by S. W. Perry
The door is too thick for Nicholas to judge how many people are in the chapel. But there’s no lock.
No lock – and careless guards. A secret, then, barely worth protecting. Or has complacency caused its keeper to underestimate the threat? Easing the door open as gently as he can, Nicholas slips inside.
He already knows the layout of the chapel – he’s observed it through the ground-floor windows before he took that astonishing walk with Lizzy Lumley. But the gallery above is new to him. And it’s in almost complete darkness. The only illumination comes from the trembling glow of candles rising from the floor. It takes his sight a moment or two to adjust. And while it does, he’s captivated by a single voice. A strong male voice. High Latin, chanted sweetly. It sounds too beautiful to be so sinful.
Slowly, the detail of the gallery offers itself to him. He can tell that it runs the full width of the chapel, some seven or eight paces in length, a good ten feet above the floor. A finely carved screen rises before him to chest height. There’s a narrow stone stairway to his far right. He thinks, this is where guests must sit if they’re not important enough to be part of the congregation.
Edging to the wall opposite the stairwell, Nicholas moves silently to peer over the screen.
What he sees makes his mouth gape open in astonishment.
Go, now! Turn around and walk away. Pretend you’ve seen nothing. Leave Nonsuch immediately. When you get to Cecil House, tell them you were somewhere else when John Lumley and his wife were taking the papist Mass before a fully robed father-confessor of the Romish heresy.
36
Nicholas can’t drag his eyes away.
For a start, Francis Deniker – the one doing the chanting – appears to have undergone some form of magical transformation. His formal clerk’s tunic has somehow turned itself into vestments of silk and damask. They glint opulently in the candlelight. Tied around his waist is a braided girdle. In one hand he holds a silver chalice. On a low table before him is a small, grey flat square of stone: a miniature second altar. A papist altar. And beside the table stands an empty travelling chest, an innocent wooden box – home for it all. Robert Cecil’s words flood into Nicholas’s head like a breaking wave: You have no idea how cleverly these people disseminate their vile philosophy. Only last month we hanged and quartered a Jesuit priest who’d disguised himself as a peddler. He had the abominable devices of his ministry hidden in his box of ribbons!
And then Nicholas hears another voice, much closer this time, and not in Latin but in very angry English. He feels the sharp press of a knife-point against his back – not enough to stab, but enough to get his full attention.
‘I knew you were a spy from the moment you came here,’ says Gabriel Quigley in his ear like a spurned lover. ‘You’re not the physician, you’re the disease.’
‘I suppose you’d better come down, Dr Shelby – if you think your immortal soul can withstand the peril,’ Lumley says, his voice remarkably firm as he looks up at the gallery.
It can’t be easy, thinks Nicholas, for a man of advanced years to rise from his knees to a standing position in the same instant all his secrets are exposed, and still maintain some semblance of dignity. But John Lumley achieves it with some grace.
Lizzy Lumley is still kneeling. She stares up at Nicholas, a look of terror on her face. Francis Deniker, for all his priestly apparel, looks like a man caught in the act of purse-diving a judge of the Queen’s Bench.
‘Don’t blame yourself, Gabriel,’ Lumley calls out, trying to spot his secretary in the semi-darkness of the gallery. ‘Close the door. Stay outside until I call. And say nothing of this to anyone – understand?’
‘But, my lord, this man is an informer, I’m sure of it. I’ve had my fears about him since he arrived,’ Quigley calls back.
‘And I should have heard them, Gabriel. But what is done is done. Let Dr Shelby and I speak awhile.’
Quigley hesitates. He wants to ram the dagger into Nicholas’s back as deep as the hilt will allow.
‘Gabriel—’
‘Very well, my lord,’ says Quigley reluctantly. He steps back. But not before he gives Nicholas a parting jab with the tip of the blade. Nicholas feels a hot, sharp pain low down on his right hip, and a warm trickle of blood running down over his right buttock. ‘You’re lucky, spy,’ Quigley rasps in his ear. ‘If this were not a holy place—’
The stinging pain stays with Nicholas as he descends the stairs at Lumley’s command. Reaching the bottom, he steps out into the candlelight as bravely as he can.
‘Merciful heaven, Husband. We are utterly undone,’ Lizzy Lumley whispers when she sees him.
‘That rather depends on Dr Shelby, Mouse.’
Francis Deniker is packing away his vestments in the pine reliquary like a travelling haberdasher at the close of a country fair. Perhaps he thinks he can make Nicholas un-see what he has seen. His hands are shaking and his skin has the pallor of a man about to face the axe – which is almost a certainty, if Nicholas survives to tell Robert Cecil what he has witnessed.
‘I should have taken more heed of Gabriel, Mouse,’ Lumley says with a slow shake of his head as he helps his wife to stand. ‘We’ve been at this young man’s mercy since the moment he arrived at Nonsuch. Isn’t that so, Dr Shelby?’
Nicholas doesn’t know how to answer.
‘I always knew my enemies would send someone here to shatter all this,’ Lumley says, the merest hint of a wry smile on his lips. ‘The question is, Dr Shelby, which one of them was it?’
Lady Katherine Vaesy.
Bianca has heard Nicholas speak only of Sir Fulke, the great but apparently incompetent anatomist. Is Katherine his wife? Or his winsome daughter? A fair cousin, perhaps? Whatever her connection, Bianca imagines her suffocating in silk, crushed under a weight of pearls, troubled by nothing worse than which of her many maids to call upon first to comb her hair.
But you can’t claw like a Veneto maid when she’s faced with a rival, Bianca tells herself with a tight smile. You’d be as much use with a blade as Vaesy himself, if what Nicholas says about you is true. In a dark piazza in Padua, surrounded by a bunch of over-enamoured gallants, you’d have no idea which bit of them to kick first.
She scolds herself for this jealousy, which will not let her be. She thinks, you’re probably just a decent woman who gives alms to the distressed poor at the Magdalene. So why do I care what ceremony you performed with Nicholas Shelby when I wasn’t there to protect him from himself ?
But why has he still not written?
‘I care not for myself, Dr Shelby,’ says Lizzy Lumley in astonishment when Nicholas has recounted in full the true story of how he has come to be at Nonsuch, ‘but to think you would betray my husband to save a tavern-mistress!’ She seems uncertain whether to regard him with compassion or fury.
Nicholas stands there like a felon pleading his case before the bench. The jab from Quigley’s dagger makes him want to massage his hip, but he thinks that would simply make him appear furtive. He wonders if he’s dripping blood on the chapel floor.
‘Bianca Merton saved my life, Lady Lumley,’ he tells her, giving the only defence he can – the truth. ‘When my wife and infant died, I was utterly lost. I would have committed the sin of self-destruction, had not Mistress Merton taken pity on me. How could I then abandon her? I bear neither you nor your husband malice of any sort. Your faith is of no concern to me. I’ve already lost mine.’
John Lumley walks to the chapel windows, draws the hangings and stares pensively out at the setting sun. ‘From what he’s told us, Mouse, he could have done no less and kept his conscience clean. And Robert Cecil is adept at coercion. We know that only too well.’
‘I assure you, my lord, there was no deceit in my original letter,’ Nicholas says. ‘I really was seeking your help. But then Robert Cecil got his talons into me and all went awry.’
‘Do the Psalms not tell us that a man who deceives shall not abide in God’s house, Dr Shelby?’ asks Liz
zy Lumley, less forgiving than her husband.
‘Madam, that is a place in which I have not dwelt for some considerable time,’ Nicholas replies softly.
Lumley turns back from the windows and appraises him silently. Then he says, ‘For Lizzy and myself, I am not overly troubled by what you have discovered here, Dr Shelby. The queen knows of my adherence to the old faith. She tolerates it as the eccentricity of a man living in the past. I suppose the Privy Council might persuade her to a fine—’
‘You can’t afford a fine, Husband,’ Lizzy protests angrily. ‘You owe enough to the Crown already! Francis, tell him he can’t afford a fine.’
‘Hush now, Mouse. If not a fine, then perhaps a few months in the Tower. That can be less tiresome than it sounds. I’ve been there before – as I suspect you already know, Dr Shelby. I’ll survive. It is gentle Francis I fear for most.’
Nicholas understands that fear only too well. It’s not just their altars and their vestments – the outward trappings of their hated religion – that damn these Jesuits to a traitor’s death. It’s not their taking of confession or their dispensing of indulgencies. It’s not even their Masses. It’s the fact that they carry with them the Pope’s message to all the English: that God will excuse them when they rise up and overthrow their heretical, excommunicated queen.
‘You underestimate the danger to yourself, my lord,’ says Nicholas. ‘I’m sure I don’t have to remind you that hiding a Jesuit priest is a felony. And to hide one in a place the queen visits often, to allow him to give the Mass in a chapel she herself may even pray in, is tantamount to treason. If Robert Cecil has his way, it will mean the scaffold not just for Master Deniker, but very probably for you, too.’
‘The question is: are you going to tell him?’ asks Lizzy Lumley. ‘Will you condemn these two good souls to the torment their enemies will demand – all to save this tavern-mistress of yours?’
Before Nicholas can answer, Francis Deniker says ‘That is a fate I have been prepared to suffer since I first entered a seminary. I am prepared, and strengthened.’ He glances at Lumley. ‘But I would beseech you, sir, do not be the cause of this good man’s destruction.’
Nicholas takes a deep breath, gathering up his conscience with it. He imagines the fate in store for Deniker and Lumley: dragged through the city streets so that good men and women of the new faith may spit upon them; half-hanged on the gibbet, then cut down to enjoy with the baying mob the spectacle of what follows: their disembowelling, their privy parts burned before their dying eyes, mercy coming only when the axe slams into their limbs for the final quartering. ‘None of you need fear me,’ he says. ‘Robert Cecil will never learn from me what I saw here. You have my word on it.’ Then he offers up a silent promise to Bianca that he will find some other way to protect her from Burghley’s hunch-backed son.
‘Thank you, Dr Shelby. My trust in you was justified,’ says Lumley, exhaling in relief. He takes his wife’s arm and draws her close. ‘I think we may consider our own devotions at an end, Mouse – for today. But that does not absolve us of our duty. If Dr Shelby is right, there is someone else here at Nonsuch much in need of our prayers.’
37
She sits in one of the broad bay windows of the Nonsuch library, a small figure set against the fading glow of fiery sunset. She makes Nicholas think of a handmaiden patiently awaiting her fate while behind her back Rome burns.
She wears a plain woollen kirtle, her hair tied neatly back from her face. Now Nicholas can see the livid burn mark along one cheek. In the light from the candles that John Lumley has had placed in the sconces, her skin gleams as though an artist has just this minute finished painting her upon his canvas.
Lizzy Lumley kneels on a cushion in front of her. Nicholas hangs back a little, in awe of this young maid whose courage and endurance he cannot even begin to measure. Gabriel Quigley waits nearby. He’s been commanded by his master to make a written record of what transpires, Francis Deniker’s hand being still a little less than firm. Lumley has taken Quigley aside and told him that Nicholas is no enemy. He seems unconvinced. He casts malevolent glances in Nicholas’s direction, as though he’s considering calling up a couple of the handier servants and having him dropped down the nearest well. Perhaps he’s regretting he didn’t make better use of his knife. Nicholas massages his hip. The bleeding has stopped and he’s sure the wound is not substantial. But it still smarts.
No one present can be certain the girl they call Betony will be persuaded from her self-imposed silence. Everything is down to Nicholas now. He runs his tongue around his mouth so that the dryness in this throat will not rob him of a clear voice at the critical moment. His heart pounds in his chest. He begs Eleanor to give him the courage to act, to give him the wisdom not to shut off Elise Cullen’s voice for ever by a thoughtless word or gesture.
‘There is no need to be afraid, child,’ says Lumley gently. ‘We have summoned you here only out of love. You are in no trouble – none. You are amongst friends. You are safe. Do you understand that? Quite safe.’
The girl has made fists of her hands. She gently rubs the knuckles together. Still she says nothing in reply. Then, to Nicholas’s immense relief, she gives the faintest of nods.
‘Good,’ says Lumley, smiling. ‘Now then, child, I would beseech you to listen carefully to what Dr Shelby has to say to you.’
Quigley casts Nicholas a glance that says: what fresh deceit are you about now? But he takes paper, nib and inkpot from his scrivener’s box and lays them out carefully on a table by one of the windows. ‘I’m ready, my lord,’ he says.
‘Gentlemen, in mercy’s name be careful,’ urges Lizzy in a whisper.
‘I’ve been sent by a woman named Alice Welford,’ Nicholas begins, realizing that his first words to Elise Cullen are a lie – Alice Welford has not the slightest idea he’s here.
Sometimes a lie is what we have to tell if that’s what it takes to reach a greater truth, Eleanor tells him. You lied to John Lumley to get here. But now the truth is right here in front of your eyes. Don’t start fretting about your conscience now, Husband.
‘Alice Welford told me a story,’ he continues, stepping out into clear view, ‘about a young girl named Elise—’
The girl’s head turns towards the sound of his voice, as though she were a wooden manikin connected to his hand by an invisible cord.
‘Alice would look after this girl when her mother Mary could not. She’d make sure she had a bowl of paplar for breakfast, that her clothes were washed regularly. And it wasn’t only Elise that Alice looked after. This girl had a little brother named Ralph. You remember Alice Welford, don’t you… Elise?’
He means this to put her at ease; but the foolish grin that takes over his face comes from somewhere he did not expect. It has stolen up on him. It has ambushed him not with joy, but with a complicit agony. It is the smile he realizes he’s been saving for the child Eleanor was to have given him. It’s been sitting inside him all this time with nowhere to go.
‘Alice told me that Elise Cullen had a fine voice,’ he says, feeling the tears stinging his eyes. ‘Elise used to trill like a pipit – that’s what she told me. A pipit. Never silent. Not for a single moment.’
Now the girl’s face is fixed so intently on his that her eyes seem to be boring into him.
‘A pipit is such a little bird,’ he says, narrowing the thumb and index finger of his left hand to illustrate, ‘but by Jesu, how our good Lord loved to hear her sing.’
The effect of his words takes even Nicholas by surprise.
One moment the girl is sitting as inanimately as a carved saint in a shrine, the next she hurls herself from her seat. The cushions go flying. A candle sconce clatters against the floor, the wax splashing like blood. Nicholas ducks into a run before he even knows it, anticipating the chase – a pursuit he knows will silence the pipit’s song for ever.
But Elise does not flee. Instead she throws herself into Lizzy Lumley’s arms. The sorrow and the fear co
me bursting out of her in a torrent of heaving sobs. Her body writhes as though a host of invisible demons is beating her with rods of fire. She clings so tightly to Lizzy that Nicholas must struggle to confirm there’s something else spilling from her mouth other than her cries of anguish: words!
Ralphie… oh, little Ralphie… I’m so sorry, Brother – so sorry… Forgive me… I should never have called to the angel…
38
Night has slipped in before Elise Cullen recovers enough to tell her story. At first her voice is so weak, so faltering, that Nicholas fears it cannot possibly bear the weight of the words it must carry. But Elise Cullen is no stranger to burdens. She has endured the weight of her little brother on her back along weary miles of country lanes, borne the trials of living in the open, through summer heat and winter chill. She’s faced hostility and violence from almost everyone she’s met on the way. So – quickly – the voice begins to strengthen. Soon Elise Cullen is all but singing like the songbird Alice Welford said she was. And she confirms everything Alice had told him: the journey through a succession of increasingly rundown stews and tenements of Bankside; the sudden decision, made one day last summer, to take herself and little Ralph away, to the place her mother had often told her about: Cuddington, where a rich and kindly relative lives in a great house. As he listens, Nicholas hears in her voice the desperate longing for a better life than the one she’d been dealt. He thinks of his own – the future he’d anticipated with Eleanor and their children. Why is it so easy, he wonders, to build our lives on such treacherous hopes?
Lizzy lays a hand on the girl’s knee. ‘But you have found your refuge now,’ she says gently. ‘It is here.’
Does Elise know what has happened to her brother? Nicholas wonders. And how did she herself escape Ralph’s fate? He would ask her directly, but how do you speak of murder and mutilation to a maid who’s suffered what Elise has suffered? Instead he asks, ‘Who was the angel, Elise? You spoke of an angel – said you should never have called to her.’