The poisoned chalice

didn't know about poisons wasn't worth knowing. I was talking about her last week when our Queen came to visit me -Elizabeth, with her white painted face, black teeth and red wig. The great Virgin Queen – don't you believe it! Well, she brought me sad news. How our love-child, Robin, had been captured at sea by the Spanish and taken to Madrid. I told her not to worry. If Robin was truly our child, the bloody Spanish wouldn't hold him long and, if they do, then he is not worthy of our blood. I made her laugh and she reminded me of how Robin had been conceived. You want to know? Fine, I'll tell you. I was once a Member of Parliament and one day in the chamber at Westminster, a Puritan, a lozenge of sanctified humility, got up from his arse and roared at me because I called him a blackened turd.
    'Shallot,' he bellowed, 'you'll either die by hanging or die of the pox!'
    'That, sir,' I coldly replied, 'depends on whether I embrace your principles or your wife.'
    Well, the chamber was in an uproar. I refused to apologise to the Speaker so the Serjeant-at-arms hustled me to the Tower. Elizabeth (because I had been defending her) came to visit me. She insisted on seeing me alone, and you know Shallot! A cup of wine and a pretty girl in an empty room and anything could happen. On that occasion it certainly did! In her younger days Elizabeth was a passionate girl. She had a cloying sensuousness and, like her mother, Anne Boleyn, she could ride anything. (I see my chaplain snigger so a quick rap across the knuckles reminds him to keep his mouth shut and his thoughts clean about his betters.)
    Ah, poison, the subtle murderer of my dreams. Well, I have now marshalled my thoughts, summoning memories from that summer over seventy years ago. Oh, Lord, it seems only yesterday when I and my master, Benjamin Daunbey, nephew to the great Cardinal Wolsey, were sent to the Chateau de Maubisson outside Paris to resolve certain mysteries. Ah, I have mentioned his name! Benjamin, with his long, dark face, kindly eyes and lawyer's stoop. When I think of him I always smile. He was one of the few really good men I have ever met. If you have read my earlier memoirs you will know how this occurred. We went to school together, I saved him from a beating and he rescued me from a hanging, twice; once in Ipswich and then again at Montfaucon, that great forest of gibbets which stands near the Porte St Denis in Paris. Now, Benjamin's uncle, the great Wolsey, and his black familiar, the enigmatic Doctor Agrippa, used us both on countless errands in the sinister twilight world of treason, murder and lechery of the courts of Europe. Lackaday, they have all gone now! They're just shadows, ghosts who dance under the shade of the spreading yew trees which border the far end of the lawn in front of my manor house.
    Ghosts they may be but they bring back memories of broken hearts, foul deeds, sinister minds, and souls stained with the blackness of hell. I'll tell you this as I sit in the centre of my maze and listen to the clear song of the thrush: the murderous soul I met at Maubisson was one of the most chilling I have ever encountered.

Chapter 1
    In the spring of 1520 Benjamin Daunbey and I were the proud occupants of a large manor house on the outskirts of Ipswich. Really, it was more of a pleasaunce than a manor with its white lathed plaster, ornamental chimney pots, squat black beams, with panelled rooms with carved furniture, and a cellar well stocked with a variety of wines. On our estate were granges, barns, a mill, carp ponds, lush fields and fertile meadows. We were the grateful beneficiaries of the largesse of Benjamin's uncle, the great Wolsey, who lavished rewards on us for resolving, only a few months earlier, the sinister White Rose murders.
    Now success had not changed Benjamin. He still dressed drably. Indeed, I well remember him as he was then, long and lanky, his sombre, solemn face framed by jet black hair. At the time I was of the same colouring (there's a portrait of me hanging at Burpham). I was dark, my black hair cropped close, a slight cast in one eye, and a cheeky expression which many said would send me to the gallows. In a way they were right but, thankfully, I was never hanged though I was close to it on many occasions. What amuses me is that many of those who claimed I would hang, died violent deaths themselves in some pot-holed alleyway, bleak battlefield or gory execution yard. I was a bigger rogue then than I am now but