Witness of Bones Read online

  Conley asked Matthew what his name was and where he dwelt and what he did. To all such questions Matthew answered truthfully. The assistant scratched away with his pen as Matthew spoke.

  “You are charged with the murder of Stephen Graham and before the magistrate pled not guilty to the offense,” intoned Conley, looking at Matthew accusingly.

  “I did.”

  “And now wish to plead otherwise—to confess to the crime?”

  “Well, sir, that depends,” Matthew said, looking from Conley to Buck, who was observing the proceedings from a place in the corner.

  “Depends upon what?” asked Conley curtly. “Either you plead one way or t’other. There are no two ways about it.” Conley turned his head to look at Buck, as though he were responsible for this confusion.

  “It depends on whether information as to who bid me do the killing is worth some leniency in my case,” Matthew said, fearing at once that in making such a claim he had been too bold.

  For a few moments Conley said nothing, but fixed Mat-

  thew in an icy stare of hostility or contempt, Matthew could not discern which. Matthew’s heart pounded. He found Conley’s stare excruciating, but he was not about to drop his own eyes first.

  “It is not my custom to negotiate with murderers,” Conley said.

  “It is not my custom to be regarded as such.”

  “You sell cloth in Chelmsford, I understand.”

  “I do.”

  “And are the town constable?”

  “I am.”

  “Were you bom and bred a Papist or are you a convert?” “Neither, but an Englishman bom and a dutiful communicant of the English church.”

  This response seemed to take Conley by surprise. He waited a moment before proceeding, studying Matthew’s face. “Then you scorn the Bishop of Rome and all his works.” “As God is my witness,” Matthew said, thinking with respect to these religious matters there would be no cause to dissemble, whatever he might say otherwise.

  Conley shifted in his chair, lowered his brow even farther so that Matthew wondered that the man could still see him and said, “Who is he who bid you do the murder?”

  “A man whose place at court is such that to describe his influence is to give his name—and yet not to give it.” There was another chilling silence.

  “I see you have sojourned in the City long enough to learn the art of indirection,” Conley said. “Am I to understand that you are prepared to name names but not to do so until some concession has been made?”

  “You are.”

  “And may we know your terms?”

  “I must have a guarantee,” Matthew said.

  “From—”

  “From someone with power to enforce it.”

  “You want a patron?”

  “In exchange for the one I have lost.”

  “He whom you are prepared to incriminate.”

  Matthew nodded. He turned his head briefly to see how Buck was taking all this and caught a fleeting smile of approval flash across the young man’s face.

  Twelve

  The innkeeper, a large florid man, looked at Joan strangely when she entered, although he had been open and amicable before. Then she remembered how she was dressed, how she must appear, still in her old woman’s disguise—a version of her own mother while she was still alive. She pulled the hat off to reveal her face, mumbled something about having lost her good cloak to a thief, whereupon the innkeeper, smiling indulgently, said the same thing had happened to his own wife not two years since, and begged her to join him and the other guests for supper.

  She said no, thanking him for the offer, and he replied he would have his boy bring up wood for her fire straightway.

  In her chamber, Joan removed the diary from the cloak, and wishing not to commence her perusal until the boy had come and gone, she hid the diary in a narrow crack she found in the hearth and sat down to think. Belatedly, the full realization of the risk she had taken that afternoon came upon her. Why, the door might have been opened by Hop-wood himself rather than the sexton and he discovering who she was might have seized her as an accomplice in Matthew’s crime. Instead of sitting as she now was in the relative comfort of a London inn, she might have been in the Marshalsea herself, or standing helplessly before a stern magistrate or being interrogated by a prosecutor. Or worse, she imagined, what if Hopwood, recognizing her, had called the sexton who wore a dagger at his side and looked the man to use it. Would he have hesitated to plunge it into her chest had he thought her a danger to himself?

  A knocking came at the door and a voice without identified her visitor as Jack, the innkeeper’s boy. She unbolted the door and let him in.

  The boy who entered looked to be thirteen or fourteen with freckled face and hair the color of straw. He wore an apron around his waist and in his arms he carried two sturdy faggots. He went directly to lay the fire.

  “A gentleman asked after you just now,” he said as he struck the match to the kindling.

  “A gentleman? Did he give his name?”

  “He said he thought you were the wife of an acquaintance of his and wanted to confirm it was you and not some other.”

  “Indeed, and what did this gentleman look like?”

  Jack’s description suited Stearforth perfectly, and Joan felt sick inside, as though she had eaten unripened fruit.

  “Did you tell him my name?”

  “I said your name was Mistress Gray.”

  “Yes?”

  “He said that he must have been mistaken, for the woman he sought was named Joan Stock of Chelmsford.”

  The boy stood with his back to her as the little flame curled up around the faggots and became a bigger flame. She gave the boy a penny for the wood and said she would have sixpence for him if he saw the man around the inn again and brought word to her directly. She said good night and bolted the door behind him, her heart beating rapidly and the sick feeling still with her.

  Remembering the diary, she retrieved it from its hiding place. She sat down before the firelight and opened the book to the last page, moving forward until she came across Graham’s writing.

  The minister wrote in a generous round hand, easy for her to read.

  The last entry was dated the day before Graham’s murder. It was more of a religious meditation upon the sacrament than a record of what he did and said. In fact, as she read, she wondered if the elegant sentiments of the meditation were his own, or copied from some other author, making of the diary more a commonplace book than a record of the maker’s daily affairs. Her doubt on this point was resolved when she turned to the day earlier, for here was a summary of a conversation Graham had had with Motherwell, the sexton. The quarrel between them was over the burial plots in the churchyard, for which the sexton was discovered to have charged an extra fee, unapproved by Graham. Graham referred to the sexton as greedy, unscrupulous, insolent. He had threatened to complain to Lady Elyot. How Motherwell had answered to this threat was not recorded. Had it been with that knife that Stearforth had stolen? But how would Motherwell have the knife, but by Stearforth, and why should Stearforth be concerned about Motherwell’s keeping his place? No, revenge made no sense. If Motherwell’s did the murder, he did it upon Stearforth’s instruction; if Stearforth was the murderer, he acted upon the orders of some greater. And who knew where it all ended, how high up it went?

  The entries before were clearly written during the parson’s sickness and consisted of prayers and appeals for health, inventories of his physical symptoms, and harangues against his enemies, who had sent him threatening letters and who he believed may have poisoned him. These made dreary reading and Joan found herself skipping large sections of these bilious and morbid reflections.

  Finally, she came upon a passage that interested her greatly. It was dated approximately a month before Graham’s death. She read the words out loud. Her fear was gone now:

  Met Master S. in Fleet Street where he gave me good day and said his mistress had asked a
fter my health.

  Said all the town talked of Poole’s resurrection and that he thought it was a great fraud. Approved of my sermons denouncing it as the same and gave me a crown for the poor box. Said all Papists were traitors to England and ought to be hanged.

  Joan hurried over the next section which consisted of an anti-Roman diatribe and then found Master S. mentioned again. But of course Master S. had to be Stearforth.

  Master S., secretary to Lady E., came to my house for dinner with two other gentlemen, Sir John Putney and Master Davidson, friends of his grace the archbishop. Sir John commented that the archbishop looked favorably on my nomination to a bishopric, not sure which but know that Ely will soon be vacant. Also remarked that the Council had taken interest in my response to the matter of Christopher Poole. Sir John noted that my election, however, would not please the Bacon party, who favored one of their own, he would not say who.

  There the entry ended for that date. Joan thought about Graham’s words. The Bacon party. That would be Lord Bacon, whose friendship with the fallen Essex had put him and his friends in bad odor at Court. She knew that much about politics. A candidate of their own for bishop. She understood little of ecclesiastical policy except that it was as obscure and twisted as that of the lords temporal and was inextricably connected to it. Here was a goodly matter to reflect upon. If the followers of Lord Bacon, who all the world knew, were at odds with Cecil, preferred another candidate over Graham, that meant that the unnamed gentleman was Graham’s enemy. But would such rivalry among men of God move them to murder? It seemed unthinkable.

  But all this reading by firelight had given her a headache. She closed the diary, intending hilly to conclude her reading the next day, and inserted it in its hiding place.

  She went to the door to make sure she had bolted it securely, then prepared for bed. Nor did she forget her prayers for Matthew’s rescue, the triumph of truth, and the confounding of her enemies, not only Humphrey Stearforth but also the unnamed lord temporal or spiritual who seemed ultimately behind these mysteries.

  Sometime later Joan dreamed. Scenes from her day, hopelessly confused, then a clearer more sustained vision of her own house in Chelmsford. She sat stitching with Graham’s diary in her lap. Or a book like it. Suddenly she heard a noise from out-of-doors. She rose to go to the window. It was one that looked not out on High Street but on the back parts of the house that gave away to a field where there were a sprinkling of outbuildings, a garden, a pasture. Matthew approached from a distance. She could tell it was Matthew by his gait and swing of his arms. A broad-brimmed hat shielded his face.

  At the same time she became aware that across the pasture was a lone figure dressed in a long frieze coat and a peaked cap of the kind cowherds wore. He was following Matthew, although her husband did not seem aware of him. Then she saw for the first time that the man carried a sheep crook over his shoulders. He grew nearer to Matthew but still her husband showed no awareness.

  Joan opened her mouth to call out to Matthew, but the sound that came forth was no more substantial than a whimper although she tried with all her might, growing increasingly anxious for her husband without knowing why.

  She turned from the window and ran downstairs, thinking to warn Matthew more directly, but by the time she came to the door it was already opened and a man was standing in her kitchen.

  It was not Matthew, but the cowherd. She looked over his shoulder to see if her husband was to be seen, but he was not. Then she looked at the cowherd. In her dream she almost expected to see Stearforth or Motherwell, but he

  before her had a face she had never seen before, a long face with weary eyes and thin lips. He made neither explanation nor apology for his intrusion, but stood there as though he were the true master of the house, the sheep crook upright like a soldier’s pike.

  “Where is my husband?” she said. “Where is Matthew?”

  But the stranger made no response, and Joan awoke, wondering what the dream had meant. Like any good Christian, she believed in the prophetic powers of visions of the night, believed that they were sent by God, or occasionally by the devil. Which was this?

  Her contemplations were disturbed by a sound, and it was a moment before she recognized the source. Someone was at the door of her room. What hour must it be? She had retired early, without supper. She reckoned it must be near midnight, for she knew she had slept awhile before the dream awoke her and the fire was no more than a pile of glowing embers on the hearth now.

  The knocking came a little more incessantly, yet it was not the pounding of an alarm as might have been given if the house was afire.

  She rose from the bed, threw her cloak around her and went to the door. She asked who her visitor was before she even considered forgoing the security of the door’s iron bolt.

  She heard Jack’s voice. “It’s I, Mistress Gray, with more word about the man who asked of you.”

  Joan remembered her offer to pay the boy for further word of Stearforth’s activity and without further concern unbolted.

  She had opened the door no more than a crack before Jack came stumbling in. Stearforth was behind him. He seized her in an ironlike clutch and stifled her protest with a rough hand over her mouth. Behind him she saw Motherwell. His knife was drawn and he held it at Jack’s neck. The boy’s face was a mask of terror.

  Motherwell shut the door. He carried a brace of candles so Joan could see all now, the hostile faces of the invaders and the paleness of Jack’s face.

  “I’m going to take my hand from your mouth,” Stearforth said. “But if you scream, the boy will die.”

  Joan looked at Motherwell and knew that Stearforth was not exaggerating. She nodded her head in compliance. Motherwell took an even tighter grip on Jack and pressed his dagger so hard into the boy’s flesh that she thought she saw blood run on his skin.

  “Dress,” Stearforth commanded after he had released her. “And be quick.”

  “Not with you men looking on,” she said.

  “You will dress and be quick about it, regardless of who looks or who doesn’t look,” Stearforth said. “My friend will finish the boy and proceed to you thereafter.”

  The tone of Stearforth’s voice warned her against further objections. She went over to the bed where she had laid out her gown and turning her back on the intruders she did what she had been ordered to do, although with such fear and trembling that she was hard put to tie or button.

  “You’re taking me to prison then? At least I will see my husband.”

  Behind her the men laughed.

  “A prison of sorts,” said Motherwell.

  “Just don’t hurt Jack,” she said.

  “Oh, we won’t,” Motherwell said.

  Finished dressing she turned about and was startled to see that Jack was no longer being held by Motherwell. The boy was now seated over by the hearth, his arms wrapped casually around his knees, and was looking on these activities with more curiosity than fear. Before she could inquire into the reason for the boy’s release, Stearforth came forward and pulling a scarf from his pocket bound it around her mouth.

  “The boy is a plausible actor,” Stearforth said. “He has a good sense of which side his bread is buttered on, Mistress Gray.You promised him sixpence but I gave him twice that. For helping bring a runaway wife back to her husband. And so we shall.”

  “Here boy,” said Stearforth, handing Jack the coins. “There’s a bit more too, so that you may more quickly forget

  everything that has transpired here. Tell your master Mistress Gray departed for home earlier than she had expected.”

  “I shall, sir,” said Jack, rising from the hearth. He cast a glance at Joan on his way out the door, but she could not discern whether his expression was one of gratification or regret.

  At such an hour, the inn seemed a vacant house, and there were no witnesses to Joan’s abduction. Even if there had been, she was not sure she could have given any signal of distress, so closely kept she was on each side by
her two captors.

  In the street were a horse and cart. Stearforth pushed her into the back of the cart and climbed aboard with her while Motherwell drove. He drove slowly from necessity since the street was so narrow and the only light was from the torch affixed to the cart. She was facing the rear but she looked for landmarks as they passed; she wanted to remember everything. Who knew but she would have opportunity to find her way back again.

  She grew worried when they passed through Ludgate and started to leave the City. Where were they bound and to what purpose? Joan reckoned that if Motherwell’s intent was to slit her throat he might have done so on any London street or alley to good effect. She thought perhaps she was being taken to some outlying house, remote from other habitation. And what would be done to her there—murder or worse?

  She knew that by the road they traveled they were not far from the river for she could smell it in the cold night air, all marshy and fetid. They must be near Wapping, she thought. Sometime later her suspicion was confirmed. Ahead of them she glimpsed a broad expanse of moonlit water and at a distance the outlines of a ship at anchor. Was she to be abducted then, rather than murdered? Conveyed to France or to some deserted isle to die of hunger and loneliness, or perhaps be thrown overboard as soon as land was left behind?

  The cart jolted to a halt and Stearforth yanked her from the earthed. Motherwell led the way with the torch. They walked along the riverside for twenty or thirty yards before coming to a boat concealed in the reeds. Stearforth ordered her to climb in, while Motherwell found oars beneath the seats and prepared to row. Stearforth shoved the boat into the stream before jumping in himself.

  “We’ve planned an ocean voyage for you Mistress Stock,” Stearforth said. “To a place where no one will think to look for you. If your husband is of a cooperative mind you may see Chelmsford again. If not, burial at sea is very economical, I understand. And you avoid the indignity of disinterment in five years to make way for another rotting corpse.”