There was also a bag of coins. This was heavy, the coins within being of unexpectedly substantial denominations. It was more money than Jack’s cousin could have made in several months of trading for the Stannards – and this was presumably what remained after Simon’s apparently indiscriminate spending in the taverns of Boulogne. There was also a letter with the bag; or rather, some sort of arrangement, or contract. It specified the delivery of the sum within the bag to Simon Bulbrooke, but did not indicate what services, if any, these monies were intended to pay for. It suggested that the bag was a downpayment, the balance to come in due course. There was a signature and a wax seal, and Jack puzzled over both. The seal was familiar, but he could not place it.
Then he deciphered the signature, and the provenance of the seal came back to him. It was the seal of Southwold, a mark that could only be affixed legitimately by high officials of that town. As indeed it had been: for the signature was that of one of the two bailiffs of Dunwich’s arch-rival.
It was the signature of Stephen Raker.
* * *
It took three more days. On the very afternoon of Jack Stannard’s discovery, a great rumbling, more violent than any thunderstorm ever to strike Dunwich, presaged the fall of a section of the wall around the upper town, which collapsed in a vast cloud of dust. The miners had achieved their goal, and by evening, a succession of English attacks was hammering at the new breach in the French defences. Still the town held out, but it could now only be a matter of time, especially as there was still no sign of the Dauphin’s great army. There were fresh parleys, with heralds riding hither and thither under flags of truce. It took a little while for the news to reach the harbour, but when it did, it was unequivocal. After sixty days of siege, the governor of the city, the lord of Vervins, had sent three emissaries to offer King Henry the surrender of Boulogne, this to be accomplished on the following day.
So it was that, on a warm September morning, Jack Stannard watched from the deck of the Osprey as the fleur-de-lis banner flying from the gates of Boulogne came down, and the royal standard of England ran up the staff in its place. Great Harry was in his city: his new city. Jack knew where he was bound, and what he would be doing there. He and the Duke of Suffolk would be making for the great church of Notre Dame, there to give thanks to God and to hear Te Deum sung. The choristers of the Chapel Royal had been brought over especially, in anticipation of victory, and Jack remembered how, as boys at the short-lived Cardinal College, he and Will Halliday wished for nothing more than to join that august body, the finest singers in all England. Would they be singing the settings by Fayrfax or Sheppard? Or had Taverner produced a new setting for the occasion? But Taverner was an old man now, and he knew from Will that there was supposed to be a brilliant new composer at the Chapel Royal, one Tallis by name.
Jack Stannard sighed. He could almost sense Alice reproving him, as she often had when she knew his thoughts were turning that way, or if he was struggling to sing a half-remembered faburden line of Cornysh’s Gaude Virgo. That world was lost to him, and had been for nearly fifteen years, as his wife had known better than he. But a part of him, one small, stubborn part, still wished that he was there, in the choir stalls of Notre Dame, singing glory to God before the King of England.
As it was, he had paid for a requiem mass to be sung for Simon Bulbrooke in the battered church in the lower town where they had last taken communion together. Jack and the crew of the Osprey formed the entire congregation, and although Jack could only regret that his cousin had been buried in Boulogne, rather than upon Dunwich cliff, he would, at least, rest in what was now English soil. Whatever dealings Si may have had with Stephen Raker – and, God knew, that must have been what he had been attempting to confess, the night he was killed, when he had talked of nearly betraying the Stannards and Dunwich – they would now be judged by a higher authority, that which dictated the passage from Purgatory. When all was said and done, Simon Bulbrooke was still blood kin, and he deserved the respectful burial Jack gave him, the locket containing the hairs of his daughters lying upon his chest as he was laid to rest.
That done, Jack Stannard turned his thoughts toward readying the Osprey for sea. The king and Lord Admiral Lisle wanted many of the men who had been most active in the siege carried back home, to be replaced by fresh men coming out from Portsmouth and Dover, the men who would form the backbone of the new English garrison of Boulogne. So, for Jack and his crew, there would be one final voyage in the king’s service, then a return to Dunwich and winter ashore. After that, in the spring, there would be another campaign, this time aboard the new Alice, if Jed Nolloth had her ready in time. Nothing was surer than that the war would continue. The colossal pride of King Francis would demand that he took back his lost town, and the equally colossal pride of King Henry would demand that he retain it at all costs.
No, hard as the campaigns of 1544 had been, they seemed set fair to be a children’s game alongside the Armageddon that 1545 threatened to bring.
TWENTY-ONE
The side chapel in the south transept of Saint Dunstan in the East, just west of the Tower of London, was illuminated only by a very few tapers, the air stale from the August heat, flies buzzing all around. The coffin of William Gonson lay, plain and unadorned, upon a trestle in the middle of the vaulted space. All the other mourners had left: Gonson’s widow still confused, distraught and inconsolable; his three daughters tearful and hostile, taking their lead from the formidable eldest sister, Thomasina, Lady Tyrell, who treated every man in the building like an infant; the two sons that Will Halliday had not formerly known, Christopher and Anthony, both stern-faced and seemingly still intent, several weeks later, on blaming Will and their younger brother Benjamin, the two men who worked most closely with their father, for somehow not preventing his death. Both still clad in their mourning cloaks of black, the hoods over their heads, Will and Ben were the only living souls left in the entire church so late at night.
Benjamin Gonson stood at the foot of the coffin, staring down at the lid.
‘You know the fate of suicides as well as I,’ he said. ‘Sir Philip Babington has consigned my father to eternal hellfire, just as surely as he did my brother. A suicide cannot rest in such a place as this, and he cannot enter the kingdom of Heaven. Not ever. I swear it, Will – if I ever find that man Babington, I’ll be avenged upon him. The fate David suffered will be as nothing.’ Tears welled in Ben Gonson’s eyes. ‘But that’ll come too late for the bones in that box, for we know where they must lie.’
Will nodded. It had been the bitter, unspoken, unspeakable truth in the chapel when the entire family was assembled there: the cause of much of the rage that consumed the other members of the Gonson family. Suicides could not be buried according to the rites of the Church, in consecrated ground. Instead, they were buried at crossroads with stakes through their hearts, a warning to all who might seek to deny God’s divine law. As if they did not know it well enough, Palsgrave, the priest of Saint Dunstan’s, reminded them as he stretched the Church’s injunctions to their limit by saying brief prayers over the body.
One Corinthians Three, verses sixteen and seventeen.
‘Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? If any man defile the temple of God, him shall Gdod destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which ye are.’
William Gonson had destroyed the godly temple that was his body, so the teaching of the Church was unequivocal. He could expect only hellfire for all eternity, and no decent burial for his mortal remains. It had taken weeks of persuasion for Palsgrave to allow even this small concession, that the embalmed body which had previously rested within Gonson’s own house could now lie here, in respect.
Will Halliday put his hand on Ben Gonson’s shoulder.
‘We’ll find a way, Ben. There has to be a way to have him b-buried here, in Saint Dunstan’s.’
The other’s cheeks were wet with tears.
‘You heard the coroner’s verdi
ct, Will. Not a shadow of a doubt. Great God, you gave the most powerful evidence of all – but even if you hadn’t, there were, what, a score of other witnesses among the shipkeepers, and the men on the shore? The verdict’s indisputable, man. No priest in England will bury him on consecrated ground. Not even his own brother, my uncle Bartholomew, even if we could somehow get the body half way across the country.’
Will Halliday knew the case was unanswerable. Marion Bartleby had told him of an uncle of hers who had taken his own life, and was buried at a crossroads in Hertfordshire. The foxes dug him up and devoured him within a week.
‘Surely, though, P-Palsgrave might?’ said Will, knowing he was not really convincing himself. ‘He knows and respects your family – Gonsons have worshipped here for, what, forty years? He knows how much your father gave to the church in alms. It was obvious when he was here with us, Ben. He g-g-grieves for you all. He would help you, if he could.’
‘And risk being charged before a church court? Perhaps defrocked? Yes, he’s a good man, and he respected my father. But it would be asking him to place his mortal livelihood and immortal soul in danger, Will. What’s more, he’s a man with a considerable reputation, once tutor to the king’s sister, she that was the Queen of France. Would he risk all that, do you think, just to bury the corpse of a suicide?’
‘He will have a price,’ said Will, thoughtfully. ‘All men do.’
Ben Gonson pulled back his hood, and shook his head.
‘I doubt it. But then… Palsgrave likes living well – we’ve dined with him, and you won’t find gristle in his meat or mouse droppings in his ale. This is a rich parish, though, Will, so he’ll make a good income from tithes. Which means any price he might demand is one that the Gonsons can’t pay. My father’s affairs are in chaos. He left many debts… so many debts…’
‘There’s talk of you t-taking his place. Treasurer of the Navy Royal, Ben – surely you could draw off some funds?’
Gonson smiled, but it was a bitter, humourless smile.
‘I’ve not seen my twentieth birthday, Will. The king, Lord Lisle, all the rest of them, will never make me treasurer. And I’ve seen enough of what it did to my father to know that it’s too great a task for one man. The Navy Royal’s grown so much since my father first began. Bigger and bigger, year after year, as he always said. They all know that, they all see it. Lisle will change things, appoint four or five men to do the work of the one, and I doubt if I’ll be one of those new men. Certainly not treasurer.’
Will placed his hand on his friend’s shoulder.
‘Then I’ll get money. Enough to convince Palsgrave to set his scruples aside, and give your father a Christian b-burial, here, in this church.’
In spite of his grief, Ben Gonson smiled.
‘You, Will? You’re a mere clerk, no better than I, as you keep saying of your prospects with Mistress Bartleby. Where in the name of all the saints will you find such a sum of money?’
Will Halliday only nodded, for an idea was forming in his mind. He was thinking of a conversation with an old school friend, some six months before, in a tavern in Suffolk, beneath the walls of Framlingham Castle. He recalled a promise made. And with that memory in his mind, he resolved to write a letter: a letter to an ancient and decayed man, in an ancient and decayed borough.
When the Gonson family next came together in Saint Dunstan in the East, again gowned and hooded, one dusk-time a little over a fortnight later, there was no bitter recrimination toward Ben and Will Halliday. As John Palsgrave, the eminent rector of the church, uttered the words of Christian committal over the coffin of William Gonson, the dead man’s children, even the formerly icy Lady Tyrell, looked toward Will in particular with gratitude, respect, and not a little puzzlement. But then, they had not been privy to the conversation, in the church vestry some days earlier, between Will and Palsgrave; a conversation at first strained and something of an embarrassment to both, then rendered very easy indeed when the rector of Saint Dunstan’s weighed in his hand the bag of coins that had come from Dunwich that very morning. John Palsgrave might once have been tutor to the Queen of France, but, as he said, she had been dead for eleven years and her king for thirty, and ancient titles of honour pay no bills. John Palsgrave might have written the best book about the French language ever produced on either side of the Channel, but, as he said, it made him no money, the English generally being as interested in learning French as they were in being sober. Above all, Ben Gonson had been right about one essential truth. John Palsgrave liked living well, and was evidently aggrieved that the tithe income from Saint Dunstan’s had been in precipitate decline for some years, thanks to the loss of all those tradesmen who had depended upon custom from the abbey of Saint Mary Graces, just the other side of the Tower. And Will Halliday, too, had been right. John Palsgrave had his price.
The keeping of parish registers was a new innovation, brought in by the Lord Cromwell only a few years before as one of his many schemes to make the Kingdom of England a beacon of efficiency and modernity, in marked contrast to the Church of Rome from which it had just broken. As Cromwell had intended, once an entry was made upon a register, it was legal proof: an unchallengeable record, laid down for the scrutiny of all future generations. Thus no-one would ever be able to challenge the bald statement, written proud in Palsgrave’s own hand, that William Gonson, sometime treasurer and storekeeper of the king’s Navy Royal, was given due Christian burial in his own parish church of Saint Dunstan in the East on 20 August 1544, and therefore could not possibly have been that most despised and rejected of all sinners, a foul suicide.
* * *
Jack Stannard took his bearings on each familiar seamark in turn, his heart leaping as Dunwich got ever nearer. The same spirit prevailed among his crew: the smiles grew broader with each sighting and each change of course. Even the seagulls circling the ship seemed to be happier, cawing more lustily with every mile the ship progressed. From the North Foreland, Jack steered north by east, as his father had taught him to do, running between Longsand and the Kentish Knock before turning north-west into the Sledway, his course set directly for the great square tower of Bawdsey church. Then north by a little easterly, laying over for the night at single anchor in Hollesley Bay before crossing it in the morning, always keeping his bearing on the ancient but still mighty polygonal keep of Orford Castle. The fair south-westerly breeze carried the Osprey easily past the spit of Orford, then Aldeburgh, until Jack caught his first sight of the best beloved seamark of all.
‘Home safe, my love,’ he said to Alice, lying for eternity beneath the tower of All Saints, unmissable there on Dunwich cliff. ‘Deo gratias, deo gratias, deo gratias.’
The Osprey hove to and lay off the Minsmere shore, awaiting the turning of the tide. Then Jack took her into the mouth of the Blyth with the very first of the flood, hoping to tack as far as he could up the Dunwich river before he was forced to tow and warp. He wished, if he could, to avoid any unpleasantness with Southwold, half-a-dozen of whose ships lay ashore or at anchor on the north bank of the Blyth. He thought he glimpsed the malign shape of Stephen Raker on one of them, but the figure disappeared from view almost at once. On, into the Horse Reach, where even the oft-resented sight of the boat carrying Lyman, the customs searcher, was, for once, very welcome. The familiar and much-loved buildings of the town were now clearly visible ahead: there the warehouses of the Stannards, the Cuddons and the rest on the quays, there the houses with the thin wisps of smoke rising from their chimneys, there the Maison Dieu, there Saint John’s, there the tower of All Saints, next to the ruins of the Greyfriars. The sight of the latter put Jack in mind of Thomas Ryman. Where was the old man? Had he reappeared in Dunwich while the Osprey was at Boulogne? Had he gone back to the Scottish war? Was he dead?
Whether he was or not, the living were very much present. Jack could see people up on Hen Hill, others nearer still on the Kingsholme itself, all of them waving, some shouting. Two of them were much smaller than those
all around them, and both were jumping up and down. Running awkwardly and breathlessly after them was the unmistakeable shape of Joan Cowper, accompanied by a very large dog.
Jack grinned, and waved at his son and daughter.
Truly, it was good to be home.
PART FOUR
THE LOST CITY
OCTOBER TO DECEMBER 1544
Ye venerable walls, with ivy crown’d,
The sad remains of ancient Gothic state,
Whose scatter’d honours strew the hallow’d ground;
The spoils of time and unrelenting fate.
Thy pomp, thy pow’r, O Dunwich, now’s no more;
Lost is thy splendor, sunk in endless night,
Fair trade and commerce have forsook thy shore,
And all thy pristine glory’s vanish’d quite.
Thy pleasant hills, thy vales, thy rich domains,
The sea’s devouring surge hath wash’d away;
Disclos’d the graves, and gave their last remains
To the remorseless waves, the fated prey.
Henry Dell, Verses Written at Dunwich, in Suffolk (1762)
TWENTY-TWO
Thomas Ryman had now been detained at Kenninghall for five long months. The letter writing had stopped many weeks before; but his adherence to a version of the monastic hours had not, and the nightmare of the ship of the dead no longer came to him so often. True, he still dreamed of, or perhaps remembered, the sound of the bells of all the lost churches of Dunwich, still ringing out from beneath the waves. That was the heritage of every man, woman and child of the town born since the days of its greatness: to hear, or, as some had it, to imagine, the tolling of the ancient, sunken bells. That aside, Thomas Ryman was, as much as he could be, content, although his thoughts often strayed to the distant war, to how Jack Stannard might be faring, to whether or not he even lived. Thomas offered up more prayers than any layman would have time to do, and as he did so, a thought often struck him, and amused him. In a sense, and thanks to the bitter animosity of the Duchess of Richmond, he had become the last monk in England.
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