Sacrilege: A Novel

by S. J. Parris

  “Paracelsus!” I smiled to myself in the half-light, turning the fat pill over between my fingers. Of course—Paracelsus had brought it back from his travels in Arabia in just this form, supposedly hidden in the pommel of his sword. “Stones of Immortality,” he called them, these black tablets made from laudanum, mixed with citrus juice and quintessence of gold.

  I thought of the burned scrap of paper I had taken from Fitch’s hearth. Paracelsus again. The apothecary’s papers had been burned to conceal a reference to Paracelsus, and now here was Langworth spiriting away laudanum pills which also spoke, at least obliquely, of the alchemist’s work. What was the connection?

  I wrapped the black pills back in their brown paper and sat for a moment in the shadows, thinking of Paracelsus. I had felt an affinity with the maverick Swiss alchemist since I first encountered his proscribed books as a young monk. I had admired the way he refused to content himself with the ideas of the past and had set out to overturn the lazy, narrow thinking of the academies, whose learning derived from tradition, not experiment. In the process he had acquired a reputation as a troublemaker and frequently found himself hounded out of the universities, accused of necromancy by those made fearful or jealous by his hunger for knowledge and his rebellious independence. Without consciously intending to follow in his footsteps, I had found myself repeating his experience half a century later, driven by (I liked to think) the same tenacious spirit of enquiry into the nature of this vast universe we inhabit.

  Like me, Paracelsus had been fascinated by the secret wisdom and natural magic of Hermes Trismegistus, the Egyptian sage who was called the father of alchemy and natural magic. It was a lost manuscript of Hermes that I had followed from Italy to France to England and finally held in my hands for a moment last autumn, before Henry Howard had snatched it away. A book believed to contain the secret of man’s divinity—a secret more powerful even than the philosopher’s stone, which Paracelsus was supposed to have received from an Arabian adept in Constantinople. This was the book I dared to hope Howard might have entrusted to Langworth, via his nephew, to keep it from the eyes of the government searchers he knew would ransack his own houses for evidence of treason. And now here was Langworth hiding stones of laudanum, and William Fitch—or his murderer—burning recipes that spoke explicitly of Paracelsus. I pushed my hands through my hair, gripping clumps between my fingers, as if to press my brain into making the connections, but the sense of it all eluded me, swirling through my muddied thoughts.

  Angry at myself, I left the parcel on the floor where Langworth had thrown it and concentrated on securing the secret room behind me. My fingers moved more deftly with my own knife and this time I succeeded in turning the lock. I climbed through the broken casement unobserved, at least as far as I could tell (those opaque windows of the building that backed on to Langworth’s house seemed to bear down on me with accusatory stares, though I told myself not to be foolish). But as I was rounding the corner of the row of houses in sight of the cathedral once more, I almost collided with a black-robed figure heading in the opposite direction. I apologised, flustered, and looked up; to my surprise, it was not a cleric, as I had thought, but a woman.

  “Oh. Mistress Gray—forgive me, I didn’t see you.”

  She appraised me in silence from beneath her veil, then glanced over my shoulder, as if to judge where I might have come from. I met that look as confidently as I could, wondering for my part where she was going; there was nothing at the end of the path except Langworth’s house. We stood for a moment, looking at each other. Finally her eyes flickered briefly upwards to the sky.

  “We shall have a storm, I think,” she observed, her tone pleasant, as if I were an old acquaintance. I followed the direction of her gaze to see that the layer of cloud had thickened into scalloped rows, pressing the heat down like a blanket. To the east, above the rooftops, the sky had taken on an edge of steel grey. I nodded, unnerved by the way she studied my face. What was her connection to Edward Kingsley? Why had he left her money? I wanted to ask her questions but could not think how to broach the subject without causing offence.

  When it seemed that she intended neither to speak nor to move, I touched my forefinger to my fringe in an awkward salute, bowed my head briefly, and walked quickly away, with the uncomfortable sensation of her eyes on my back until I had turned the corner.

  Chapter 10

  Robin Bates and his companions were waiting outside the Three Tuns after supper as they had promised, playfully jostling one another or leaning against the hitching posts, spitting into the dirt. The boy named Peter, whose place I had taken at the card game the night before, picked up a stone and threw it at a scrawny cat, who yelped and scurried away, belly low to the ground. Bates nodded as I approached, and I noticed two of the others lean their heads together and whisper, eyes fixed on me, knowing smirks playing about their lips in a way that made me immediately wary.

  “Have you brought a full purse, my Italian friend?” Bates said.

  I smiled, patting the moneybag I carried at my belt. The thought had occurred that, once outside the city limits, these boys could simply take my coins by force and leave me in a ditch, though I brushed the idea aside; they might choose to fight me for sport, but their youthful aggression was straightforward, not calculating. I was clearly there to be the target of their jokes, but I did not think they would deny themselves an evening’s entertainment by robbing me before we reached the card table. Bates slapped me on the back approvingly. I smiled again and laid a hand over the purse at my belt, feeling the reassuring shape of the keys I had copied from Langworth’s. I was content to play the joker for these young fools if it gave me access to Edward Kingsley’s house. The old priory held some secrets, that much was certain; secrets important enough for Langworth to fear that Walsingham had sent me from London to uncover them.

  We walked through the town, crossing the Buttermarket and heading along Sun Street in the direction of the North Gate. The boys talked and cursed loudly, keen to draw attention to themselves with their swaggering gait and playful fighting; I noticed all carried swords in elaborate scabbards swinging at their sides. I wondered how much skill they possessed in the use of them. My little dagger, hanging at my belt, looked inadequate by comparison, yet I suspected I was probably more efficient with it than these boys who carried their fine blades as ornaments of their wealth. People scowled and turned away from them; I kept my head down as best I could and hoped we might avoid any trouble inside the city walls. It would not help my reputation in the town to be seen in the company of notorious brawlers, as I guessed these young men were known to be.

  To distract him from looking too provocatively at a group of men who stood by the gate of a tavern, eyeing the boys with dislike, I turned to Bates and nodded in the general direction we were walking.

  “Are you sure your friend Nicholas will be happy to see us? I gathered last night he is still in mourning.”

  Bates laughed.

  “Mourning? Not he. Nick hated the old devil almost as much as he hated that whore he married. Though he’d have bedded her himself, given the chance. We all would.” He gave a lascivious grin and I flexed my hands quietly into fists at my side, as I smiled in complicity. “No—if Nick seemed unwilling, it is only because he is afraid he will jeopardise the legal process. His father’s property is not his in law yet.”

  “Then whose? His widow’s?”

  “Well, that is just the point.” He turned to me, his eyes gleaming with the excitement of a story. “Nick was cut out of his father’s will and everything left to the wife. But if it was she who killed Sir Edward, then naturally her rights are forfeit and all should return to Nick. The difficulty is that she cannot be tried because she has fled.”

  “Is that not as good as a confession of her guilt?”

  “Eventually, I suppose, if she does not return. But she cannot be tried in absentia. Meanwhile Nick has a house, lands, income, and a full cellar he has been instructed by his attorney n
ot to touch, and we his friends grow very impatient with the business. We had thought his father’s death would make him a wealthy man. In fact, I believe we have you to thank for his agreement tonight—he did not want to lose face in front of a stranger.” He punctuated this sentence with a friendly punch to my upper arm, which I received with good humour, inwardly gritting my teeth.

  “But you said if the wife killed Sir Edward. Is it not certain, then?” I prompted.

  Bates darted a quick, lizard glance sideways at me.

  “They found her gloves, all bloodied. The next day she was gone, with a purse of his money. Hard to see how it could be anyone else. Mind you,” he added, assuming a thoughtful expression, “if she had not as good as confessed by running, there are plenty who might have pointed the finger at Tom Garth—the big fellow who tried to make trouble at the Three Tuns last night.”

  “I remember him,” I said. “You think he could have done it?”

  “He had reason. I’m not saying he did it. But he wasn’t the only one glad to see Nick’s father go to his grave.”

  “Including Nick himself?”

  He turned slowly, with a knowing smile.

  “He was glad all right. But Nick is all talk, he could never have done it. He’s a coward at heart.”

  I almost pointed out that a coward may well attack a man from behind in the dark—Tom Garth had said as much—but decided it was not in my interest to keep pressing the possibility of Nicholas Kingsley’s guilt while I was a guest in his house.

  We crossed under the North Gate, which was no more than a small chapel built across the road, supported by wooden pillars, with room for a carriage to pass beneath. Beyond it, the streets opened up into orchards and fields, baked yellow by the heat. A wide avenue followed the line of the city wall, edged with fine houses, taller and more generously spaced than those nearer the centre of the town. As we walked, my hair was lifted from my face by intermittent gusts of a hot breeze that whipped and eddied around us, churning the heavy air. Gulls circled, calling mournfully. I squinted upwards; the sun was a malevolent eye glaring through the cloud.

  At the end of a row of houses, Bates indicated to the right and I turned to see a handsome manor house, built in the style of an earlier century and set back from the road behind a low wall in spacious grounds that had been left to run wild. It was only as we drew nearer that I realised what had looked like a large rambling garden was studded with crumbling stone crosses and other burial monuments, and I recalled Fitch’s story about his niece being afraid to approach the house because of the old priory cemetery. The grave mounds were all grassed over and many of the headstones worn almost smooth.

  We passed through a small gate. The path to the front door of the manor ran along the edge of the graveyard.

  “I’m not sure I would like to live out here, surrounded by the dead,” I remarked to Bates. He laughed.

  “It’s the vengeance of the living you have to worry about here.” He gestured to the cemetery. “This belonged to the parish, after the priory was dissolved. But twenty years ago the lessee of the manor house had the burial ground enclosed as part of his private lands. When Nick’s father took the lease, the parishioners petitioned him to give the burial ground back to the town, but he refused, so they have to carry their dead farther out of town now, at more expense. Created a lot of resentment. Still, they’re always complaining about something, the poor,” he added airily, and any respect I might have felt for him as the best of the group instantly evaporated.

  To hide my irritation, I turned to look back at the graveyard. The end farthest from us, bordered by the ivy-shrouded masonry of the original boundary wall, remained steeped in shadow, but as I shaded my eyes, I noticed a low stone mausoleum with a façade of white columns, cracked and patched with moss, and the carved figure of an angel standing on the portico, wings outstretched as if it were about to step off the roof into the air. I stopped and looked around, straining for any unusual sound. It was here that the girl Rebecca imagined she had heard someone screaming, as if the sound came from beneath her feet. From the very graves themselves, Fitch had said with that wink of his, little knowing how soon he would lie in his own. I shivered, despite the warmth of the evening, and overhead a seagull uttered a sharp lament.

  “Are you joining us, Filippo?” Bates said from the threshold. He had the bell rope in his hand and behind the studded oak door its clamour echoed back through the house.

  I tore my attention away and smiled enthusiastically, but my curiosity was sharpened even further.

  “COME IN, THEN.”

  Nicholas Kingsley did not have the air of a gracious host; he seemed stiff and ill at ease, glancing furtively about him as if at any moment he expected to see his father appear in a rage. He ushered us into a well-appointed dining room, with a large oak table in the centre and a polished wooden buffet standing against the back wall, where pitchers and drinking vessels had been lined up. In one corner of this room stood an elderly woman dressed in a plain brown smock of rough cloth covered by a white apron, her grey hair bound up in a coif and her hands folded meekly in front of her. She raised her eyes briefly as we trooped in—seven young men in number, including me—and I caught her glance for a moment. She flinched and looked quickly away and I saw that she was afraid. I was gripped by an urge to reassure her; this good old woman who had helped Sophia and been the only one to show her kindness during those terrible six months of her marriage.

  I craned my neck to take in the elaborately carved wooded bosses of the ceiling as the others took their places, thinking how strange it was to be seated here at this table where Sophia must have endured so many meals, forcing herself to eat and make polite conversation with her husband’s dinner guests, aware of the greedy eyes of her stepson on her. Without meaning to, I found myself glaring at Nick down the length of the table; he chanced to glance up at that moment and the look he sent me in return was no less hostile. I tried quickly to rearrange my expression; I was so close, I thought, to the mystery of this house, and I must continue to play my part for this evening. To make them suspicious now risked ruining everything.

  WE GATHERED AROUND the table, the boys’ spirits running high, pitchers of wine passing back and forth and spilling from pewter tankards as cards were thrown down amid shouts and curses, coins rattled into a heap to be scraped up by whomever luck had favoured at the end of each hand (for I had no illusion that any of them succeeded by skill, so raucous and impulsive their gaming seemed). Bates, who appeared by general consent to have appointed himself the dealer, called for hands of bone-ace, one-and-thirty, or maw, and the others reached for their purses as the pot was emptied. I lost graciously at the first three games and on the fourth, though not by any considered effort on my part, I found myself the winner of a hand and was able to return some coins to my depleted store. By this time it seemed I had earned enough of a place in the group for this small flash of good fortune not to turn them against me; in fact my companions cheered on my behalf and those nearest clapped me on the back—all except Nick Kingsley, who continued to glower from his end of the table.

  If I disliked the boy before, my contempt for him was doubled by the way he spoke to the old housekeeper, Meg, as if she were a dog, demanding she fetch more wine even while she was busy bringing dishes of food from the kitchen, which the boys all set to with their fingers. The second time he barked orders at her to bring up more bottles, I gently offered to help.

  “If you just point me towards the wine cellar, I could save her the trouble—”

  “For Christ’s sake, man”—Nick spat half-chewed chicken across the table—“she’s a servant. Let her do her job. Or don’t you have servants where you’re from?”

  “I thought she might be tired,” I said, glancing at Meg, who raised her eyes briefly and gave me a faltering smile.

  “Well, if she’s too tired, I can always get another servant who can manage the work,” Nick said, with a malicious look at the housekeeper. She turn
ed pale and shook her head vehemently.

  “No, Master Nicholas, I have not complained. I’m going right away.” She backed out of the room and I saw the fear in her eyes; she would probably not find another position at her age, and was stuck here at the mercy of this young brute.

  “Got to remind them who’s in charge,” Nick said, to no one in particular, while Meg was still within earshot. His friends murmured assent, examining their new cards and wiping greasy fingers on their breeches. I felt revolted by the lot of them, and silently hoped they would drink themselves into a stupor as soon as possible, leaving me free to explore the house.

  I drank slowly; at first, from time to time one of them would remark on it, calling on me to drink up, while the others cheered for my cup to be refilled, but as the evening wore on and their drunkenness increased, my behaviour attracted less interest. They lit clay pipes of pungent tobacco, filling the room with clouds of woody smoke that ascended to hover like a blue veil above our heads; beneath the table they passed around a piss pot and soon the sharp smell of urine mingled with the pipe smoke and roast meat in the close air. I breathed through my mouth, fighting the urge to run outside into the night.

  When dusk fell, Nick bellowed for candles to be brought, and the faces of the players were lit by that strange, wavering orange glow, creating shadows in the hollows of their eyes and cheeks as they leant forward over the table. By midnight, three of them had fallen asleep where they sat, heads resting on their arms on the tabletop, snoring with their mouths hanging wetly open, and the others continued their game half-heartedly, until Nick pushed his chair back abruptly, knocking over his tankard as he did so, and mumbled that he was for bed.