The White Rose murders srs-1 Read online

  In time I moved house, joining Benjamin in his narrow, dark tenement in Pig Pen Alley behind the butchers' shambles near Ipswich Market – a pleasant enough place inside with its low-ceilinged rooms, buttery, kitchen, small hall and white-washed chambers above. Behind it, however, Benjamin cultivated a paradise of a garden, laid out in rectangular plots, each protected by a low hedge of lavender. Some contained herbs – balm and basil, hyssop, calamine and wormwood – others flowers: marigolds, violets, lilies of the valley. There were stunted apple and pear trees as well as pot herbs growing along the wall to season the meat in winter. Benjamin, taciturn at the best of times, always used this garden as the setting in which to share his deepest thoughts. My master never explained why he intervened to save my life so I never asked him. One day he just sat in the garden and declared: 'Roger, you can be my servant, my apprentice. You have broken so many laws, you are probably more of an expert on justice than I am. However,' he wagged one bony finger at me, 'if you appear before Scawsby again, you will undoubtedly hang!'

  I never did but Scawsby had not seen the last of me. Benjamin intrigued me, though he never discussed his early life.

  'A closed book, Roger.' He smiled.

  'Why haven't you married?' I asked. 'Don't you like women?'

  'Passing fancies, my dear Roger,' he replied, and remained assiduous in his pursuit of his duties, even persuading me to join the choir at the local church, my bass an excellent foil to his tenor. I lustily bawled out the hymns whilst watching the heaving breasts of our female companions. Since then I've always had a soft spot for choirs.

  At first, life was plain sailing. I kept my head down, doing the occasional errand, staying away from those areas where the powerful Scawsby family had a measure of influence. I feared for my master but one thing I had forgotten though Scawsby knew it well: Benjamin was a nephew of the great Lord Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Bluff Hal's principal minister. Now the Lord Cardinal was a hard man, not known for his generosity. A butcher's son from Ipswich, he had not forgotten his obscure beginnings but was equally determined that none of his relatives should remind him of them. When the rest of his large family came begging for favours, they were whipped off like a pack of hounds but Benjamin, the son of his favourite aunt, was cossetted and protected. My Lord Cardinal was determined that if he could be saved from the shambles of Ipswich and rise to be a royal favourite, Archbishop of York, Lord Chancellor and a Cardinal of the Roman Church, so could Benjamin.

  Well, we all know about Wolsey. I was there when he died, in the Cathedral House at Lincoln, his great, fat fingers scrabbling at the bed clothes as he whispered, 'Roger, Roger, if I had served my God as well as I have served my King, he would not leave me to die like this!'

  Now, old Wolsey fell when he failed to secure Bluff Hal's divorce from Catherine of Aragon and place him between the sheets with the hot-limbed, long-legged Anne Boleyn. I never told Benjamin this (indeed very few people knew it) but the Lord Cardinal did not die by natural causes – he was murdered by a subtle, deadly poison. However, that's another story for the future. In 1516, by subtle fetches, Wolsey had crept into the ear of the King. A brilliant scholar, Wolsey had gone to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he became fellow and bursar until his hand was found dipping in the money bags. Anyway, with his crafty mind he soon became chaplain to long-faced Henry VII, buying a house in St Bride's parish in Fleet Street. When Henry VII went mad and died, our new young King, the golden boy, Bluff Hal, saw the craftiness in Wolsey and raised him high. He bought a house near London Stone in the Walbrook, becoming Almoner, Chancellor and Archbishop until all power rested in his great fat hands. Some people said Wolsey was the King's bawd, others his pimp, alleging he kept young ladies in a tower built in a pleasaunce near Sheen for the King's entertainment. Others claimed Wolsey practised the Black Arts and communed with Satan who appeared to him in the form of a monstrous cat. A great man, Wolsey! He built Hampton Court, his servants went round in liveries of scarlet and gold with the escutcheon T. C on their back and front – 'Thomas Cardinalis'. And, all the time, the Lord Cardinal never forgot his favourite kinsman, young Benjamin.

  My Lord Cardinal did not give Benjamin actual honours but rather money, as well as opening the occasional door to preferment and advancement. At least that was the Cardinal's plan though it came to involve treason, conspiracy, murder and executions… but that was for the future. If I had known the end of the business at the beginning, I would have run like the fleetest hare. There, I speak as lucidly and clearly as any honest man!

  Benjamin was twenty when I met him again as Clerk to the Justices. I was two years younger and quickly learnt to play the role of the clever, astute servant, ever ready to help his guileless master. Well, at least I thought him guileless but there was a deeper, darker side to Benjamin. I did hear a few rumours about his past but dismissed them as scurrilous (I never really did decide whether he was an innocent, or subtle and wise). Do you know, I once met him in a tavern where he sat clutching a small wooden horse to his chest, gazing at it raptly, his eyes full of religious fervour. Now the toy was nothing much, any child would play with it. This particular one looked rather old and battered.

  'Master, what is it?' I asked.

  Benjamin smiled like the silly saint he was.

  'It's a relic, Roger,' he whispered.

  Oh, God, I thought, and could have hit him over the head with a tankard.

  'A relic of what, Master?'

  Benjamin swallowed, trying hard to hide his pleasure.

  'I had it from a man from Outremer, a holy pilgrim who has visited Palestine and the house Mary kept in Nazareth. This,' he lifted it up, eyes glowing as if he was Arthur holding the Holy Grail, 'was once touched and played with by the infant Christ and his cousin, John the Baptist.'

  Well, what can you say to that? If I'd had my way, I'd have smashed the toy over the silly pedlar's head but my master was one of those childlike men: he always spoke the truth and so he believed that everyone else did. After that I decided to take him in hand and help him make full use of the Lord Cardinal's favours. In the spring of 1517, Wolsey granted Benjamin a farm, a smallholding in Norfolk on which to raise sheep, and my master gave me gold to buy the stock. In an attempt to save money I bought the sheep from a worried-looking farmer who pocketed my silver at Smithfield, handed over the entire flock and ran like the wind. No sooner had I returned these animals to my master's holding than they all died of murrain which explained the farmer's sudden departure. Of course, I did not tell my master about their former owner or how I had kept the difference between what he gave me and what I had spent. I am not a thief, I simply salted the money away with a goldsmith in Holborn in case Benjamin made further mistakes.

  Cardinal Wolsey's rage can be better imagined than described. He angrily despatched his nephew to serve Sir Thomas Boleyn, a great landowner in Kent. You have heard of the Boleyns? Yes, the same family which produced the dark-eyed enchantress, Anne. Now she may have been a bitch, but once you met her father, you knew the reason why! Lord Thomas was a really wicked man who would do anything to advance his own favour with the King – and I mean anything. Of course, like all the arrogant lords of the soil, he hated Cardinal Wolsey and plotted with the other great ones to bring the proud prelate low. Although a powerful landowner, Lord Thomas had still married above himself, one of the Howards, the kin of my old general the Earl of Surrey who slaughtered the Scots at Flodden Field. Now Boleyn's wife, Lady Frances Howard, was the proverbial drawbridge, going down for anyone who asked her. Bluff King Hal's hands had been under her skirts and well above her garter many a time. The same is true of her eldest daughter, Mary, who had the morals of an alley cat. She bore Bluff Hal an illegitimate child but even he had grave doubts about its parentage and locked it away in the convent at Sheen. Mary and her sister Anne were sent as maids of honour to the French court. That's a gauge of Lord Thomas Boleyn's stupidity – it was like putting two plump capons down a fox hole.

  King Henry may
have been lecherous but King Francis I of France was the devil incarnate when it came to lewdery. Well, he was in his younger days. I met him later on when he had lost all his teeth and suffered from great abscesses in his groin as his whole body rotted away with syphilis. In his youth, Francis brought the best and the worst of Italy to Paris: Italian painters, Italian tapestries and Italian morals.

  In his heyday he was tall, sardonic in looks and temperament, high-spirited, a virile devil with a grand air, smiling, insouciant, glittering in his gem-encrusted doublets and shirts dripping with lace. He was surrounded by women, in particular three voluptuous brunettes who formed his little band of favourite bedfellows. He was always most anxious to know about the love affairs of his ladies, being especially intrigued to hear of their actual joustings or any fine airs the ladies might assume when at those frolics, the positions they adopted, the expressions on their faces, the words they used. Frances even had a favourite goblet, the inside of which was engraved with copulating animals but, as the drinker drained it, he or she saw in its depths a man and woman making love. Francis used to give this cup to his female guests and watch them blush.

  Now Anne Boleyn kept to herself but Mary took to this lechery like a duck to water, even acquiring the nickname of the English Mare, so many men had ridden her! Nothing abashed her, not even when Francis's fiery young courtiers played evil jokes by placing the corpses of hanged men in her bed.

  Now, I told all this to my master, giving him a detailed description of the morals and habits of the Boleyn women, and what does he do? One night at supper he innocently turns and asks Lord Thomas if my tales had any truth in them? An hour later we left Hever Castle, and the world-weary Lord Cardinal, hearing of the incident, decided his nephew needed further education. We were despatched to the halls of Cambridge. However, a year later, when my master came to give his dissertation in the Schools, a parchment was found in his wallet containing quotations from the Scriptures, St Cyprian as well as the other fathers of the Eastern church. Benjamin was accused of cheating and promptly sent down. I never confessed that I put it there in an attempt to help him. The Lord Cardinal, so Benjamin reported later, informed him, in language more suitable to a butcher in a shambles than to a man of God, exactly what he thought of him, and we were dismissed to our own devices at Ipswich. Suffice to relate, many was the occasion when my master would grasp me by the hand.

  'Roger,' he would declare proudly, 'God is my witness. I don't know what I would do without you!'

  In a way I am sure he was right and I constantly prayed for an upturn in our fortunes. My step-father died but his house and possessions went to others and I became rather worried because Benjamin had given up his place as Clerk to the Justices and Scawsby would scarcely hand it back. Moreover, he must have listened to the tittle-tattle of the court and realised Uncle Wolsey was now not so sweet on his blessed nephew. Nevertheless, in the late summer of 1517 my prayers in the Chantry chapel of St Mary the Elms were answered. The great Cardinal, in one of his many pilgrimages to Our Lady's shrine at Walsingham, decided to stop at the Guildhall in Ipswich on his way home. He arrived in the town in an aura of splendid pomp, flaunting his purple cardinal's robes, his tall, silver crosses and heavy gold pillars carried aloft before him. A vast army of gentlemen and yeoman tenants arrayed themselves on either side of him. His arrival was heralded by criers wearing splendid livery who parted the crowds in the streets shouting, 'Make way! Make way for Thomas – Cardinal, Archbishop of York and Chancellor of England!'

  After these came heavy carts and carriages, loaded high with his baggage. Young boys scattered rose water to lay the dust, then came the Cardinal himself, tall and massive, mounted on a mule. By tradition this is a humble beast but My Lord Cardinal's was carefully groomed, caparisoned in crimson and velvet and carried stirrups of gilded copper. His attendants took over the main chambers of the Guildhall. Benjamin and I watched them arrive but my master did not expect the personal summons he received from the Cardinal later in the day.

  We changed into our best doublets, slops and hose and hurried to the Guildhall where yeomen wearing the Lord Cardinal's livery took us along to the audience chamber. I tell you now, it was like entering Paradise. The floors were strewn with carpets, the most modest being of pure lambswool, the richest of silk imported by Venetian merchants from Damascus. Rich jewels and ornaments, images of saints, fine cloth of gold, damask copes and other vestments lay scattered round the chamber. There were chairs upholstered in crimson velvet, others in black silk, all embroidered with the Wolsey coat of arms. Tables of cypress and chairs of pine were covered with a great number of cushions, appropriately decorated with cardinals' hats, dragons, lions, roses and gold balls. Oh, how my fingers itched to filch something!

  The prelate himself sat in robes of state on a high episcopal chair stolen from the nearby cathedral. He was dressed from head to toe in pure purple silk, a small skull cap of the same colour on his head, and even his cushioned slippers bore a coat of arms. He was as proud as he looked with his square-jawed, heavy face, skin white as snow, lips full and sensuous but eyes half-closed black pools of arrogance.

  On the Cardinal's right, like a spider, sat a black-garbed figure, cowl thrust back to reveal a cherubic face and shining bald pate. This was Doctor Agrippa, envoy and spy for the greatest in the land. I studied him curiously.

  'A strange man, Doctor Agrippa,' Benjamin had once remarked. 'He has personal acquaintance with the Lord of the Cemeteries, a man steeped in magic who dabbles in the Black Arts.'

  On closer inspection, I could hardly believe that: Agrippa's face was smooth and kindly, the eyes steadfast and sure in their gaze, though I did glimpse the silver pentangle hanging round his neck. People said he was Wolsey's familiar, his link with the demons of the underworld. On the other side of the Lord Cardinal was a bland young man with sandy hair, sea green eyes and a boyish, freckled face. He smiled at us in a gap-toothed way. I asked Benjamin who he was but my master hoarsely told me to keep quiet. Wolsey waved one purple-gloved hand and Benjamin hurried forward, kneeling at the footstool to kiss the heavy gold ring slipped over the Cardinal's silken glove. Wolsey ignored me, flicking his fingers at us to sit down on two quilted stools. I kept bobbing my head vigorously to placate the Lord Cardinal who sat studying us pensively.

  'Benjamin, Benjamin, my dearest nephew.'

  My master squirmed uneasily.

  'My favourite nephew Benjamin,' Wolsey continued in a silky voice, 'and, of course, Shallot, his faithful amanuensis.'

  (To those who don't know Greek, that means secretary.)

  Wolsey abruptly leaned forward in his chair. Oh, Lord, I was so frightened, my heart as well as my bowels seemed to turn to liquid. Had the Lord Cardinal found out about the sheep? I wondered.

  'What am I going to do with you?' the Cardinal snapped. 'Failed farmer! Failed merchant!' (That was another undertaking which went wrong.) 'Failed scholar! Failed spy!' (I'll tell you about that presently.) Wolsey brought his hand crashing down on the arm of his chair. I glanced sideways at Benjamin. His face was pale but he was not frightened; those curiously innocent eyes gazed steadily back at his uncle. I detected no smell of fear. (Believe me, I know that perfume well!) No, my master was serene, undoubtedly drawing strength from my presence. I quietly preened myself.

  'When,' the Lord Cardinal barked, 'are you going to rid yourself of that?'

  I heard Agrippa giggle. I thought Wolsey was pointing at my master's cloak for, as I've remarked, I have a slight cast in one eye, then I realised the Cardinal meant me. Doctor Agrippa giggled again whilst the young man on Wolsey's left looked embarrassed.

  'Dearest Uncle,' my master replied, 'Roger is both my secretary and my friend. He is shrewd, learned in the arts, of prodigious character and a strong protector. I will always value his companionship.'

  'Master Shallot,' Doctor Agrippa intervened smoothly, 'is a lying, base-born rogue who disgraced himself at Flodden and, by all rights, should be drying out in the sun
on the town's scaffold!'

  I was hurt by Agrippa's words. The Cardinal smiled and stared at his nephew. God be my judge, I saw a look of rare tenderness and gentle irony in the Cardinal's eyes.

  'You wrong Shallot,' Benjamin spoke up. 'He has his vices but also has his virtues.'

  (A rare perceptive man, my master.)

  Wolsey made a rude sound with his tongue and flicked his hand at Agrippa. The magician rose and took three chessmen from a lacquered board on the table beside him.

  'You may still redeem yourself,' Wolsey began. 'Explain, Doctor Agrippa.'

  The fellow crouched in front of us, his black cloak billowing like a dark cloud around him.

  'There are three strands to this tapestry I paint,' he began.

  I stared, fascinated by Agrippa's eyes which seemed to change colour from a light blue to a liquid black whilst his voice grew deeper and more soporific.

  'This,' Doctor Agrippa remarked, holding up a small white pawn, 'represents the Yorkists driven from power in 1485 when their leader, the Usurper Richard, was killed at Bosworth by the present King's father. This,' the doctor now held up the white king, 'is our noble lord, Henry VIII, by the grace of God our King. And this,' he held up the white queen, 'is our beloved King's sister, Queen Margaret, widow of James IV, who was killed at Flodden, now unjustly driven from her kingdom of Scotland.'

  I stared, half listening to Doctor Agrippa, now convinced I was in the presence of a powerful magician. As he spoke Agrippa's voice changed timbre and his eyes constantly shifted in colour, whilst sometimes as he moved I sniffed the rottenness of the kennel, and then at others the most fragrant of perfumes. The magician turned and grinned at Wolsey.

  'Shall I continue, My Lord?'

  The Cardinal nodded. Agrippa cleared his throat.

  'The Yorkists are traitors but they survive in secret covens and conspiracies, calling themselves Les Blancs Sangliers after the White Boar, the personal insignia of Richard III. They were once shown favour by James IV of Scotland, and now they plot and threaten England's security.'