The Bartholomew Fair Murders Read online

  he is and you, girl, will tell us or the consequences will be dreadful. Your employer’s beating will be only the beginning of your miseries. I charge you now, Rose Dibble, in the Queen’s name, to reveal his place of concealment or be as guilty of these murders as Stubbs himself.”

  This dreadful threat with its reference to the Queen and promise of more physical abuse sent the girl into even greater paroxysms of terror. She began to babble incoherently about angels and devils, God and commandments, obedience and disobedience, and like language. Grotwell said the girl had been listening to too many sermons and that the practice had made her as mad as Stubbs.

  Witnessing such confusion in the girl’s speech, Joan feared the sergeant might be right. Had a religious lunacy infected Rose too? But to the others present, and especially to Ursula, all Rose’s talk of God and angels was only a ruse to affect innocence where there was none.

  “Satan himself can speak godly if he chooses,” observed Pullyver, as though he were as familiar with the subject as with his leeks and turnips, cabbages and pears.

  The scrivener agreed, but the two bearwards said that the beating had knocked her brains awry and hence her confusion and they were in favor of letting her go, for they thought there was no real evidence against her, and that surely her present insanity mitigated her crimes, whatever they were.

  “Insanity is no mitigation,” declared Pullyver with stolid conviction.

  “Indeed it is not,” Grotwell agreed. “A cabbage head may hang as well as a scholar. There’s precedent for it.”

  Matthew took the bearwards’ view and began to speak on the girl’s behalf, while Ursula screamed, “She’s lying, lying in her teeth.”

  Then Joan prevailed upon Grotwell to allow her to ask a few questions. She said she thought the interrogation was much too violent and wanted a woman’s subtler touch. Ursula let out a

  great derisive guffaw but then shut up with the others to hear what questions Joan would put to Rose and with what success.

  Joan approached Rose and pulled her away from the officers, who had been holding her tightly as though any moment the slim girl would spring from their clutches and dash off into the darkness. Joan smiled reassuringly at the quaking girl.

  “I’ve a daughter of about your years,” Joan said. “You and she are of about the same stature too and might be sisters by your face. Now tell me, if Gabriel is as innocent as you declare and he evidently claims, surely he would wish to say as much to the sergeant here, who wants nothing more than to find out the truth. Isn’t that right, sergeant?”

  Joan cast a glance at Grotwell, who was smirking at her with such insolence that she would have gladly borrowed Ursula’s pig pan and remodeled his head with it. Grotwell said in a wheed-ling voice, “Oh yes, Mrs. Stock. The truth and nothing more.” Joan turned to the girl again. “Wouldn’t Gabriel want us to know he was innocent?” she continued. “If Gabriel tells us he is innocent of the wine seller’s death, then we will know for a surety. Even as you do now. You do want us to know, don’t you?”

  Rose nodded her head but still did not speak. She had stopped trembling and looked trustingly at Joan.

  “Please tell us,” Joan prompted again.

  Finally Rose spoke, haltingly and in a barely audible voice. “All should know, even as I. He will explain. Explain as he did to me. Come, I’ll show you where he is. He’ll tell you everything that happened and why. You’ll see. As innocent as a lamb. It’s all God’s work, every whit. He’s at Jack’s booth. I left him hiding there. He wanted me to find out how things stood at the bear garden, whether he was accused and sought or not suspected at all. I never discovered until Ursula found me, for when I went to the pit there was no one there save the bear.” “I think she’s lying,” Grotwell said when Rose had finished her statement. “Why should he be hiding in the dead man’s booth? Why, it’s a ridiculous place to conceal himself.”

  “Not so ridiculous,” Joan said. “No one thought to look there, it would seem.”

  “It is the last place we would think to look,” Matthew added.

  Pullyver and Chapman and the two bearwards all said they thought the girl was telling the truth, on this matter at least, and all were eager to look for Stubbs in the wine seller’s booth.

  “Well, it won’t hurt to look,” Grotwell conceded.

  Joan went forward to put her arms around Rose, defying the officers to interfere. She felt a sinking in her own heart now that Rose had confessed Stubbs’s hiding place. It seemed some-how sinful to take advantage of one so vulnerable to honeyed words. But honey had done it in a way that all Ursula’s vio~ lence of body and word had not. Rose had surrendered her se-* cret, and as far as Joan could tell by her expression, Rose imagined she had done Stubbs a favor in doing so.

  “Well, bring her along,” Grotwell said to his men. “If she is telling the truth, the young devil is ours. In the wine seller’s booth, is he? All right then, damn me but the lad’s got his nerve if he is there. You’ve got to give him credit for that, madman or no.”

  The curfew hour had come and the booths of Bartholomew Fair were closing one by one, until it was quite dark and the fair looked like a deserted city whose inhabitants had long ago fled some pestilence. The raucous music of the day had dwindled into a few isolated goodmights and the whine of scavaging dogs and cats in the alleys. Through these now, Grotwell led the way, torch aloft, stopping at a sufficient distance from the wine seller’s booth so as not to betray the presence of himself or his band. Skeptical before, Grotwell now talked sanguinely about capturing Stubbs and began to sketch out a plan of attack. He committed Rose into the Stocks’ care. The rest were to go on ahead, Babcock and Crisp to circle the booth and take it from behind, Pullyver and Chapman to proceed quietly to the end of the lane and prevent an attempted escape in that direction. To Grotwell and his two officers was to go the honor of invading the booth directly, with the specific instruction of the sergeant that Stubbs was to be taken, dead or alive, and if dead all the better. “Stubbs is a killer, remember that,” Grotwell said, handing the torch to Matthew. “Here, Mr. Stock, you take the torch. We don’t need light to advertise our presence.”

  With the prospect of violence in the offing, Joan was happy to remain in her husband’s company, away from the immediate danger. Yet she was still afraid. The street was so dark and quiet now; the booths so forbidding. Matthew also seemed nervous, as did the other men—all save the sergeant, who was used to such bloody encounters, she supposed. The poor scrivener looked as though any minute he would be sick in the street, so pale he seemed by torchlight.

  Grotwell then motioned the men into place and Joan watched, her heart in her throat, her arm around Rose Dibble’s shoulder, as the men went off. Rose also watched, praying aloud for the fugitive. Joan saw the shadows that were the sergeant and his two men steal inside the distant booth and then heard a hoarse cry of alarm. It was Grotwell’s voice, she thought. Then there was more shouting and curses too and garbled replies from somewhere behind the booth. She heard the sound of splintering wood, as though the invaders were tearing down the booth to get to Stubbs.

  All during this commotion Matthew and Joan held their breaths, but almost as quickly as the action commenced it was over, or so it seemed. They were soon coming back, all of the men. They were quarreling and cursing and GrotwelPs complaints were the loudest and most bitter. The attack had failed. Stubbs had not been found in the booth. He had either escaped in what now seemed—to Joan at least—a ridiculously inept attempt to trap him, or long before, warned by Rose or by his own instincts to flee. Where had he gone? God only knew, and maybe the Devil too.

  “Damnation!” cried Grotwell bitterly. “I’m cursed if that filthy rogue didn’t slip by us all.”

  “Or was never there,” said Francis Crisp. “1 saw no man.”

  “It was no fault of mine,” protested Pullyver, who was out of breath but for no apparent reason since both he and Chapman had remained at a safe distance during the ass
ault. Grotwell’s officers blamed each other. The one said the other was clumsy of foot and gave warning to the fugitive, who hearing the noise stole from the back of the tent through a hole in the canvas. The officer accused of this retorted that it was his companion, rather, who signaled the alarm by crying out like an idiot. “Which cry would have raised the dead man, much more his murderer.”

  They two argued about this while Francis Crisp and Ned Babcock insisted that they had seen no one in the dark.

  “We’ll never find him now,” said Grotwell. “Not in this gloom. Besides, he knows we’re after him. He’s been warned good, he has, slippery devil.” He turned to Rose. “Now, mis-tress,” he said sternly, taking the torch again from Matthew and thrusting it forward so that it came close to singeing the girl’s hair, “we may have lost your confederate, but we have you and we shall carry you forthwith to Justice Baynard, who will deal with you as you deserve.”

  Joan protested the arrest of Rose, who had done nothing wrong that she could see, but Matthew pointed out that Rose was now in greater risk than before, for surely Stubbs would reason that she had been the one who had led them all to his hiding place and thus betrayed him. But Rose denied that Gabriel Stubbs would harm her. “He’s an angel, an angel of God,” she repeated, while the sergeant’s men laughed outright.

  “O poor fool,” Grotwell murmured in disgust. “Take her off,” he said to his men. Then Grotwell wished Matthew and Joan goodnight and the same to the bearwards and Chapman and Pullyver. He thanked them all for their efforts, unsuccessful as they had been. After he and his men had gone, Pullyver said to Babcock, “It seems you are ever beset with bad luck, friend Ned. Surely this new incident of death augurs an uncertain fu-ture at the least. Once it is bruited about that you harbored a maniacal Puritan in your midst, your reputation will stink, stink worse that Smithfield. You best sell while you can, Ned, while you can. Why, look you now, I’ll buy you out—we’ll settle the score.”

  “I’ll not sell,” Babcock said resolutely.

  “Well said,” remarked Francis, who seemed more alarmed by this talk of selling the bear garden than he had been in con-fronting a dangerous fugitive.

  “Samson’s been exonerated,” Babcock said. “You heard the Justice say as much. And I am not to blame for the boy’s fanati-cal religiosity. Besides, we’ll all turn a tidy profit yet—even more perhaps.”

  Chapman said he thought it was well past the hour to be discussing business, but Pullyver argued it was the best of times, especially in light of recent events and the great likelihood of there being more trouble ahead. An argument ensued between the greengrocer and the two bearwards, during which voices were raised and slanders were exchanged to the point that Joan was disgusted with the lot of them and wanted nothing more than to return to the inn and a comfortable bed.

  But Matthew was somehow dragged into the discussion and he lingered. Finally, Joan interrupted to borrow the torch and left the men arguing in the dark while she walked over to the booth to see the damage wrought by Grotwell’s invasion.

  She climbed over the debris and entered the wine seller’s private quarters. Inside she saw a wooden chest overturned and all its contents strewn about, several large malmsey butts still upright, and a clutter of smaller casks all topsy-turvy but unbroken. There was a strong odor of sweet malmsey and she supposed in the fracas some had been spilled and had since seeped down into the straw to give joy to the lice, mites, and other small creatures crawling therein. The canvas back of the booth had been rent, and she wondered if this had been done by the sergeant and his men or by the fleeing Stubbs. There was no other evidence around to suggest that during the earlier part of the evening the booth had been the hiding place of a murderer or that Grotwell’s raucous intrusion had done any other good but to dispel the lingering ghost of Jack Talbot.

  • 162 •

  • 17 •

  Matthew and Joan returned to the inn, both too weary from the night’s adventure to speak further of the murder or lament the loss of supper. Clutching Matthew’s arm for security, Joan was aware of their vulnerability in the black night, in the strange city. In her brain a discordant company of conflicting interpretations, suppositions, and theories struggled with one another for preeminence, like unruly guests at a feast.

  Arriving at the inn, they found the door fast and the house apparently asleep. Matthew was forced to stand before the door crying out for the host and pounding until at length the host came, wiping sleep from his eyes and looking quite absurd in a nightshirt that came to mid-shank of his bare, hairy legs and slipperless feet. Recognizing Matthew as the clothier of Chelmsford, he said, “You’re wanted, Mr. Stock. Master Clerk of the Fair, Justice Baynard, and other gentlemen of note await your return this half hour or more. They sent me to bed, sir, but the rest are in the Lion.”

  Mathew thanked the host for the message and exchanged glances with Joan to indicate he was as perplexed by this summons as she, although she supposed it certainly must have something to do with the Bartholomew Fair murders.

  “The gentlemen said you must come straightway,” the host said, eyeing Matthew with a mixture of curiosity and envy that he should be connected in some way to the distinguished persons awaiting him. The host provided Matthew and Joan with candles and wished them good-night.

  While Matthew went to the Lion to fulfill his appointment, Joan went sleepily upstairs to their chamber. Holding one candle aloft, she inspected the unfamiliar interior, feeling the heavy weight of depression she always experienced when faced with the prospect of a night’s sleep in a house not her own, in a bed not her own. No cheery fire had been laid in the grate to welcome her with its bright licks of flame and smoky smell and cracks and snaps. None had been needed in this dry, hot month. The casement had been left open to air the room. She closed the casement, lighted the larger candle at the bedside, extinguished the smaller, then went to make fast the door. Now more than ever it seemed prudent. She would let Matthew in when he was finished with his meeting and only after he had identified himself as he and not some other.

  She made ready for bed, thinking about Stubbs, remembering him as she had first viewed him, shirtless and with his rickety, odoriferous wheelbarrow. A handsome, well-shaped young man, his limp notwithstanding—of poor condition but goodly manners, soft, pleasing voice, clear eye, ready smile. Who would have thought him to be what he was, a monster of sorts, vicious and deadly, wearing his godliness as a concealment. She had not suspected him of being a Puritan at all, much less one driven by dreams and visions. Yet the evidence he was guilty was incontrovertible. What a strange world it was, and what even stranger persons dwelt in it.

  And how dreadful madness was too. She had known a mad' man once, years before when she was a child. A scatterbrain with rheumy eyes and lantern jaw. Yet harmless. The man thought himself a bird. He would flap his arms and cry out shrilly like a lapwing to the delight of the neighborhood chib dren, of whom Joan had been one, amazed and amused as the others by his curious deviation from rational behavior. As though the mind didn’t know the difference between man and bird. He had run around the fields, this loony, skipping and gamboling, leaping suddenly upward on legs of amazing spring-iness, raising his arms in the attitude of flight, splaying his fingers, crying shrilly. His name had been Stephen, she remembered as she had not in years. Stephen Cribbage, the madman of Chelmsford. His aging mother kept him at home, where he cut wood, gathered acorns to make bread, and harvested wild radishes in their season. In midsummer he found berries and tried to fly.

  But if Stephen Cribbage had dreams and visions, he did not report them. Content to be a bird when the humor struck him, he had done no murders.

  And therefore Stubbs’s madness, equally as unfathomable to her understanding, was of a different sort, not the simple de-rangement people spent good money to see among the mind' sick at Bethlem Hospital. Stubbs’s madness was the stuff of nightmares.

  Joan said her prayers and climbed into the bed, but she did no
t extinguish the candle at her bedside. With herself alone for company, she had no relish for the greater darkness without it. Besides, she wanted to remain awake—both to let Matthew in when he and the gentlemen were done and to discover what business had kept him from her. She wondered who these other gentlemen of note were the host had spoken of. But in time, rubbing these same thoughts raw, she succumbed to a fitful sleep, and in her sleep she dreamed of Esmera, who clutched Joan’s wrists with her strong hands, pressed her long, strangely beautiful face into Joan’s, and whispered of catastrophes to come.

  The Lion was not a bedchamber but a welLfurnished parlor used for private suppers and other meetings of the inn’s more wealthy clientele. The room took its name from a large faded tapestry that hung on one wall and depicted the king of beasts surrounded by a flock of lambs and other innocuous creatures who showed no fear of it. The scene symbolized the period of Christ’s reign spoken of in the Scriptures, when lamb and lion should be bedfellows and all the world at peace. This image of holy promise had thus been the witness of many considerably less holy festivities, some of them downright sordid, but of these Matthew knew only by hearsay.

  When Matthew had come to the door, even before knocking

  he could hear from within the sound of a familiar voice and he waited a moment until he placed it in his memory. Grotwell let him in, hut it was not Grotwell’s voice Matthew had heard.

  “Come in, Mr. Stock of Chelmsford. You’re right welcome among us,” said Sir Robert Cecil.

  Despite the great social gulf that separated them, the two men who now greeted each other knew each other well. Matthew had served the Queen’s Principal Secretary before, once in the discovery7 of a particularly sinister and pernicious piece of espionage involving a London jeweler who cared more for Spanish gold than for his country, a discovery that would hardly have been made had it not been for Matthew—and for Joan too, to give her the credit due her. Matthew was surprised to see Cecil here. Her Majesty’s Secretary was seated in a large, straight-backed chair that underscored his own diminutive stature, so that he vaguely resembled a child with a middle-aged man’s sallow cheeks and baggy eyes. The thought passed quickly through Matthew’s mind that were it not for the accident of birth by which Cecil was a great man’s son and not some common laborer’s, this little man might have ended up among the freaks of Bartholomew Fair, for many, and especially his enemies, ridiculed him for being no bigger than a dwarf.