A Play Of Heresy Part 11

"Then we can get back to our practice," Burbage ventured hopefully, gesturing at Joliffe and himself.

"Best you do," the crowner granted. "The inquest will be at my place tomorrow, ninth hour. You three as first finders will be there." An order, not a request. Burbage, the man who had come for him, and Joliffe all nodded their acceptance. The crowner added, "But don't talk about this anymore than need be."

"Master Sendell-he's heading our play-the Weavers Guild's play-he has to be told," Joliffe said. "Ned Eme had a part in it."

"Blessed Saint Michael!" Burbage sounded as if he had just added a new horror to all the rest, "His brother is part of our company!"

"I leave it to you, then, whether to tell him what's happened or else just that he should get himself home," the crowner said.

Burbage and Joliffe accepted that with other bows and willingly escaped, even if it was only escape from one miserable matter to another, with now Sendell and Richard Eme to be faced and told. They split the duty. Burbage went to Richard, presently sitting in talk on one side of the yard with Master Smale and Powet. Joliffe went the other way, to Sendell who was in talk with Cecily, with d.i.c.k standing between them, his arms out-stretched while they pulled and s.h.i.+fted Christ's over-robe around on him.

"Like that then should keep the white robe hidden until we want it seen," Sendell was saying before he saw Joliffe. His frown was somewhere between irked and worried, as if he were ready not to be angry if Joliffe's reason for disappearing was sufficient. He finished with Cecily and d.i.c.k by saying, "It's good. You're going to look very right, d.i.c.k. Thank you, Cecily"-then turned to Joliffe with-"Well?"

Joliffe made a small beckon of his head to draw Sendell aside. Across the yard, Richard Eme had risen from the bench and was leaving, hopefully to go home rather than to the yard across the way. In no manner should any man see his brother the way Ned was now.

Looking from Joliffe to Richard Eme as he went out the gate and back to Joliffe as they moved beyond anyone overhearing them, Sendell demanded, with worry now definitely taking the upper hand, "What is it?" And then with the sharp-wittedness of alarm exclaimed, "It's Ned Eme, isn't it? Something has happened to him. What? How bad is it?"

Joliffe told him.

Chapter 16.

The next day began gray, with low clouds and scudding rain, well suited to Joliffe's dark humour and, he did not doubt, to a number of other people's. It had been bad enough, seeing Ned Eme hanging there. Today he would have to look at his body again and did not care even for the thought of that.

Then there would be the possible wreck of the play to deal with.

After Richard Eme had left them, Sendell had perforce told everyone else why and let them all go, too, having no hope of any more rehearsing them just then. Joliffe and Burbage had stayed longer for Cecily to mark where their robes would be hemmed. Powet and d.i.c.k had waited, too, to help carry home the weighty bundles of almost finished clothing when she had done. d.i.c.k had tried to ask questions of Joliffe and Burbage. They had given him no more than shakes of their heads, refusing, until Powet told d.i.c.k to hush. Cecily had worked silently, her head bent low, and with no sign of tears. Joliffe had to suppose Ned Eme must not have been much to her, but then why should he have been? She did not know he had probably been her brother's murderer.

When she had finished, and she and Powet and d.i.c.k had left, Sendell had said dully to Joliffe and Burbage, "That was a waste of time, though, wasn't it? The play is done. No Gabriel, and likely Richard Eme will be unwilling to go on with either of his parts, and it's over-late to get anyone else who's any good to take them."

Joliffe had had no comfort to offer; he had been already thinking much the same, but Burbage said, "I think you need not count Richard out. I think that, given a few days, he'll be able to set aside whatever grief he has for his brother sufficiently to go on with the play. They never much liked each other, and you've maybe noted he does dearly love self-display."

That was harsh, but it had a true enough ring to it that Sendell had given a grudging grunt of almost-laughter. Rubbing at his face with weariness and discouragement, he had said, "Well then, we'll see. That leaves Gabriel." Only then did he give way to the despairing question that always came with any self-murder. "Why did he do such a fool thing?"

Since there was rarely a sufficient answer to that and none at all this time, neither Joliffe and Burbage had given any. Now in the gray morning Joliffe set himself to seem as ordinary and honest a citizen as he could, dressing in his soberly best doublet and unmended hosen. He let Rose straighten his collar and comb down the back of his hair for him, told Piers no, he could not come, too, and went his way to the inquest. Burbage having told Joliffe last night where the crowner lived on Hill Street, he had no trouble finding the house. Of course the finding was made easier because Burbage was standing at the front steps leading up from the street to its main door and greeted him with a glumness that matched Joliffe's own.

"I had Master Eme around to me at dawn today," he said. "He wanted what I could tell him about finding Ned's body. He wanted to come to the inquest, too. To know all, he said."

"n.o.body ever truly wants to know all," Joliffe said, which was somewhat lacking in truth, given the breadth of his own curiosity at life. "Did you talk him away from it?"

"I did. I think it was his wife wanted him to come anyway."

"She'll make Richard come instead."

"You think she will?"

"He's coming along the street behind you."

Burbage looked over his shoulder and muttered something but joined Joliffe in putting the best faces to it they could as Richard Eme joined them. Properly in mourning black, he was deeply solemn and-to Joliffe's mind-altogether too aware of the moment as he accepted their condolences. He was playing "the grieving brother," Joliffe thought before he was able to curb the unkindness. Unkindness did not make it untrue, though. But neither did it mean Richard's grief was false. It was just that people whose feelings ran not very deeply often did not know the difference between the form of feeling a thing and truly feeling it. Judging from how Richard played his parts in the play, his feelings did not run deeply; they merely washed shallowly over his good opinion of himself.

"Here's Master Waldeve," Burbage said as they were joined by the man who had come for him after finding Ned. Glum greetings were exchanged all around. Then Burbage said, "Not there," as Richard made to go up the steps to the front door. "Down here." Pointing to the half dozen steps to the house's cellar.

"They put him in the cellar?" Richard said with an edge of outrage. "They put my brother in the cellar?"

"It was there or the stable," Burbage snapped. "Master Grevile's wife doesn't want bodies in her house. They put your brother where best they could."

"Given he can't be in any church," Master Waldeve said, low-voiced but meaning to be heard. It served; Richard Eme was instantly silent.

That was the next hard thing his family would have to face and then live with all the rest of their lives-that for self-murderers the rites of Christian funeral and burial in hallowed ground were forbidden, leaving little likelihood of salvation, no matter how many Ma.s.ses might be bought for their souls, supposing a priest could be persuaded to such prayers at all. To add to the misery, in some places-but rarely in England-the body was refused any burial at all, was dragged through the town, and was thrown into a ditch or river or out with the town's rubbish; and everywhere a self-murderer's goods and property were forfeited to his overlord and lost to his family, just as for any other homicide, whether of self or someone else.

The four men went in silence down the steps. The door was standing open, a servant waiting just inside. The cellar was a series of narrow, columned bays holding up the house above it. As to be expected, it was cool and damp and dark, with shadowed shapes of stored goods along its length. Only the bay nearest the door had been kept clear, with a shroud-covered shape lying long on a trestle table in the middle of it and racks of candles set to either side. Only one candle was burning as the men came in, but the servant nodded to the nearest rack, said, "You can light them, if you will, while I fetch Master Grevile," and went away toward a patch of light marking the inside stairs.

Keeping busy lighting candles was better than standing with nothing else to do except avoid looking at the shrouded shape. Joliffe moved before the others could, but after he had lighted the first few, Burbage took one of the burning ones and went to light the other rack. They were finis.h.i.+ng as Master Grevile joined them, the same servant with him but another man, too, who must be his clerk, given he was carrying what he needed to write down what would pa.s.s here.

"Gentlemen," the crowner said, including Joliffe in his nod. He being an officer of the crown, they all bowed in return. Straightening, Joliffe saw he was giving a long look at Richard Eme as if half-thinking to challenge why he was here. If he was, he thought other of it and only said, "Adam, take down the names of who is here. Note who are come as first finders and who is here to witness. If you will say your names, please."

They obliged. Then Master Grevile directed his servant with a silent nod to uncover the body. The man folded the shroud in even folds toward the foot of the table. Ned's body had been stripped. When the servant had done, the body lay there naked in the steady candlelight. Someone had done what could be done to better the misshapen face. Save for that and the sc.r.a.ped line of the rope around the neck there was nothing dreadful for Richard Eme to avoid reporting to his family. No terrible gashes. Nothing crushed and mangled. Hopefully he would have sense enough to lie about the rest to his parents and sister. Ned's parents and sister.

Master Grevile, the crowner, said, "Shall we begin? Is this the man you saw hanging in the smiths' pageant house yestereven?"

Master Waldeve, Burbage, and Joliffe confirmed that it was.

"How would you judge that he died?"

"By hanging," Master Waldeve said. Burbage and Joliffe spoke their agreement.

"You found him suspended from a beam by a rope around his neck and strangled," the crowner said.

"That's the way of it, yes," Master Waldeve agreed. Burbage and Joliffe nodded.

"Please examine the body closely to confirm there are no other wounds or signs of violence on it."

Joliffe moved to the far side of the table. Burbage and Master Waldeve stayed together. Richard Eme kept his distance. It was first finders and other immediate witnesses, if need be, who served for the crowner's jury to determine if an unexpected death was natural or by misadventure or murder. If it were natural or by misadventure, the crowner's ruling ended the matter. If it were determined to be murder, it became the sheriff's business. Here, though, the verdict would have to be self-murder and not a matter for the sheriff in the end.

No, in the end there would simply be endless grief for a son lost not just for this lifetime but for eternity, his soul d.a.m.ned.

But then it was already d.a.m.ned for the two murders he had done. Alive, he might have come to repent them, done penance, gained absolution and thereby the salvation of his soul. He could never do that now.

Always continuing to suppose he had done the murders. But why else, if not in despair and guilt, would he have hung himself? Surely not because Anna Deyster had not yet accepted his suit, when he could still have had hope of her.

While Master Waldeve, Burbage, and Joliffe obediently looked more closely at the body, with the crowner's servant obligingly rolling it on its side so they could see its back, too, Master Grevile asked, "Master Eme, since you are here and can be asked, perhaps sparing your parents my questions later, is there any known reason in your family why your brother should have taken his own life?"

The answer came sharp and harsh. "He thought himself in love with a woman who continued to refuse him."

"Was it marriage he offered, or-" The crowner let the question trail off discreetly.

"Marriage," Richard Eme snapped. "Marriage many times over. He gave her gifts. He implored her for her love. He must have finally despaired. It's her that brought him to this."

Burbage said back at Eme with some of Eme's own sharpness, "She learned only days ago that the man she hoped to marry was dead. Ned had no business trying for her so soon. Nor any business despairing so soon, either."

"Well, he did try and he did despair," Richard Eme snapped back. He gestured at the corpse to make his point. "He hung himself. Anyone can see it. Is there aught else for me to see or do here?"

"Can you say when you last saw your brother?" Master Grevile asked.

"At supper two nights ago. At home."

"What was his humour then?"

Richard shrugged and shook his head. "Good enough. Much as usual. Or so he made it seem."

"Thank you. We need nothing else from you at present."

"Then I'll go." He started to, as an after-thought turned back, made the sign of the cross at his brother's body, shook his head at the hopelessness of it, and left with the haste of someone glad to be away.

A slight silence stayed behind him, ended by Burbage saying, "That accords well with Ned having done it sometime in the night before last. Given how the rigor was pa.s.sed off by the time he was found."

"So it's to be a verdict of self-murder then, is it?" Master Waldeve said.

"Is it?" asked the crowner.

Burbage and Master Waldeve looked at him, somewhat uncertain.

"Um," said Joliffe.

Everyone looked at him, including the clerk raising his head from the parchment on the writing board he held and the servant long since drawn back into the shadow of one of the pillars.

"You have some doubt?" Master Grevile said. His tone neither encouraged nor discouraged.

"Those." Joliffe pointed at the corpse's trunk.

"What?" Burbage asked.

Joliffe unwillingly stepped closer and pointed, without touching, at a round bruise about an inch wide, low on Ned's right rib. Then at another and another-a scatter of more than half a dozen all over his upper body. "Bruises," he said. "On his back, too."

The crowner jerked his head for his servant to roll the body sideways again. While the man did, Joliffe fetched a candle from the nearest rack and held it where it cast clear light over Ned's back. There were more of the round bruises there, a half dozen perhaps.

"Odd," said Master Waldeve unwillingly.

The servant lay the body down again and stepped back. So did Joliffe. Looking at him, the crowner asked, "So? What do you make of it?"

Joliffe looked at Burbage and Master Waldeve. They both shook their heads, frowning with uncertainty. "A pole?" Joliffe suggested. "A flat-ended, round pole about an inch thick?"

"Such as rolled under my foot in the shed when I was looking at the body," Master Grevile said evenly.

Joliffe gave him a sharp look.

Burbage said, "But that would mean-" He broke off, unwilling to say what those bruises meant.

"Look at his hands," the crowner said.

Ned's arms were laid along his sides, his hands flat on the table. Master Waldeve went forward, picked up the nearer one, exclaimed with a kind of horror, and hurriedly set it down again. "What?" Joliffe and Burbage exclaimed together, Joliffe reaching out and lifting the same hand. The wordless sound he made in his turn was more pained than horrified, although he was both. Setting it carefully down again, he said, "It's broken." He looked at the crowner. "It feels like all its bones are broken."

"If not all, then nearly all. The other one, too," the crowner said. "And the forearm on the other side."

"But there's the fingernails," said Joliffe, now making himself take closer look. "They're torn. Broken. There's dried blood on some of the tips. Like he'd-" He broke off much as Burbage had done, almost not wanting his mind to go where it was going.

"Like maybe he clawed at the wood wall there in the shed, trying to grab hold in the first moment of swinging off the wagon," the crowner said.

"But if he had changed his mind about hanging himself after he'd started," Burbage said, "the post that holds the crossbeam was in his reach. At arm's length, yes, but in reach. Or, even better, he could have reached up and grabbed the crossbeam and held on to that one-armed while loosening the noose with his-" He broke off again, this time with a wordless choking sound as the parts of it all came together in his mind.

The way they already had in Joliffe's.

Chapter 17.

"Someone else was there. Someone who broke his hands so he couldn't hold to anything and save himself," Joliffe said.

Master Waldeve protested, "But still he could have wrapped his legs around the post there. The crossbeam is so short, he only had to twist his body and wrap his legs around that and hold himself up while he loosened the rope enough to call for-" His words trailed off, leaving his mouth half open as his wits caught up to the impossibility of that.

Joliffe, harsh-voiced, said it anyway. "Except he couldn't come at the post, because someone pushed him away with a pole. After breaking his hands, probably by beating on them with maybe the same pole when he surely tried to grab hold to save himself, they pushed him away from reaching it even with his legs and kept pus.h.i.+ng at him until the rope finally throttled him."

Throttling could be a slow death or a quick. Of late Joliffe had been taught ways to kill a man quickly by throttling-silently, too, if he did it skillfully enough, he had been told. His own hope was that he never had occasion to find out how skilled he was, because he deeply doubted his willingness ever to do it. But there had likewise been a time when he had hoped never to dagger a man to death, and that hope was now a lost one. As for throttling-Ned's had surely not been quick. Hangmen who were paid to be skilled knew how to make a knot rightly, how to set it just so on a man, and what fall was sufficient when he was pushed off that his neck would break on the instant, making a quick end of him. All that took goodwill as well as skill on the hangman's part. Both the goodwill and skill being often missing, most hangings did not end easily or quickly, nor did most who came to see men hanged want it over quickly. The desperate thrash and twist of the dying man's body as it fought to stay alive against the slow strangling of the rope was what they came to see. If more than one man were being hanged at a time, wagers could be laid on which would die the first and which last the longest, with cheers and groans from the onlookers as they won or lost. Sometimes there was sufficient sympathy for the condemned man-or woman, often when it was a woman-that the hangman was allowed, even welcomed, to grab hold on the dangling legs and pull hard down, shortening the struggle, hurrying the death.

Whichever way it went, it was an ugly way to die, and by the look of it there had been no merciful shortening of it for Ned Eme.

Master Waldeve had got his mouth closed and joined Burbage in saying prayers for mercy half under their breaths. Joliffe was so choked with sickened anger at the evil of such killing he could do no more than silently cross himself. The crowner, firmly holding to business, said, "So your verdict, one and all, is that Edward Eme's death was not self-murder?"

Master Waldeve and Burbage broke off praying to join Joliffe in a ragged agreement of, "No," with Burbage adding fiercely, "Not by any means could this be self-murder."

"So let it be written down," Master Grevile said formally. As his clerk's pen scratched the words, he nodded to his waiting servant. The man came forward to draw the shroud over the body while Master Grevile told him, "Take word next to Master Fylongley and Master Purefey that they're wanted here. Do not say fully why. I'll tell them myself. I think it best we let the world still think this was self-murder for the while. Say nothing otherwise to anyone. Understand?"

The man bowed that he did and left while Master Waldeve was asking, "Are we done here?" He gestured at Burbage and himself. "We've work that's waiting for us. My forge. His shop."

"Fylongley and Purefey will be here shortly. There's no point to you going, just to be called back again before you've hardly turned around," Master Grevile said. "But we don't have to wait for them here. Upstairs will suit better."

They went, greatly willing to be out of the cellar and away from Ned Eme's body.

The parlor one storey up from the street had been readied for them, with drink and bowls set out on a table and three stools beside it. There was likewise a Franciscan friar there, seated on a bench beside the fireless hearth, telling over the beads of the rosary hung from his belt. He stood up as the men came in, his look questioning to Master Grevile who said, "Thank you for waiting, Brother. We're done for now. You're free to go pray over him."