grudge against him too, and he came to the cathedral precincts that night, so you said?”
“So he did. I tried to keep him out—he was drunk, of course—but he swore blind his father had sent for him and he must be let in. In the end I thought he would only make a fool of himself, interrupting the dean’s supper table. As it happened, the dean’s steward would not admit him and he came back to the gatehouse barely ten minutes later, raging under his breath.”
“And had his father sent for him?”
“How should I know? I doubt it. But I knew he’d have gone back to his friends at the alehouse and any number of people would see him there so it would never stick if I’d tried to say it was him. Besides”—he sucked in another great shuddering breath—“I have seen how that goes. Someone like me, up against someone like Nick Kingsley, with all his father’s powerful friends. And I wouldn’t even have the truth on my side this time. Whereas with a woman …” He left the thought unfinished.
“Lower even than a gatekeeper,” Sophia said scornfully, looking down at him from under her hood.
There was a noise; a sudden crack that jolted us all from our thoughts and made us glance around, startled, nerves bristling. It was nothing to fear; Tom had leaned too hard against a pile of logs and his weight had caused them to shift, one falling slightly against another. But the sound had reminded us of the danger of our being caught. I reached for Sophia’s arm in the dark.
“Let us leave. Tom—I rely on your silence, as you may rely on mine.”
“You have my word, Master Savolino.”
I led Sophia through the wet grass to the shelter of the wall beside the middle gate. To our right, the ink-blue of the night sky was shading to a pale violet above the rooftops in the east; the pitch-blackness of the precincts was giving way to a haze of grey shadows. We ran across the open path to Harry’s front gate, hand in hand, cloaks pulled tight over our faces and I still clutching the box inside my clothes hard to my ribs, through the curtains of drizzle until I was able to fumble open the front door and we fell damply, breathing hard, into the entrance hall and the door was closed behind us against the night. We paused there, listening for any sound or movement, but there was only the creaking of the old timbers and the patter of the rain on the glass. Sophia lifted her hood back and looked at me frankly; in the dimness I saw the gleam of her eyes and moved towards her as if by instinct. She raised a hand and laid it for a moment flat to my cheek, then she leaned closer and our mouths met again. I pulled her to me and felt the sharp edge of the casket press into my chest beneath my doublet, sending a stab of pain through my bruised ribs.
“Come,” I whispered, and led her upstairs to the room under the eaves as quietly as I could, though I feared every tread of the stairs would wake Harry and we would be obliged to sit with him and answer his questions. My blood was feverish with hunger for her now, quickened by the wordless encouragement of her apparent desire for me.
I shut the door of my room behind us and dropped my wet cloak to the floor. The wooden casket I placed carefully on the window ledge, to be examined later; it had suffered a crack when Tom Garth threw me to the ground, but appeared otherwise undamaged. If you had told me a month ago that I would have the lost book of Hermes Trismegistus in my hands and leave it aside for a woman, I would have laughed; but Sophia had an effect on me that no woman had had for years and there were some longings that no book could satisfy.
As the sky shaded slowly into the shimmering light of a wet dawn, I slipped the rough dress from her thin shoulders and laid her down on the narrow truckle bed, tracing circles over her damp skin with my tongue while she curled her fingers into my hair and arched her back like a cat in the sun, softly moaning as I moved lower, over the sharp bones of her hips and the softness of her belly and lower still. She wanted me: I felt it in the mounting tension of her muscles and the urgent way she gripped my head as my mouth matched the rhythm of her rocking motion, until eventually she subsided in a liquid cascade of snatched gasps and shuddering sighs. She reached down and pulled me to her, covering my face in kisses and whispering my name while I wrestled, impatient and clumsy, with the ties of my breeches. And then I was inside her, moving with her, looking into those wide tawny eyes that had haunted me since Oxford, hardly daring to believe that we were here, now, joined. She kept her eyes fixed on mine as I began to move faster, more deliberately, her gaze fierce and inscrutable, so that I could not tell whether she was looking at me with love or pity. Perhaps both. As my breathing grew more ragged, she seemed to awaken from her reverie and I felt her pushing me urgently away from her. It took me a moment to understand: her fear of getting with child again. I felt a brief pang of irrational, inexplicable rejection, but in the last instant I slid away from her and spent myself into the sheet beside her, my face buried in her shoulder to muffle any involuntary sounds.
For a long while we lay without speaking, side by side; her hand continued to caress my hair, but absently, and when I glanced at her face I knew she was elsewhere, far from me, her eyes fixed on the ceiling but her gaze turned inward to her own thoughts, and a strange melancholy stole over me, a bleak fear that what we had just done marked not a beginning but an ending. Though my arm remained across her body, my fingers lightly stroking patterns along the curve of her waist, I fell asleep feeling oddly alone as the pale dawn light crept across the bare plaster of the walls.
Chapter 15
A persistent peal of bells from the cathedral tower woke me, though it seemed only moments since I had closed my eyes. I reached across and found the bed empty. Gulls were clamouring outside the window; when I squinted into the morning light, I saw Sophia, already dressed, leaning on the window ledge with the precious book in her hand. My throat clenched; I had to fight the urge to leap up and tear it out of her hands. But she could have no idea what she held, and I did not wish to whet her curiosity further.
“Greek,” she said, without looking up. “What is it?”
“Can you read it?”
“Only a little. I had some schooling with my brother, but my Greek was never advanced and my father would not allow me to study with a tutor after my brother died. Why was this book buried with Becket? Is it forbidden?”
She raised her head and looked at me and I saw the glint in her eye. In Oxford she had pestered me to tell her the secrets of natural magic and I recalled the same light in her expression when I had told her of occult books I had read on my travels. She would have made a fine scholar, I thought; she had the necessary hunger for any knowledge she was told she must not seek.
“I think it is a book I saw once in London,” I said, waving a hand as if it hardly mattered, “but I need to study it further to be sure. In the meantime we have more pressing questions. I have only one more day before the assize judge arrives to try and find some evidence against your husband’s murderer.”
“But you don’t know who he is yet,” she said, biting her lip. “That is, if you believe Tom Garth didn’t do it. We only have his word for that.”
“True. And perhaps I am mistaken. In any case, we have no choice but to rely on his oath—he could land you, me, and Harry in gaol with one word about your presence.” I shook my head. “But in my gut I do not feel it was Garth. It
She looked confused.
“What plot? Which boys?”
I told her, as briefly as I could, of my night at St. Gregory’s Priory, my altercation with Nicholas Kingsley, the gruesome discovery under the mausoleum, and the suspicions Harry and I had formed about the three men’s intention of staging a miracle by the bones of Saint Thomas when the time was right. When I reached the part about finding the medallion of Saint Denis around the neck of the corpse in the underground tomb, she covered her mouth with her hand and tears sprung to her eyes.
“Oh, sweet Jesus,” she said, when I had finished, her voice barely audible through her fingers. “To think of that happening underneath my own house.”
“The beggar boy would have been before you married Sir Edward. But the Huguenot child—yes. He was kept prisoner and poisoned while you were enduring your own sufferings above ground.”
