The Bartholomew Fair Murders Read online

  In the midst of this bustle stood the clothier himself, a short, dark-complexioned man of about forty with an affable, good-natured expression—usually. A man of infinite patience, for the last hour he had been making a face to suggest his old virtue had worn as thin as a beggar’s shirt. He leaned against a table, his face turned upward toward the stairs. He too was impatient to be off, but the delay—for which he now held his wife’s indecision, about what and what not to take, responsible—was not his only concern. Something quite unpleasant had occurred earlier that morning and he still thought about it, as any decent man would.

  One of the weavers came out of the back parts of the shop, and severed the thread of Matthew’s meditations by asking him if Friday of the week would be a holiday for weavers too.

  “Yes, blockhead. Of course, you and your fellows will have the saint’s day. Enjoy your idleness. But mind you ...” And at this the little clothier tempered his harshness, having seen the look of dismay in the weaver’s eyes. “Don’t make a Shrove Tuesday riot of the occasion or be as those foolish mice who while their master is abroad make merry in the larder. You’ll be expected at your looms the morning after. And with clear heads, if you please!”

  The weaver grinned sheepishly and hurried away to tell his fellows the news. Matthew watched him go, then turned his attention to the single bolt of cloth half-unrolled on the table beside him. He reached for the cloth and, taking the smooth fabric between forefinger and thumb, felt its texture with a lov-ing care. If he were any judge at all—and who was his peer in such judging?—the bolt was as fine a sample of Coggeshall Whites as any produced in Essex. He had money in his pocket to wage with any London draper who might maintain the contrary.

  An apprentice came to deliver the cloth to its place in the wagon, and Matthew walked over to the window and peered through the lozenge-shaped panes into the street. No less than three sturdy wagons stood before the shop, each drawn by a team of four horses. They seemed to take up the whole of High Street, which, narrow at the best of times, was now so full of wagon, beast, and man that a passerby not content to gawk at the proceedings would be at pains to elbow his way through the throng. Matthew regarded the splendid argosy with satisfaction and contemplated its destination: Bartholomew Fair, the great fair at Smithfield.

  The clothier had hardly missed a year at the fair the past twenty, not since he became a man and his own master. But this year was different. For the first time his wife would keep him company. He was confident she would enjoy the sights of the fair and that the display of his wares would produce great profits for himself. His journey would also involve a reunion with an old boyhood friend with whom he had irregularly corresponded over the years and who had recently set up business as a bearward.

  He heard his wife at the top of the stairs and turned from the window. She was giving instructions to Betty, a round, cheerful woman with a red, moist face, as to the care of the house in her absence. Betty had been long in service to the Stocks and this parting with her mistress was not without emotion. The two women embraced and blessed each other. The Stocks’ daugh-ter, Elizabeth, was to come from the farm she and her husband had outside of Chelmsford to mind the shop in their absence. Joan started down the stairs.

  Like her husband, Joan Stock was rather short, with olive skin and dark, intent eyes. She had a pretty oval face that retained its youthful freshness, a melodic voice, and the confident carriage of a woman used to having her way. Following her came Peter Bench, Matthew’s young assistant. Peter sweated and staggered with his burden, a heavy chest. More of Joan’s things, Matthew thought, eying the chest with masculine disdain. His wife rarely traveled but when she did, she took enough clothing for half a year.

  “In good time,” he remarked. “It’s nearly noon.”

  “Is it?” she answered in a tone suggesting she was not content to bear the whole blame for their tardiness. “I’faith, noon is God’s time too. So whether it be dawn, or noon, or even, if prayers be said before and the beasts rested and watered and all stowed properly in the wagons, we leave betimes after all.”

  Joan preceded Peter out the door, not waiting for Matthew’s reply. There she said good-bye to each of the apprentices, whom she was wont to mother shamefully and who looked very sad to see her go, although some of their sadness may have been regret that they were not part of the excursion. Matthew joined her in the street and looked up at the pale, sun-washed sky. Noon had lived up to the morning’s promise. It would be a day too hot for the salamanders, whom, it was said, no fire could scorch. Everyone sweated, even the wagoners who had done

  nothing since breakfast but sit on their bums and watch the apprentices work.

  But the heat put that unpleasant matter into Matthew’s head again, that death’s-head of his meditation. It was for that reason too his departure had been delayed and Matthew put to extra expense for the wagoners’ time. While one of the apprentices helped his wife up onto the gray gelding that would carry her to London, Matthew’s brain compressed the whole train of events into a few moments’ recollection.

  He had had no choice but to respond to the report, since he was town constable, elected yearly by his neighbors to perform such duties as policing the parish should require. Well, the truth was that he did have a choice, as Joan had reminded him between sleep and awake. He might have sent the man on to John Davidson and been done with it. Davidson, who was to serve in Matthew’s place while the clothier was in London. Davidson was a good man, conscientious to a fault, sturdy of limb, no drinker or brawler. Yet this was the rub: Davidson was a novice in that thicket in which Matthew during the handful of years of his constableship had made himself a forester. The thicket of crime and lesser mischief.

  It was not that Matthew was perfect in his duties. Nor that the particular crime occupying his thoughts was one that he alone could handle. But experience did account for something. And Matthew’s experience had been such that now his reputation extended beyond the parish bounds. It was said, and truly, that he had done some service on the Queen’s behalf and was a friend to her Principal Secretary, Sir Robert Cecil. It was said that a wise thief or coney catcher might practice his trade in another town, and this was true too; yet Matthew was a simple man, a lover of family and hearth, and he brought to his con-stableship no more mysterious skill than dogged determination and patient observation.

  Of course it did no harm to have a clever wife. Joan had

  often helped him in his official duties, being as she was a woman of great curiosity and remarkable intuition.

  Then there was the dead man, spoiling the bright morning of Matthew’s departure like a worm in an apple.

  It was Samuel Hopkins, an unemployed carpenter, who had found the body. He had come early to the constable’s house to report it, so early that Matthew had been roused out of bed by the carpenter’s pounding and clamor. Matthew had dressed in the dark and awakened one of his servants to hitch the horse to the delivery cart. Then Matthew and Hopkins had driven out together to where the body was, with the first light of dawn staining the morning sky in spectacular streaks of rose and ocher.

  While they drove in the jostling cart, Hopkins, a crooked little man with rheumy, slanted eyes and reddish hair, told his story. His voice was dry and cracked. “I got an early start, you see, Mr. Stock, before dawn, to avoid the heat. I had walked all the way from Witham, my only light and company the round moon. In time I felt a powerful urge to relieve myself and stepped off the road to do my business privily. When I had satisfied nature’s call, I started back to the road again and then saw the cart, naught more than a shadow where it stood. I heard no voices, saw no fire about it. I thought it strange that travelers on the road would not be stirring afore light. I drew closer and saw the cart clearly, then all about the ground the forms of tiny bodies. Dead babies was the first thought that came to mind. My heart thumped so within my chest. God, it thumped! I started to turn, to be off, then a wiser thought came to me and I looked again. They was popki
ns, every one of ’em—little puppets like they use in the Punch and Judy shows. But one of the shapes was no puppet, I’ll tell you. No, sir, Mr. Stock. It was no puppet. Then I did turn on my heels and made for the road again, jogging along the way until I came breathless to your house.”

  “You did the right thing, Samuel,” Matthew said.

  The carpenter drew the flat of his hand across his forehead as

  though to wipe away the memory of the scene. Matthew did not press for more details.

  He knew he would soon see for himself. The two men jostled along in silence while morning established itself over the fields and meadows and the chorus of birds commenced in the woods beyond. After a while they came to the place. The carpenter indicated it with a pointed finger. “There,” he said. “There, just off the road.”

  The road made a bend like the crook of a man’s arm; at the elbow was a hawthorn hedge growing thick and green. The fo' liage made an effective screen for the cart, the tracks of which could still be seen pulling off the dusty road into the softer earth of a hollow.

  Matthew thought it was the sort of place a weary traveler might have chosen for a midday nap, cool and private. A small stream would have made it all perfect, but the hollow was dry. Branches of trees arched overhead; the leaves were dewy, shin' ing in the morning light. Matthew reined in his horse and dismounted. He would have told the carpenter to stay where he was had the little man showed any inclination to move. Hopkins sat bolt upright in the cart seat, his face turned away. Matthew caught the unpleasant smell too. The smell of decay. He steeled himself for the unpleasantness to come.

  It was as Hopkins had said. Puppets dressed gaily in taffeta and swatches of other good cloth lay scattered in the sparse grass as though flung there by a giant in a fit of rage. Their little clay faces shone with enamel, their smiles or grimaces unper' turbed by the rough treatment given them. Close at hand, Mat' thew saw a king and queen in crowns and scarlet. A fool in motley. A black'bearded blackamoor. A Saracen knight with his simitar. Farther off, a monk in his cowl, Punch and her mate. A puppet representing, Matthew supposed, a Spaniard by his fantastical dress, hung upside down in a bramble bush. All lay like fallen soldiers on a field, and Matthew could understand how Hopkins, by the eerie moonlight and predawn melancholy

  that afflicts all, might have thought them actual corpses, de' spite their diminutive size.

  There was also a puppet theater of wood and painted buck' ram. Or what was left of it. It had been dragged from the cart and smashed. A chest lay on its side, lid open, contents scat' tered. A few shirts, one shoe, a patched blanket, an old cloak, and a broad'brimmed hat.

  Against the wheel of the cart, propped up in a sitting posh tion, was a gross fat man. His bearded chin rested on his chest, his bald pate waxy and exposed to the bright morning sun. Flies buzzed about him, crawling on his head. The flies and the nox-ious odor of decay were all that suggested the man’s posture of repose represented more than sleep.

  Matthew drew near and bent over to look more closely, feel' ing as he did the first assault of nausea. Only then did he see the full extent of the dead man’s injuries.

  He had seen many corpses in his time, both in his official capacity and in the normal course of living. Corpses dangling on the gibbet; corpses foul and almost beyond recognition in the ditch bottom; corpses bloated and sore-infested in the plague bed. More hideous forms than the imagination could conceive.

  This dead man was no pretty sight, and while not the worst condition for a corpse, the full view of the dead man’s face was enough for Matthew’s gorge to rise. For a moment he thought he would be sick. His forehead beaded with sweat, while at a distance he could hear Hopkins mumbling the Lord’s Prayer and begging for Matthew to come away anon, for the carpenter was sure the very ground they stood on was haunted by the murdered man’s ghost.

  Matthew recovered; his stomach settled. He wiped his brow with his handkerchief and stared again at the dead man’s face.

  There was a terrible wound above the man’s right ear, a dent in the skull; the blood, from head to the grizzled beard, had turned brown and crusty. On the forehead, five slashes con' verged at a point above the brows, done clearly with cool delilv

  eration by the assailant. Done without regard for the human decency that forbade the mutilation of a corpse. Carrion birds had savaged the eyes and left gaping sockets. The whole face was a hideous mask.

  Matthew judged the man to have been dead for two days or more. The condition of the body suggested that, although given the extremity of the temperature it was difficult to tell exactly. In such weather, putrefaction would have begun at the last beat of the heart.

  Matthew tried to detach himself from the scene, cast a cold eye on death. He reminded himself that the dead man, a puppeteer by all evidence, was nothing to him. He tried to pretend that the man was no more substantial now than one of his lifeless puppets. The inquiry into the death was all something that Matthew had to take care of, like taking his turn as juryman at quarter sessions or keeping his ditches free of filth. But it was useless. Somewhere, someone would mourn the passing of the poor wretch he now examined with finger and eye. The corpse, once a living soul, remained a thing of some significance, a vessel to be buried in sanctified ground, to be prayed over; a body to be avenged for what was clearly an act of murder.

  The man’s purse was at his side, tucked beneath the flesh of the belly. Matthew took the purse, opened it, and emptied the contents into his palm. He looked at the sprinkling of silver and copper. No fortune, certainly, but a goodly sum for the taking. Matthew noticed that the knife sheath near the purse was empty of its blade.

  Matthew stuffed the dead man’s purse in his own belt and began to search about the cart. A little distance away he found a long birchwood staff of the sort travelers carry to steady their walk and beat off dogs. He thought it strange that such a stout staff should be discarded. Unless it could no longer be used, its owner having now a horse to ride on. He carried the staff over to the corpse and looked at the wound again.

  The blow had been delivered to a point just above the ear

  and with enough force to crack the skull. He gripped the cold, hard wood and imagined it swishing through the air.

  He conjectured that the missing blade might have made the marks in the dead man’s forehead.

  He tossed the staff aside and turned around to look at Hopkins. The carpenter had not left his place in Matthew’s cart. He looked as pale as death himself and cried in a whining voice, “In God’s name, Master Stock. Can we not be gone now? What more is there to see, but that the man is stone dead, his horse stolen, his goods ravaged? Oh, we are all prey to these highwaymen, every honest citizen.’’

  But Matthew did not think the deed was done by a high' wayman. His imagination worked in another direction. He saw the puppet master atop the cart, another man seated at his side. A friend or, more likely, a passenger, given a ride for charity’s sake. Charity’s sake. Some way to repay charity, that—return a good deed with a whack on the head and a Godspeed to eternity!

  Matthew walked around to have a closer look at the cart. It was old and weathered, a veteran of bad roads and hard times. The rear, emptied of its contents, was floored with splintery planks with cracks opening to the long, slightly yellowed blades of grass beneath. On the cart seat worn smooth by the puppet master’s fat buttocks, Matthew noticed a few drops of dried blood. There were patches of dried mud and straw on the floor' board, mostly at the center. Matthew imagined how the dead man must have shifted from his customary position at midseat to give room to the passenger. It would have been a tight fit, given the dead man’s bulk. Matthew decided that the passenger must have been slender, perhaps a boy, or there wouldn’t have been room there for the two of them.

  He imagined them, the fat puppet master and his slim pas-senger, riding along the dusty road. The blow delivered would have involved a clumsy movement likely to miss its mark, likely to be prevented by an upraised hand,
likely in the best of cir-cumstances to result only in a stinging ear. After which the

  assailant might well himself have fallen victim to the fat man’s knife. But likely wasn’t certain. Matthew had known a man who had drowned in his own vomit, and another who had been conked on the head with a stone no larger than a pea. The poor fellow had been buried the next day. The blow may not have been intended to be mortal but it was. Sometimes things turned out that way, plain bad luck.

  Now, Matthew thought, a cold-blooded murderer would have handled things differently. He would have taken no chances on the puppet master’s returning the blow. He would have used a knife, not a staff; and if a staff, he would have waited until the men were off the cart and the victim’s back turned so that the blow could be delivered with full strength and at a certain target. That was the way a murderer would have done it.

  Matthew concluded, therefore, that this death was not anticipated, by either party. It had come about of a sudden, taking both men by surprise. Perhaps there was a quarrel, an argument exploding into sudden fury. That was a common enough story. Perhaps the passenger had not meant to kill at all.

  But how then to explain the mutilation of the corpse—the wounds radiating from the brow like the claws of a beast? That argued more than self-defense. That argued a rage beyond reason.

  Matthew took a last look at the scene. It was all a great mystery. Who was the passenger? Where was he bound? What had caused the rage? Only the puppet master could tell. And he was dead.

  Matthew returned to his own cart and drove the horse forward until the two carts were side by side, then he told Hopkins to get out and help him load the body.