Sacrilege: A Novel

by S. J. Parris

  I had no idea which of the houses around the edge of the precincts might be Langworth’s, nor how to ask without arousing suspicion. Neither did I want to walk past Harry’s house in case the sharp-eyed Samuel saw me through a window. I squinted to my left at the cathedral, pale and solid under the morning sun. Ahead of me, I noticed a man approaching from the eastern side of the precincts, pushing a barrow loaded with planks of wood; I quickened my pace and assumed an air of confidence.

  “Excuse me,” I said as I drew level, “but I wonder if you can help me—I have to deliver a letter to the canon treasurer’s house, but I’m afraid I’m confused as to which one it is.”

  The man rested his barrow on the ground, wiped his hands on the front of his dirty smock, and gestured the way he had come, through the middle gate.

  “All the way round the end of the corona on the other side, opposite the treasury.” When he saw my blank look, he added, “The treasury is built on the side of St. Andrew’s chapel. Sticks out from the north side. You can’t miss the house—it’s the only one of three storeys on that side.”

  “And will his servant be there to receive it, if he is not?”

  “He keeps no servant. A woman from the town comes in to clean for him now and then, I believe. If he’s not there, you’ll have to come back later, or try one of the other canons.”

  I thanked him, relieved, and watched as he hefted his load up again and set off towards the Archbishop’s Palace. Once he had rounded the corner, I glanced to my right and left; the precincts on the south side were still deserted. I could not walk around the end of the apse without passing Harry’s house. The only possibility was to go through the cathedral. There was a small door at the end of the southwest transept; I hurried across, tried the handle, and found it open. As silently as I could, I closed the door behind me and stepped into the sacred hush of the cathedral church.

  Just as I had the day before, I experienced a slight dizziness, the sense of being suddenly dwarfed, as I looked upwards into the multiplying geometrical vaults that fanned out more than a hundred feet above me in all directions. Almost at once, I heard the echo of footsteps on the flagstones; I froze as they drew closer, and from the direction of the choir a ruddy-faced young man appeared in the plain robe of a minor canon, a pair of tall brass candlesticks tucked under his arms. He walked in haste with his head down; I pressed myself against the wall by the door and waited until he had passed. To my left, at the far end of the nave, I saw a number of men in clerical dress milling about, presumably preparing for the divine service of communion which would begin shortly at nine. I crossed the transept briskly and slipped out of the opposite door, the one I had entered the day before with Harry, beside the site of the martyrdom, and emerged at the corner of the cloister. Two men in black robes were approaching from the west side, but I turned purposefully to my right along the narrow passage that led alongside the Chapter House. I had learned over the years that the best way to avoid being confronted somewhere you don’t belong is to give the impression at all times of having every right to be there. So I held my head up and retraced the path I had taken with Harry until I saw ahead of me a rectangular building of one storey with a gabled roof, attached to one of the cathedral’s side chapels but of later construction, its windows secured with thick iron bars. I passed around this and almost opposite stood a narrow house, timbered in dark wood and three storeys high, each overhanging the one below. Beside it was a crooked row of smaller dwellings, all standing in the shadows of the ruined priory buildings. The great bulk of the cathedral blocked out the morning sun from the path on this side, and the windows of the treasurer’s house reflected the façade of the church, blank and impenetrable. I realised that Langworth’s door was very close to the spot where Sir Edward Kingsley’s body had been found. The dark stain was still visible on the path where Harry had pointed it out. Hardly surprising, then, that the treasurer on his way home had been the first to see his friend lying dead. But it was also extremely convenient.

  I looked around. There was no one to be seen on this side of the cathedral, and I knew I must act quickly. Langworth had said that the broken window was in his back parlour, so I looked along the row of houses for any sign of an alley that would lead to the rear. There was a small path that disappeared around the crumbling arches of the priory infirmary; just as I made to follow it, a great peal of bells erupted from the tower above me, causing me to jump almost out of my skin. Catching my breath, my heart pounding in my throat, I moved as quickly as I could past the ruins and found myself facing the backyards of the row of prebendaries’ houses. These yards were no more than six feet across, separated from the path by a low wall. On the other side of the path more buildings backed onto these; I gave a quick glance to their windows, but decided I had no time to worry about who might be overlooking the treasurer’s yard. If I was lucky, everyone in the precincts would now be on their way to the service.

  Emboldened by the knowledge that Langworth did not have a live-in servant, I scrambled over the wall and saw immediately the window he had complained about; its latch was broken and the weight of the leading was causing it to hang open. The casement itself, to the right of the rear door, was not large; a man like Tom Garth would not have stood a chance. Even for me it was an effort, but I was able to fold my limbs sufficiently to climb through and land, with dry throat and clammy palms, inside Langworth’s parlour.

  The room was small, with a low wood-beamed ceiling, much like the inside of Harry’s house on the other side of the precincts. Little light entered from the windows facing the yard, making it all the more dingy and ominous. Langworth’s furniture was simple, austere even, like the man himself; there were no decorative touches, no ornaments. A high-backed settle of plain wood was placed near the hearth and against the right-hand wall a buffet displayed a few items of tableware, sufficient for one person; these were of silver, but unremarkable. If Langworth were siphoning funds from the cathedral treasury, he was not obviously spending them on fine living.

  Where would a man like Langworth keep his most private correspondence? These old houses offered so many nooks and crannies for hiding places—loose bricks, floorboards, crevices in chimney stacks or under stairs—that I realised as I took my first step the absurdity of my ambition. The creak of the boards beneath my feet echoed through the house and I froze, listening for any telltale sign of movement. But the cathedral bells struck up another peal and after a moment I was satisfied that the house was empty.

  The door of the little parlour where I had entered gave on to a narrow corridor leading to a small and basic kitchen, a staircase to the first floor, and, at the front of the house, a larger room evidently used as a library and study. Two cases of handsomely bound books stood against the wall, while a wide oak desk was placed before the windows, almost empty save for a pile of papers stacked neatly on one side with a book on top to weight them down, as well as an inkwell, penknife, and a block of sealing wax.

  On my hands and knees, so that I would not be seen by anyone who happened to pass the front window, I crept over to the desk and cast my eye over the papers. Most contained columns of figures and details of expenditure on mundane items, the necessary outgoings of a cathedral community, with the occasional query in the margins. Nothing here of interest, but then I would hardly have expected him to leave any sensitive documents in plain view. There were no titles on the bookshelves to excite curiosity either; though they were fine editions, most were volumes of orthodox theology, classical literature, and approved Christian philosophy, such as you might expect to find on the shelves of any learned and pious official of the English church. Nothing contraband, nothing overtly controversial, nothing to indicate the Catholic loyalties that might tie him to Henry Howard. Here on the ground floor at least, any visitor could observe that Langworth’s personal effects were unimpeachable.

  Creeping as quietly as I could manage, I climbed the stairs to the floor above. The bells had ceased and an anxious silence settl
ed over the house, in which I imagined I could hear my own blood pulsing through my veins as I held my breath. At the top of the stairs I found myself on a small landing with only one door to my right, though directly ahead was a bare wall where it looked as if a doorway should have been. I pushed open the right-hand door into what proved to be Langworth’s bedchamber. The air held the faint musty smell that I associated with old men, but the bed was made and the floorboards swept clean. There was no other furniture save a wooden stand with a jug and bowl for washing. I looked around, feeling something was not right. The room was too small. This bedchamber must be directly above the study downstairs, so there ought to be another room on this floor over the back half of the house, above the parlour where I had come in. At some point, that room had been blocked off, the doorway plastered over.

  On the back wall, beside the bed, hung a frayed tapestry depicting a lascivious version of the story of Susannah and the Elders. Though the colours were faded, the voluptuous curves of the nude bathing and the lustful eyes of the voyeurs were still lifelike enough to inspire less than virtuous thoughts. Quite a scene for the caustic treasurer to contemplate every night as he lay down to sleep, I thought, with a smile, amused by this indication of another side to him. But as I looked at the tapestry, I noticed not its design but its position, and on a sudden hunch I stepped forward and pulled it to one side. Concealed behind it was a door. I clenched my fist in triumph; this must lead to the back room which could not be accessed from the landing. Naturally, when I tried the latch, it was locked.

  Over my years of travelling, in the course of which I had often found myself in the company of thieves, I had acquired a degree of skill in unfastening doors that people wanted to remain closed, but I had left my knife at the gatehouse and without it I could not begin any attempt at picking the lock. Then I remembered the penknife on Langworth’s desk downstairs; it was at least worth a try. I bolted down two at a time, forgetting all my earlier caution about soundless steps, and returned with the knife. The lock was not straightforward and it took some careful teasing with the end of the blade to discover where the key was supposed to rotate; a business made all the more difficult by the fact that my hands had begun to sweat, both from the heat and from fear of taking too long. Eventually, I found the sensitive point that triggered the lever, releasing the latch, and a wave of sweet relief washed over me; extracting the knife, I pushed open the door gently, bracing myself for some dark secret.

  The room was empty. I felt my stomach lurch with disappointment, though I told myself not to be so foolish; why go to all the trouble of disguising and locking the door if there was nothing to be found? Only one wall had a window and this was covered by thick velvet drapes, so that barely any light entered. In the gloom I could make out little beyond bare boards and an empty fireplace. Yet I had a sense of apprehension, an instinct that I had stumbled upon something important, if I only had eyes to see. Something had been, and perhaps remained, hidden in this room, something Langworth did not want anyone to come across by chance.

  I crossed to the fireplace; the hearth was swept clean and it was clear that no fire had been lit here for a long while. Crouching, I felt blindly inside the chimney breast—my friend John Dee used to hide caches of letters and secret books up his chimney and I wondered if Langworth had tried the same trick—but my groping was rewarded only with a cascade of soot and dried bird droppings. There appeared to be no recess inside that I could feel. I knelt to try and brush the mess away from the tiles of the hearth to conceal evidence of my search. I dared not draw back the curtains in case anyone glancing from one of the buildings behind the house should see the movement, but by now my eyes were growing used to the gloom. As I scattered the fall of soot with my fingertips, I realised that one of the earthenware tiles that formed the floor of the fireplace was loose. At its edge was a slight indentation that allowed me to slip the tips of two fingers into the gap and lift the tile; though it was heavy, it was evidently not sealed in like the others and lifted easily, with a loud scraping. I set it to one side, wiped my sweating hands on my breeches and felt inside the cavity that had been revealed. My fingers brushed the surface of a wooden box, and with little difficulty I eased this out through the opening. It was carved with a design of serpents and vines intertwined, small enough to be held between my two hands, and it was no great surprise to find it locked. After a bit of judicious probing with the penknife, the clasp sprung open. I moved to sit beneath the window, where I lifted the drape just a fraction, enough to allow a sliver of daylight to illuminate the contents.

  At the bottom of the casket I found folded papers, and I had to fight to keep my hand steady as I reached for these; their contents must be valuable, since Langworth had taken such evident pains to hide them. On top of these papers was a bunch of keys, four altogether, of varying sizes, though two were quite large and had acquired the tarnish of age. I put them to one side and turned my attention to the letters.

  The first bore a broken seal in scarlet wax with a device I did not recognise and, as I unfolded it, my heart sank; the letter revealed only a series of numbers, arranged in groups of differing lengths that must correspond to words, but impenetrable to anyone not in possession of the cipher, as the writer had intended.

  I sighed. I should not have been surprised; at least the coded letter told me that Langworth’s secret correspondence was likely to be worth reading. Walsingham had a master cryptographer in his employ, Thomas Phelippes, a man of extraordinary abilities who could probably break this code in a matter of minutes just by looking at it. Though I had read a great deal about ciphers and seen a good many coded messages pass through the French embassy during the business there last autumn, I would not know where to begin in deciphering it and could easily waste hours in the attempt. I hesitated, holding the letter up gingerly between my thumb and forefinger. The paper was dog-eared and stained with what looked like drops of water on one side, as if it had been well-handled on its travels. I stared fruitlessly at the lines of numbers in the author’s tiny, neat hand. Where had it come from? I needed to make a copy—Langworth would certainly notice if I took the original, and if it should be damaged or destroyed while in my possession, crucial evidence would vanish forever—a mistake I had made once before, to my shame and Walsingham’s fury. But even supposing I had time to make a copy now, how could I get it to London? I would have to ask Harry’s servant Samuel to take it, and I doubted he would be in a hurry to do me any favours.

  The letter was signed not with more numbers but with a symbol, which seemed to me oddly familiar, but though I ransacked my memory trying to place it there was no jolt of recognition. Silently, I cursed my own failure; I, who was renowned in Paris as an expert on systems of memory, yet could not pull this vital information from my own brain when it most mattered. I knew that those who corresponded in code, whether to deliver secret intelligence or illicit conspiracies, often used a symbol in place of a signature to authenticate their dispatches; when I wrote to Walsingham I used the astrological symbol for the planet Jupiter as my own mark. If the sign on the letter I now held in my hands was familiar, it was most likely that I had seen it on one of the letters that had passed through the French embassy and so, logically, Langworth must be receiving letters from someone who had been involved with the invasion conspiracy of the previous autumn. Knowing of his Catholic leanings, this was hardly a surprise; the question was: Who? Henry Howard, from his prison cell, or someone outside England? And who was his courier?

  The most pressing question, though, was whether I had time to copy the letter before Langworth returned. I tucked it carefully into the leather pouch I wore at my belt and hesitated, weighing the keys in my hand. What secrets did they hold, I wondered, and did I dare remove them to find out? The house remained deathly silent. In the shard of light from the window, dust drifted gently.

  Outside, the cathedral bells struck up a new peal, startling me out of my thoughts. If they signalled the end of the service, people woul
d be spilling out into the precincts and it would be harder to leave without attracting attention. I looked down at the keys in my palm, willing myself to make a decision. Was one of these the key to Sir Edward Kingsley’s cellar?

  It was reckless, I knew, but I was afraid I would not have another chance. I slipped the bunch of keys into my pouch too, closed the casket, and fiddled impatiently with the lock, my fingers made clumsy by haste, until I felt it click beneath the knife. At least if he found the casket locked Langworth might attribute the missing keys to some lapse of memory on his own part. I hid the box again under the tile and left the hidden room, returning to Langworth’s bedchamber and closing the door as silently as possible behind me. But this time I could not make the lock turn back into place, and the persistent clamour of the bells began to seem an alarm meant to warn me that time was short. Instead of easing the knife gently, as I knew I should, I tried in my haste to force it; the blade glanced off the bolt and caught the edge of my finger. A gout of blood splashed to the floor; stifling a curse, I sucked furiously at the cut and at that moment I heard the sound of a door opening downstairs, followed by voices.