Low Treason Read online

  Praise for Leonard Tourney’s previous Matthew Stock Mystery, The Players’ Boy is Dead

  “Marvelously readable . . . This detective story, written in the style of sixteenth-century England, is vividly evocative of its era.”

  People

  “Exceptional.”

  Washington Post

  “A truly original suspense novel set in Elizabethan England—a most satisfying story.”

  M.M. MacGiffin

  The Cleveland Plain Dealer

  Also by Leonard Tourney

  Published by Ballantine Books:

  THE BARTHOLOMEW FAIR MURDERS

  THE PLAYERS’ BOY IS DEAD

  LOW TREASON

  Leonard Tourney

  BALLANTINE BOOKS • NEW YORK

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  About the Author

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States of America by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published, in hardcover, by E.P. Dutton, Inc., in 1982.

  A portion of this story appeared in 1980-1981 Annual of the University of Tulsa as “The Devil Spoke English.”

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 82-9414

  ISBN 0-345-34368-9

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Ballantine Books Edition: March 1989

  One

  SINCE the first light of that day Thomas Ingram had avoided the high road that ran northeast from London. He had kept to himself, secure in the bristling hedges of haw-thome and oak, in the fringe of woods green and fecund to a madness, concealing himself from the curious gaze of wayfarers, the carters with their great heavy-laden rumbling wagons, the merchants and gentlemen on horseback or in coach. Now in the cool of the evening the traffic had almost disappeared. Travelers, fearful of the dark or worse, had fled to file inns or come wearily at last to their own hearths. A few straggling herdsmen sang to their cows or sheep, and a shirtless boy danced homeward between the holes and ruts, an old yellow dog snapping at his heels. Thomas reckoned he was now no more than an hour from Whitford. Once over the bridge there, he could cut across the fields and be in Chelmsford before dark.

  But he was not home yet. His bones and muscles ached, his stomach groaned. He had not eaten since early the day before, except for a loaf of brown bread and two apples he had bought from a street vendor with the last of his money. This was no fit meat for a man of sixteen, tall and sturdy of limb and on the verge of a beard. Thomas

  dreamed of some fleshy fowl well spiced and succulent, a slice of good cheese, or fresh white bread spread with butter and honey. His feet were sore, the soles of his shoes worn through.

  He tried to distract himself from his own misery and thought of his friends, but then realized there was little relief in that. It was better to think about the road, about the trees and the river ahead.

  But he thought of his friends just the same. Of Ralph Harbert. His friend’s face hovered before him like a spirit of the air—a pale, long face with heavy-lidded, somnolent eyes and a square chin made for honest dealings. Poor lovable Ralph, as innocent as a babe and with a heart the size of a muskmelon, overripe and ready to burst with its sweetness.

  He should have brought Ralph away with him, told him all. It had been a sin to leave him behind.

  Thomas moved cautiously through the tangle of trees, bushes, tall angular weeds thrusting upward like spears’ heads. His shirt clung to him, sticky with a week’s sweat and grime, its coarse fabric chafing his flesh. Here where he trod, in this rioting verdure, fugitive rabbits and wood mice had made their habitations—traps for the unwary. Here an ill-placed step could snap an ankle like a twig. He kept his eyes on his feet, taking a short cut across a pasture, away from the road and whoever kept watch there.

  He came to the end of the pasture, climbed a stone fence, and sat down to rest, leaning back against the stone. He watched while the shadows of the day lengthened. He thought of London again, the girl.

  He had said to her, Mary, you must come with me. This place, it’s ... it’s ... He had sought to fix in a word or phrase just what the city was. Not Sodom and Gomorrah. She would have mocked the phrase, blown away the words with a laugh that would have undermined his resolve and melted his heart with desire for her. She had said earnestly and in a tone he had found compelling: Anything is better than home. Whatever comes. And then, out of her pain, as though probing a still festering wound, My father, my father. Crazy with drink. A violent man. The house we

  lived in was no better than a sty. He would have sooner taken his pig indoors than his child. fled and never looked behind. Whatever comes.

  All his fears for her had been inarticulate, like an infant’s fit or sick man’s palsy. Dumb motion. She had laughed and looked upon him as though he were the innocent one, just come to town and all agog at some novelty he had seen at Smithfield.

  It had been no novelty, although when he spoke to her of what he had seen, what heard, she dismissed it all as though it were a fancy, an idle dream.

  Well, she knew her own mind, if not the City, not willing to forgo the dangers there for her father’s farm in Sussex, secure despite the filth and the old man’s violence. In his mind’s eye now he saw her face, her full lips and gray eyes, the fair complexion framed in honey curls. In London how long should such beauty last? Six months? A year? And that body, the long straight limbs, the delicate childlike hands? As safe from harm in London as fine glass in a tavern brawl.

  He heard the groan and rattle of wagons, the voices of the drivers, and he concealed himself in the green brake. Despite his care to go unobserved that day, he had occasionally surprised a shepherd or fanner at his work and become the object of their curiosity and perhaps fear. No one liked to meet a stranger in the woods or fields, especially one in a hurry and about no apparent business, when there was a broad straight road within a stone’s throw. Honest men kept to the road, traveled in pairs for safety’s sake. Nervous, unkempt Thomas Ingram looked too much what he was, a runaway, likely to turn beggar, thief, or worse, given the chance.

  The wagons rumbled past each pulled by six horses tied head to tail, swinging rhythmically with their dark rounded haunches and their heads lowered as though to drink up the dust. There were three wagons. Thomas counted them. The drivers’ voices grew indistinct. The wagons vanished into the dust.

  From his place of concealment, Thomas watched with glazed, hopeless eyes. He was sick inside now, feeling

  more pain in his heart than in his aching legs and feet. He knew he was fooling himself if he thought he would ever see the girl again. The city would swallow her up, swallow her up in the great maw of its corruption.

  Through the trees ahead of him the tower of the old stone church and the roofs of the scattering of cottages that was Whitford came into view. Woolly smoke curled into the dusky air, and in the distance he could hear the forlorn echo
of human voices and the sad lament of the village dogs. He could smell some householder’s supper, but he put the thought of food from his mind. He had no money in his pocket and no friends in Whitford. In Chelmsford he would find meat enough at his brother’s farm and safety, too, his brother’s father-in-law being constable of the place.

  He hurried across the bridge and into the village. A few dirty-faced children played in the road, pausing in their game to examine him with cold, hostile eyes as he passed. A pack of dogs lumbered around the comer of one of the houses, saw Thomas approaching them, and began to growl menacingly. Thomas looked at the dogs. They were lank and sickly creatures, living off the village scraps. He was afraid of them. They glared at him with their yellow eyes, their moist pink tongues lolling from their jaws, and then they rushed toward him, formed a circle and began to yelp and bark, lunging at his feet and leaping into the air threateningly.

  Thomas stopped in his tracks and quickly glanced about him for a stick or stone to beat them off. Seeming to sense this attempt at self-defense, the dogs grew more threatening. One tore at his hose and he felt a sharp jab of pain in his leg. The scent of blood excited the others. He was about to cry for help when a harsh masculine voice called out from a darkened doorway commanding the dogs to silence. They dropped their heads and mingled about in confusion for a few moments, then Thomas watched with relief as the pack trotted off obediently, as though they had been doing nothing more than sleeping in the sun. He turned in the direction from which the voice had come to thank his preserver, only to face a closed door of a shabby cottage. There was no one else in the street.

  The dog, he saw, had broken the flesh, but only slightly. There was merely a trace of blood on his hose and the pain was nothing he could not tolerate. He continued to the edge of the village, looking behind him once or twice to make sure the dogs were not following. He could see the pack in the distance. They had treed some other creature and were now busy at the foot of an oak, whining clamorously.

  The trees, tall and gloomy now, grew conspiratorially together and then suddenly parted to reveal the promise of a narrow path. This he took, lengthening his stride, satisfied that his journey was nearly at an end and that a halfhour more would bring him to his brother’s house, a warm supper, and a clean bed. He had not gone a furlong into the wood when he saw the men. They had stepped out suddenly from behind a tree and now blocked the path.

  “You take an odd way home, lad.’’

  The man who spoke was tall and thick with a flat, swarthy face and a fringe of ragged dark hair beneath his cap. He wore a dirty jerkin and in his hirsute hands he held a cudgel. Thomas thought the man looked familiar. The other man Thomas knew well enough.

  “Hello, Starkey.’’

  “Thomas.”

  The person Thomas Ingram addressed as Starkey stood with his hands folded behind his back like a schoolmaster. The men didn’t move; they kept their eyes fixed upon him as though they were waiting for an explanation of his presence there, as though it had been their half-acre he trod upon.

  “We watched you cross the bridge, then drew back to conduct our business with you privily,” said Starkey.

  “What business?” asked Thomas uncertainly.

  “I think you know very well,” said Starkey.

  Thomas took a step backward. The ground beneath him was hard and even, a well-worn path. It was so all the way to the village. In his mind’s eye he saw the path by which he had come and estimated the distance that lay between him and the village and the chance of his arriving there and securing help, but he thought, too, of the closed doors, the vicious dogs, and the unfriendly stares, and his heart sank. No, there would be no help for him in Whitford.

  “You’re not thinking of going back to London, are you, lad?” asked Starkey in a tone of exaggerated solicitude. “It’s much too late for that now, you know. You had your opportunity and a golden one it was, but you didn’t appreciate it. You were ungrateful, and if ingratitude is not one of the deadly sins then it should be. Some thought you ran off to sea or Smithfield. No, said I, not Thomas Ingram. Young Thomas will go home, as sure as heaven— or hell. We had naught to do but wait at the bridge until we saw you coming.”

  “I’ve quit, Starkey,” said Thomas, trying, vainly, to control the tremor in his voice.

  Starkey turned to his companion, the tall, thick man with the cudgel who had spoken but once and for the last few minutes had been staring at Thomas with the dull, passive expression of an ox. Starkey spoke in a low, mellifluous voice, the voice of a tempter. “Thomas wants us to let him be,” he said. “Now isn’t that a fine thing, him wanting us to let him be after all I’ve done for him?”

  The tall man smiled stupidly and began to swing his cudgel to and fro like a pendulum. Thomas eyed the cudgel and looked about him hurriedly for something to use in his own defense, but his eyes could focus on nothing clearly. It had grown quite dark in the woods.

  “What do you want of me?” he cried in what was more protest than question. But he waited for no answer. The words were no sooner past his lips than quicker than thought the boy whirled around and fled down the path. His movement must have surprised the men. For a moment they must have just stood there because for a dozen or so yards Thomas could hear nothing but his own breathing, the hectic patter of his feet on the path, and the breaking of the twigs and small branches that he pushed violently from before his face. But then he heard the men behind him. They were running, too, racing him to the bridge. In a fatal move, he turned his head to look behind him, glimpsed for a second the taller man in the lead, swinging the cudgel in the air, and then felt himself trip in the undergrowth. He went sprawling into a bed of moist leaves.

  He was nearly to his feet again when he felt the blow, not the cudgel but the body of his assailant, hard and heavy and harder for its being propelled through the dusky air. Its impetus hurled him to the earth again, and then they were struggling in the leaves and dirt, the two of them, man and boy, their arms and legs locked in a furious embrace, the man’s arms clenched about the boy’s chest, the boy’s hands pushing against the man’s shoulders. The man, sweating and grunting, had enormous strength and the cunning of an experienced fighter. He thrust upward with his knees, aiming for the groin. Thomas kept twisting, pushing, spitting out dirt and leaves, half blind with desperation and disgust, for they were face to face and the man’s breath was hot and sour. Then he did it, the boy. He suddenly ceased resisting, their bodies closed like lovers, and he bit deeply into the man’s face. There was a hoarse cry of rage, the taste of blood. Thomas tried again for the face, but the man had been warned.

  “Dispatch the whoreson dog, dispatch the whoreson dog!”

  Even in the dark Thomas could see to whom these words were addressed. Starkey stood above them, observing the fray. He had picked up his companion’s cudgel. He was laughing a low, vicious laugh and wielding the shadowy thing the cudgel had become above his head. Then Thomas heard the mortal rush of rent air. There was no time to cry out, no time to hear the thud or feel the blinding pain, or worry more about the fate of his bruised senseless body.

  Matthew Stock stood at the open window of his shop on High Street singing a melancholy air in a bright tenor voice. He seemed quite lost in the music, a sad, plaintive thing full of dark images and poignant emotions. As he sang, his wife, Joan, sat in the chimney comer, not for warmth but from custom, for the oak settle with its embroidered cushion and sturdy footstool was her sewing and thinking place. She worked busily, her nimble fingers plying their skill as though they had a mind of their own. From time to time she glanced up to study her husband’s

  face. He sang:

  “Flow my tears, fall from your springs,

  Exiled for ever, let me mourn Where night’s black bird her sad infamy sings,

  There let me live forlorn ...”

  It was a wondrously sad song, a grim song, and the words sounded strange in her husband’s mouth, given his jolly temper, but at the moment he was si
nging the words with such intense feeling that she thought surely his heart must have broken. When he paused to begin a second verse she asked him the song’s name.

  “ ‘Flow My Tears,’ ” answered Matthew Stock, clearly pleased at Joan’s having asked. “It’s from Mr. Dowland’s new book, The Second Booke of Songs or Aires.”

  “Indeed,” she said, remembering now, “the book William Ingram’s brother sent you from London at Christmas?”

  “The very same,” he answered, turning again to the open window.

  “You should have Henry Smythe teach you to play the lute. Then you might accompany yourself.”

  Matthew Stock looked at his thick, stubby fingers and laughed pleasantly. “So that I might turn minstrel and play on market day? No, my music is in my voice, not my hands.”

  Smiling, Joan looked down at her work, pleased to see its progress and to hear, despite the song’s melancholy, that her husband was in his customary good spirits. Matthew resumed singing:

  “ No nights are dark enough for those That in despair their lost fortune deplore ...”

  She nodded dreamily. In the dim light and cooler air of evening Matthew looked younger and, turned at an angle as he was, thinner. As she remembered him from their youth. Her mind made the long journey back to that time, across the pleasant fields of their first love, across the shared pain of starting out, the stillborn children with their little white bloodless faces, the long struggle for security and, finally, prosperity in the town. Surely she was not that old, she wondered, although her figure had swollen with time and her face, she sadly feared, had lost its comeliness, however her husband might deny it with his sweet flattery. At the moment her thoroughly solid husband seemed younger than she, more robust, more blessed, and she felt the sting of envy. She could not sing, she could not find her way to his satisfaction in the vibrant current of sound. His voice had not changed and that was a miracle. What was it, she wondered, about the human voice that caused it so to preserve itself from age, as though it embodied the imperishable soul, being as the soul was, a thing of no fleshly parts but a creature of the pure and timeless air?