The King's Evil Page 5

He pointed at a chair by a small table underneath the window. He sat opposite me and leaned over the table, bringing our heads close together.

  ‘I’ve a commission for you, Marwood. Do you remember Edward Alderley?’

  I was so surprised I couldn’t speak.

  ‘Alderley,’ Chiffinch said irritably. ‘For God’s sake, man, you can’t have forgotten. That affair you were mixed up in after the Fire with my Lady Quincy’s second husband. Edward Alderley was the son by his first wife. He used to be at court a great deal.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Of course I remember him.’

  ‘He’s dead.’ He paused, fiddling with the wart on his chin. ‘I daresay no one will shed many tears.’

  I felt shock, swiftly followed by relief. What a stroke of luck for Cat. ‘How did he die?’

  ‘Drowned. But it’s not that he is dead that matters. It’s where his body was found.’ Chiffinch’s forefinger abandoned the wart and tapped the table between us. ‘In Lord Clarendon’s well.’

  I began to understand why the Duke of York had been in such a rage. Lord Clarendon was the Duke’s father-in-law. ‘In my lord’s house?’

  ‘In his garden. Which comes to the same thing. But mark: this is a confidential matter. Breathe a word of it to anyone, and you will regret it. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir. But are you sure that I am the man best suited to a matter of such delicacy?’

  ‘You wouldn’t be my choice for the job, I can tell you that. It’s by the King’s command. I suppose he chose you because you know a little of the man and his family.’

  Then there was no hope for me. ‘What do you want me to do?’ I asked.

  ‘Go to Clarendon House and look into the circumstances of Alderley’s death. The body is under lock and key. Lord Clarendon knows, of course, and so does one of his gentlemen, Mr Milcote. Alderley was discovered this morning by a servant, who has been sworn to secrecy. We don’t want the news made public yet. Not until we know more. That is essential.’

  ‘Was the death accidental, sir?’

  Chiffinch flung up his arms. ‘How in God’s name would I know? That’s for you to find out. Report back to me as soon as you can.’

  ‘Mr Williamson—’

  ‘May go to the devil for all I care. But I shall see he’s informed that the King has given you a commission. He can hardly object.’ Chiffinch glanced piously in the direction of heaven. ‘After God, our duty is to serve the King. We would all agree on that, I hope.’

  I nodded automatically. The more I thought about this, the less I liked it. I had been long enough at Whitehall to know that when the great ones of our world squabbled among themselves, it was the little ones who tended to be hurt.

  Chiffinch drew a paper from his pocket. ‘Here’s your authority, with the King’s signature.’ He held the paper in his hand, but did not give it to me. ‘Remember. My Lord Clarendon is no longer Lord Chancellor, but he still has many friends who would like to see him restored to the King’s favour. And one of them is the Duke.’ He paused, which gave me time to reflect on the fact that the Duke of York was the King’s heir presumptive, and that the Duke’s daughters – Clarendon’s grandchildren – were next in line to the throne. ‘So for God’s sake, Marwood, go carefully. And if you see my lord himself, try not to anger him. He has had much to cope with lately. Bear in mind that his wife has hardly been a month in her grave.’

  He sent me away. With my mind heavy with foreboding, I walked slowly through the public apartments, through the Guard Chamber and down into the Pebble Court. It was still raining, even more heavily than before.

  I was to go immediately to Clarendon House, but on my way I had to call at the Gazette office in Scotland Yard to collect my cloak and my writing materials. I was tempted to scribble a note to Cat, care of Mr Hakesby, while I was there, to give her private warning of her cousin’s death. But I dared not ignore Mr Chiffinch’s prohibition until I knew more of the matter.

  Besides—

  A thought struck me like a blow in the middle of the court. I stopped abruptly. Rain dripped from the brim of my hat.

  How could I have been so foolish? Not two days earlier, I had told Catherine Lovett that her cousin had found her out. And she had told me that he had raped her when she lived under her father’s roof, and that she meant to kill him for it.

  From any other person, that might have been merely an extravagant way of speaking, a way of expressing hatred. But not from Cat. She was a literal-minded creature in many ways, and a woman of great spirit. I had seen what she was capable of. And now Edward Alderley was dead.

  I faced the dreadful possibility that Cat had somehow contrived to kill her cousin. Worse still, that I had played a part in causing the murder, by warning her that her cousin had found her.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE OFFICIAL NAME of the road was Portugal Street, in honour of our Queen, Catherine of Braganza, but everyone persisted in calling it Piccadilly. It was an old route west to Hyde Park and then towards Reading. Long ago, some of the land nearby had been owned by a man who had grown rich in the manufacture of those large old collars of cutwork lace named piccadills, and somehow the name had been transferred to the road. In recent years, the mansions of the rich had sprouted like monstrous mushrooms among the fields. The greatest of them all was Clarendon House.

  It was a vast building of raw, unweathered stone surrounded by high walls and tall railings. It faced Piccadilly, looking south down the hill to St James’s Palace, which seemed diminished and even a little squalid in comparison with its magnificent new neighbour. I had heard Mr Williamson say that the King was not pleased that the house of a subject should so outshine his own palaces.

  Most Londoners hated it, too. Here was Lord Clarendon in the splendour of his new house, while thousands of them had lost their own houses in the Fire. People called it Dunkirk House, for they said that the former Chancellor had profited hugely and corruptly from the government’s sale of that town, one of Cromwell’s conquests, to the French king.

  Though it was broad daylight, the main gates were barred. The gateposts were still blackened in places. During the riots in June, the mob had lit bonfires here and burned the trees that used to line the street outside. They would have burned the house itself if they could.

  The mob blamed him for all our ills, past and present, including the Queen’s failure to give the King an heir. They believed Clarendon had purposely found a barren wife for him so that his own grandchildren by the Duke of York would one day inherit the throne. They blamed him for our crushing defeat at the hands of the Dutch navy in the Battle of the Medway. They blamed him for everything. According to popular belief, no form of corruption was too large or too small for Lord Clarendon. It was even said that he had stolen the stone intended for rebuilding St Paul’s after the Fire and used it for his mansion.

  It was a house in mourning – not for Alderley, of course, but for Lady Clarendon. Her funeral hatchment hung over the gateway. Two manservants, both carrying arms, waited inside the gates under a temporary shelter. I presented my credentials and asked to be taken to Mr Milcote. His name was enough to allow me into the forecourt. One of the servants escorted me to a side door in the west side of the house and brought me to an antechamber draped with black. It was so large you could have fitted the whole of Infirmary Close into it, from kitchen to attic. I was left to wait under the suspicious eye of a porter while yet another servant went to find Mr Milcote.

  I heard his rapid footsteps before I saw him. He appeared in a doorway leading to a flight of stairs.

  ‘Mr Marwood – your servant, sir.’

  We exchanged bows. He was a tall, quietly dressed man in his thirties. His periwig was fair, and his complexion suggested that the natural colour of his hair was not far removed from the wig’s. He too was in mourning.

  ‘I hope they haven’t kept you waiting. We have not been able to be as hospitable here as my lord would have liked, unfortunately.’ His mouth twisted. ‘Recent even
ts, you understand.’

  I nodded. There was an openness about Milcote that I liked at once, and also a sort of delicacy too, a sense of what was fitting for a situation. I said quietly, ‘I’m come on the King’s business.’

  He glanced at the waiting servants, took my arm and led me outside. ‘You mustn’t think me rude but it will be better if we talk outside.’ He looked up at the grey sky. ‘At least the rain is slackening.’

  We walked down the flagged path. The side of the house rose above us, austerely regular, blocking much of the light. We came to a gate of wrought iron, which Milcote unlocked to let us pass, and entered the garden at the back of the house.

  ‘I assume you have come about our … our recent discovery?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘My lord has much to occupy himself,’ he went on. If he had noticed the scars that the fire had left on the side of my face and my neck, he was too well bred to show it. ‘He may not be able to see you today.’

  ‘He knows I’m here?’

  ‘Oh yes. The Duke sent word that someone would come.’

  We paused at the corner of the house, looking out over the garden. It was on the same scale as the house – at least five or six acres, and surrounded by high walls. The paths had been laid out, and many shrubs had been planted. But there was an unfinished quality to it all: some areas were covered in old canvas sails, much patched and faded; and the paths were rutted and muddy. Oblivious to the weather, teams of gardeners were at work. Against the far wall were two pavilions, which were only partly built. One of them lacked a roof. Between them, a gap in the wall was blocked by a heavy wooden palisade.

  ‘It will be the greatest garden in London when it’s finished,’ Milcote said. ‘The designs are Mr Evelyn’s. It’s a pity that this … this accident should happen here.’

  ‘Where, exactly?’

  He pointed to the left-hand pavilion, the one with a roof. ‘Shall we go there directly?’

  Milcote guided me to a path running parallel to the side wall. Halfway down, he paused to command a gardener to keep himself and his fellows away from this part of the garden. I glanced back at the front of the house. I saw a white blur at the first-floor window nearest to the south-west corner. Someone was watching us, his face distorted and ghostly behind the glass. We walked on.

  ‘I’ve sent the builders away,’ Milcote said.

  ‘They arrived after the body was found?’

  ‘Yes. They could have continued on the other pavilion, but I thought it wiser that we should have as few strangers here as possible while we deal with this.’

  ‘Then who knows about it?’

  ‘Besides me, I believe only the servant who found the body, one Matthew Gorse, and Lord Clarendon himself.’

  ‘But the rest of the household must be curious?’

  ‘I put it about that we had discovered the roof to be unsafe, and nothing could be done there until new tiles arrived.’ Milcote frowned. ‘And I sent a message to the builders telling them not to come today. But we can’t keep everyone in ignorance for long.’

  The pavilion was of two storeys above a basement, with a balustrade masking the roof. Though the wall facing the garden was of stone, dressed similarly to the stone of the mansion, the wall to the side was of crumbling, dirty red bricks, which looked out of place in this setting. Near the ground was a small mullioned window set in a stone frame and protected by iron bars.

  Milcote climbed a shallow flight of steps and unlocked the double door. I turned to see if the face was still visible at the window.

  ‘We are not overlooked?’ Milcote said.

  ‘I think someone was watching us from the house.’

  For an instant alarm flared in his eyes, but he suppressed it. ‘A window? Which one?’

  ‘At the end to the right, on the first floor.’

  ‘My lord’s private apartments are there.’ He smiled, adding with obvious affection, ‘He may be old, but he likes to know what’s what.’

  He pushed open one leaf of the door just wide enough to let us pass. I found myself in a room with brick walls, to which islands of old plaster still clung. It was lit by two tall windows, one facing the mansion and the other, at right angles to it, facing the other pavilion at the opposite corner of the garden. The flagged floor was uneven and stained with age. In one corner was a pile of planks and newly cut stones. The air was very cold.

  ‘The body’s downstairs in the kitchen,’ Milcote said, closing the door behind us and throwing the bolt across. ‘Through there.’

  In the wall to the left, a door led to a lobby containing a staircase with worn treads.

  I glanced up. ‘Where does it go to?’

  ‘The main apartment. After that, to the viewing platform.’

  I followed Milcote down to the basement. It was the same size as the room above, and much gloomier, for the two barred windows were small and set high in the wall. It had a large fireplace with two ovens beside it. There was no furniture of any sort apart from a wooden contraption tucked into a corner, with a pile of scaffolding poles beside it. It was almost as high as the barrel-vaulted ceiling.

  ‘There,’ Milcote said, pointing at the floor in front of the empty fireplace where a long shape lay like a vast boar hound across the brick-lined hearth. It was draped with a horse blanket.

  I took a step towards it but he caught my arm to stop me.

  ‘Have a care. The well is there.’

  Ahead of me, a yard or so in front of the wooden contraption, was a wooden disc about five or six feet in diameter. It was countersunk into the floor, which was why I hadn’t noticed it before.

  ‘I wouldn’t trust my weight on the cover,’ Milcote said. ‘Just in case.’

  I skirted the well and knelt by the body. I pulled back the blanket. My stomach heaved. I had seen too many dead bodies in the last few years. During the Plague they had been piled in the streets. But I’d never grown used to them.

  This was Edward Alderley: there was no doubt about it. His single eye stared up at me. The face was almost grey. The features were heavier than I remembered. His mouth was open, showing blackened teeth. He had lost his wig, and the dome of his skull was speckled with stubble. There were drops of moisture on his skin.

  I drew back the blanket to the waist and then down to the knees. A drawn sword was lying on the floor beside the body. The tip of the blade winked in the light from the lantern. The sheath, which hung from the belt by two thin chains, had entangled itself with the legs. The leather was black from the water.

  Death had made Alderley look ridiculous, as death is apt to do. Frowning, I touched his collar and then his coat.

  ‘He’s soaking wet.’

  ‘Didn’t they tell you?’ Milcote said. ‘The poor man fell in the well and was drowned.’

  I glanced at the cover. ‘But how? The cover’s on.’

  ‘It wasn’t over the well this morning. It was leaning against the wall.’

  ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘It must have been after Saturday afternoon. That was when work stopped. So between then and first thing this morning when the servant came to unlock the pavilion.’

  ‘Perhaps he was here on Saturday with the builders,’ I suggested. ‘And they locked him in by accident.’

  ‘It’s possible.’ Milcote shrugged. ‘But unlikely. The surveyor in charge of the works is a sober man, very thorough. He was on site on Saturday – I saw him myself.’ He hesitated. ‘Between ourselves, there’s some doubt as to whether the work will continue. Mr Hakesby is understandably concerned, as he’s already retained the builders.’

  I swallowed. ‘Did you say – Hakesby?’

  ‘Yes. The surveyor-architect. An experienced man, highly recommended.’ Milcote looked curiously at me, and I knew my face must have betrayed the shock I felt. ‘I’ll question him, of course, but I’m sure he would have ensured the well was covered up when he left, and the building secure. He has his own key.’

  ‘
Yes,’ I began, ‘or I will talk to him myself.’ I tried to mask my confusion with a change of subject. ‘Who identified Alderley?’

  ‘I did. I was a little acquainted with the gentleman, and he’s visited Clarendon House in the past.’ Milcote hesitated. ‘But I had no idea he was here, or how he got into the pavilion.’

  I was about to ask how he knew Alderley when there was a hammering above our heads. Both of us swung round as if surprised in a guilty act. The sound bounced off the walls, filling the empty spaces between them with dull echoes.

  Milcote swore under his breath. He took the stairs, two at a time. I followed. He unbolted the door. I glimpsed a manservant through the crack.

  ‘It’s my lord, master. He wants to see you in his closet. And the other gentleman.’

  The old man sat by the window wrapped in a quilted bedgown. His bandaged legs rested on a padded stool. Clarendon was a martyr to the gout, Milcote had told me on the way up here, so much so that even the staircases in the house had been designed with exceptionally shallow treads to make them as easy as possible for him to climb.

  A brisk fire burned in the grate, and the room was uncomfortably warm. After the grandeur of the stairs and the outer rooms, I had not expected this closet to be small. It was full of colours and objects – paintings, sculptures, rugs, pieces of china, curiosities and books – always books, more and more books.

  My warrant from the King lay on Clarendon’s lap. He had insisted on examining it himself, even holding it up to the light from the window, as if the very paper it was written on held secrets of its own.

  ‘Marwood,’ he said. He looked half as old as time, but his voice was clear and hard. ‘Marwood. Was there once a printer of that name? Dead now, I think.’

  ‘Yes, my lord. My father.’

  Clarendon’s memory was legendary, as was his command of detail. His small eyes studied me, but to my relief he did not pursue the subject. ‘You’re from Whitehall, yes?’

  ‘I work for Mr Williamson on the Gazette.’

  ‘The Gazette?’ His face grew suspicious. ‘Does that mean that Lord Arlington has a finger in the pie, as he usually does?’