Martyr/Revenger/Prince

Book 0: John Shakespeare

by Rory Clements

Genres: Historical Fiction; Historical Mysteries

Synopsis

The first three books of the bestselling John Shakespeare series of Tudor spy thrillers from Rory Clements, author of the Sunday Times bestseller Hitler's Secret *** Martyr Tensions in Elizabeth I's government are at breaking point. At the eye of the storm is John Shakespeare, chief intelligencer in the secret service of Sir Francis Walsingham. When an intercept reveals a plot to assassinate England's 'sea dragon', Francis Drake, Shakespeare is ordered to protect him. With Drake on land fitting out his ships, he is frighteningly vulnerable. If he dies, England will be open to invasion. From the splendour and intrigue of the royal court, to the sleek warships of Her Majesty's Navy and the teeming brothels of Southwark, Shakespeare soon learns that nothing is as it seems . . . Revenger The quiet life of John Shakespeare is shattered by a summons from Robert Cecil, the cold but deadly young statesman who dominated the last years of the Queen's long reign, insisting Shakespeare re-enter government service. His mission: to find vital papers, now in the possession of the Earl of Essex. When John Shakespeare infiltrates this dissolute world he discovers not only that the Queen herself is in danger - but that he and his family is also a target. With only his loyal footsoldier Boltfoot Cooper at his side, Shakespeare must face implacable forces who believe themselves above the law. And in a world of shifting allegiances, just how far he can trust Robert Cecil, his devious new master? Prince Driven on by cold rage, Shakespeare's investigations will take him from magnificent royal horseraces to the opulent chambers of Black Luce's brothel, from the theatrical underworld of Marlowe and Kyd to the pain-wracked torture cells of priest-hunter Richard Topcliffe, and from the elegant offices of master tactician Robert Cecil to the splintering timbers of an explosive encounter at sea. As Shakespeare delves ever deeper, he uncovers intricate layers of mystery and deception that threaten the heart not only of the realm, but of all that he holds dear.

Release date: July 23, 2020

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 1200

Sample

Pursuivants: state-employed officers with the power to execute warrants of search and arrest. They were a rag-tag bunch of armed mercenaries, often hastily assembled from local people, court hangers-on, legal officials and even convicts, all made legitimate by wearing the Queen’s escutcheon. They were particularly used in hunting Roman Catholic priests and those who harboured them. Christopher Devlin in The Life of Robert Southwell describes them as ‘hounds to whom harrying women was cheaper and more sensational than stag-hunting’.

Priest holes: hiding places built deep within the fabric of Catholic houses. The greatest exponent of the craft was Nicholas Owen, a diminutive carpenter and lay Jesuit brother from Oxford, who built many priest holes before being starved out of one himself and dying under torture in the Tower in 1606, staying silent to the end. Owen, who was known as ‘Little John’, was canonised and beatified in the twentieth century. One of the finest remaining examples of his work, which visitors can enter, is at the National Trust property Oxburgh Hall, Norfolk.

Intelligencers: spies reporting to the Principal Secretary Sir Francis Walsingham, who is seen as the father of the modern secret service. His network of agents and correspondents encompassed Europe and the Middle East, yet he was expected to fund the operation himself and was so impoverished at his death in 1590 that he was buried privately at night, to avoid the cost of the splendid funeral so immense a figure might have warranted.

Jesuits: members of the Society of Jesus, a highly disciplined religious order founded in 1534 by the Spaniard Ignatius Loyola with the aim of converting heathens to Christianity. They took vows of poverty, chastity and pilgrimage to Jerusalem (though this was, at that time, impossible). They were known for their unflinching obedience to the Pope and for their care of the sick and destitute. Jesuits soon became the ‘shock troops of the Counter-Reformation’ (well, that’s the way the Protestants saw them), sending the likes of Robert Southwell and Edmund Campion to martyrdom in England. Elizabeth I and her ministers regarded Jesuits as traitors ready to resort to assassination to restore the Pope’s authority. In 1606, the Jesuit Fr Henry Garnet (who had arrived in England with Southwell in 1586) was hanged, drawn and quartered, having been implicated in the Gunpowder Plot.

Weapons: firearms were rapidly replacing the medieval crossbow and longbow. The most frightening innovation for monarchs was the wheel-lock pistol, which was replacing the matchlock. Wheel-locks had a mechanism which span a serrated steel edge against a piece of iron pyrite, sending sparks into the gunpowder, which exploded and discharged the ball or bullet. Previously, with matchlock weapons (including the cumbersome old arquebus, familiarly known as hagbut or hackbut), the gunpowder had to be ignited by a pre-lighted taper, or match. The big advantage of wheel-locks was that they could be held in one hand, be primed and loaded in advance and be small enough to be concealed under a cloak or in a sleeve. Ornate wheel-locks became the must-have accessory for men of substance and whole cavalry squadrons carried them into battle, each man carrying two or more primed weapons in his hands and belts. Men commonly armed themselves with swords and daggers (a poniard is a small dagger). Guards carried pole weapons – pikes and halberds. The pike was little more than a pole with a spearhead, while the halberd had a three-edged head: axe, pike and hook.

Whores: it is curious that the seamier side of life flourished so well at a time of great religious fervour. Southwark was famous for its brothels, which the London authorities could do nothing to control, being outside the City walls. Prostitution was illegal but bribery of constables was commonplace. Whores were often called ‘Winchester Geese’, as much of Southwark came under the control of the Bishop of Winchester. Other slang names included: bawdy basket, callet, drab, punk, hobby horse, stale, strange woman, strumpet, trug. A brothel madam was known as ‘Mistress of the Game’, and her clients were called ‘commiters’ or ‘hobby horse men’. Sexually transmitted disease – the ‘French Welcome’ – was rife and, in the days before antibiotics, virtually untreatable (though that didn’t prevent early quacks devising and selling so-called cures).

Army and Navy: Unlike the professional Spanish troops, England did not have a standing army. In times of trouble, such as the impending Armada invasion, militias were raised by the nobility from among their tenants and by the great craft guilds. Nor was the Navy a permanent fixture, but thanks to the enthusiasm for privateering of Drake, Hawkins and others, the English had become great sea warriors. Their ships were designed to be leaner and faster than the towering Spanish galleons which had an advantage in close combat, but were easily harried and outgunned by the English at longer range.

The Privy Council: the rough equivalent of a modern-day Cabinet of ministers. During Elizabeth’s reign it varied in numbers from ten to twenty. The Queen did not attend meetings, but the proceedings were reported to her assiduously and she had the final say over matters of policy. Generally, she expected her ministers to get on with the day-to-day business of running the country. As well as executive powers, the Council also acted as a court when it sat in Star Chamber (the old council chamber at Westminster). Lord Burghley and Sir Francis Walsingham were the dominant Privy Council men for much of the reign.

Prison: there were fourteen jails in London. A wide variety of offences could land someone there, ranging from vagrancy, debt or fortune-telling to the most severe of crimes. The conditions prisoners had to endure depended largely on how much garnish (bribe money) they could afford to give the keeper. They were surprisingly open, however, enabling Robert Southwell and other priests to visit prisoners and say mass. The Marshalsea and the Clink in Southwark were seen as softer options than the City jails such as Newgate, Bridewell, Wood Street Counter and the Fleet. Southwell’s companion, Fr Henry Garnet, wrote of feeling ‘safe from danger’ while visiting prison.

Tobacco: tobacco was not introduced to England by Sir Walter Ralegh. Though he sponsored ventures to Virginia in the 1580s, he never went there himself and, anyway, tobacco was probably brought to Europe by sailors – Spanish, Portuguese and English – as early as the 1560s, when Ralegh was still a boy.

Beasts: Richard Topcliffe and others used the word to refer to the Pope, Jesuits and the Catholic Church generally, because they were seen as the anti-Christ – ‘the beast of the apocalypse’, from the Book of Revelation, Chapter 13.

Printing and newspapers: some historians believe that half the population of England could read by the end of the sixteenth century. Londoners, particularly, were hungry for news and bought up broadsheets (or broadsides) as fast as they could be printed. Illustrated with woodcuts and often written in ballad form, they would look very different from newspapers as we know them.





ROSE DOWNIE SAT on the cold cobbles, cradling a swaddled baby that was not hers.

She leant her aching back against the wall of the imposing stone house, close to its arched oak door. Under any other circumstance nothing could have brought her near this building where baleful apprehension hung heavy in the air like the stink of tallow, but the man who lived here, Richard Topcliffe, was her last hope. She had been to the court of law but the justice had merely shaken his head dismissively and said that even had he believed her – which, he said, with a scowl, was as unlikely as apple blossom in November – there was nothing he could do for her.

The constable had been no more helpful. ‘Mistress Downie,’ he said, ‘put the baby in a bag like a kitten and throw it in the Thames. What use is it alive? I promise you, in God’s name, that I will not consider the killing a crime, but an act of mercy, and you shall never hear another word of the matter.’

Now, outside Topcliffe’s house in the snow-flecked street, close by St Margaret’s churchyard in Westminster, Rose sat and waited. She had knocked at the door once already, and it had been answered by a sturdy youth with a thin beard who had looked her up and down with distaste and told her to go away. She had refused and he closed the door in her face. The intense cold would have driven anyone else home to sit at the fireside wrapped in blankets, but Rose would not go until she had seen Topcliffe and begged him to help.

The bitter embers of sunlight dipped behind the edifices of St Margaret’s and the Abbey and the cold grew deeper. Rose was fair, young, no more than seventeen, with a face that, in other times, sparkled with smiles. She shivered uncontrollably in her heavy gown and clutched the baby close to share what little warmth she had. Occasionally, she lifted out her large, well-formed breast to feed the infant; the milk was free-flowing and rich, and her need of relief was almost as insistent as the child’s hunger. Steam rose in the icy winter air as the child sucked with ferocity, and she was thankful for it. Monstrous as she considered the baby, some instinct made her keep it and feed it. The day moved on into darkness, but she was as immovable as stone.





JOHN SHAKESPEARE STAYED up late into the night and when, finally, he crept into bed he slept fitfully. Like all Englishmen in these terrible days he was fearful for the safety of his queen and country. At night these anxieties spilled out in dreams and he woke bathed in sweat.

Before dawn, he was out of bed, breakfasting alone at his long table. He was a tall man, six foot, but not powerfully built. His eyes were hooded and dark and carried the cares of the world in their depths. Only when he smiled, and that had been rare enough in these past few months, did he appear to shake off the worries that permanently clouded his face.

His maidservant, Jane, was bleary-eyed in her lawn coif and linen nightdress as she lit the fire. He liked to see her like that, unkempt, buxom and still warm from her bed, her breasts loose and swaying beneath the thin material. He guessed from the way she looked at him that she would receive him with warmth, energy and generosity, should he ever climb the stairs to her attic room and slip under the covers with her. But there would be a reckoning. Such nectar always came at a price, be it the parson’s knock at the door demanding the banns be called or the wail of a babe no one wanted. And Shakespeare was too cautious a fox to be so snared.

Jane served him three small hen’s eggs, boiled hard the way he liked them, good manchet bread and salt butter, some Dutch cheese, common saffron cakes, which she had bought from the seller the day before, slices of spiced rump beef and a beaker of small beer. The room was lit by beeswax candles that guttered in the draught through the leaded window. This winter of early 1587 was cold and Shakespeare ate well to fill his belly and stir life into his limbs.

While Jane cleared away the remnants of the meal, he knelt briefly and said the Lord’s Prayer. As always, he spoke the words by rote, but today he laid emphasis on ‘Lead us not into temptation’. He was twenty-eight; time to be married. These feelings – urges – were too powerful and needed an outlet other than those to be found in the comfort of a single man’s bed.

At first light his man, Boltfoot, was waiting for him in the panelled ante-room of the ancient house. He was talking with Jane but she scurried away to the kitchen as soon as Shakespeare entered. Shakespeare frowned; surely there was nothing between them? He shook his head dismissively. A young woman like Jane would never see anything in a grizzled former mariner with a club foot.

The building John Shakespeare called home was a handsome four-storey wood-frame house, which had creaked and moved and bent sideways with the passing of the years. At times he wondered whether it might fall about his ears, but it had lasted two hundred years so far and was conveniently close to Mr Secretary Walsingham’s fine city house in Seething Lane. Though not large, it served as office and home.

‘Is Slide here?’

‘Two men, Mr Shakespeare,’ Boltfoot said, in his habitual perfunctory manner. ‘Slide and a constable.’

‘I’ll see Slide.’

Boltfoot Cooper was like an old oak, thought Shakespeare, the sinews and raised veins of his face weathered and rutted like bark. He watched his servant as he turned towards the door, his body short and squat, the left foot heavy and dragging, as it had been since birth. He was in his early thirties, or so he believed: his mother had died of childbed fever and his father could not recall the year or month of his son’s birth. Somewhere around 1554 seemed most likely.

‘Wait. What does the constable want?’

Boltfoot stopped. ‘Says there’s been a murder.’ His brusque voice, deepened by years of salt air in his time as a ship’s cooper, revealed him to be from Devon.

‘Just that? A murder? Why come to me? Why not fetch the justice or the tipstaff?’ There was an unmistakable edge of irritation in Shakespeare’s words. At times, these days, he felt as if he would seize up like rusted iron, that the pressure of responsibility laid on him by Walsingham was simply too great for one man.

‘Says the woman killed looks high-born,’ Boltfoot said. ‘Soft hands. Says there are papers and strange letters, and the house where she was found was burnt down. He’s scared.’

Shakespeare sighed in resignation. ‘Tell him to wait while I see Slide.’

Harry Slide bowed low as he entered the ante-room, sweeping aside his sable-edged cape with extravagance and, as he rose, extending his fingers like the neck of a swan.

‘All right, Slide. You’re not at court now.’

‘But I am in the presence of greatness, am I not? The magnificent Mr John Shakespeare. I have a hundred marks says you will be a minister of the crown before too long.’

‘If you had a hundred marks, Harry, I doubt you would be here.’

Shakespeare eyed Slide’s glittering clothes, his taut collar and stiff doublet with gold and black slashes in the Spanish style. With such expensive tastes, it was hardly surprising he was always impoverished. ‘So, what can you offer me?’

‘I hear everything, as you know, Mr Shakespeare. Today I heard that the Archbishop of Canterbury was caught in the vestry on Sunday last with his cassock round his waist swiving a member of his flock.’

Shakespeare raised a disapproving eyebrow. Such irreverence could cost a man his life or, at the very least, his ears.

‘Nothing very strange about that, you might think,’ Slide continued, ‘but the next day he had her for dinner with carrots and some garden mint.’

Shakespeare couldn’t help laughing.

‘At least she was a ewe, not a ram, so I suppose that’s all right. Isn’t it?’ Slide said. ‘I’m afraid I’m not sure of the teaching on such matters in the new church.’

Shakespeare laughed again. He was grateful to Slide for lightening his mood. There had been much darkness lately: plots against Her Majesty, a pending death sentence hanging over Mary, the Queen of Scots. ‘You will get yourself hanged if you don’t take care, Harry Slide.’

‘Perhaps. But, for the present, could I interest you in the whereabouts of two priests of the Society of Jesus?’

Shakespeare suddenly paid attention. ‘Two Jesuits? Garnet and Southwell?’

‘The same.’

‘Well, yes, of course, that would be a big catch. You have them?’

‘As good as in the net, Mr Shakespeare.’

‘Tell me more.’

Slide was a slender man with open features beneath fair locks. It was said he could charm eels out of rivers or bees from their hives. Even those he betrayed, and there were many, found it difficult to dislike him. ‘I want a hundred marks for my information.’

Shakespeare knew he was dissembling, that he did not know as yet where the notorious Jesuits were hiding, but if anyone could find them it was Slide. He claimed to know what was going on everywhere in the capital and said he had at least one informer in every prison in London and Southwark. Shakespeare didn’t doubt it. Slide had played a major part in exposing the recently foiled plot to murder Elizabeth and replace her on the throne with the Scots Queen. It was the Scots Queen who now seemed likely to have the shorter life, for she had shown herself to be up to her slender royal neck in the conspiracy against her cousin. Tried and condemned to death, Mary now awaited her fate in the bleak confines of Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire. All that was needed was a stroke of Elizabeth’s quill on the death warrant.

Mary’s plight was in no small part thanks to Harry Slide for he had infiltrated the conspirators and followed their every move on behalf of Walsingham and Shakespeare. The guilty men – Babington, Ballard and the rest – never stood a chance. Their short lives had ended in torment and butchery at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, hanged by the neck but not allowed to die, their bodies sliced open, entrails drawn from them, beating hearts tossed carelessly into the cauldron, then their carcasses quartered and spread about the capital. Finally, their heads were thrust on pikes and raised above London Bridge to warn other would-be traitors.

If Slide felt anything for these hapless, tragic men, whom he had come to know so well and whose friendship he had encouraged, he did not show it. He was an expert in the art of projection, feigning sympathy with a cause to draw its adherents to their doom. It might be impossible to trust Slide but, like a sharp kitchen knife that could slip and cut you, he was necessary. And, as far as Shakespeare was concerned, he was good company.

‘You will have to tell me more before I can even think of parting with such a sum for a couple of Jesuits.’

‘Well, I have sound knowledge that Southwell is living close by the city.’

‘Where exactly?’

‘I will know within forty-eight hours.’

‘And Garnet?’

Slide grinned disarmingly and shrugged his well-padded shoulders. ‘Garnet is not here, I think. Gone travelling among his flock of traitors in Norfolk, I believe.’

‘Well, that halves the price to start with.’

‘Mr Shakespeare, I have expenses . . .’

Shakespeare took his purse from his belt and removed two coins. ‘You mean you have tailors, vintners and whores to keep happy. Gaming debts, too, I don’t doubt. Three marks now and twenty-seven more if you bring me to the Jesuit.’

Slide took the coins and jingled them jauntily in his hand. ‘You are a hard man, Mr Shakespeare.’

‘Luckily for you, I’m not as hard as I might be, Harry, or you’d spend half your life in the pillory. But keep alert as always. We need intelligence.’

‘Your will be done, O master . . .’ Slide departed with another sweep of his expensive cape.

The constable could not have been more of a contrast as he bent low beneath the oak lintel of the door. He was big, with longbowman’s arms that bulged through the woollen smock beneath his oxhide jerkin, yet he was shaking with something akin to terror. He smelt of fire.

Shakespeare called Jane to bring ale to calm the man’s nerves and then the officer blurted out his story of a woman found murdered. Shakespeare listened intently. It was a grim tale and one that Walsingham would expect him to investigate without delay.

The three of them – Shakespeare, Boltfoot and the constable – took horse and rode through the busy morning streets up through the Bishop’s Gate, beneath the piked heads of thieves and murderers.

Ten minutes later they arrived at Hog Lane, close to Shoreditch and just north of the theatres where the old Holywell Priory had stood before Great Henry pulled it down. Their horses stood in the cold winter air, steam rising from their flanks and hot breath shooting from their nostrils. In front of them was a burnt-out house. The depressing stench of soot and scorched straw hung round them. Blackened debris lay at the horses’ hooves on the hard, icy earth.

Shakespeare huddled into his black bear cloak, a welcome gift from the New World presented to him by Walsingham at Christmas last. It was a generous gesture and typical of Walsingham in his dealings with those he loved or for whom he felt responsible. He had taken Shakespeare into his employment nine years earlier, when he was a young lawyer newly arrived in London from the Midlands. Shakespeare’s master at Gray’s Inn, Paul Ballater, was a friend of Walsingham and had recommended his pupil for the post, thinking him more suited to practical work than endless dry books. ‘I see you looking out of the window when your mind should be on precedent law, John,’ Ballater had said. ‘Take my advice and go with Walsingham. You will find no better patron in all of England.’ Shakespeare had seen the truth in this and had not hesitated in accepting the post. He had suffered few pangs of regret, though Walsingham – the world called him Mr Secretary – was an unbending driver of men.

The constable brought him back to the present. ‘I believe the fire was set deliberate, Mr Shakespeare,’ he said. ‘When it caught, at midnight, the house and thatching suddenly went up into flames. I am told it was as if a taper had been put to powder, sir. George Stocker, the bellman, was here very quickly.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘At home not far away, sir, abed. He sleeps by day.’

‘Fetch him.’

The burnt house stood on a row of a dozen or more frames that had clearly been thrown up quickly on three or four acres of uncultivated land. Shakespeare recognised it as part of the expansion outwards from London into what had been until recently open country to the north of the wall, past Spital Fields towards Ellyngton Ponds. The encroachment was everywhere. The ruined house had not been well built, but hastily erected by the landowner. Shakespeare guessed its purpose was to accommodate incomers from the shire counties; there was good money to be made providing lodging for skilled men who had any sort of work. London was growing fast, with men moving from all parts of the country and from over the water, either seeking wealth or escaping persecution in France or the never-ending war in the Spanish Netherlands. The city could no longer contain all those who would live there.

Under the eaves of the stabling near the house, four vagabonds, all men and sturdy beggars by the look of them, lay beneath woollen rags on the bitter ground, sleeping off a night of strong ale. They looked the sort of people no one wanted, the sort who could not get a bed without thieving the wherewithal, and then, most likely, swinging on the fatal tree at Tyburn for their trouble.

‘Wake them, Boltfoot. But keep them here. I want to question them.’

Boltfoot dismounted from his horse and approached the gang. With his good foot he kicked them one by one in the ribs and pulled them to their feet, ordering them not to move on pain of a flogging. They stood stiffly in the cold but made little protest; the sight of Boltfoot’s short-muzzled caliver slung round his back and the cutlass hanging loosely from his right hand was enough incentive to keep them standing obediently in their tatters, shivering.

The bellman, George Stocker, arrived with the constable from the direction of Shoreditch. He was still adjusting his smock, having been raised from his slumber, and his bell clanked as he walked. He was a well-fed man with a belly like a pig ready for the shambles.

‘Tell Mr Shakespeare what happened, George,’ the constable ordered.

Stocker removed his hat. His beard was thick and full of goose grease, and his brain was clearly as slow as only a bell-man’s could be. He grunted some indecipherable greeting, then began his story. ‘I did ring my bell hard and loud, sir, and called out. Folk came from their beds in the houses around, sir, and drew water from the well in pails. We did douse it quite quickly, sir.’

Stocker glanced at the constable, who nodded. ‘Go on, George. Tell the master what you told me.’

‘I did find . . . Sir, I do not know whether I should say this for it feels like a sin to talk of it.’

‘I believe you found a body. Is that right?’

Stocker tensed and looked down at the rough earth beneath his paltry-shod feet. ‘There was the body of a young woman, sir. Unclothed, sir. And most terrible dealt with.’

‘And what else, bellman?’

‘Papers, sir, with writing on, I know not what.’

‘You can’t read?’ Shakespeare asked.

‘No, sir.’

‘And you, Constable? Can you read?’

‘No, sir. Though my wife’s brother knows some reading. Should I fetch him?’

Shakespeare ignored the question, slid from his grey mare and handed the reins to the constable. ‘I shall go inside. Hold my horse and stay out here with them.’ He nodded towards the beggars.

The neighbours had done a good job of dousing the fire; London was built largely of wood, and fires were frequent, so every husbandman had to be proficient at fetching and carrying pails to douse them. The walls of this house were still standing, though blackened. Shakespeare allowed the bellman to lead the way through the gaping hole where the door had been kicked in. He was conscious of the time. One of Walsingham’s post riders had arrived late the previous evening saying Shakespeare was wanted at Barn Elms by midday on a matter of urgency. The Principal Secretary would not wait.

Shakespeare looked around the gloomy shell of the house. It was remarkably intact, given the ferocity of the fire described by the constable. Something caught his eye on the sodden floor. He picked it up. It was a paper, wet and unreadable. Then he saw that there were more papers lying around among the burnt stubble of thatching. Some bore distinguishable words and all were unfolded, which meant almost certainly they were new printed. He signalled to Boltfoot. ‘Gather them all up.’

There were other things, too: type sorts for printing. But no sign of a press. ‘All of it, Boltfoot, the type sorts, too. I will examine it later. Perhaps we can discover the letter foundry where it was made. Now, Mr Stocker, where is the body?’

Above them the roof was burnt away and the sky hung a brilliant grey where the ceiling should have been. A few flutterings of snow began to drift down.

The staircase was intact, though charred, and they ascended it to the first floor where, in a jettied chamber at the front, they found a woman’s body, naked and bloody, stretched obscenely on a large oaken and canopied bed. A kite was pecking at her eyes but flew up through the skeleton of purlins and rafters as they approached. The bellman gripped his hat in his hands as if he would wring it dry, and averted his gaze. Shakespeare understood why he would wish to do so and why the constable had seemed so shaken.

Her throat had been slit until her head was almost separated from her body. The pink of the woman’s skin had turned a ghastly blue and the blood a coagulated red, like dark rusted iron. Her head hung limply with a gaping wound like a second mouth, but that wasn’t what caught the eye. It was her splayed legs and her woman’s organs that commanded attention.

Her belly had been torn open and her womb exposed. A foetus, perhaps three inches long, had been pulled from her and lay above the wound, still attached by its cord. Shakespeare shuddered; its little head seemed perfectly formed. Pulling his eyes away from the tiny body, he approached the bed and examined the woman’s face. Though twisted and contorted by her death agonies, he knew her features. He turned to the bellman. ‘Leave us, Mr Stocker. Wait outside with the constable.’

The bellman needed no second bidding to leave this charnel house; he was gone like a hare from a hound.

‘What do you make of it, Boltfoot?’

‘Most profane, master.’

‘Do you recognise her? She’s a Howard. Lady Blanche Howard.’ She was, in fact, as he knew well, a close cousin of the new Lord High Admiral and commander of the English Navy, Howard of Effingham. She had been brought up in his household when the plague took her parents. The Lord High Admiral was known to treat her as his own daughter.

‘Yes, sir.’

For a few moments Shakespeare was silent. He looked closely at the body, then took in the surroundings. What had a woman like Blanche Howard, a cousin of the Queen, been doing in such a place? Though far from the worst sort of tenement, this house was a long way from the palaces and great country houses to which she had been born.

‘This is a bad business, Boltfoot.’

Shakespeare had seen Blanche at court from time to time, and thought her to be about eighteen or nineteen. She had seemed typical of the younger women of the nobility who made their way to court and fluttered about like butterflies or attended the Queen’s chamber until their parents made a match for them and they were consigned to their husbands’ country estates. Were there rumours about her? Was she married or betrothed yet, and if not, why not? He thought he recalled hearing that she had fallen in with some of the more loose-living, wanton elements, but there was nothing unusual in that. The young ladies of the court were not known for their purity. Suddenly Shakespeare felt the cold of the morning through the thickness of his long fur clo