The Twelfth Night Murder (6 page)

The old woman shrugged. “I cannot say, but the risk is there. I can say it may or may not be by those close to you. That is not in the chart.”

“How did you know I was beaten by someone close to me?”

Esmeralda had to think over the answer to that question, her palms against the paper in her lap and her eyes cast upward. Then she drew a deep breath, looked over at Suzanne, and said in an utterly straightforward tone, “Who else? You were not raised in Southwark, that is plain. You lived as a middle-class woman, with middle-class manners. The roughness you present as one who manages a troupe of actors—and as an actress yourself—is learned. I didn’t need to see your chart to observe that. I must assume that if you lived with violence in your childhood, it was at the hands of someone close. The logical assumption is that it was your father. Am I correct?”

Suzanne had always thought herself a skilled observer of behavior, but found herself awed by this woman. She didn’t wish to answer, for the assessment was quite correct. She shifted in her seat and reached again for her chocolate. Another sip of that soothed her, and she replied, “Yes.” That was as much as she would confess, and she said, “Please, continue with the matter at hand. What of the boy?”

“Have we a natal date for him?”

“We haven’t even a name for him. I was hoping you might give me some indication as to where to look for that.”

“In your chart? That question would be more specific than is truly possible. God hides certain things even from those of us able to read the stars.”

In spite of her current frustration, Suzanne thought that might be a very good thing. She said, “Well, then is there an indication of what the influences will be for me during the next month or so? Perhaps that would give me an idea of where to begin my investigation.”

Esmeralda nodded once to confirm she understood, then leapt to her feet in search of another book. It happened to be at the top of a nearby stack. Paging through it, she sat back down next to the paper with Suzanne’s chart, and quickly came to the page she sought. “Very well, then. We have . . .”—she made a humming noise and muttered to herself—“. . . Mercury retrograde . . . no . . . Neptune . . . no . . . riches.” She slapped a palm against the page. “Ah. I see you will come into the presence of money. Great wealth. Are you expecting to gain an inheritance or a windfall of any kind?”

Suzanne shook her head, though her heart skipped at the thought of suddenly gaining great wealth.

“Then you will be in the presence of someone else’s wealth.”

That was nothing particularly noteworthy. She saw Daniel often, and he had more than a few guineas to his name these days. He was an earl, after all, and well aligned with the king. “More than usual?”

“Enormous wealth. Refined folk. Very much more than what you might be accustomed to. Very proper people.”

“Proper people would be something new to me, to be sure.” During her years as a tart she serviced a great many members of the peerage, and none of them had ever struck her as having any better moral sense than a jackal.

“There you have it. Look to the ruling classes in your quest for the identity of the boy.”

“Thank you, Esmeralda. I hope this steers me in the right direction.” Suzanne drained the last sip of chocolate from her cup, then rose. The old woman set aside the book and the chart, and rose also.

“Best of luck with all this. Do beware of the violent men.”

“Always, I assure you. Good day, mistress.”

Once again in Thread Needle Street, Suzanne fell into deep thought about the boy and what Esmeralda had said. Ruling class. Perhaps she was right. The child had certainly been beautiful. Besides comely features, he had an air of sureness about him that bespoke a privileged background. His manners had been smooth. Cultured, not learned. Surely the old woman had been right. Suzanne would need to ask Daniel about this. And wouldn’t that be a study in frustration, to get him to help her with a task he didn’t want her to do in the first place?

She stopped walking, and looked at where she was, as she realized she hadn’t cut across Cornhill Street as she should have to head home. She stood in Bishopsgate Street, where it crossed Thread Needle. A turn to the right would take her in the correct direction, back across the river, and her detour would only have been a slight one, but to the left she realized she was not very far from Dunning’s Alley, where she’d grown up. She’d not been there since she’d left at the age of seventeen. It was the only place in London she dared not go, and until today she’d always made great detours to avoid this section of Bishopsgate.

For a long moment she considered her route. South toward the bridge, home. North and not very far, the home she’d fled. She gazed northward along the bustling throughway thronging with pedestrians, carts, sedan chairs, and carriages. The words of the old woman returned to her. Esmeralda had known there was violence in her past. It wasn’t an uncommon thing, but nobody else had ever brought it up to her before, because it was so common among the people she knew. Nobody thought it all that noteworthy, and they all got on with their lives, as did she. She’d thought she had forgotten those days, first in the scramble for survival and more recently in the peace that was her new life in the theatre, but now memories swarmed over her like bees. She wanted to run away from those sharp, painful thoughts.

At the same time curiosity leapt into flame from the embers in her heart. It had been twenty years since she’d seen that house or anyone in it. Nobody had ever come looking for her. Nobody had ever tried to speak to her again. She wondered who of them might still be alive. Two older brothers, two younger sisters. Mother. And the father who had never valued her, for being a girl.

Her chest tightened, and she took a step to the north. What if she went there? What would she find? She took another step. Would anyone still be there? Her oldest brother, Benjamin, more than likely. Would Father or Mother still be alive? The more she wondered the more surely her feet moved her toward her old home, and soon she was walking as if she’d meant to go there all along.

Dunning’s Alley was more of a close than an alley. The narrow street led from Bishopsgate Street, back in among a row of narrow houses that, like most other houses built in the past two centuries, leaned out over the street for the sake of gaining space inside. A fairly good-sized close lay at the other end of the street, where four houses stood around a square in which a single tree grew. It was an oak, and hadn’t changed terribly much in the past twenty years. Perhaps a little taller, but it had been tall all her life. One torn limb stuck out, ragged, over the paved close. It looked like it had come off a few years before, and its raw end was dark and rotting.

Her father’s house stood on the north side of the close. Its door was blue now, rather than the brown it had been before, and may have been freshly painted. Or perhaps she just saw it that way since she’d expected the tired, old brown shade and the blue was far brighter. All in all, the place seemed cheerier than she remembered. There was a sharp twinge of envy, which she couldn’t explain. Envy for a house? She’d hated it as a child. This was a place where pain was an everyday thing, where nobody spoke unless spoken to, as if Father were the king in his domain. Nobody in the house, not even Benjamin, wanted to attract his attention, for it was never good.

Many women lived that way, but Suzanne knew not all, and she also knew it was not how she had ever wanted to exist. When she was old enough to understand that certain people did not have to fear being beaten, when Daniel had shown her that another sort of life was possible, she had determined for herself that she would get away from that man who had made her hate herself as much as he hated her.

She looked up at the windows, which were shuttered against the winter cold though there was little wind here in the close. She could remember playing under this tree as a child. Never climbing it, though she would have liked to follow her brothers up it and see the world from high in its branches. She thought they could see all of London from up there. Little girls weren’t supposed to climb trees, and she was told if she did so she would never find a husband. It was so terribly important to her father that she find a husband! All her life, everything she was taught or allowed was aimed at securing a husband and freeing her father from the burden of her upkeep.

The peek hole in the blue front door opened for a moment, then closed. The door then opened and a woman stepped into the frame to look out. “May I help you?”

Suzanne shook her head, then looked toward the alley exit, ready to flee rather than answer questions, but she hesitated. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. She turned to the woman and replied, “I’m sorry to bother you, but I am looking for a family named Thornton.”

The woman was young, perhaps a few years older than Piers, but not many. Her attire was plain brown without adornment, and that identified her as Puritan, or at least leaning in that direction. She said, “My father bought this house from Master Thornton nigh on ten years ago.”

“Jonathan Thornton?”

A shrug. “I truly cannot say.”

“An old man, or a younger one?” Suzanne wanted to know whether her father was still alive, or if the house had been bought from her brother.

Again, however, the young woman held up her palms. “I’m at a loss to help you, mistress. ’Twas nearly a decade ago, when I was only a girl, and I never saw those who lived here before. My father has since passed, and now I live here with my younger brother.” She was quick to add, “I’ll be married within the month.” Lest Suzanne think she was a spinster.

“I see.” Suzanne couldn’t tell why the lack of information disappointed her, except that it had been a hard decision to come here at all and now she had nothing to show for her effort.

“I can tell you he was a married man. Beyond that, I know nothing.”

Suzanne nodded her thanks, though the information told her nothing. Benjamin hadn’t been married when she left, but he could very well have been by the time the house was sold. And even had her father been alive to sell the house himself, it had been so long since then that he wasn’t necessarily still walking the earth. So she knew little more than she had before she came, beyond that her family had gone.

“Again, my apologies for the intrusion. I thank you for your help, and I wish you a good day.”

“God bless you, mistress. I hope you find what you seek.”

That took Suzanne aback somewhat. The kindness in the woman’s eyes spoke of a sympathy that was alien to Suzanne and not entirely appropriate to this encounter. As if the woman knew something she wasn’t telling. She said, “Thank you. Do you know what I seek?”

She shook her head. “You appear as if you’ve lost something very important to you.”

Sudden, irrational tears rose, and Suzanne swallowed them. What she’d come for couldn’t be so important. Letting it become important to her would be a disaster to the peace she’d found in her son and the life she’d carved for them both during the past two decades. She forced a smile. “Not so important, I think. But thank you for your help.” With that, she turned and headed quickly for the alley, lest the woman try to speak of it further.

S
uzanne didn’t relish the conversation she now needed to have with Daniel. He was her only connection to things upper-class, and though she’d once met the king, it had been through Daniel, and Charles was unlikely to remember her face even less than a year later. Daniel was her best hope to follow Esmeralda’s suggestion, but he was certain to balk at doing so. She decided to take a more conventional route to real evidence first.

It was possible the boy had been thrown from somewhere on the south end of the bridge, near the mill. If so, there was a good chance someone had seen it happen. She went there in hopes of finding someone who had seen something.

This process, surely, must be why Constable Pepper disliked his job so much. Though the law required that witnesses to crime step forward to give testimony and sometimes even apprehend the offender, and though most of London was populated by folks who thought it great fun to involve themselves and tell what they’d seen and heard, there were some crimes and criminals that struck fear in the heart of the average Londoner. Southwark was not like Whitefriars, where authorities feared to tread and nobody ever witnessed a crime. Folks in Southwark were as law-abiding as anyone could be living among the lower and working classes. But it was understood that one respected the privacy of one’s immediate neighbors, particularly if they qualified as friends, and one did well to fear anyone who would commit a murder.

At the bridge, Suzanne paused beneath the Southwark gatehouse and looked up at the heads on pikes above. There were a few belonging to those who had been recently executed for the murder of Charles I, in various stages of rot. One or two were nearly skulls, and showed grinning teeth, appearing utterly unrepentant and even a little arrogant in curled, decayed lip. One had tilted back on its spike and gazed sightlessly at heaven, and another had slumped forward, staring hard at the street as if judging each Londoner who passed beneath. Most of Southwark was unconcerned about the details of crown politics, and so Suzanne wasn’t sure exactly who these had been, but she figured they deserved what they’d received. In her opinion, regicide was an even worse crime than homicide, for it struck to the very heart of law and order. Killing a human being was terrible enough, but murdering the king brought war, disorder, and destruction to the entire kingdom. Furthermore, that particular war had taken Daniel from her. Her personal loss during the exile of the crown and the King’s Cavaliers was incalculable.

Suzanne proceeded onto the bridge and began looking about, assessing the people she saw and examining the layout of the buildings at the southern end to find a spot where the scenario of murder might have been played out.

The jumble of houses and shops lining the roadway was as disorganized as was the rest of London. Some of these buildings had been here since the end of the twelfth century, and like the rest of London they tended to reach out over the street farther with each successive storey upward. Since the nature of any bridge is that it is a throughway, a stream of traffic moved continuously amongst the buildings in both directions. Some vendors cried their wares, but the percentage of those who stopped to buy were fewer than elsewhere. Suzanne approached the side of the bridge to locate the mill, for that was where the archway through which the body had floated was located.

The mill didn’t seem much like one, since its wheel was well below the roadway and out of sight. The building appeared just as any other, and to know it was at work grinding wheat and barley corn into flour one had to go inside to find the turning stone. It wasn’t until Suzanne did so that she could hear the mechanism, for the commerce, the traffic, and the current of rushing water in the river below quite drowned it out. Workmen in plain linen aprons hurried about their jobs, their hair, clothing, and every exposed part of them heavily dusted with flour and crusted with dirt and chaff. Suzanne wondered why they bothered with the aprons.

A woman behind a table near the front filled small orders, took money, and made change. More than likely she was the proprietor’s wife, and by her air of authority Suzanne guessed she might be the one who truly ran the business, while her husband operated the millstone. The master would be deeper inside the workings of the place, supervising the grinding and bagging, and putting together the larger orders for transport to great houses, and smaller towns in the countryside. He would have less time than his wife, and possibly insufficient business experience to attend to the more delicate matters of dealing with the public.

Suzanne approached the proprietor’s wife, who greeted her with a wide, sunny smile and said, “Good day to ye, mistress!”

“Good day to you as well.”

“How much flour can I get for ye?” She absently swiped and slapped her clothing, as if suddenly aware she was covered in white powder. Everyone and everything here had a thick or thin dusting of it, and her apron was covered with dry flour as well as damp smears.

“I’m afraid I haven’t come for flour today.” Nor any day, for Sheila did all the cooking and procuring. It had been years since Suzanne had not had a cook, and even before that she’d also had no kitchen and bought most of her food prepared by street vendors. “I come to ask about a murder that happened near here three days ago.”

“Which murder? There’s been three nearby of late.” She spoke with confidence, as if she knew everything about all of them and only needed clarification so she could sort them out.

“A boy in a blue dress.”

The woman nodded in a
say no more
fashion. “Oh yes. That one. Everyone’s talking about the boy who drowned.”

Suzanne’s heart fell. Plainly this woman didn’t have the facts, and might tell her anything to appear in the know. But she pressed onward, in hopes of gleaning a tidbit that might shed light. “What do you know about him?”

“Oh yes, everything, I vow. We get the gossip in here, and so there’s nothing I can’t tell you about what happened. They found him just below the bridge, don’t you know. Caught up in the flotsams at the bank, he was. Floating facedown, they say. Wearing a dress prettier than mine.” She gestured to the flour-permeated linen work dress she wore, and her smile widened at her own jest.

“He drowned, you say?”

“He certainly did. They say he drowned when he fell over the side up thataway.” She now gestured toward the upstream side of the bridge. “He was pushed, they tell me. Right over the side, then
kerplunk
, straight into the water. Died instantly, they say.”

“I thought you said he drowned.”

“Right. He drowned instantly.”

Even had she not seen the stab wounds on the victim, Suzanne would not have thought it likely he’d simply been pushed over the side like that, and nobody drowns “instantly.” The few spots where throwing him over might have been possible had a wall high enough to make it difficult to shove an unconscious body into the river, and never mind tossing a kicking, screaming boy over it. “Who told you this?”

“Everybody knows it. ’Tis all over.”

Suzanne wished she could eradicate all information from the earth that was “common knowledge.” She replied, “So it was some patrons who came in here and told you this?”

The woman nodded.

“Do you know of anyone who saw it happen?”

She thought that over for a moment, then shook her head. “No. Like I said, everyone knows what happened. I figure the constable has got the culprit all locked up by now.”

It was easy for the public at large to assume things were being taken care of, and that everything they heard was truth, for their lives were narrow enough that most things in the world could be categorized as someone else’s job. Only those whose job it was to collect details and make sense of them cared whether what they heard was true and plausible. She said, “I’m afraid he doesn’t. I’ve been charged with collecting information about what happened. I wonder, is there anything you could tell me firsthand? Where were you that night? Could you have been here after midnight three days ago?”

The woman shook her head. “Afraid not, my dear. We close up at sunset. Lock this place up tight, we does, or the folks tramping this way and that over this here bridge would rob us blind.”

“You don’t have anyone to guard it? An apprentice, perhaps?”
Someone who might have witnessed something amiss?

“Nah, nobody. Our last apprentice worked out his contract, then went home to his family last summer. We’ve nobody since then to stay the night and watch over our wares.”

“So you don’t know exactly when or where the murder happened?”

The woman shook her head again.

“Do you know anyone who may have seen it happen?”

She thought a moment, her sunny smile disappearing into a rather folded-looking expression that made her face seem toothless, though it wasn’t. “Well,” she ventured slowly, “there’s a pie seller on the bridge who may have seen it. At least, he’s the one who first told me about it. He came in here, all excited-like, and told me the whole story.”

“Where is he today?”

The woman gestured vaguely to the north, farther across the bridge. “Just a bit up thataway. He’s always there, selling them pies. Good pies, they are. Makes them himself, and buys his flour here, he does, so I know he has a care for ingredients.” Suzanne thought she might know whom she meant, and they were excellent pies. Though she didn’t know his name, she’d seen him often in her frequent crossings and tasted his wares on occasion.

“Did he say he’d witnessed the incident?”

“No, but he had a lot to tell about it he’d heard elsewhere. I figure he knows something.”

Suzanne’s hopes were not high on that account, but she nevertheless bade the woman good day to go in search of the pie seller who might know something.

First she had a look at the two nearby spots on the bridge where only a wall stood between the street and a precipitous drop to the rushing water below. At the upstream side what she found discouraged the idea that the murder had occurred on the bridge at all. It was a corner where even in the daytime sunlight was scarce. Tucked away from the roadway, the place was dark at the moment, and at night would be pitch-black. She saw no sconces for torches, nor braziers of any kind.

It would be the perfect spot to kill someone, but only if one could see what one was doing. And not only was there no source of artificial light here, but she remembered the night of the murder had been so thickly overcast there was no possibility of even momentary moonlight. The buildings to the north and south of this spot were built with overhangs that at three stories blocked the sky in any case.

Then there was the wall itself. This bridge had taken decades to build during the late twelfth century, and though it was worn by hundreds of years of weather and calamity, it had been well maintained during its lifetime, and this wall was as solid as any in London. Furthermore, it was higher than she was tall. Not that she was so very tall, but even a large man would have had to struggle to throw a person—even a small, deceased person—over it.

She looked down at the stone beneath her feet, where the accumulation of rubbish and natural detritus was kept to a minimum by publicly paid bridge maintenance. Though there was some buildup of leaves blown from the shore and things dropped by people crossing the bridge, for the most part the area was clear. She looked for any indication of past violence, and found nothing to appear even suspicious. The stone was swept regularly, and drainage was not a problem here. The area was clean and dry, and though she found some very old stains, there was nothing to suggest anything untoward had happened here recently. No blood puddle, no bloody footprints, not even a footprint or scuff mark in the small amount of rubbish directly beneath the wall. Nothing on the wall, either. Nothing about this spot caught her eye to make her think there had been a struggle here.

She stood in the spot, like in an eddy away from the stream of bridge traffic, and the thing other folks called “intuition” did not tickle the back of her head as it might have. Nothing about this spot bothered her and made her want to ask questions.

A look at the other side of the bridge was equally fruitless, for there was no spot that gave public access to the bridge wall close enough to the bank as to let a dead body lodge where the boy had been found. The closest open wall on this side was well over the stiff current that would have carried anything dropped from it nearly out of London.

She sighed and moved farther onto the bridge.

The pie seller owned a cart he parked near the center of it. The cart held a large iron box with a drawer beneath where coals on a tray kept the box and its pies warm. The savory smell of them made her realize she’d missed eating dinner, and her stomach gurgled loudly enough for the pieman to hear.

“Ah, mistress! You sound as if you are in need of one of my fine pies! Come, have a taste! Only a single farthing! If you don’t think my pies are the best you’ve ever tasted, I will give you your money back.”

Suzanne knew his game. The sample pies for a farthing were small indeed, and very, very good. A full-sized pie cost more, and though they were also good they were not as tasty as the samples. Nevertheless, she bought a full-sized pork pie for three farthings and bit into it with relish. With the paper it came in, she wiped gravy from her lip and savored the meat and pastry as she chewed. As usual, there was perhaps a bit more gravy than necessary, and an excess of onions because onions were cheap, but the pie was hot, fresh, and well seasoned with salt and pepper. That she was hungry as well made it so much more delicious.