The Scottish Play Murder (17 page)

“What did you do with those notes? Why didn’t you burn them?”

The countess looked at her with an expression that said she wished she’d thought of that. She said simply, as if the answer should be obvious, “They were his.”

On the surface of it Suzanne could understand this wife’s loyalty, but on a deeper level she considered it stupid. Had it been herself she would have burned suspicious letters in an instant, and never mind sentimental value. Nevertheless she said, “I understand. Where are they now?”

“I slipped them under the mattress of my bed. My bedchamber is next to my husband’s, on the first floor above the ground.”

Suzanne stifled a sigh of impatience at how dull witted the aristocracy could be. Under the mattress. Nobody would think to look there. She said, “Let me intercept them.” She wanted her hands on those notes as if they were gold. She didn’t know how to read Greek, either, but she was certain she could translate these. When the countess nodded, Suzanne rose and left the room at a scurry.

It took a few minutes to find the bedchamber in question. She found the stairs and went up one floor, listened for noises from Pepper’s contingent of soldiers, and followed them to the bedchamber of the dead earl. That room had been well searched, and they were now in the room beyond it. The wardrobe was crowded with boxes, trunks, chests, and armoires, and would take a while to search.

Just short of the earl’s bedchamber was a smaller, closed room. Sparsely furnished for a woman so elaborately decorated in her person, it was nevertheless stylish and tasteful. Silk velvet bed curtains complemented the comforter and pillows. A small dressing table boasted a rather large gilt-framed mirror. Suzanne couldn’t help gawking at herself in it; she’d never seen all of herself at once in a mirror, and was stunned to learn she was as comely as everyone said she was. She’d grown up in a family that had impressed upon her all the failings of a homely woman, who had led her to believe she was no prize and would be lucky to attract even an adequate husband. Now she saw that “handsome” wasn’t such a bad thing, even for a woman.

She had to tear herself away from herself, and went to the bed to slip her hands beneath the mattress. There it was, right at the top on the side handy to the room. Exactly where the soldiers would have found it, within a moment of entering the place. She pulled out a bundle of notes tied with a thin red ribbon. It was thick, each letter folded into a self-contained packet. Without opening even one of them, she slipped the bundle into the pocket under her skirt, and hoped the bulge wasn’t visible.

One of the soldiers who had gone with Pepper came to the door. “Mistress Thornton.” She jumped, then turned to face him as she smoothed her skirt. He said, “Mistress Thornton, the constable wishes you to come to the wardrobe.”

“Yes. Certainly.” She went through to the wardrobe on the other side of the master’s bedchamber, and found Pepper standing in the midst of some mounds of shoes. Suzanne said, “Have you found something?”

“I think so. Have a glance, Mistress Thornton.” He bent to pick up one of the pairs of shoes at his feet, and held them in the light of a nearby window so she could see them well. They were fine satin dyed lavender, decorated with a large, floppy bow. The heels were frighteningly high, nearly as high as Suzanne’s most daring pair.

“Right,” she said. “Larchford was a fop. That was plain when we examined the body.”

“Look more closely.”

Suzanne leaned in, and saw it. A line of nearly-black brown along the bottom of the shoe, just above the sole. Blood. Her breath left her, and she struggled to gain it back.
Blood
. Breathlessly, she said, “Dear God in heaven. These shoes have taken a stroll through a puddle of blood.”

Of course. Suzanne set one of the shoes down on the floor next to her own. Larger, but with the same toe-heel pattern as hers. Exactly the same outline as the bloody footprints she’d seen in Angus’s rented room. She said to Pepper in a whisper, “Do you have the dagger with the blood on it?”

He looked around the room. Of course it had been returned to the widow with Larchford’s body, but . . .

“It was here a moment ago. I know I saw it.” He stepped over a mound of shoes on the floor, bent, and picked up the absurdly ornate dagger from atop a stack of clothing. “Here ’tis.” He handed it over to Suzanne.

She took it and unsheathed it to examine the blade. It hadn’t been cleaned, and still bore the dried blood they’d seen the day Larchford had died.

Pepper said, “You don’t suppose that’s simply Larchford’s blood on those shoes?”

“These aren’t the shoes he was wearing when he was killed. Those were gray calfskin. These are lavender silk. And the line of blood is even, all around the bottom. These shoes walked upright through a puddle.” She looked around at all the shoes lying about. “Where are the gray ones he wore when he died?”

Pepper took a glance at the floor, but said, “I haven’t found them. I expect they were buried with him.”

Suzanne uttered a crude word in frustration. “Well, I was going to compare the blood on them with that on these. I wouldn’t have expected to see a level blood line on those gray ones, because he wasn’t standing at the time. Knocked to the ground with one or two blows, the blood on the shoes would have been on the tops and sides rather than the soles. Here there is some on the top, but the bulk of it is on the bottoms. See, they’re soaked with it.” She held the soles up so Pepper could see the blood crusted around the sides where the shoe top met the sole.

Pepper reached over to urge her to lift the shoes for a better view, and he bent his head to consider them thoughtfully. “How do you know so much about how blood falls and where you would see it on a dead man’s shoe?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. It stands to reason, doesn’t it? Can you picture this line of blood on a shoe that had not stepped in a puddle of it? I certainly can’t. Unless you know of another recent murder where the killer walked through a puddle of blood and left prints, I think these are the shoes that made the footprints in Angus’s room.”

“You think he murdered your musician friend as well as the pirate?”

Suzanne nodded.

“Then who else was involved? Larchford didn’t bludgeon himself to death with a mace.”

Suzanne shrugged. “Then there was a fourth man who did.” She thought of Ramsay, but pushed the thought away. It had to have been someone else.

S
uzanne arrived back at the Globe barely in time to deposit the packet of messages on the desk in her bedchamber, then hurry upstairs to prepare for that afternoon’s performance of
Macbeth
. In the green room she sat at the makeup table to paint her face in the dark, defining shades that would make her features visible from the upper galleries. She was in a hurry but trying not to be, because making a mess of it would require taking it off and starting over. Peering at herself in the mirror shard, she thought of the enormous silvered mirror in Lady Larchford’s bedchamber and wondered whether she might ever be able to afford one such as that. Then she smiled at herself, pleased she’d come so far in the world as to even contemplate that sort of luxury.

Ramsay came into the room and sat next to her. He was even more tardy than she, and he dabbed the paint onto his cheeks with quick, deft strokes.

She glanced at him sideways, glad for the moment there was no large mirror for him to see her do it. She wondered whether he might actually be involved in Larchford’s murder. Even if he hadn’t done it, perhaps he knew or suspected who had. She asked herself why, if that were the case, he hadn’t said so, and answered her own question. There could be a number of reasons, depending on how involved he was with Santiago’s business and what, exactly, that business was. And who else was involved. So far all she knew was that Santiago was a Spanish sailor assumed to be a pirate. She knew there was at least one other man involved besides the three dead fellows, and that fourth man might possibly be Ramsay.

Then she considered the rumor that Ramsay might be the pretender from Edinburgh. Coming from that city at such a coincidental moment, calling himself Diarmid, having such a talent for presenting himself as someone else, and carrying a pricey ruby necklace . . . it all made her wonder as she finished painting her face.

That night’s performance was not as fine as the ones during the week they’d opened. Things went wrong that had never gone wrong before. Tonight Matthew seemed to have forgotten all his lines as if a whirlwind had dusted up between his ears and swept them all away. He paraphrased nearly everything he said, and that challenged everyone else to invent their own lines ad libitum for the sake of making sense with whatever he happened to say. Suzanne just knew old Willie Shakespeare must be restless in his grave.

The gunpowder used to cover the exit of the three weird sisters through the trapdoor was too much today, and set fire to the skirt of Third Sister. Tucker screamed hysterically as he went through the trap, a coincidentally womanish sound in his panic. Once in the cellarage beneath the stage, he rolled in the dirt and the others flogged the fire out with their cloaks. Far too late to not be noticed by the audience, one of them closed the trapdoor while the play proceeded above. Banquo said,
“Whither are they vanish’d?”

Ramsay as Macbeth sniffed the air, held his nose, and replied, “Into the air; and what seem’d corporeal has burnt to a cinder. Would they had stay’d, we might have had roast for supper.”

That brought an uproarious laugh from the audience and a sigh of relief from Suzanne, for blunders weren’t nearly so bad when they served to amuse the audience in a good way.

But then the young man playing the torch-bearing servant went missing just before Act II, leaving Ramsay to enter alone with no torch. A small annoyance, for the servant had no lines in that scene, but dramatically it made for a jarring transition from the exeunt of Banquo and Fleance to the pivotal dagger soliloquy in which Macbeth talks himself into doing the terrible deed. Suzanne, listening from behind the entrance doors upstage, flinched.

Aside from the logistical slipups, Ramsay’s portrayal of his character took on a directness today that caught Suzanne’s attention. During the final scene in Act I when Lady Macbeth urges her husband to murder, Ramsay looked into her eyes with a querying intensity. As if he were peering into her soul through its windows, and she felt laid bare. Almost violated. It forced her to shut them when she might not have otherwise. He distracted her in ways that were not helpful. It became a chore to focus, and she was forced to concentrate on remembering lines she should have been able to bring forth without effort. All in all, when the performance was over for the day, everyone let go a sigh of relief.

Afterward in the green room, Horatio burst through the door and boomed, wild eyed and hands gesticulating madly, “I knew it! ’Tis as I’ve said, there is naught but bad luck with this play!” A single forefinger thrust into the air in a gesture of
mark my words
. “We’re doomed! The curse is upon us!” Without waiting for reply, he turned and exited the room, and his wailing could be heard all the way out of the building.

Suzanne stared after him, and hoped nobody took him seriously. There was no comment from the other actors, so she thought it would amount to nothing. Then, in bright voice as if nothing had just happened, she invited Ramsay downstairs for supper. Though she would rather have been alone this evening for the sake of licking her wounds and salving her actress’s ego, she felt a need to talk to him. To feel him out about certain things, so that she might have a better idea of what to think. He accepted with a smile, and once they’d cleaned the paint from their faces he accompanied her down the stairs.

They were greeted at the door by the smell of roasting beef and fresh-baked bread. Ramsay took a deep breath as he entered the sitting room. “Ah! Sheila’s wonderful bread! I would be your friend if only for the sake of that!”

Suzanne chuckled, for though he was joking, she felt much the same way herself about Sheila’s cooking. She said, “Then you must be nice to me.”

Ramsay reached for her hand, and kissed the back of it in the Continental manner. “’Struth, I should treat you kindly regardless, good woman, for you are one of God’s comelier creatures and a treasure to behold.”

Suzanne laughed, flushed with pleasure, and gestured that he should take the guest seat at her small table. Supper was delicious. The beef was more tender than usual, and as always seasoned just the way Suzanne liked it. She’d become more accustomed to using a fork these days, and rather enjoyed eating greasy foods without making her fingers slippery with it. She noticed that Ramsay was quite skilled with his, and wondered how he’d learned that in Scotland. Though she’d never been there, she’d always thought of Scotland as a wild place filled with wolves and half-naked madmen who climbed about the granite mountains like goats.

She said, “Tell me, Diarmid, why have you come to England? You Scots are ever on about how wonderful Scotland is; I wonder why we ever see any of you here in the south.”

“Och, ’tis true,” he said. “Scotland is as bonny a place as anywhere on earth, and I miss it as I would a leg were it gone missing.”

“But you came here. From the Highlands, via Edinburgh, yes?”

“I’ve been to Edinburgh. Not so nice a place to live as Moray.”

“The Gordons are historically associated with that general area, are they not?”

Ramsay sat back to regard her. An odd light came into Ramsay’s eyes. He thought a moment, then took a deep breath and said, “Aye. There are a number of us there.”

A frisson of alarm skittered up her back at this revelation. “You’re a Gordon, then?”

“George Gordon led a good-sized and wealthy clan, and produced a large number of descendants. I happen to be one of them, on my mother’s side. Indeed, she went by Gordon until her death, even after her marriage to my father.”

“She was proud of her descent from the man who led an uprising against his queen?”

“Why, yes, of course. All her life she would tell anyone who would listen about her illustrious ancestor who tried to marry his son to the queen by force, and when Mary escaped his plan he very nearly had her kingdom by other means. She was a Gordon by blood and by spirit, and a Ramsay by aught but marriage.”

“So you were raised in the Highlands by a woman who prided herself in being a Highlander. How did you find yourself in Edinburgh, for all that?”

He leaned forward, his elbows on the table, and looked her in the eye. “Well, I’ll tell you. I left home to make my way in the south because our lands were taken from us by Cromwell. My father had died before the war, and my mother was killed by the Roundheads. My brothers fled to France and my sisters to convents and whorehouses in the south. I never knew whether they survived or if they were killed. I myself went to Edinburgh to make my way as best I could. There I found some distant relatives who helped me in small ways.”

“What did you do for a living there?”

There was another brief pause as Ramsay considered his reply. It was hard to tell if he was being disingenuous or merely circumspect. Finally he said, “I acted.”

“Theatre? During Cromwell’s rule?”

“Some types of performance were allowed. Small crowds, brief presentations. I learned the craft out of need.”

“You’ve a talent for it.” She wondered whether she was seeing an example of it at that moment.

“Aye, I do. I was well received among the players.”

“These players were the cousins you were talking about?”

A slight hesitation caught her attention and made her wonder. Then he said, “Yes. Cousins of my father, actually. They performed privately for parties of certain individuals whose cash resources were greater than their respect for Cromwell’s laws proscribing theatre.”

“You were able to perform in the open?”

Ramsay shrugged. “More or less. We played rather restricted versions of the most popular plays. Scenes from
Hamlet
and
Macbeth
, short bits that were more like a play about the play, or else a vignette or a single scene that could stand on its own.”

Suzanne thought how wonderful it would have been to have found a troupe during the interregnum that was free to work in the open. But she remembered her purpose in asking Ramsay to join her for supper. “Tell me, Ramsay, while you were in Edinburgh, you must have heard tell of that fellow who presented himself as one of your cousins and helped himself to some jewelry before he disappeared.”

Ramsay’s eyes narrowed, and he shifted his seat in what appeared irritation, but Suzanne couldn’t imagine what about the thing she’d said might have irritated him. Unless she’d struck close to a bone of some sort, though she also didn’t want to know what bone that might have been. He said, “No, I can’t say as I’ve heard about any such fellow.” His tone told her he was a liar. Nothing about that sentence was true. He absolutely had knowledge of the pretender in Edinburgh; Suzanne was sure of it.

“You haven’t? Surely you must have heard of what happened. ’Tis rumored even here in London; it’s puzzling that you could have missed hearing it in the city where it happened.”

He adjusted his seat once more, and leaned forward to rest his elbows on the table and look directly into her eyes. “Tell me what is rumored in London. I’m interested in hearing what the English have to say about Scotland; it’s fair amusing, they so often get it so very wrong.”

It was Suzanne’s turn to shift in her seat and lean back, away from him. Whatever she said at this point would be challenged in some way. But she folded her hands in her lap and told the story she’d heard from Daniel, and she told it as if it were nothing more than a bit of juicy gossip. “Well, what I heard is that a fellow calling himself Diarmid Gordon appeared out of nowhere, with a story about being descended from George Gordon, clan chieftain and traitor to Queen Mary of Scotland.”

“There are a great many of us descended from auld George. ’Tis strong blood, in spite of our stained history. A great many forced marriages, don’t ye ken.” He winked at her and grinned.

Suzanne wasn’t certain how to take that, and had to clear her throat as it tightened. “Right. In any case, this Gordon fellow imposed on everyone he could charm, and apparently was well liked by the wives of all that nobility, for he managed to lay hands on several very rich pieces of jewelry. Then he absconded and hasn’t been seen since.”

Ramsay laughed, but not with the sort of surprise usually heard in response to an amusing story. Again Suzanne had the feeling he’d known what she was about to say. He said, “And where do they think he went?”

Suzanne shrugged. “I surely cannot say. I would expect he’d fled to France, like every other criminal with a need to leave the country.”

“I’m sure the French would rather the English and Scottish all just stayed on our island. I’m told they have no great love for us there. Even Catholic royalty in fear for their heads have to beg for alms when they flee to the Continent. It’s positively degrading.” He sounded as if this had crossed his mind often.

“So . . . you think such a criminal may have gone elsewhere for not wanting to upset the French? How terribly considerate of him.”

Ramsay chuckled in genuine amusement.

Suzanne changed the subject, though in her mind it was not different at all. “’Twas a terrible thing happened to the Earl of Larchford, wouldn’t you say?”

“Oh, aye. Terrible indeed. A messy death, and to no purpose. To be bludgeoned in battle is honorable; to be laid low from behind by a coward must carry into the next life as shameful. A waste.”