Sacrilege gb-3

by S. J. Parris

  “Am I pardoned?” he asked, blinking up at me and then at Edmonton. “Am I not to hang after all?”

  “Not today,” the constable said, sucking in his cheeks.

  “You are safe, brother,” I said, taking Anselm’s arm to steady him. His milky eyes filled with tears.

  “I thought those people would tear us apart where we stood,” he whispered. “But blessed Saint Thomas heard our prayers.”

  “Well. He has a lot to answer for,” I said.

  “Filippo?” A woman’s voice at my shoulder; I turned, my pulse quickening, to find the Widow Gray twisting her hands together, her eyes anxious. I raised my eyebrows: yes? “I want to come with you to the justice. I think it is time I made my deposition.”

  * * *

  “YOUR HONOUR, COULD I—before we—I must go back to Doctor Robinson’s house in the cathedral precincts. He may have need of me.”

  “Don’t worry about Harry,” Hale said, his eyes still skimming his papers. Four o’clock in the afternoon; the light soft and golden where it fell in scattered shapes on the panelled walls. With his entourage he had taken over an entire floor of the Cheker, its grandest rooms; the one we now sat in was furnished with silk cushions and embroidered curtains. Brother Anselm had been led away by one of Hale’s clerks to be fed, washed, and rested before he gave his deposition, in the hope that it might be more coherent. The Widow Gray was waiting outside the door for her turn. Mayor Fitzwalter had been arrested by the justice’s men as he stepped through the door of the Cheker, to avoid further public unrest. Now Hale sat behind a desk, his back to the open window, radiating calm, a glass of wine in his hand. Beside him, another clerk scribbled a note of every word that was spoken. Whenever a serving boy came in with food, the room fell silent, recognising that these were matters not to be overheard.

  “I sent two of my assistants to Harry’s house after he came to me this morning,” Hale continued. “Nearly killed himself trying to get here before I left for the hearing. He told me everything.”

  “Everything?” Did he mean Sophia?

  “Langworth’s plot. Becket. The dead boys. Monstrous! And the attempt on your own lives last night. The servant Samuel will be removed to more appropriate conditions until he is well enough to be questioned.”

  “Will he live?”

  “Let us hope so. We will need his testimony.” He paused to sip his wine. “It is a great blessing that Sir Philip is here with the queen’s pursuivants—I understand that was your doing. You are a brave man, Giordano Bruno. Reckless, perhaps, but undoubtedly useful.”

  “Still—I must go back to see Harry Robinson, as a matter of urgency—”

  Hale glanced up; his brow seemed to bristle at the presumption.

  “I sent Harry home to rest. This will not wait, Doctor Bruno—my assize is only adjourned. I have at least twenty more criminal cases to hear today, not to mention all the minor petitions. We shall be sitting until midnight as it is. Take a drink and let us begin on your deposition.” He paused at the sound of the door. “Ah, Sir Philip.”

  The door was closed behind Sidney, who strode over and squeezed my shoulder. He looked as exhausted as I felt.

  “Langworth is taken,” he said, throwing himself into a chair and clicking his fingers at one of the clerks for a glass of wine. “Found him in his house trying to light a bonfire of his letters. Thankfully he had not progressed very far—should be enough to make interesting reading. But the bad news is that Becket is gone.”

  “Under the floor,” I said, “at the eastern end, between two marble columns. I can show you the place.”

  “No need.” He twisted his mouth in distaste, though I could not tell if it was at the wine or the outcome. “We found the place. The coffin is empty. Not so much as a holy toenail to be seen.”

  “Langworth has moved him, then. He will tell you where.”

  Sidney gave a grim laugh.

  “Let us hope. When he is in the Tower he will be encouraged to tell us all manner of things.”

  I winced. “Langworth must have told someone. There are no more guardians left—Kingsley and Sykes are dead, Fitzwalter is arrested.”

  “Unless Fitzwalter was not the fourth guardian,” Hale said. “He swears he knows nothing of any relics. Admits to taking bribes from Langworth and Kingsley to smooth their financial interests, but nothing more. Of course, Fitzwalter is a coward,” he added, pursing his lips in disapproval. “He will say anything to spare himself hard questioning. We may yet learn something of use.”

  “So there could be another guardian,” I mused. “If Langworth will not talk, we may never know where Becket is buried.”

  “Oh, he will talk eventually,” Sidney said, as if there could be no dispute. He threw back the last of his wine and stood. “The pursuivants are all over Langworth’s house—I should go and see what more they have found. Then, Bruno, you and I deserve the finest supper this town can provide. We have much to talk about.” He gave me a meaningful look, stretched his arms above his head and cracked his neck from side to side, then swept out of the door again.

  “I’ll tell you another thing—it’s a damned shame the physician Sykes was killed before he could be questioned,” Hale remarked, reading over his notes. “Now that is a curious business. Was it Langworth’s doing, do you think, Bruno? Stop him talking? Seems bizarre, if it was. You’d have thought Sykes was essential to the whole miracle plot.”

  I hesitated. No one had yet mentioned Sophia. That meant only one of two things; either she was still hidden at Harry’s, or she had taken her chance to escape while the whole town was gathered at the assizes.

  “Sykes’s housekeeper kept his appointment book, apparently,” Hale continued, in a tone of mild curiosity. “He made a note of all his patients so that he wouldn’t miss a fee. He was supposed to see the Widow Gray the morning he died but he never got there. The housekeeper says someone came to the door crying that there was an emergency, begged him to go with her there and then. She says Sykes didn’t even stop to write down the name of the patient or pick up his jacket, just went out like that in his shirtsleeves, with his bag of remedies.”

  “It was a woman? At the door?”

  “The housekeeper didn’t see, but she says it sounded like a woman’s voice. Curious. Well,” he put the paper aside and looked up, his jowls creasing into a weary smile. “I cannot worry about that now. Let us hear your story, Doctor Bruno, as quick as you can make it, so I can get back to my adulterers and coiners. Justice will not wait.” He rolled his eyes. “You,” he barked at the clerk to his right. “Sharpen your quill for this man’s words.”

  * * *

  SO I GAVE my deposition from the beginning; how I had come to Canterbury at Sophia’s request; how Walsingham had asked me to keep an eye on Langworth; how Sir Edward Kingsley had led me to the murdered boys and the plot to revive the cult of Becket. I did not mention at any point that Sophia had travelled to Canterbury with me. Hale interrupted only once.

  “Where is she now? This woman—Kingsley’s wife?”

  I paused, weighing up my answer. Was this a test? Had Harry already told them she was at his house? Would the men who came to take Samuel have found her? Lying to the justice would not serve me well; I had lied for Sophia once before and Walsingham had given me strong words for it.

  “I don’t know,” I answered, truthfully.

  His eyes rested for a moment on my face with a practised scrutiny, then he nodded for me to continue.

  When I had told my story—as much of it as I felt necessary for a deposition—he folded his hands together and pushed his chair back.

  “An audacious scheme,” he murmured, shaking his head. “You almost have to admire them for it. To revive the shrine of Saint Thomas with a miracle of resurrection—extraordinary presumption. Ha!” A sudden laugh erupted as if from deep in his chest, and his clerks echoed it with polite titters. “That a man should think to mock the powers of God Almighty. Beggars belief.”

  “Yo
ur Honour, the Catholic Church has been doing this for years. Red powder you shake up to make the blood of Christ. Statues of the Virgin with mechanisms that make them weep on Good Friday. Man is ingenious when it comes to aping miracles.”

  “And others are more than apt to believe in them. By God, Doctor Bruno—the longer I do this job, the more I feel nothing could surprise me when it comes to the baseness of human nature. It’s a wonder Our Lord bothers with us at all.” He stretched out his legs under the desk and leaned back. “I wish some miracle would relieve me of this day’s business. I will have two armed men escort you to Harry Robinson’s, in case the mob are still restless.”

  * * *

  THE STREETS were lively with people; the town seemed to have given itself a day’s holiday in honour of the assizes. If the crowds had been disappointed at being deprived of a spectacle at the gallows, they seemed mollified by the drama of the queen’s own soldiers coming to town to arrest their canon treasurer. This time there were no flying vegetables as I passed along the High Street in the company of my guards, but I felt the stares as I passed, the muted whispering, as if I were somehow more dangerous now that they did not know what to make of me.

  Harry opened the door and his face gave me the answer I needed. The guards took their place unquestioningly outside and I stepped into the hall.

  “She was gone when I came back from seeing the justice this morning,” he said, leaning heavily on his stick.

  I nodded, summoning all my remaining strength to keep my jaw tight, my face steady.

  “I have not had a chance to thank you for that,” I said. “You must have almost killed yourself getting there in time.”

  “I knew he would not leave his lodgings until the last minute. His assistants did not want to admit me but I told them the safety of the realm was at stake. I may have mentioned the Privy Council.” He shifted position and sucked in a sharp breath, his face pinched with pain.

  “You should get some sleep, Harry,” I said. “You look exhausted.”

  “My leg is bad today. I have not walked so fast nor up so many stairs for months, and I can’t remember the last time I nearly killed a man in the middle of the night.” He tried to laugh but it ended with another wince. “Did you know she would be gone?”

  “I guessed.”

  “But you don’t know where?”

  I shook my head and leaned against the wall, the exhaustion of the day and the previous night settling on my shoulders like a lead cloak. She must have realised that there was little hope of her being able to claim her inheritance as Kingsley’s widow if no one could be found guilty of his murder; perhaps she suspected that I would eventually piece together the truth. But the killing of Sykes had not been part of her plan. Had Olivier decided on that course alone after Sophia had related to Hélène what I had told her about finding Denis’s body? I pressed my palm to my forehead. Like Tom Garth, Olivier had believed there was no justice for people like him under the law. He had dispensed his own hot-blooded justice to Edward Kingsley and to Sykes, and part of me understood how a man might be driven to that. I could tell Hale, have the hue and cry sent after them, but what would it achieve, in the end, if they were caught and hanged for the murder of two men whose actions—some might argue—had deserved a sentence of death? I sighed. In Oxford, I had stopped Sophia from running away because I thought I was saving her life. This time, I would let her go. There was a kind of justice in that, I thought.

  “This might give you some idea,” Harry said. I looked up to see that he was holding out a letter, folded in quarters, unsealed. “I have not read it,” he said, quickly. “It was left on your mattress.”

  “Thank you.” I took the letter and turned it between my fingers. “I—I think I will read it in my room. You should lie down. You look terrible.”

  “Sleep won’t cure that,” he said, with an attempt at a grin, and shuffled away to the parlour, his breath rasping in his chest with every step.

  The room was as she had left it, the bedsheet crumpled so that I almost fancied I could see the imprint of her body in it. I sat down and opened the letter.

  Dear Bruno

  By the time you read this your trial will be over. I cannot help but believe it will go your way; you can talk your way out of anything. Besides, you have a knack for survival, as I do. I had hoped you could talk me out of a murder charge and into my inheritance, but I see now that this was too much to ask. My best hope is to begin again, with a new name. I am growing so practised at this that I hardly know who I am any-more; I invent myself from day to day. You understand this, I think. You have understood me better than anyone, so you will understand, I hope, that just as I no longer have faith in God, neither can I trust in any man. Please do not think I am oblivious to everything you have done for me, and why. I do not think I can love again. The part of me that knew how to love was destroyed when my son was taken from me. You will say that I betrayed you; I still say you betrayed me in Oxford. You will find this hard to believe after what I have done, but I will miss you.

  Perhaps we will meet again—I would like to think so. I cannot help but feel our destinies are tangled together somehow. Though if we do, I imagine you will want to murder me.

  Yours

  S.

  I let the letter fall to my lap. To kill her? No. Perhaps. I placed one hand on the sheet beside me, as it might still contain some trace of her, and wondered where she would have run to with no money, no possessions … Then I closed my eyes. A cold realisation crept over me; I crumpled the letter in my fist and hurled myself across the bed to the corner where I had prised up the floorboard. The nails lay loosely scattered. I dug my fingers in and pulled the board away, tearing my fingernails in my haste. The wooden casket was gone. So was my purse, though it was a small consolation to see that she had left my little knife. I drew it out, weighed it in my hands for a moment. With a raw moan of rage I took the stairs two at a time; it was not too late to find them. I would go to Sidney, get him to order out the hue and cry; with men on every road out of Canterbury it would take no time to run them to ground like foxes, leave them cowering in a corner, begging for mercy. If she thought she could betray me twice, she would learn that I was not another of her doe-eyed boys, to be used and thrown away as it suited her. She would learn…

  I stopped at the front door. If the hue and cry caught them, they would die for certain. In my anger I might wish Sophia to pay for deceiving me, but with her life? To exchange two young lives for a book; could I live with myself? I leaned my forehead against the wall, pushed my hands through my hair, called down all the curses I knew in every language I had ever learned until they all merged into incoherent, racking sobs. I did not lift my face away from the wall even when I heard that familiar shuffle-and-drag and felt a hand rest on my shoulder.

  Harry did not speak until I had exhausted myself into silence.

  “You will mend, son,” he said, looking past me to the window. “I did. Safer, in the end, to travel alone.”

  Chapter 18

  Morning light in jewel-coloured patches on golden stone; the cool hush of the cathedral before Holy Communion. I stared at a bare patch of floor; the wavering shadows on an empty wall, and tried to picture Thomas Becket standing where I now stood, when he was just a man like any other, but perhaps more stubborn, before England turned him into a conjuring show encrusted with gold. When he looked towards that door on his left to see the knights thundering towards him, swords drawn, he could never have imagined how his death would ripple out through four hundred years of history.

  “Pax vobiscum, Thomas,” I whispered. “Wherever you are.”

  Sidney appeared at my shoulder.

  “Praying to saints, Bruno? Do I need to call the pursuivants? We could make room for you in the cart beside Langworth if you’re slipping back into popery.”

  I forced a smile and craned my neck up to the vaulted arches a hundred feet above, their tracery fanning out like some great stone forest in a legend.


  “Do you think he’s still here somewhere?”

  “Becket?” Sidney sniffed. “If he is, Langworth will tell us where. If not, the queen will speak directly to the archbishop, tell him to get down here and have some care for his See. They’ll have every last tomb in this place torn up, if that’s what it takes. She won’t want Becket lurking like a snake under a stone ready to jump up and bite her at any moment. Listen, Bruno.” He turned, suddenly serious. “The girl. If Walsingham should ask …”

  After supper the night before, when the two of us had sat up late in Sidney’s room at the Cheker, I had told him about Sophia, Olivier, the book, Kingsley, Sykes. I had asked his advice.

  “Let them go,” he had said, when he had heard me out. “No one should die for a book, Bruno—though I’ll wager you would, if it came to it. What will she do with it? She can’t read it, can she?”

  “She will sell it,” I had replied. “And then there is no knowing whose hands it might fall into. It’s my own fault—I should not have told her it was valuable.”

  “You should not have done a lot of things where she’s concerned,” he had said. “But it is done now. What matters is protecting you from Walsingham’s wrath. Her crime was not political, but he is scrupulous on points of law. He won’t like to think you let a murderer go free because your softer feelings mastered you.”

  “Say only that she has gone her way,” I said now, looking back to the floor where Becket’s brains had once been scattered.

  “I have been thinking,” he said, lowering his voice. “The servant Samuel will be in no state to contradict anything that is put to him. A confession will be eased from him as soon as he is fit to sign his own name. I don’t see why he can’t be made to confess to the murders of Kingsley and Sykes on Langworth’s orders as well as the apothecary. It would leave things tidy.”

  “Falsify a confession?”

  “He’s going to die anyway, Bruno, either at the end of a rope or from that crack in his skull Harry fetched him. Come on. It’s not as if we’d be condemning an innocent man.”