The Opening Night Murder (33 page)

He looked down at his arm as if he’d just then realized he’d been injured. “I…well, when I heard the verdict and the sentence, I’m afraid I didn’t take it very well. When I protested the trial was unfair, I rose from my seat and approached his honor the magistrate.”

“You rushed him and tried to shake some sense into him. I know you well, Piers.”

“I would have, had I reached him. As it was, the bailiff prevented me from it. Then he beat some sense into me. I am far wiser now than I was this morning.”

Suzanne laid her fingers aside his cheek to examine his split lip in the candlelight. “I came when I heard the verdict. And the sentence.”

He guided her to the chair, then sat on the edge of the bunk that contained a straw mattress and a wool blanket crusted with what may have been dried blood or vomit and was jumping with fleas. Seeing the look on her face, he fingered the blanket and said, “I’m told an anonymous person paid for me to have a more comfortable cell. I wonder what I would have had otherwise.”

“Anonymous?”

“Daniel, I suppose. Unless you’re as ashamed as he is to admit being my parent.”

Suzanne shook away that thought and continued, her urgency not to be denied, “You must recant your confession.”

“I killed him, Mother.” He glanced at the door, and she understood that the guards must be listening, and they would offer to the crown for sale anything they heard. What went unsaid by him was that he would not recant, in order to keep Pepper from arresting his mother.

But she shook her head and said, “You did not. I know you didn’t.”

“Of course I did. I hated him, I hated the way he treated you. You know that much is true; he was a horrible man and there’s no denying it. When he came around to threaten you, that was the last straw. Had I been there that night I would have throttled him with my bare hands.” He stood and crossed his arms over his chest again and held his chin up, daring her to contradict him. “I had to kill him. So I stole the crossbow from the green room—”

“You were never in the green room. You almost never go into the green room.”

He leaned toward her. “
I stole the crossbow
. Then I found him in the stage right gallery.”

“What made you think he was there?”

“I followed him.”

“From where? Had he been in the green room?”

Piers hesitated. All his life he had been no sort of liar, and was now no better at it than he had been as a child. He blinked, then continued with his original thread of story. “I followed him to the stage right gallery.”

“He was never there.”

Again Piers was thrown from his confession track. He backed up and went down it again. “I followed him to the stage right gallery, and shot him with the crossbow.”

“He fell from the roof.”

He glanced over at the door where the guard was eavesdropping, and his agitation grew. “Mother! I killed him, not you! You had nothing to do with it!”

“You’re right, I did have nothing to do with it. It was an accident. I can prove it.”

Piers’s face went slack once more. “What sort of proof?”
There was no belief in his face, only doubt and a conviction that she was making things up so he would recant.

“I found the crossbow on the roof. I also found blood splattered on the gutters.”

“That only means he wasn’t shot in the gallery.”

“This is how it happened, Piers.” She settled herself into the chair and placed her hands on the table near the candle, then took a moment to sort the facts in her mind. Carefully she began the story. “The crossbow was stolen from the green room, and I was told by Arturo—”

“The mummer?”

Suzanne nodded. “He said he’d seen William that night in the green room. He didn’t witness the theft, but he saw William was there.”

“Why didn’t anyone else see him?”

“Arturo was the only one in the room who would have recognized him. He, Louis, and Horatio are the only ones other than myself who have ever seen him, and the other two were already onstage at the time.”

Piers nodded in understanding.

Suzanne continued, “So, William stole the loaded crossbow. He took it upstairs and up the ladder to the storage room, and out the window to the roof.”

“Why?”

“To assassinate the king.”

Piers took a moment to absorb that. “The king? Charles was there?”

“He’d accompanied Daniel to see the play, incognito. They sat in the third floor gallery, directly over the entrance.”

“If he was on the roof, why didn’t they see him from where they were sitting?”

“For the same reason nobody knew William didn’t fall
from the gallery: Everyone who might have seen him was looking down at the stage. It stands to reason that William would have known that, and he thought he would get away with shooting the king by slipping away down the ladder from the storage room. Or even by hiding in the storage room until the danger was past and he could leave the premises at his leisure.

“In any case, he went to the roof, ready to kill Charles, and steadied himself on the sloping shingles with one foot on the rain gutter. But the gutter wasn’t strong enough to hold his weight. It broke. He fell, and as he fell, he dropped the loaded, cocked crossbow and twisted around in an attempt to grab the gutter behind him and stop his fall. The falling crossbow lodged in a crook of the downspout, which set off the trigger and loosed the bolt upward and into William’s throat. Blood sprayed over the gutter. Having been shot, he missed his grasp of the gutter and fell to the stage three stories below. Not quite dead yet, but he was finished off when someone pulled the bolt from his throat and he bled to death.”

Piers thought hard some more, then said, “You can prove this? How can you be certain he wasn’t followed from the green room to the roof instead of the gallery?”

“Two reasons. First, the angle of the wound was wrong for any scenario in which William was shot by anyone not directly above him. Since, by the splatters of blood, we know he was on the roof and not in the gallery below, we also know it is impossible for anyone to have shot him from above.

“In addition, I found the crossbow lodged in a spot where I had to hang over the eave of the roof to reach it. A murderer is unlikely to have stopped in his flight from the scene to oh-so-carefully hang over the eave and place the bow where I found it, thus risking someone looking up and seeing him
there. You’ll remember we all looked up in search of a murderer during those moments after William fell. Nobody saw anything, not even the crossbow, which was behind the downspout.”

Piers was silent, lost in thought. Finally he said, “You didn’t kill him, then?”

“Of course not. I would never kill anyone, though I’ve wanted to murder dozens in my time.”

Her son hesitated for a moment, then said, “I would. I would have killed him to save you, without a moment’s hesitation.”

Suzanne had mixed feelings about that—on one hand pleased her son cared for her, but also not liking the idea that he could do murder. Or even that he thought he could do it. She said, “But you didn’t. You must recant, Piers, or they will hang you.”

He slowly shook his head. “It’s too late, Mother. I’m convicted. They will hang me no matter what I say.”

S
uzanne stayed with Piers as long as she dared, but finally had to tear herself from him and ask to be returned to the keeper’s house and Horatio.

Immediately on arrival at the theatre Suzanne sent for Daniel, then waited by the fire, staring into it and praying he would heed her summons, terrified he might ignore her completely. Daniel was the only one who could help her now. He must. Her body ached with tension and terror. Piers in that horrible place was too much to bear, and every time she closed her eyes she was visited with a nightmare vision of him carried to the gallows in a cart, his hands tied and his neck bared for the stretching. She saw the terror in his eyes, and knew what it would be in his heart. It was her job to keep him safe, as it had been since the day he was born. If he died, her life would be over as well.

She wished she could go to Daniel at his house in Pall Mall. A part of her relished the idea of an ugly, theatrical scene in
front of his wife. Or even her brother. Surely that prospect would be sweet revenge for abandoning her. To have Anne and Piers punish him where Suzanne could not, and hand James the power to give Daniel grief with his wife and disgrace him in Parliament at every opportunity for the rest of his life.

But she refrained, for the same reason she hadn’t done any of that already: Making a further mess out of things just wouldn’t be helpful. Hurting Daniel for revenge wouldn’t save Piers. She needed better grace than that.

Daniel arrived quite late that evening—nearly midnight—in a timely manner but still in no particular hurry, and somewhat impatient at having been bothered to come. His attitude frightened her, for she had no power to save Piers and neither did anyone she knew except him. He was her only hope. But she took heart in that he did come and didn’t simply send a return message. Perhaps it meant he had a thought about how to proceed.

She presented him with the crossbow, holding it out to him laid across both hands. “Here is the crossbow that killed William, Daniel. When I tell you where I found it, you’ll know our son is not a murderer.”

Daniel gave the bow an unconcerned glance as he folded his gloves and tucked them into his belt. “I don’t think he’s a murderer. I think he’s protecting you. In fact, almost nobody actually thinks he did it, and nearly everyone knows he’s protecting you.”

She blinked and her jaw dropped. “You believe I did it?”

He grinned and handed his hat and cloak off to Sheila, then settled into the sofa and crossed his legs to be comfortable. “Of course not. I don’t know you all that well, but I know you well enough to be certain you haven’t a murderous bone in your body. But Pepper thinks you did it, and as stupid and
lazy as he is, he’s the one who matters in this. He would see you hung if he didn’t have Piers for it. He would rather see a man go to the gallows, because any woman, even a whore—”

“Former whore.”

He tilted his head side to side in equivocal agreement. “That may very well be, and I’m enchanted you’ve turned over a new leaf, but Pepper won’t ever see you that way. He neither knows nor cares whether you’re virgin or whore or my old Aunt Fanny. Regardless of how you make your money these days, or who might be welcome or unwelcome in your bed, Pepper would prefer to hang a man than a woman. Onlookers are far more accepting of a questionable hanging if it’s a man, and if he can get Piers executed, the case will be closed and stay closed. Pepper will then no longer fear questioning after the fact.”

She ignored his irrelevant point, for she had faith in the rightness of things and had evidence of the truth. All she needed was for Pepper or the king to know what she knew. She sat in a chair nearby and leaned forward in her excitement, her hands on her knees. “There will be no hanging. William’s death was an accident. What we need is for the right people to hear it.”

Daniel let out a bark of a laugh. “Oh, won’t Pepper be amused! What he’d said all along, and now it’s you saying it! Of course, it has nothing to do with wanting to get Piers off the hook. And now he’ll be ever so pleased to give you grief for making him actually investigate the mystery. Which, I suppose, may be why he picked you out of the crowd to take the blame in the first place. God knows it couldn’t have been because of the evidence he couldn’t be bothered to discover.”

She was frustrated with Daniel’s refusal to hear what she was telling him. “The death was an
accident
; I have proof.”

“What proof is that?” Daniel still sounded unimpressed.

“I found the crossbow lodged behind a downspout beneath the eave of the heavens. William was never in the gallery, as you said. He was shot when he fell and dropped the crossbow. It jarred when it hit the downspout, loosed the bolt, then it struck him in the throat before he toppled over the eave and landed on the stage.”

“You mean you wish to present one of your several crossbows as the murder weapon?”

Suzanne sat up, feeling as if he’d slapped her face. “Pardon me?”

“You’re Piers’s mother. And you’ve had days to think of a way to prove he didn’t do it. Far better that someone else had found the bow, other than you. Nobody will believe you.”

Suzanne’s face flushed hot red. She said, “There was blood splatter on the roof, just as you said there should be where William was murdered.”

“Sheep’s blood, then?”

Again Suzanne was caught up short. “You’re accusing me of manufacturing the evidence?”

“I’m only saying the things Pepper would tell you. He dislikes you, is naturally vindictive, is as lazy as the day is long, and is unlikely to simply swallow your story whole.”

“Then you must convince him of the truth.” She leaned forward in her urgency. “Pepper has got his conviction. The crown will hang Piers
tomorrow
if something isn’t done quickly!

That took the wind out of Daniel’s sails, and all breath left him. For a moment he appeared to struggle for words, then said, “So soon? He’s been convicted?”