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
John 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
