The Scottish Play Murder (15 page)

Injury showed in his eyes. She’d touched a nerve. More than touched; she’d bruised it badly. “I do care for you. You’re my mother, and you’ve done everything for me. I should never want to hurt you.”

“Then let me live the rest of my life as I please.”

“That Ramsay will hurt you. I couldn’t bear to watch it.”

“He won’t, Piers. I won’t let him. I didn’t let William hurt me, nor any of the other men I knew after your father. If you want to protect me from someone, look to your father. He’s hurt me more than anyone ever has.”

A puzzled look came over Piers’s face. “Yes, he abandoned us.” It was a question, asking if there were something else Daniel had done.

“After I ran away from my father’s house, I thought he would care for us. I wanted him more than I wanted a stable marriage. I trusted him because I loved him so much. I cared for him almost as much as I do you. And now I feel as if I’ve got a barb in my chest I can’t remove.” As she said those words, she realized she’d never admitted that before, even to herself. As angry as she’d been with Daniel for denying her and Piers, the betrayed love had been an extraordinary pain impossible to ignore. Suddenly her throat closed and she couldn’t say any more. She pressed her lips together and sat back, her hands limp in her lap. She gazed at Piers, who looked so much like his father, and she realized that every day since his birth he’d presented the image of Daniel to her. And she’d been tortured by it, knowing she would never be a part of his life, and knowing she would never find a husband of any kind because of him.

She leaned forward and gripped her knees. “Piers, I understand your concern. I am glad you care enough for me to want to keep me away from someone you think is harmful. But I must also do what I think is best. Ramsay has done nothing to make me think he isn’t a good man.”

Piers opened his mouth to argue, but she hurried to qualify. “A good man at heart.”

“Very well. But I’ll be watching him, lest he misbehave in any way.”

Suzanne sat up and sighed. In her experience, everyone misbehaved eventually.

*

T
HAT
night before bed, as usual Suzanne took a candle to her desk table in the alcove to work at her writing. First she composed a short reply to a message from Stephen Farthingworth, who had been Piers’s master during his apprenticeship. Stephen, who lived in Newcastle, had heard about her new theatre and was asking about it, wishing her well. She replied with her thanks and some details about the new venture and Piers’s involvement. Short, polite, and proper.

That finished, sealed, and set aside, she fingered some pages of a play she had begun. She had mixed feelings about the thing, which was her first attempt at putting a story to paper. She’d memorized her share of dialogue, and understood how a play should be constructed, but the situation was entirely different when taking a story from scratch and deciding what should happen on the stage and how. The play interested her, but it was yet unformed. She knew there needed to be more to it, but wasn’t sure what was missing. Further, she wasn’t sure whether to continue writing it for presentation on her own stage, or try it with the French staging. Imagining how her drama would look behind the new arch that framed the unmovable set was just not possible. It was too strange for her. So she set the manuscript aside and reached into the pocket of her doublet draped across the foot of her bed for the folded note written by Larchford.

Daniel had said it was in Larchford’s hand, and though his knowledge of handwriting was slim, he had also identified the paper as stationery made specially for the earl. The design was a source of humor among those who disliked him and thought his use of the fleur-de-lis pretentious.

The blood rose at the center was very dark now, brown and nearly black. But she could still see the writing beneath it. The note said:

And at the bottom of the paper, just over the gilt design, were the numerals 1 and 3.

It appeared to be nothing more than a string of random characters. Meaningless. But it had to mean something. Somebody wrote it, to be read by someone else. Furthermore, it was important enough to have been encoded. Shopping lists were rarely converted to code for secrecy.

Suzanne stared at it. Her gaze ran over each line, as if the words were there and all she needed was to know how to read them. For several minutes she stared, until she was nearly in a trance. Her eyes went unfocused, and she saw a pattern in the strings of characters. The letters were mixed with non-letter symbols. None of them made sense in context, but she noticed that while there might be several letters in a row, there was never more than one symbol in a row. In her gaze, the symbols began to stand out from the letters. Punctuating them, dividing them into . . . words.

Excitement rose as she grabbed a quill from the wooden cup she kept, trimmed it with a knife, and dipped it into her inkwell. On a fresh sheet of paper she copied the letters in the note, leaving spaces instead of the symbols. Now she had something that looked like a note with words. Only the words made no sense. As if the letters were out of order.

HC RWSUC GOBHWOUC XOAOWQO

W KWZZ BCH PCK HC SLHCFHWCB QCBHWBIS OG PSTCFS CF MCI KWZZ TOQS OFFSGH W YBCK VCK HC RSOZ KWHV PZOQYUIOFRG GIQV OG MCI

She tried moving the letters around within their clusters, but came up still with gibberish. Not enough vowels. She stared some more, hoping a pattern would show itself within the words. She looked from word to word, seeking similarities. Then she saw it: Some of the words were identical. “OG,” “HC,” and “MCI” plainly were commonly used words. She considered which might be the most common three-letter words, and thought “the.” So she wrote above each “MCI” the letters “THE.” But replacing all the Ms with Ts, the Cs with Hs and Is with Es resulted in more gibberish. So she crossed all that out.

Then she thought the short line at the top might be a salutation. If this were a letter to someone, the most common three-letter word might be “you.” So she replaced “MCI” with “YOU” and the result was:

H
O
RWSU
O
GOBHWOU
O
XOAOWQO

W KWZZ B
O
H P
O
K H
O
SLH
O
FHW
O
B Q
O
BHW B
U
S OG PST
O
FS
O
F
YOU
KWZZ TOQS OFFSGH W YB
O
K V
O
K H
O
RSOZ KWHV PZOQYU
U
OFRG G
U
QV OG
YOU

More excitement rose as more words presented themselves. The first two-letter word, in the likely salutation, became “TO,” which gave her all the Hs. She realized that in a message the single-letter words might be “I.” So she replaced the two lone Ws, and the note became less gibberish. English words began to form. Solutions to ever more words presented themselves. The two-letter words she now knew started with O must not end in F if the original Fs must be replaced. Those became “OR,” which gave her all the Fs and they became Rs. Two spots had the same double letters, so she tried the commonly doubled L there and it worked well. That word became “WILL,” and that gave her all the Ks, which became Ws. At that point words began to present themselves. V became H, B became N, L became X, P became B, and so on.

TO
R
I
SU
O
GO
NTI
OU
O
XOAO
I
QO

I WILL NOT BOW TO SXTORTION QONTINUS OG BSTORS OR YOU WILL TOQS ORRSGT I YNOW HOW TO RSOL WITH BLOQYUUORRG GUQH OG YOU

But still there were too many letters missing. She made some more guesses at the most common letters. So many Ss suggested Es, and the remaining two-letter words became “AS.” That gave her all the Os, and they became A.

TO RIEUO SANTIAUO XAAAIQA

I WILL NOT BOW TO EXTORTION QONTINUE AS BETORE OR YOU WILL TAQE ARREST I YNOW HOW TO REAL WITH BLAQYUUARRS SUQH AS YOU

As the message came clear, Suzanne found herself breathless. Quickly she wrote the alphabet in order, then below it wrote the corresponding letters of the code and found they were all in order. She filled in the rest of the letters easily, and finished decoding the message:

TO DIEGO SANTIAGO JAMAICA

I WILL NOT BOW TO EXTORTION CONTINUE AS BEFORE OR YOU WILL FACE ARREST I KNOW HOW TO DEAL WITH BLACKGUARDS SUCH AS YOU

Heart pounding, Suzanne sat back and realized what she had. Proof of a connection between Henry, Earl of Larchford, and the Spanish pirate Diego Santiago.

But what could it mean?

I
t was far too late in the evening to find Constable Pepper in his office, and Suzanne hadn’t the faintest idea where to find him at home. So she tucked Larchford’s note and her translation beneath the wooden cup on her desk and dressed for bed. First thing in the morning she would take it to Pepper.

The next morning the weather had turned cold, and the light flurry of late November snow in the wind bit her nose on her way through the streets of Southwark. When she arrived at the constable’s offices they were empty and locked. She chastised herself for forgetting that Pepper was lazy and would never come so early as this. She made an about-face to return to the Globe, then stopped as she realized how much she wanted to discuss this note with Pepper, and that once she arrived back at the theatre she would have to wait for nearly two hours for rehearsal to begin. There was nothing better to do than wait, so she decided to stay.

She stood outside in the street, and waited. She pulled her cloak tightly around her and held her back to it, with her hands tucked into a woolen muff, remembering times when she hadn’t had even a cloak against the cold. The memory made her even more uncomfortable than the cold itself. But she stayed. She found a spot against the building where the wind wasn’t quite so strong, and huddled into it. And she waited.

Nearly an hour later she spotted the constable turning a corner one street away, and approached him in a hurry, her numbed hands in the muff held hard against her stomach. She made a mental note of which direction his home must be. Knowing Pepper, and knowing the whole of Southwark, she might even have guessed which street he lived in.

“Constable Pepper!”

He pretended to not hear her, or perhaps was simply ignoring her.

“Constable!” She raised a hand to catch his attention.

Now he heard, and attended as she closed to speaking distance. “What brings you out in this diabolical weather, Mistress Thornton? ’Tis awfully silly of you. I can’t imagine anyone braving this cold who didn’t have to. I myself wouldn’t be here, did I not have urgent business in my office.” He strode past her without slowing, his pink hand pressing his hat to his head, lest it fly away. The plume in it whipped out before him like a torn sail as he hurried toward the office where there would be shelter and heat.

She turned and hurried after him, and her own hat tried to leave her head. She held it down with one hand, though she hated to let that hand out of her muff. “Constable, I’ve broken the code.”

“What code?”

“That note. The one we found in Larchford’s pocket.”

He gazed, unfocused, at the ground before him for a moment, then it all cleared. “Ah! Yes! The note. Good. Come with me and I’ll look at it.” He hurried onward, and she ran to keep up with him. Her numbed fingers made her happy to follow him indoors.

Once inside the office, he rummaged a little to sort out the hearth and build a fire. Suzanne noticed the absence of his clerk. “Where’s your man today?”

Pepper looked around, slightly puzzled, as if he’d thought the young fellow was there, then shrugged and returned to his task. “I cannot expect anyone to come out in this chill.” His tone was as if she should have known this already. “Surely your theatre won’t be performing today.”

Her theatre performed every day, so long as the audience could see the stage. The Globe’s high, circular galleries kept out all but the worst winds, and braziers every few yards warded off the cold. The galleries being covered, only the actors and the groundlings ever were rained on, and a scarce sprinkling of snowflakes such as today was of no concern to anyone. Today there wouldn’t be many in the audience, but by God there would be a performance. But Suzanne didn’t reply, and took a seat near Pepper’s desk. Once the fire was going, the constable collected his brandy and glass from their shelf then sat in his chair. He didn’t offer a drink to Suzanne, and she wondered whether it was because she was female, or an inferior. Perhaps it might be a little of both. She didn’t care for one in any case, for it was far too early to drink, even for a worn-out tart.

She said as he settled himself, “I’ve made a connection between Larchford and the Spaniard.” She reached into a pocket for the paper she’d written on the night before, unfolded it, and set it on the desk before the constable. He took a sip of his brandy, smacked his lips, and reached for the paper to have a closer look.

Suzanne said, “It was a code where each letter of the alphabet was replaced by another. Once I realized that, it was fairly simple to work out which letter was which.”

Pepper grunted, took another sip of brandy, and smacked his lips again as he read. “Extortion? Someone was threatening Larchford?”

“Apparently. From the tone of it, I’m guessing it was Santiago. This is a letter from Larchford to Santiago, calling him a ‘blackguard.’”

“Well, he had that right. How do you know Larchford wrote it?”

“I have it on good authority this is his hand. Also, the stationery is his.”

“Why was the note on Larchford’s person, then, if he sent it?”

“Perhaps he never had the opportunity? Santiago died before it could be sent?” But she shook her head. “No, that doesn’t make sense. He would have had to have carried it about in his jacket for a number of days, then.”

Pepper shrugged. “He left it in his jacket pocket and forgot it, I suppose. I myself do that with astonishing frequency.”

Not so very astonishing, in Suzanne’s estimation. She said, “Very well, then. He wrote it, put it in his pocket, and was going to do what with it? Deliver it himself? What was it doing in his pocket? Who would write a coded message if he was going to meet directly with the addressee?”

Pepper grunted. “I see your point. So . . . what, then?”

Suzanne thought for a moment, but nothing came to mind. She sat back and folded her hands on her lap over the muff. The room was beginning to warm, and the relative comfort helped her think. “All right, let us work out what we know. We know Larchford did some sort of business with the pirate. Probably illicit business, pirates being who they are and all.”

Pepper nodded in all seriousness, and missed the dry humor in her words. She continued. “We know that Angus knew Santiago and Santiago knew Larchford, but we don’t know whether Larchford knew Angus. We know that Ramsay knew Santiago and Angus both as well, but we have no reason to believe he also knew—or ever met—Larchford.”

“Right.”

“But we know Ramsay did
not
kill Angus, because he couldn’t have made the footprints in Angus’s room. And of course Santiago didn’t kill him, because he was dead at the time. We have no reason to believe Larchford killed him, either.”

“Right.”

“And Larchford certainly didn’t kill himself, and neither did Santiago nor Angus, because they were already dead.”

“Right.”

“So there is someone else involved. Maybe more than one person.”

“Possibly.” At this point Pepper was along for the ride, contributing nothing. But Suzanne kept on, hoping that talking to Pepper would help her keep it all straight in her head.

“But as for Santiago’s death, we know Larchford was angry with Santiago and threatened him with arrest. It would also appear that Santiago had threatened him with something, since the note referred to ‘extortion.’ If Larchford was in league with a pirate, I might guess that he was threatened with exposure. There is very little else that a man like Santiago would have over an earl.”

Pepper shook his head. “But why would a man like Larchford ever wish to have dealings with a pirate?”

“You saw his dress and accoutrements. You know he lives more richly than his rank and holdings should allow. Illicit gains are terribly tempting, particularly for those whose existence hangs on impressing wealthy people. I believe we’re interpreting this note adequately. Larchford was in league with a pirate, and they had a falling-out.”

“Right.”

“So . . . we need to learn where Larchford was the night Santiago was killed.”

Pepper’s face went slack with surprise. “You think the pirate was killed by a nobleman? I can’t imagine such a thing!”

Suzanne bit back an irritable comment about Pepper’s chronic lack of imagination. Instead she said, “The message indicates there was quite a bit of bad blood between Larchford and Santiago. If Santiago threatened Larchford with exposure, that would be ample impetus for murder.”

“Why would the pirate have threatened Larchford? Surely he would realize a member of the peerage could not fear him.”

Suzanne shrugged. “For whatever reason, it’s apparent by this message that Larchford was threatened by Santiago. I believe he was far better motivated to murder than Ramsay, and you were quick enough to want Ramsay for it last night.”

Pepper nodded. “Right. So how does one prove it?” The constable had never been one to be a stickler for proof, having little vested interest in a case once it went to trial, and Suzanne guessed he’d been told by the crown that he needed to present a solid case for the conviction of whomever he arrested in this. Surely lack of proof was the only reason he’d let Ramsay go last night.

She said, “Hm. As I said, we’ll need to find out where he was when Santiago was murdered.”

“How does this help us learn who killed Larchford?”

“Well, anything we can find out about Larchford’s business with Santiago will lead us to others involved in that business, and I’m convinced Larchford was murdered for his dealings with Santiago’s associates.”

“Such as your musician friend.”

“Angus didn’t kill Larchford. He was as dead as Santiago that night.”

“Right. So we need to find out who else was involved with the pirate and his friends, and so want to know where he was the night Santiago died. Who alive would be able to tell us?”

“His family might be a place to start asking questions. If I recall correctly, he’s a wife and several small children. Whether he spent his evenings at home is at question, and his wife could at least answer that if she’s a mind to. She might even be able to tell us something about his business affairs. She might even know something about his dealings with Santiago.”

“We won’t get much out of her on any subject if that’s the case. She’ll want any such details to stay hidden and won’t care much who killed him so long as she gets to keep her wealth and title.”

“The solution, then, would be for me to go talk to her myself. Woman to woman.”

“Whore to wife, you mean. I daresay she’ll think you’re a mistress after her husband’s money, or threatening his reputation, and by extension hers.”

“I think I can convince her otherwise.”

“I’ve got a guinea says you won’t.”

Suzanne sat up rod straight and raised her chin. “I’m an actress. I can convince anybody of anything I wish.”

Pepper smiled, possibly for the first time since they’d met. It didn’t suit him well. He said, “A guinea. Have we got a bet, then?”

She thought a moment, and gazed at Pepper’s flabby, pale face. Was he trying to be friends? Did she dare let him try, or might that bring trouble down the road? Or perhaps he was simply unaware how others perceived him? Maybe he thought she wanted friendship from him and he was being magnanimous. There was no telling with him. Finally she nodded. “A bet. I’ll have Daniel provide me with a letter of introduction, then have a visit with Larchford’s widow.”

Pepper laughed. “Oh, to be a fly on the wall of that tête-à-tête! I vow, you should never mind asking Throckmorton for a letter, and take along the king’s soldiers instead. That will be all the introduction you’ll need, and the dowager countess will give you her undivided attention and all the truth you can bear. I swear it.”

“No need for you to swear, Constable. And I have no desire to browbeat or threaten. And perhaps the crown might think hard on that subject as well. Even we commoners should be entitled to live our lives without the threat of arrest at the whim of the crown, don’t you think?”

Pepper emitted a low, guttural growl that may have been a
harrumph
of some sort. “I think that my job is to learn the truth of things others would keep secret, and any tool at my disposal that enables me to accomplish that is to the good.”

“Even though you yourself are a commoner and would suffer greatly if any nobleman took it into his head to accuse you, however innocent you may be?”

“Even though. And that is why one is wise to treat the nobility with every politeness possible. Don’t you think?”

Suzanne considered her past with Daniel, and only gave a tiny smile in reply. Then she rose from her seat and said, “I’ll have a conference with the Dowager Countess of Larchford, and then we’ll see whether honey or vinegar is most helpful in catching flies.”

“Actually, I believe the best thing for catching flies is horse shit.”

*

A
T
dinner that day and without preamble, Suzanne asked Daniel for the letter of introduction. She needed to pursue information.

“Daniel, my good friend, I’ve a favor to ask, if I may. I need a letter of introduction to the Dowager Countess of Larchford, if you would, please.” Her tone was casual, as if she were asking him to pass the salt.