sat Jane, her swollen belly very evident.

“I will send Boltfoot to you post-haste, Jane. And Jack Butler will follow.” He turned to the commander of the troop. “Look out for them, Captain.”

The captain saluted Shakespeare, then turned his horse and led the way out of the courtyard on to the streets of London, heading for the dusty, perilous road north.

Chapter 24

A S SHAKESPEARE RODE SLOWLY THE LAST MILE TO the church at Wanstead, the mortbell knelled clear across the meadows. It rang just one note again and again, a deep, dread clang that could only mean a body was to be laid to rest in the cold earth.

The mourners were gathered in the graveyard close by the Le Neve house and on their land. So few were there, a mere ten or so, that a passer-by might have thought it a pauper’s bleak interment.

Shakespeare reined in his mare a hundred yards outside the churchyard wall, and watched as the little band began walking through the porch into the church. Sir Toby and Cordelia Le Neve were there, attired all in black. So were the maid, Miranda, and the sour and ancient retainer, Dodsley. A minister was speaking the plain new funeral service as they walked. On his right was another man, a wide-brimmed black felt hat held against the chest of his dark broadcloth coat. He looked straight ahead, his face stern, as though cast from iron.

At their head, four men in workmen’s leather jerkins carried the simple coffin into the church.

Cordelia Le Neve turned and saw Shakespeare. Shock crossed her features, then anger. She touched her husband’s arm and he looked across at the intruder, too.

Miranda Salter also saw him but immediately looked away, as if ashamed for ever having spoken to him, or perhaps from shame at having betrayed their conversation to her mistress. Shakespeare dismounted and walked the mare to the church wall, where he tied her to a ring by the wrought-iron gate beside some other horses. In the yard outside the church, there were new crosses and several fresh-dug graves, and he wondered, briefly, whether the plague had begun its dread work in these parts.

He followed the mourners into the church. A hole had been dug at the eastern end of the chancel and mounds of earth piled up on either side. Sir Toby strode toward him, fury in his eyes. “You are not welcome here,” he said. “You intrude on private grief, sir, and I will not have it.”

“Sir Toby, I am inquiring into a murder. I must talk with you again. And with others.”

Le Neve’s hand was on the hilt of his sword, though he did not draw it from its scabbard. “Go, sir, go. Or I shall cut you down like a Frenchie, even in this, the Lord’s house.”

Shakespeare looked across to the man with the hat and the dark broadcloth coat. “Is that Mr. Winterberry, your daughter’s bridegroom?”

“It is no business of yours, sir. Go.”

Shakespeare ignored his entreaties and threats and walked on along the nave toward the mourning party.

“Mr. Winterberry?”

“Yes?”

The two men stood face-to-face, both tall, though Winterberry was older and his somber clothes did not hang well on his angular frame. His face was sallow and serious.

“I would speak with you, sir, about the death of your wife.”

“She was not my wife.”

“I had believed you were wed, Mr. Winterberry.”

“In church, but not in the bedchamber. In the eyes of man, but not of God, who sees all things. Now, may I ask who you are?”

“My name is Shakespeare. I am inquiring into the murder of Amy and the boy, Joe Jaggard.”

“And do you think this to be the meet and proper time to talk of such things?”

“It is a most heinous crime. I would have thought you would wish it solved.”

“She was frail, Mr. Shakespeare. She had the frailty and vanity of woman. The profane enemy, the minister of darkness, took her to his abominable breast. Look to the instruments of the Devil if you would know more of this death, sir.”

“I insist on talking with you, Mr. Winterberry, unless you wish me to fetch a mittimus from the justice to take you into custody for questioning.”

Winterberry stared at him hard. Whatever else he was, he was a merchant, and merchants were practical men who did deals every day. “Come to Indies Wharf by the Tower this afternoon and I will answer your questions, Mr. Shakespeare, though I can think of none that pertain to me. Now go, sir, as Sir Toby has demanded of you.”

Lady Le Neve came to Shakespeare and took his elbow and pulled him away firmly but without force. “Our daughter is being buried here alongside her forefathers and mother, Mr. Shakespeare. Have you no shame?”

“And what of the boy?”

“He took his life. He took Amy’s life. He has been buried at the crossroads. Now go.”

Shakespeare looked around at the little gathering and saw nothing but hostility. There was no more to be gained in this place today. He bowed in acknowledgment of their grief and to honor the dead girl about to be lowered into the earth, then walked slowly out of the little church and back through the churchyard toward the gate, where his mare waited patiently.

On the brow of the incline to the west, he saw a horseman, stock-still beneath a sycamore tree. It was impossible to make out his features from this distance, but something in the way he sat, thin and wiry like a stoat, told Shakespeare the watcher was Slyguff.

Shakespeare mounted his horse, pulled the reins southerly, and spurred her into a light trot.

And still the mortbell tolled.

S HAKESPEARE SPOKE to Perkin Sidesman and told him that if anyone were to ask, he was to say the school would be closed down for the summer but would reopen in October. If anyone wished to speak with him, they were to leave a note or spoken message. “I badly want to hear word of Jack and Boltfoot.”

“I understand, master,” the groom said without enthusiasm. He did not look happy about the extra responsibility loaded on his shoulders, but then he rarely looked happy about anything.

Shakespeare took a wherry from the green and slimy water-stairs at the Steelyard and headed downstream. On the south bank, as he passed, he watched fishermen pulling in draftnets of salmon. The tide was with the wherry, but would soon be turning; the narrow race between the struts of London Bridge was a hazardous affair, and one which, when the current was strong, many preferred to avoid by disembarking and walking to the other side of the bridge. Shakespeare did not have time for such delicacy. He held his breath as the watermen steered the craft at speed through the churning white water.

Glad to be through and alive, he breathed again, only to catch a lungful of the stink that blew from the Billingsgate fish market. Further downriver, Smart’s and Morris’s quays were thick with shipping, all moored alongside each other in a profusion of spars, rigging, and furled sails. The whole of the Thames here was a chaotic mass of proud-masted vessels: a hundred or more ships of all sizes riding at anchor in midstream, lying on their sides on the muddy banks, careened for the removal of barnacles and weeds, or standing at the wharves for discharge and loading of cargoes.

Past Customs House on the north bank, then the Tower and St. Katharine’s Dock, finally the watermen guided the little vessel in among the tangle of carracks, barks, and flyboats that encumbered the frontage of Indies Wharf.

Shakespeare paid the men fourpence, then stepped ashore onto the long quayside, hemmed in on one side by ships and on the other by warehouses. Gantries and tall cranes of oak and elm stretched out across the quay and river, creating a cacophony of creaking timbers.

A family of brown rats scurried along the edge of the wharf, unafraid. Shakespeare strode among them and went through an arched entrance into the largest of the warehouses. He found a foreman docker, who directed him to the countinghouse on the landward side of the warehouse.

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