to Tom. Lord Henry was a big, powerful, virile man, the echo of his father – the limb of his half-sister, begotten by King Henry on Anne Boleyn’s sister, so they said, while his unfortunate queen was awaiting execution. He had lately mounted a mistress nearly forty years his junior, the lovely and multi-talented Amelia Lanyer.

  However, it was not Henry Carey’s personal power that seemed to fill the room so much as his political power as Lord Chamberlain, Lord Hunsdon and Lord of the North. The North had been his stamping ground since before the lovely mistress Amelia had been born. Tom’s first childhood experience of war had been the carnage Lord Henry had left all too near his home, keeping the northern Marches safe for his queen as Howard and Drake and the others had been hardily guarding the South.

  The shock of Hobbie’s news, and Eve’s dreadful suspicions, set the Master of Logic to working busily in Tom’s head, and his amazing power of reason was focused upon Lord Henry while the wise old courtier thought the matter through and framed his plans for Tom. Clearly there had been more in his uncle’s letter than the simple report of the blacksmith’s death, though that would have been enough to worry both men on several levels.