A Murderous Affair, page 39
Well, enough of that. Cassangoe’s peace of mind can be dealt with once this other matter has been completed. Nothing must be allowed to stand in its way. The logbook of the Portuguese caravel Santo Francisco’ – the one surviving link to my father, whose soul I feel within these pages – bear witness to the wrong’s done to my family and my resolve to revenge them.
A de S. 1588
Chapter 36
‘The devil is not so black as he is painted.’
(16th Century proverb)
The alleys of Queenhithe were cold and empty. Rotting wooden houses closed mournfully together, trying in vain to shut out the sharp gusts of frozen air that blew fitfully from the banks of the river.
Matthew, Kyd and I walked purposefully over rough cobbles, towards the covered passageway that Andromeda the cat had alerted me to on our first visit. As we reached the passage, I turned, and in hushed tones explained to them both what I wanted them to do. Kyd followed me down the passageway, while Matthew walked back down the street and round past the ancient, crumbling walls of the church dedicated to St Trinity. I had asked him to find a way to the back of the house and to wait there for a signal to enter.
The old house in the hidden courtyard was quiet and no light could be seen within. Motioning to Kyd to stand guard at the entrance to the passageway, I walked quickly across the exposed yard. The downstairs window had not been repaired and I had it open in a matter of seconds. I slipped quietly into the small parlour, trying to make as little noise as possible, and then crept to the foot of the stairs. Opposite the parlour, the door to the storeroom was wide open, but inside was only blackness. I put a foot on the bottom step of the stairs and it creaked ominously.
‘Cassangoe,’ I said in a stage whisper, loud enough for him to hear but not to scare him. The old house seemed to flutter for a second before sinking back down into stillness. There was no answer from above. I tried again.
‘Cassangoe. It’s Lovat. I’ve brought the diary.’ Still nothing. ‘Don Alphonse’s diary. The one I found in the warehouse … before it burnt down. Before you burnt it down.’
Still nothing.
‘Cassangoe.’
‘Devil!’ A shocking vision came swiftly out of the darkness of the storeroom – a face, dead and alive at the same time, locked in a silent scream of agony. My heart leapt into my throat and I tripped backwards onto the stairs.
The terrifying figure stood over me. Gone was the elaborate finery of an Italian gentleman. Instead, he stood above me naked, apart from a thin piece of material covering his loins and an array of beads and jewellery hanging around his neck – his body criss-crossed with scars, tattoos and a shiny, white paint. I couldn’t see his face – from the neck upwards was only the dreadful wooden mask that had frightened the life out of me. Behind the mask Cassangoe let out his deep, monstrous laugh. In his hand he held a long, archaic-looking spear with a sharp, business-like metal tip poised inches from my neck.
‘What were you doing in there?’ It sounded ridiculous but it was all I could think of saying.
‘Waiting. Waiting for the devil.’
Cassangoe jerked the spear towards me, tearing the skin inches below my throat and drawing blood. I began inching backwards up the stairs.
‘Did you come alone, Devil? Or did you bring that old man to protect you? Who have you told about me devil?’
‘I know about the lady.’ He jerked to a sudden halt as though punched in the gut. ‘Please. Take off that mask Cassangoe.’
‘The lady? Don’t speak of her. You are not worthy.’
‘I have a letter from her to her lover. To Don Alphonse. She wasn’t your lover was she, Cassangoe? Never was. It was all in your imagination.’
‘Let me have the letter.’ Cassangoe began moving ominously forward again, the spear twitching perilously close to my neck
‘Did you want to be her lover? Were you jealous? Jealous of your friend? Is that what happened?’
‘The letter, devil. Give it to me.’
‘You wanted her but you couldn’t have her.’
‘Quiet devil.’ Barely more audible than the low growl of the earth at night.
‘Your friend had her instead. You had to leave the house when he brought her back here.’
‘I didn’t leave. I stayed … and listened. He wasn’t worthy of her. He corrupted her. He used her for his own ends.’
‘Is that what you hated? Is that what you had to stop?’
Cassangoe suddenly darted at me. I had gradually been inching backwards and I now fell over and sprawled onto the landing. Cassangoe laughed and motioned for me to keep moving. The door to the open hall on the first floor was shut tight. The only way was to continue up the stairs to the attic. Cassangoe started a low, guttural chant as he stalked me. I started talking more quickly.
‘You met him that night, didn’t you, on the river before he could reach the Chancel House? You had already tried to reason with him in the garden, but he had brushed you aside. You knew he would return and were waiting for him. You wanted to stop him disgracing the lady. To tell him not to shame her – to leave her out of it. He was going to introduce you to Hardwick as the man who had been cuckolding him with his wife. Disgrace him and his wife into the bargain. Is that what you had to stop?’
The chanting continued behind the mask – the sound of a bird trapped in the gates of hell. I reached the top of the stairs, my back pushing against a small wooden door. The spear had stopped wavering as if it had decided its point of entry. I could feel the cold sweat of fear running down my spine.
‘But he wouldn’t listen to you would he? He wanted his revenge. He didn’t care about the lady. So you had to stop him. You didn’t mean to. Before you knew what was happening your hands were at the chain around his neck – the chain he was flaunting as a gift from his latest victim. And like that time in the jungle all those years ago, those big hands of yours had a life of their own. They squeezed that chain tight till there was no more breath.’ Cassangoe thrust the spear at me. I leapt backwards and galloped on with my speech, thinking it was the only way I could save myself.
‘When he was dead you put him in a boat and then rowed towards the bridge. Then you launched the boat into the waterwheel.’ It was partly guesswork on my part but it explained Don Alphonse’s missing boat, the broken waterwheel and Don Alphonse’s battered body.
‘How do you know all this devil? Witchcraft?’
Cassangoe charged at me with the spear, letting out a shrill cry of anguish. I was saved by something on the floor that I tripped over backwards, the spear grazing my cheek as I fell. I grabbed it and hung on with all my strength. The masked man fell on top of me, as we fought over the spear between our bodies. I felt it snap, the sharp point in my hands, but it was too late to manoeuvre – I was pinned down by his weight advantage and those huge hands were at my neck. I let go of the spear and grabbed the hands instead. The mask had half come off and I could see his crazed, bloodshot eyes beneath. The air left my body in gulps. Numbness was creeping into my brain. I was drifting. Those manic, terrorised eyes were the last thing I would see.
Then the hands loosened their grip. The madness in the eyes seemed to die a little – some sense returning.
‘Cassangoe?’ I croaked, my mind starting to black out.
I’ll never forget the anguish in his tone: ‘I killed my friend.’
My mind was still foggy from the throttling. Everything happened in a blur. Mumbled shouts – hands grappling mine, grappling Cassangoe’s – prising the fingers away from my throat. Other hands round the neck of my assailant, pulling him backwards. Choking on the floor as I watched Matthew and Kyd manhandling Cassangoe into a corner. Matthew holding him in a headlock while Kyd, totally out of his depth, tried to tie some rope round his wide arms and torso. Cassangoe’s arms flailing – catching Kyd and sending him flying, shaking Matthew off roughly, his head cracking the floorboards sharply. Matthew grappling for a leg, Cassangoe taking up the broken spear head. Matthew holding on tenaciously. My desperate croaked plea as I saw Cassangoe swing the spear head in a great ark and drive it into Matthew’s shoulder. Matthew’s cry of pain. Cassangoe bursting from the attic. Matthew – good, honest, loyal Matthew – collapsing backwards in a crumpled heap.
* * *
It was many hours later when Kyd and I spoke of Don Alphonse’s murder. I explained to him how during all his years in Europe, Cassangoe had descended into a state of lonely paranoia. How he had become both jealous of his friend’s freedom but also contemptuous of his actions and motivations. How Leticia Hardwick had been the catalyst that finally pushed him over the edge – the beautiful object of his desires, which he could never have, but which his friend only wanted to corrupt. How on that night at the Chancel House, Don Alphonse had told Cassangoe to meet him in the garden after everyone except Hardwick had left.
‘The plan was to confront Hardwick with Cassangoe and Leticia’s jewellery and make him believe that Leticia had betrayed him with the moor – my brother and Anne were to bear witness. He would then have exposed Hardwick’s plot to Robert and enjoyed the fall out.’ I looked at the ring and brooch that were still in my possession. Leticia’s wedding ring and wedding gift. I wondered if I should have returned them to her but it was a bit late now. ‘Hardwick could just about bear the thought of Don Alphonse cuckolding him – but Cassangoe? Cassangoe wanted no part of it, though. He arrived earlier than expected, waited in the shadows of the garden and tried to reason with Don Alphonse one last time as he was leaving – the argument that Turney and Drummond overheard – but Don Alphonse angrily dismissed him and told him to wait till he returned. Instead, Cassangoe lay in wait on the river and strangled his friend in a fit of rage. He then pushed the boat with the lifeless body into the waterwheel under the bridge, smashing them as the body and boat were churned up in the powerful force of the wheel – not the work of drunken youths, as the engineer had thought, but the work of a crazy outcast, who had turned against the society that rejected him and the friend who had brought him in to it.’
I then explained how Cassangoe had tricked Hercules Smyth into believing he was being persecuted and into letting him hide in his workshop. How he had been there the night Matthew and I broke in and how he had later burnt the warehouse down in the hope of destroying the only evidence that showed his state of mind – Don Alphonse’s diary.
‘So it wasn’t Ingram and his men who started the fire?’
‘No. I was convinced that it must have been but it didn’t make any sense after a while. They didn’t need to destroy the warehouse. They had simply planned to move the goods to help incriminate my brother further – I suspect Nesbitt had suggested they do it.’
All the time we were speaking, Kyd listened with the intensity of an audience member watching the death of Heironimo in his famous play. Emmalina listened intently too, in between bouts of tending to Matthew, who lay on my bed, the wound in his shoulder wrapped in bandages. When Kyd and I had carried him back to my lodgings, the spear still sticking viciously from the wound, we had felt at times that his survival was touch and go. But he was a tough old fellow and Emmalina was a compassionate and competent nurse. She had successfully staunched the flow of blood, and was now trying to prevent him from getting fever as he lay wearily on my bed.
‘What I don’t understand is why Leticia Hardwick didn’t tell you that her lover was Don Alphonse and not Cassangoe. Why did she let you believe it?’
I thought about my answer for a moment as I had done before. I hadn’t wanted to believe Cassangoe’s guilt from the beginning, even when my brother insisted, for his own ends admittedly, that he must be guilty. Why not, I thought? To spite my brother, certainly; to fight for the underdog, as always; but there was something else when I had learned that he had been the cuckold and not Don Alphonse. Something that I couldn’t put my finger on, even now, but something that had stopped me from even closely broaching the subject with Leticia Hardwick. I had subsequently opened her letter to Don Alphonse and seen that he was clearly her lover after all, and not Cassangoe. ‘I should have guessed,’ was all I could say, weakly.
‘How did you know he was guilty?’
‘It’s all in the diary, if you read between the lines, that is, and besides, too many things didn’t make sense. And then of course there was the testimony of the lighterman.’ I glanced over at the prostrate figure on the bed. ‘Matthew did a brilliant job of finding him. Even in the darkness on the river, he caught enough of Cassangoe’s description. Still, I wasn’t sure until we went to the house – until he confronted me in his tribal mask. Finally, I understood his madness.’
I reflected for a moment on everything that happened over the last few weeks. ‘From the beginning this has been a story about outsiders – Don Alphonse, Hercules Smyth, myself even, but Cassangoe – he was the biggest outsider of us all.’
Epilogue
‘Fortune, seeing that she could not make fools wise, has made them lucky.’
(Michel de Montaigne)
On a bleak Monday in January 1589, Sir Christopher Hardwick was delivered to the river gate of the Tower, charged as a traitor to England and her Majesty. A few days later his accomplices, a Scotsman called Edward Dakers and a Frenchman called Etienne Vaillons, were hung without ceremony at Tyburn, convicted of the crime of giving aid to Catholic priests. They had all been arrested a month earlier, a few days after I had given the information to Walsingham. Vaillons had been picked up on returning to Rye. All had protested their innocence, but the evidence against them, not all of which I was expecting and which seemed to be have been fashioned purely for the purpose in hand, was overwhelming.
Hardwick avoided execution, at least for the time being, by dint of his status in society. I wonder if he ever realised that the man who had set his destruction in motion was the same boy whose father he had murdered.
A number of other men had also been rounded up, including Ingram and a man called Frazier Inglecrook, who I later learned had a milky-eye, set off by a livid scar running down his left cheek. There was no mention of anyone called Grayson. The Lady Merrydance had not returned to Rye and I could only assume that Buck had eventually achieved his wish of being set ashore in France. I wondered also about Karl Würtembatter –whether or not I would be able to honour my pledge to him and whether he would ever be reunited with his bird, Lucius, who Emmalina and I had made a gift of to my landlord’s children.
Hardwick was joined in the Tower by Lord and Lady Asthor, late of Chillenham manor, who had been surprised by Walsingham’s agents in the middle of saying Mass. Both the Hardwick and Asthor estates had been seized by the Crown and would no doubt be distributed as favours by Gloriana at some convenient time – I doubted if the man who had brought all of these crimes to light would benefit, however.
Of Lady Hardwick I heard only rumours. Exonerated of any involvement in her husband’s crimes but nevertheless besmirched by them, she was finally turfed out of the home of her childhood, and had gone to live with relatives somewhere in the North. Not long afterwards, so the rumours had it, she had become the object of desire of half the county’s bachelors and had taken her pick of the richest – and oldest.
I wasn’t in England to witness any of this and only learnt of it later. A few days earlier I had set sail from Gravesend to France. Walsingham had been persuasive and there was little to keep me in London. Rather than show any gratitude for the good turn I had done him, my brother grew cold towards me, perhaps embarrassed that his base half-brother had saved the family name. He could not (or would not) find any work for me, and my visits to the Chancel House became evermore infrequent. I had some sympathy for him though. The scandal had done him some damage at court and he was sidelined from the action, which, for a man of Robert’s ambition, was tantamount to a death sentence. He apparently haunted the Chancel House by day, bemoaning his fate and scaring the servants by coming upon them unexpectedly.
At least I wasn’t the only outcast from the house. Nesbitt had removed himself and disappeared completely. Drummond had avoided prosecution but had been turned out by my brother. Tainted by his treachery and unable to get another patron, he was reputed to be drinking himself to death in the stews of Southwark.
This, and more, I learnt from a rapidly recovering Matthew, who was a regular visitor to my lodgings on the Bridge. For many nights after Cassangoe’s flight, we would sit and discuss the strange case of Don Alphonse’s murder, whilst taking it in turns to gaze at the stars hanging over the city through the simple eyeglass that had belonged to my father. One day he brought me a gift, wrapped in a velvet purse. I opened it to find a silver brooch and a short note thanking me for everything I had done and promising me a return to favour soon. It was written in Anne’s neat handwriting
Of Cassangoe himself there was no news. The day after he fled from Matthew and Kyd’s clutches, I visited the home of Hercules Smyth. I told him about everything that happened since we had last spoken and he listened to me patiently, with a thoughtful expression on his wrinkled old face. Afterwards he showed me to the door promising to inform me should Cassangoe seek help from him but there was plenty in his manner that made me doubt whether he would. As Cassangoe’s potential only ally in London, I thought of staking out his house but there seemed little point. Events had overtaken Don Alphonse’s murder and no one would thank me for bringing in his killer and besides I was weary of the whole affair. Wherever he was, I knew that he must be in torment and I also knew that some of that was down to me. Even if he wasn’t hanged for the murder, at the very least he would be committed to Bedlam, where his colour and features would ensure that he would be right at the front of the entertainment for the passers-by on Bishopsgate Street. I thought it better to allow him to escape that fate and take his chances on the streets of London but I also told no one about the secret house in Queenhithe and also swore Matthew and Kyd to do likewise. Perhaps one day he would creep back there and find a modicum of peace.
