gown would have been of fine quality. Such items are worth much gold.”
Shakespeare was thinking fast. This was nothing to do with him; he was already neglecting the Roanoke inquiry and needed to get word to Cecil about the wolfsbane. Yet these killings worried him. There was the link to Essex and there was something else, jangling in his mind. The name Joe Jaggard. Arthur Gregory had spoken of a murdered boy named Jaggard. Not just any boy, but a lad with connection to Charlie McGunn. A boy who had been seeking Eleanor Dare on his behalf.
He knew what Walsingham would have said: leave no dunghill unforked. He looked once more on the tableau of death in the wintry crypt. “Whoever did this must have been a man of immense power, to kill them with one blow each.”
“I don’t think so,” Peace said. “Given the right weapon, any man or woman of reasonable strength could have inflicted these injuries. These two young people had been swiving. It is not beyond the bounds of likelihood that on a warm summer’s day it made them nod off to sleep, which would be why they were left so open to attack. Certainly if they had not been caught unawares, that lad would have been strong enough to defend himself against most men. He had the build of a pugilist.”
“Thank you, Joshua. I must go.”
“One more thing. If your friend is being poisoned with wolfsbane and if he or she is already having vivid imaginings, it might already be too late…”
Chapter 16
T HE ENTRANCE TO HOGSDEN TRENT’S BREWERY and cooperage in Gully Hole, Southwark, was littered with hoops and staves. The thick walls of the old stone building were permeated with the smell of fermenting barley and the bitter tang of hops. It was a scene that would never cease to give Boltfoot an uneasy feeling. He had spent many years as a cooper, both by land and sea, and had no desire to return to that life.
Boltfoot looked about him. There was some good craftsmanship here; he would have been proud of this work himself in the old days when he sailed the world. A couple of men wandered past in open-necked shirts and rolled- up sleeves, with leather tool-aprons about their waists. One of them stopped.
“Can I help you?” He was sixty or so, with short-cropped white hair and welcoming eyes. “I’m Ralph Hogsden.”
“I’m looking for a man called Davy.”
“Davy Kerk? Dutch Davy? Yes, he’s here somewhere. Come in and I’ll find him.”
They found Davy in the yard, sawing long staves for puncheon casks. Boltfoot watched a moment, admiring the work. Davy finished his cut, ran his palm along the edge to feel the smoothness, then looked around at Hogsden and the newcomer.
“Davy, this fellow was after talking with you.”
The cooper dusted down his hands. “And why would that be?”
Davy was a man in his mid-forties, but well kept. He stood an inch or two taller than Boltfoot, his face partially obscured by a long carpet of graying hair that hung about his head like a helmet. He had the same salt-weathered lines to his face as Boltfoot-the look of a man who has been to sea for many years. His nose-or what you could see of it beneath all that hair-was long and hooked down sharply at the tip. His ears, which protruded through his mane, were large and festooned with bristly hair like a man twice his age. It seemed to Boltfoot that if the man ever bothered visiting a barber, he might be fair-looking. His accent was broad and foreign, but his voice betrayed no animosity. He met Boltfoot’s eye and held it.
“My name is Boltfoot Cooper. I’d like to talk with you awhile, about a voyage.”
Boltfoot thought Davy stiffened, but the man said evenly, “A voyage? I’ve been on a few voyages in my time; what voyage would that be?”
“Aboard the
“And why would you be interested in that?”
“Do you want to speak here?”
“I’ve got no secrets.”
“As you wish. I am here on the orders of Mr. John Shakespeare, an intelligencer working for the Earl of Essex.”
Davy put down the saw. “You’ll have to tell me more than that.”
Ralph Hogsden was watching the proceedings with a keen interest. “Well, Mr. Cooper? What exactly is the great Earl’s interest in Davy’s seafarings?”
Questioning wasn’t what Boltfoot did. He was good with his cutlass and deadly with his caliver, but he had always been a man of few words; interrogation was for men like Shakespeare, not him. But he had never shirked a task in his life. “All right, I’ll tell you true,” he said brusquely. “There’s one as says that a so-called lost colonist has been spotted, here in Southwark. I’m looking for her on Essex’s orders. Don’t ask me why. I do what I’m told. And I do believe you were on the voyage that took them all there.”
Davy Kerk frowned, then he looked toward Hogsden, and both men broke out laughing as one.
“Is it true or isn’t it, Mr. Kerk? Were you on the
“Well, Dutch Davy,” Hogsden said, “were you?”
“Yes, course I was. So were a hundred others. What’s any of this faffling nonsense got to do with me?” Kerk had stopped laughing and was starting to look angry.
“Tell me about it, then. Tell me about the voyage and the people on it. Or come with me to John Shakespeare at Dowgate and tell him.”
“I’m not going anywhere, Mr. Cooper. I have work to do to put food on my table.”
“Then tell me what you know. Answer a few questions and that’s it.”
“And what if I don’t?”
“Then I shall return with a warrant.”
Kerk did not look concerned. “And what charge would that be? Refusing to talk to a stump of a man with a clubfoot asking me questions that mean bugger all to anyone, with some cat’s-piss notion of lost colonists turning up? Is that a new crime in England?”
Boltfoot felt the weight of the caliver slung about his back and the cutlass at his belt. Something in the movement of his body gave away his thoughts.
“Shoot me, will you? Or cut me down?” Davy Kerk bared his teeth aggressively, but then softened as quickly as the heat had risen in him. “Come on, then, Mr. Cooper, let us have done with it. Of course I remember the
“Thank you, Mr. Kerk. I am most glad to hear it. Now, as I have been told, the settlers were mostly Puritans, and given to sermonizing.”
“God’s blood, but that was a voyage of the doomed. They preached and ranted and got in the way of good, honest privateering. Made us travel away from the Carib Sea up the coast of Florida to that forsaken lump of land Roanoke. It is a place I would not have stayed for all the gold in the Spanish Main, a place of murder and evil. Bleaker than the Waddenzee in winter.”
“Murder?”
“Aye. Poor George Howe, cut down by Indians with arrows and axes while fishing. He was one of the better fellows. When you were there, on the island, you found yourself thinking those savages were behind every tree. Standing there or crouching, watching you, waiting until you crept out to the pit for a shit in the night. Never have I seen darker nights.”
The three men stood silent as if imagining a black night on the farthest of shores, knowing that you were observed by a hundred eyes. It was a feeling Boltfoot remembered all too well. There had been times ashore, on coral strands and the coast of Peru and in the Spice Islands, when he, too, had felt open to sudden death.
“There was one name,” Boltfoot said, breaking the spell. “Eleanor, daughter of John White, wife of Ananias Dare. Do you recall her?”
“Of course. She did give birth to the first child there, named for your virgin Queen. If the child is alive, she must
