The King’s Evil

The contrast between the Duke and Lord Clarendon could not have been more clearly illustrated – the one a hero to the common people of London, the other a villain. It seemed that even the King was throwing his weight behind Buckingham. But if His Majesty had decided to throw Clarendon to the wolves, to Buckingham and his enemies in Parliament, why had he sent me on a mission that seemed designed to protect Clarendon’s reputation? Was it the Duke of York’s influence? Or did he have some other, deeper motive?

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE COACHMAN DROPPED me by Holborn Bridge. ‘Phugh!’ he said, covering his nose with his sleeve. ‘Smells like a whore’s armpit.’

Fallow Street ran north–south on the east side of the bridge over the Fleet River. The river was choked with rubbish. There was a tannery nearby, and nothing made a neighbourhood stink worse than tanning leather.

The street was straight and narrow. The southern end had been destroyed by the Fire. The ruins had been cleared, but nothing had been rebuilt yet. People were living there, nevertheless, in makeshift shelters that looked as if a puff of wind would bring them down.

The southern end of the roadway had recently been partly blocked by the collapse of a long wall that had once marked the outer boundary of a building destroyed by the Fire. Someone on foot could work their way along, but the street was impassable to wheeled traffic.

I paid off the coachman and picked my way up the street. It was busy enough at the undamaged northern end. I found the carpenter’s shop by the sound of sawing and hammering that came from it. Since the Fire, there had been a great demand for carpenters and a chronic shortage of suitable timber.

The shutters were open. The master and his apprentice were erecting the frame of a simple bedstead, helped rather than hindered by a small boy of about ten or twelve, who was probably the carpenter’s son. The joints wouldn’t fit together properly – hence the hammering and the sawing and the palpable air of frustration.

I stood outside, sheltering from the rain and blocking some of their light, until the carpenter paused in his work and glanced up. His shoulders were hunched forward, and he had a big, narrow face and a very small forehead. He looked like a Barbary ape.

‘What is it?’ he said curtly. He belatedly assessed my clothes and my air of respectability, and added, ‘Sir.’

‘I’m looking for Mr Alderley’s lodgings,’ I said.

He pointed at the ceiling. ‘Up there. But he’s away.’

‘I know that. I have a key.’

The carpenter shrugged.

‘I also have a warrant that permits me to go inside.’ This was not strictly true. ‘You may have a sight of it.’

The carpenter came into the doorway and examined the paper I showed him.

‘That is the King’s signature,’ I said, pointing. ‘And that is his private seal.’

He squinted at the warrant and said, in a slightly uncertain voice: ‘It doesn’t say you can come into my house, does it?’

I lowered my voice, because there was nothing to be gained from shaming the man in front of his inferiors, and said, ‘It’s not your house. It’s Mr Alderley’s. I can come back with a magistrate and a couple of constables if you’d prefer, and I’ll also see you in court for obstructing the King’s justice. Or you can save yourself some trouble and show me where Alderley’s door is.’

He licked his lips. ‘Did you say you’ve got a key?’

‘Of course.’ I showed him the keyring with Alderley’s two keys. ‘And the warrant allows me to use it.’

‘All right. Hal – look sharp, take the gentleman round to Mr Alderley’s door.’

‘One moment. What’s your name?’

‘Thomas Bearwood.’

‘When did you last see Mr Alderley?’

‘I don’t know. Last week sometime? The wife might know.’ The small boy came out to join us, wiping the snot from his nostrils with the back of his sleeve. His father cuffed him. ‘I said look sharp.’

The boy let out a howl as a matter of form, though he seemed unharmed. He led me to a passage at the side of the shop that led to the main house. Behind us, the sawing resumed. Without a word, the lad indicated a door with his hand.

I pushed the larger key into the lock and twisted. The wards turned. The boy stared up at me, and I knew he was trying to get a better look at the scarring that the fire had left on my face. He caught my eye and ran off the way he had come. I glanced up and down the passage. No one was in sight. I opened the door and went inside.

There was a tiny lobby with a flight of stairs going up from it.

I shut and bolted the door. I climbed the stairs. They were steep and narrow and let out a creak at every step. At the top was a landing, with three closed doors. The air smelled powerfully of stale urine, which was unremarkable in a house so close to a tannery.

The nearest door led to a chamber almost entirely filled by a finely carved bedstead. The curtains were drawn back and the bed was unmade. Beyond it was a closet full of clothing, either hanging from pegs on the wall or spilling from a large press. I saw at a glance that these were a rich man’s clothes, a man who liked lace and ribbons and satin. Some showed signs of wear and dirt. But others were new. I touched the sleeve of a velvet suit and wondered how much it had cost Alderley.

One of the other doors from the landing led to another, much larger closet, this one stuffed with household goods, probably salvaged from Barnabas Place: rolls of tapestries, curtains and carpets; chairs and tables stacked one upon the other; and an iron-bound chest secured with two padlocks and three internal locks. Four swords hung from a wood peg which had been hammered into a crack in the wall – why would any man need more than one? Everything in this room was covered with a layer of dust.

The third door opened into a large square room at the back of the building, though it seemed smaller because it contained so much. The walls were panelled and hung with many pictures. Alderley had obviously used the chamber as his parlour or sitting room. On the table were the remains of a meal and two empty wine bottles.

I searched the place as well as I could among such a confusion of objects. What made it more difficult was that I had no idea what I was looking for, other than something that might explain why Alderley’s body had been discovered in the well of Lord Clarendon’s half-built pavilion. I kept my eyes open for boxes and cabinets and the like, but I found nothing with a lock that matched Alderley’s small silver key.

I paid particular attention to a large desk set in an alcove. The drawers were stuffed with papers – bills, notes of gambling debts and letters. Some of the letters were in a hand I took to be Alderley’s, for several memoranda of debts were in the same writing. These letters were drafts and copies, most of which concerned attempts to raise money by one means or the other. But, on the pile in the right-hand drawer, there was a note in a clerkly hand that stood out from the rest by its neatness. It was dated last Monday, exactly a week ago.

Sir

The deeds of your property in Fallow Street are ready for collection from my chambers at any reasonable hour convenient to both parties.

J. Turner

No. 5, Barnard’s Inn

Milcote had said the property was mortgaged. But this letter suggested the mortgage had been redeemed. I had no idea of the size of the loan that a house like this might command, but it might well be substantial; since the Fire, all the remaining property in London had increased in value. I made a note of Turner’s name and address and returned the letter to where I had found it.

I knew by the light outside that the afternoon was sliding towards evening. Nothing I had found in these overcrowded apartments hinted at a previous connection between Clarendon House and Alderley. Nor had I found any mention of Milcote. The only oddity was the unexpected signs of recent affluence – the new clothes, for example, and the letter from J. Turner of Barnard’s Inn.

As I was closing the drawer, a picture hanging on the wall above the desk snagged my attention like a rock in the current of a stream. I stopped and stared at it. I felt a momentary chill.

The painting was a small portrait of the head and shoulders of a gentlewoman in a plain but heavy frame. The woman was Catherine Lovett.

Except, of course, it wasn’t Cat at all. This woman belonged to another time, at least twenty or even thirty years ago. She wore a dark green gown with puffed sleeves and a necklace of pearls. Her hair tumbled in ringlets to her white neck.

In the background of the painting was a house whose outlines were familiar to me. It was called Coldridge, and I had visited it last year. It had once belonged to the family of Cat’s mother, and she had lived there with an aunt for several years when she was a child. It should have been hers but her uncle and Edward Alderley had cheated her out of it.

There was something wrong with the picture. I drew closer and stooped towards it. The eyes in the portrait were unnaturally large and blank. Then I saw why. Someone had gouged out the pupils of both eyes, probably with the point of a dagger.

A series of thunderous knocks sounded below.

I went back downstairs. ‘Who is it?’ I said.

‘Mistress Bearwood. Open up.’

I unbolted the door. The carpenter’s wife barely came up to my elbow but what she lacked in inches she more than made up with force of character. She pushed past me into Alderley’s lobby. She glared at me, her hands on her hips. To all intents and purposes, she felt herself mistress of the situation.

‘And who are you?’ she demanded. ‘What are you doing, poking around where you’ve no reason to be? Is there any reason I shouldn’t call the constable?’

I showed her my warrant, which she read attentively.

‘It doesn’t say in black and white that you can come into my house,’ she said grudgingly. ‘Not in so many words. But I suppose it’s all right. You’d think Bearwood was born yesterday. He’s as innocent as a newborn baby, and just as stupid. I’m sorry, master, but you could have been anyone.’

‘No bones broken, Mistress Bearwood.’

But she wouldn’t let it go. ‘I could have found you stripping the house bare, and him and the boy none the wiser. (Takes after his father, Hal does, more’s the pity.) He can’t even read properly, so your warrant made no more sense to him than Sunday’s sermon.’ She looked me up and down with an unflattering lack of interest, and then shifted her ground slightly to get a better view of the damage that the fire had done to my face. ‘And you don’t exactly look like a courtier, neither.’

‘That’s because I’m not,’ I said. ‘I’m a clerk at Whitehall. But I’m glad you’re here, mistress, because I want to ask you some questions.’

For a moment it hung in the balance: her anger – with me, with her husband, with the whole world, perhaps – struggled with the suspicion that it would be foolish to offend me if I was really who I said I was.

‘When did you last see Mr Alderley?’ I asked.

‘It’s not our place to blab about him.’

‘It’s not your place to disobey the King, either. And I promise you, on my honour, nothing you can tell me will in any way harm Mr Alderley.’

She stared up at me with black button eyes. ‘Saturday evening,’ she said. ‘He’d been home most of the day but he went out around eight o’clock.’

‘Was that usual?’

She shrugged. ‘He stays out all night sometimes, if he has a mind to. Or he lies abed all day. Or he’s up with the lark. Nothing to do with me. I’ve got work to do, sir, and—’

I cut her off with a wave of my hand. ‘Have you known him long?’ I asked.

‘Nigh on eighteen months. He rents out the shop and ground floor to us. He don’t have a servant, so I keep his apartments clean and send out the boy for his dinner or whatever he wants.’ She paused, and I had the sense that she was making lightning calculations behind those round black eyes. ‘Do you know him?’

‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘I knew him last year when he lived in Barnabas Place.’ Where he attacked Cat Lovett and raped her on her own bed. ‘Does he have any visitors?’

Mrs Bearwood shook her head. ‘Only the Bishop.’

‘The Bishop?’ Amazed, I stared at her. ‘The Bishop of London?’

‘No, sir.’ She looked pityingly at me. ‘It’s just a nickname. He’s one of Mr Alderley’s friends. If you’re such a friend of his too, you—’

‘I’m not a friend of Mr Alderley’s. I’m acquainted with him. When was this bishop last here?’

‘Friday,’ she said. ‘He brought Mr Alderley home.’ She sniffed. ‘Mr Alderley was in liquor again. He could hardly stand. He could talk all right, more or less, but his legs wouldn’t work. Bearwood and the Bishop had a terrible time getting him up the stairs.’

I threw in another question without much hope of an answer. ‘Do you know where this man lives?’

Mrs Bearwood was edging away from me, tired of my interrogation. ‘I don’t know. Watford, maybe?’

‘Watford? Outside London? Why do you think that?’

‘Because Mr Alderley opened the window and called down to the Bishop as he was leaving. He bellowed like a bull – I even heard him in the kitchen, and the window was shut – and he mentioned Watford. Maybe the Bishop was a preacher, though he didn’t look like one, not with a sword at his side.’

‘A preacher?’ I said, feeling as if I were drowning.

‘Well, perhaps. It’s just that Mr Alderley shouted something about “When you get to Watford, be sure to tell them about Jerusalem.”’

‘Jerusalem?’ I repeated.

‘Jerusalem. As I hope to be saved.’

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

ON MY WAY to Whitehall, I was tempted to call at Henrietta Street and warn Cat Lovett of what had happened to her cousin. But prudence prevailed. I didn’t want to risk advertising the connection between us. Besides, I was in a hurry to make my report.

They were the excuses I made for myself. Really, though, I was mortally afraid that she might already know of Edward Alderley’s death, that she had known ever since the moment it happened. The words she had said two days ago in the New Exchange haunted my memory: ‘I wish I had killed him.’

I ran into Mr Williamson when I returned to Whitehall – almost literally, for he was coming out of the Court Gate into the street as I was going in. I had to jump aside to avoid colliding with him.

‘Marwood,’ he snapped. ‘When will you be back?’

‘I’m not sure, sir. When the King and Mr Chiffinch—’

‘How can I be expected to carry on the business of the Gazette without your assistance?’ Irritation had scraped away the polish that Oxford and London had given Williamson’s voice, revealing the uncompromising vowels of his northern upbringing. ‘I have my own responsibilities, as you know, without troubling myself with those damned women of yours.’

It took me a moment to realize that he meant the women who trudged the streets of London with bundles of the Gazette. I had pushed the problems with our distribution network so far into the back of my mind that I had almost forgotten they were there.

‘For reasons I don’t understand,’ he went on, warming himself at the fire of his own eloquence, ‘the day-to-day conduct of the newspaper seems impossible without you, as well as other routine tasks in my office. Why this should be, I cannot tell. It is insupportable that Mr Chiffinch should have you at his beck and call whenever he wishes, disrupting the work of my department. I shall take steps to remedy it. But, in the meantime, I require your presence in Scotland Yard as soon as possible.’

I bowed. ‘Yes, sir. Believe me, I wish it myself.’

He sniffed, gave me a curt nod and swept out into the street to hail a hackney.

I made my way to the Matted Gallery. There was a door from here that led to the King’s Backstairs, the province of Mr Chiffinch. I asked one of the guards to send word to him that I was here and hoped to speak to him.

While I waited, I studied the picture of the Italian widow again, and decided that she looked nothing like Lady Quincy. But I did not want to run the risk of Chiffinch finding me in front of the painting, so I walked up and down for a quarter of an hour until a servant approached me. He conducted me to the gloomy chamber off the Backstairs where Chiffinch and I had met once before, earlier in the year. The small window was barred and had a view of the river. The rain was beating against the glass and the room smelled of sewage. It was an uncomfortable place that in my limited experience of it existed solely for uncomfortable meetings.

Chiffinch was already there. It was not yet dark, but he had had the candles lit. He was sitting at the table with the window behind him and a pile of papers and the usual bottle of wine before him. He listened intently while I told him of what I had learned at Clarendon House and Fallow Street.

I described Alderley’s body, and the unresolved mystery of how he came to be in the locked pavilion in the garden, and the ambiguous circumstances of his death. I gave him an account of my conversation with Lord Clarendon, mentioning both my lord’s anger at this desecration of his late wife’s pavilion and his wish to avoid scandal. I added that his gentleman, Mr Milcote, had hinted that it might be to everyone’s benefit if the body could be moved elsewhere.

‘Ah,’ Chiffinch said. ‘Interesting.’ He waved his finger at me. ‘Proceed, Marwood.’

When I came to what had happened in Fallow Street, I told Chiffinch no lies but I rationed the truth. I mentioned the unexpected signs of recent affluence. I told him about the so-called Bishop, Alderley’s visitor on Friday evening, whom Alderley had advised to go to Watford to tell them about Jerusalem. But I omitted the painting of the woman whose eyes had been gouged out: the woman in old-fashioned clothes who looked like Cat Lovett.

Chiffinch said nothing while I talked, which was unlike him. When I finished, he still did not speak. He ran his finger around and around the rim of his wine glass. After a while, a high wavering whine filled the air, growing gradually louder.

I shifted in my chair. ‘Should I send to Watford tomorrow, sir, to enquire about newly arrived preachers? I could write directly to Mr Williamson’s correspondent there. And I myself could call on this Mr Turner at Barnard’s Inn about the mortgage. Also, I have arranged to go back to Clarendon House to question the servant who—’

Suddenly the whine stopped.

‘Hakesby,’ Chiffinch said.

I stared open-mouthed at him.

Chiffinch regarded me coldly. ‘Hakesby,’ he repeated, wrinkling his nose. ‘I know the name is familiar to you because you yourself mentioned the man to me not a year ago. The surveyor-architect who has an office near Covent Garden. Well respected by his peers, I understand. And, as you and I both know, a man who has previously been of interest to me.’

I recovered as quickly as I could. ‘Yes, sir, I remember him well.’ I was on dangerous ground for Chiffinch had helped to arrange my meeting in the Banqueting House with Lady Quincy. He might reasonably expect that it had jogged my memory about Hakesby as well as Cat. He had known that Cat had found a refuge with Hakesby at the end of last year.

‘Did you know that this man was the architect working on Lord Clarendon’s pavilion?’ Chiffinch said in a silken voice.

‘Yes, sir. Mr Milcote – Lord Clarendon’s gentleman – chanced to mention it this morning, but I thought it—’

‘Did it not occur to you that there might be a connection?’ Chiffinch’s tone was heavy with sarcasm. ‘We already knew the Lovett woman was working under an assumed name as Hakesby’s servant, and that the King was content it should be so as long as she didn’t make trouble. He is not a vengeful man. When Lady Quincy told him that Alderley was threatening Mistress Lovett again, he was even content that you should warn her of the fact. Some might think that he’s too tender-hearted, but it is not my place to question his decisions.’

I tried to put the matter in the best light I could: ‘I thought it unlikely Mr Hakesby would take a woman to a site where he was working.’

‘This woman is the daughter of a Regicide: and by all accounts, she’s a fanatic like her father – a madwoman who hates her cousin Alderley so much that she stabbed him in the eye. He was lucky to escape alive. And she tried to burn down the house about their ears as her uncle and aunt slept.’ For once in his life, Chiffinch sounded genuinely shocked. ‘That a woman should do so foul a thing to her family, to the cousins who sheltered her,’ he went on. ‘Why, it beggars belief and turns it out of doors. And her cousin Alderley is now found drowned, probably murdered, in the very place where Hakesby is working. Does it not strike you as significant?’

‘I grant it’s a curious coincidence, sir.’

‘A coincidence? Would you have me think you a fool or a traitor, Marwood? There’s only one possible conclusion.’ He opened the folder before him and took out a sheet of paper. ‘I received a letter this afternoon.’

He slid it across the desk to me. He watched me, sipping his wine, as I read it. There was neither date nor address.

Honoured Sir,

Mr Edward Alderley lies drowned in Lord Clarendon’s new Pavilion at Clarendon House. He was murdered by his Cousin, Catherine Lovett, the Regicidal Spawn and Monster of her Sex. You will find Her hiding in the House of Mr Hakesby in Henrietta Street, by Covent Garden. Mr Hakesby has often been at Clarendon House of late, and the She-Devil with Him. Hakesby holds the Keys to the Pavilion.

A Friend to His Majesty

The handwriting was clumsy but by no means illiterate, as if the writer had sought to disguise it, perhaps holding the pen in his left hand. I turned the letter over. There was nothing on it except Chiffinch’s name. The person who had written it had known to address the letter to him, not to a magistrate or some great man charged with public order. Outside Whitehall, few people knew of the importance of Chiffinch, the man who arranged the King’s private affairs. And fewer still could know that the King had charged him to look into the death of Edward Alderley.

‘It was handed in at the gate,’ Chiffinch said. ‘I have enquired, but no one knows who brought it.’

There was a ringing in my ears. ‘Is the woman Lovett in custody, sir?’

‘Unfortunately not,’ Chiffinch said. ‘Officers went to arrest her this afternoon, but she had gone. Her flight is as good as a confession of guilt.’

I nodded, as if in agreement. Dear God, I thought as the implications sunk in, this damnable letter taken together with her flight could bring her to the gallows.

‘They’ve brought in Hakesby,’ Chiffinch was saying. ‘But he’s not much use to us or to anyone else. Doddering old fool. We’ll find her, of course, and it won’t take long.’

From my point of view, the situation was growing worse by the moment. ‘Can we find out who wrote the letter?’ I asked.

‘How do I know?’ Chiffinch snapped. ‘But it doesn’t much matter. Once we lay hands on Catherine Lovett, we have the evidence to hang her. Perhaps Hakesby, too, as her accomplice. It’s possible that he arranged for her to disappear, or even had a hand in Alderley’s murder himself. After all, she must have needed help. She may be a she-devil but when all’s said and done she’s only a woman. She probably hired ruffians to do her dirty work for her.’

He didn’t know Catherine Lovett as I did. I bit back the retort that if all women were like her there would be some doubt as to which was the weaker sex.