Martyr (38 page)

“Are you Ptolomeus?”

The blind monk shied away at his voice like a beaten dog.

A sheet of paper caught in the breeze that blew through the gaping holes where once windows had been and fluttered past the old man. Shakespeare caught the paper. It was blank but it looked of identical quality to the papers found scattered around Lady Blanche Howard’s mutilated body in Hog Lane, Shoreditch.

“Ptolomeus, I have no wish to harm you. I am come to talk with you.”

The old man’s beard was long and pepper gray, as was his hair. He was encrusted with dirt and grime. He sat on his haunches on the floorboards, beside a worn, cast-away grindstone. At his side was a wooden trencher with a few crumbs.

“Boltfoot, give him some food.”

Boltfoot limped back to his horse, which was tethered outside the mill, and took some bread and meat from the saddlebags. He brought it back and touched the sightless monk by the shoulder. “Here,” he said, less gruffly than usual. “Food. Take it.”

The monk stretched out his arms from the folds of his robe and held them together like a tray for the food. He had no hands. Both had been severed at the wrist, and not that long ago, for the scars were fairly fresh. Shakespeare closed his eyes, suffused with feelings of pity and disgust that anyone could have done such a thing to the old man. Boltfoot lay the food on the man’s stumps. “I will bring you ale, too,” he said.

“What happened to you, Ptolomeus?”

“The law, sir, the law.” His voice was surprisingly firm.

“What crime did you commit?”

“Libel, sedition, illegal printing, unlicensed papermaking. What does it matter? My life is done. All that is left me is birdsong and the scraps the villagers bring me. At least they do not judge me. I am content to be judged by God.”

“I am right in thinking that you have made the paper scattered about this place?”

“I cannot see the paper, sir. My eyes have been put out. But if you have found it here, I would hazard a guess that it is my work, poor though that is, as anyone that knows about these things will tell you. It is the water here, you see. Too muddy. That and the sad quality of the rags. The ragmen know their worth, sir.” He laughed drily.

Shakespeare stood quietly a moment and looked at the devastation around him. This broken man sat in the middle of it, still, like the silent heart of a storm. When you have lost everything and there is nothing left to lose but your life, what is there to fear? Ptolomeus ate some of the food Boltfoot had given him, hunching his head down as he pushed his stumps together around the bread and meat and held it up to his mouth. It was obvious the pain of his amputation had not yet dulled, for his body tensed with each movement and his face was set in a grimace.

Much of the panoply of papermaking was still here. The main shaft of the milling machine was attached by levers to mallets for mashing the sodden rags to pulp. Nearby, there were wooden frames with fine sievelike bases from which the water would drain, leaving a thin layer of pulp, which, when dried out, would become raw paper. There was a press, too, to help squeeze the water from the sheets. But there was no printing press. Where, wondered Shakespeare, had that gone?

“Thomas Woode told me he gave you an old press so that you could print Romish tracts on behalf of seminary priests. Where is it, this press?”

“Gone with my hands, sir. Gone with my hands.”

“Mr. Woode told me you would never have printed anything seditious.”

“That, too, is true enough. Or so I thought. Others disagreed. They said that
whatever
I printed was illicit; Star Chamber has ruled it against the law to print anything without explicit license.”

“Then tell me who did this to you? Was it the town magistrate?”

Boltfoot raised a cup of ale to the old monk’s lips. He drank thirstily, then wiped his mouth with his grubby sleeve. “That is good, sir. That is good. Thank you. No, it was not the magistrate, but one of whom you may have heard. He is named Topcliffe and I do believe him to be Satan incarnate.”

“Topcliffe?”

“He killed my fellow monk Brother Humphrey. Topcliffe cut him into pieces before my eyes and threw his remains into the river. Then he took my eyes and, lastly, my hands. He put my arms together against a log and removed the hands with one blow of an axe. He left me to bleed to death, but God, in his mercy, has let me live a little while longer.”

Shakespeare looked at Boltfoot and saw his own horror reflected. Very little could move Boltfoot, yet the cold brutality of the old man’s tale shocked even him.

“You are silent, sir?” the monk said. “Are you surprised, then, by this demon’s handiwork?”

“No. No, not surprised.”

“A goodwife from Rymesford tended my wounds and brought sustenance. She still helps me, as do others. Burghley and his like cannot kill our faith so easily, you know.”

Shakespeare reached out and touched the monk on the shoulder. Ptolomeus did not flinch. “We will leave you money,” Shakespeare said. “But you must tell us what happened to your printing press.”

“The money would be a kindness, sir. Thank you. As for the press, Mr. Richard Topcliffe took that, too. He said he had some use for it. I did hear him laugh as he carried it off on the back of my own cart.”

Chapter 43

J
OHN SHAKESPEARE AND BOLTFOOT COOPER RODE IN
silence. They had passed by the great castle of Windsor and were close to London now. The villages that serviced the city with vegetables, livestock, timbers, and ironwork were becoming more numerous and prosperous. It seemed to Shakespeare that London was the center of a great wheel and that these roads in, with their increasing numbers of hamlets and towns, were its spokes. You could hardly turn a corner without spying another church spire against the skyline.

The fields were different, too, better cared for and enclosed than those he had encountered traveling west. They passed through part of Surrey and Shakespeare collected his gray mare that had gone lame on the way to Plymouth; she was hale and in good spirits and he paid the peasant who had cared for her half a crown for his efforts. It seemed fairer than the sixpence he had promised.

The silence between Shakespeare and Boltfoot reflected their thoughts. Each knew what the other was thinking. Shakespeare broke the spell. “It can mean but one thing, Boltfoot,” he said at last.

Boltfoot nodded.

“It can mean only that Topcliffe himself printed that tract in Hog Lane. But why would he do that?”

“Justification, Master Shakespeare. To show the Catholics as treacherous.”

“Would he go to such lengths?” But Shakespeare knew the answer: what lengths
wouldn’t
Topcliffe go to in his mission to destroy every Roman Catholic priest and adherent of the old faith? Surely, a man who could commission a rack and torture room for his own home would be capable of printing a tract to justify more arrests. “Yes,” Shakespeare agreed, “yes, he
would
go to such lengths. The tract was naught but a poor copy of ‘Leicester’s Commonwealth.’ It was without meaning and could have had only one purpose: it was a diversion.”

They rode on a little way in silence. Then Shakespeare turned once more to Boltfoot. “And that leads us on to another certainty …”

“He killed the Lady Blanche.”

Shakespeare flinched at the harshness of the words, then said them, more quietly, himself “Topcliffe killed Lady Blanche Howard.”

Boltfoot issued a low noise like a farmyard animal.

“But why did he kill her?” pressed Shakespeare. “Why pick on a Howard, with all the complications that could bring? She may have been a Catholic convert, but even Her Majesty would not brook the murder of her cousin in that way.”

“I think he killed her by mistake, sir. Then tried to cover his tracks. I think he tortured her for information, but she died. The relic and crucifix were added later, as were the cuts to her throat and belly.”

Shakespeare shook his head. “No. It wasn’t a mistake. He planned to kill her all along. He knew he could not allow her to live as soon as he subjected her to torture; if he had set her free the wrath of the Howards would have destroyed him. He planned to kill her and put the blame onto the Catholics by befouling her body with the crucifix and relic, to make it seem like some debauched Popish rite. That fits in with the Searcher of the Dead’s findings. He said she had been dead three days and that she was killed somewhere else. The wounds that were supposed to have killed her did not produce enough blood, he said.”

And the marks on her wrists, he thought. They could just as eaisly have been caused by manacles as a rope used to tie her. He had seen similar injuries on Thomas Woode after his sessions against Topcliffe’s wall. But what sort of information would Topcliffe be trying to prize from her? The answer was plain: he wanted the same information from Blanche that he was now intent on extracting from Woode—the whereabouts of Robert Southwell. He must have heard of some link between Blanche and the Jesuits; perhaps a servant in Howard of Effingham’s household had passed on information, or an informant within the Catholic network. Topcliffe was a man possessed when it came to finding the Jesuit priest. Topcliffe wanted Southwell, and he did not care whom he had to ruin or slaughter to get to the priest. Shakespeare spurred his horse. He had been away from Catherine too long.

T
OPCLIFFE, YOUNG, NEWALL
, and a force of their ten most hardened pursuivants came to Shakespeare’s house in Seething Lane in the darkness half an hour before dawn.

They tethered their horses a street away, then trod softly toward the ancient house so that none should awake and alert Walsingham. There was to be no alarm, no uproar. This was to be done with precision and silence. Mr. Secretary must awake at dawn or after and be none the wiser of what had happened at his close neighbor’s home.

The plan was to go in at lightning speed. Flatten the door with one blow from the battering tree, then advance
without
shouting or mayhem, each member of the force to take one room so that no occupants of the house should escape. Topcliffe looked around him. The street was empty. “Where, Dick, is your watchman? Who is guarding this house?” His voice was a gruff, urgent whisper.

Young looked around. “The idle fool must have gone home. I’ll have strong words with him for this.”

“God’s blood, Dick, you’ll flog him raw. Take his skin off. All right, let’s go in.”

Six men held the heavy tree trunk and swung back and forward once, then back again and brought it forward halfway up the door, close to the lock, crashing it down with one blow.

Topcliffe went in first, closely followed by Young. Then they stopped where they stood, mouths agape at the scene that confronted them.

The hallway was lit by torches and candles and the room was filled with men, twenty or so. Some stood, leaning on swords or holding bows. Others lay back against the walls. One or two puffed at pipes. All wore martial clothes, thick leather doublets like the pursuivants, and they all gazed on Topcliffe and Young with nonchalant disdain.

It was an eerie sight in the flickering light. It seemed that two platoons had suddenly come face to face, both armed and ready to fight, yet one of the armies—the one already there—could scarcely bother to stand up for the battle. Topcliffe at last found his voice. “Who are you?” he bellowed.

One of the men rose to his feet and sauntered forward until he was face to face with Topcliffe. He was a young man, perhaps early twenties, with a short, neatly trimmed beard and dark hair swept back about his ears. “No, sir, who are
you?
And what are you doing in my brother’s house?”

Topcliffe spluttered, “You are Shakespeare’s brother? What do you do here? I had not expected you!”

“My friends and I are lodging here, thanks to the kindness of my brother. We have been levied from Warwickshire to train with the London militias. We will soon be garrisoned at Tilbury for the defense of the realm, not that it is any of
your
business. And what, pray, is your business? It seems you are trespassing and have caused some criminal damage to my brother’s door. Are you housebreakers? If so, I shall see you hang for it. It would behoove you well to think on this: my brother is a senior officer with Sir Francis Walsingham.”

A vein pulsed in Topcliffe’s forehead. He looked at Shakespeare’s brother with undisguised rage, then at Richard Young. The magistrate looked nervous and nonplussed. “God in heaven, Dick! Why did your man not bring us word of this?”

Young threw up his hands in red-faced bewilderment. “I don’t know, Richard. Perhaps he was afraid of these soldiers.”

Topcliffe took in the room. He was outnumbered almost two to one. There was no hope of taking on a band of heavily armed and trained fighters. This was some trick of Shakespeare’s, some stratagem to defeat him. “I don’t know how this has come about, but I promise you, Shakespeare—you and your brother—that I will be back and you will both pay. I will bring down the wrath of God and Her Majesty on your head. And I
will
get that which I seek.”

Shakespeare’s brother was a steadfast man with bright eyes and a wide forehead, shorter but more powerfully built than John. His mouth curled into a slight smile. “I think, sir, you rise above your station invoking the deity and our glorious sovereign lady. I suggest you crawl back into your festering little hole and take your brother maggots with you before you are all squashed.”

Topcliffe’s rage nearly got the better of him. He drew back his hand to strike this impertinent pup on the face, then thought again. Churning inside with fury, he swung on his heel and strode to the gaping doorway. “Let us go, Dick,” he said. “Let us unpluck your so-called watchman from his wife’s sweaty thighs and give him a beating he will not readily forget.”

One of Shakespeare’s men sitting on the floor rose to his feet and dragged a cowering fellow up by the scruff. He kicked his breeches and sent him flying toward Topcliffe. “Is this your watchman? Take him. We don’t want him.”