really searching for. I would not put it past him to contrive that a purse of money from the treasury should be found here too—that would as good as seal my sentence. Christ!” I ran a hand through my hair and thumped my fist into the mattress. “He means to finish me off one way or another. How did I not see the danger?”
Sophia crept forward and gently laid her forehead against my shoulder, her hand on my thigh.
“I am so sorry, Bruno. I had no idea it would be so tangled. Becket, the dead boys—I knew nothing of any of it. I thought it would be a simple matter of proving that Nicholas Kingsley did it so that I could be free. I believed he did. I never imagined you would end up—”
She left the words unspoken.
“The fault is mine. I should have seen the danger.”
“But then, would you still have come?”
“Probably.”
She looked up at me, eyes wide.
“Why?”
“You know why, Sophia.”
She said nothing, only continued to look at me expectantly with that unreadable expression. Did she need to hear me say aloud that I loved her? The words were poised on my tongue, but some unexplained instinct held them back. Instead I reached for her hand and she twined her fingers with mine, but it seemed more a gesture of sorrow. We were both under sentence of death now, unless a miracle happened, and even Thomas Becket was unlikely to deliver one of those.
Something, some phrase I had heard that morning chafed at my mind, as if I had missed a vital part of the picture, but when I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate to recall what it might have been, I was distracted by a great shuddering sob from Sophia that racked her thin body as she leant into me, a sob that seemed to contain all the frustration and rage of the past year. I held her while she vented her pain, her face pressed to my shoulder, my cheek leaning against her hair, but although she clung to me like a child with night terrors, I sensed with a growing hollowness in my chest that after the heightened excitement of the night before, I had passed back into my previous role of reassuring friend, a part I hoped I had left behind. I kissed her hair softly. Well, I could be patient. At this moment we were both in dire need of a friend.
Chapter 16
The morning service passed, interminably slowly. All through the singing of the choir, the reading of the Gospel, and the monotone of the dean’s sermon, none of which I heard, Langworth glared across the carved stalls at me and Harry with a very unchristian light in his eyes, as if he hoped to wither us beneath his stare like a basilisk. Sun slanted through the high windows and lit the columns and the floor with geometric shapes in jewel colours. When I could tear my gaze away from Langworth’s I looked up to those windows, where glass undimmed by centuries of sunlight depicted the miracles of Saint Thomas, the procession of pilgrims to the shrine, their hands thrown up in simple joy as the saint’s bones give them back their sight, or their legs, or their children from the grave. Had they really thought, Langworth and his friends, that they could stage a miracle? Did they imagine people would believe in it? But why should they doubt it, I thought, recalling the trade in relics in my own country, the commerce of priests offering a touch of a weeping statue of the virgin for the chink of coins in their pockets, a statue they had engineered themselves to dispense tears at the appropriate time. For nearly four hundred years people had believed in the truth of the stories told in the windows above us in the cathedral, and they would want to believe again.
When the dean eventually pronounced the final blessing, I took Harry’s keys and tried to press my way out quickly ahead of him, leaving him to watch Langworth’s movements. The treasurer’s eyes followed me as I left, but he had been detained by the dean.
I nodded a brisk farewell to them both as I passed, and heard Dean Rogers saying, “No sign of Doctor Sykes this morning, John? I think we can forgive his absence in the light of his tireless devotion to the health of our town …”
I pushed through the congregation out into the precincts and rushed to the gatehouse. Tom Garth’s look of dismay told me immediately that Langworth’s words were true.
“You gave me your oath, Tom,” I said in a low voice, forcing my way into his small lodge.
He held his hands up as if in self-defence.
“He threatened me, sir. He said he knew you had been abroad in the precincts last night and I would be expected to say I’d seen you to the constable. He said if I lied I would lose my place.” He leaned in closer. “But I never said a word about Mistress Kingsley, I swear it.”
“But you will, if he threatens you again?”
He shook his head vehemently.
“No, sir—that was my promise. I reasoned if he knew about you already I couldn’t very well deny it without bringing myself trouble. But I won’t mention a word about her. And you won’t say anything about the gloves —?”
His eyes were full of fear. I sighed.
“No. But I need your help, Tom. Langworth wants to search Harry Robinson’s house—I need to put her somewhere else, just for this afternoon. Is there anywhere—an outbuilding, a shed, any place he wouldn’t think to look, that we can get her to easily?”
He considered for a moment and nodded.
“There’s an outbuilding behind the conduit house, the one that stands between here and Doctor Robinson’s house. It was used for storage, but there’s nothing much there now. I have the key—I reckon she’d be safe in there for a few hours.”
“Excellent. When the crowds have finished milling around, come and find me at Harry’s. We have to move quickly—Langworth will not want to waste time. He’s probably on his way to fetch the constable even now.”
I returned to the house. Harry arrived a few minutes later, confirming that he had seen Langworth heading in the direction of one of the side gates. I bounded up the stairs to see Sophia bundled again in the clothes of Olivier’s dead grandmother.
“They will find me this time for sure,” she said, her voice flat.
“Come now—where is your spirit?” I said, more cheerfully than I felt. “This is only until Langworth has satisfied himself with ransacking the house.”
At the foot of the stairs she came face-to-face with Harry for the first time. He gave a stiff little bow; she offered a shy smile in return. I watched her with interest; she has a way with men, I thought. All that fierce independence of spirit that I love in her—she knows how to suppress it when she senses modesty is required. She can lower her gaze and look demure with the best of them, but that expression hides a steeliness of purpose you might never guess at, unless you caught the flash of her amber eyes from under those lashes.
“I owe you a great debt, Doctor Robinson,” she was saying, and Harry had taken her hand in his. “If we all get through this, I shall try to find some way of repaying your kindness, if it takes me the rest of my life.”
“Well, I doubt I’ll be around for much of that,” Harry chuckled. “But do not talk of debts, Mistress Kingsley. There has been great wrong done here, in this holy place, and we must rely on Doctor Bruno to put it right, with God’s help.”
“I would trust Doctor Bruno with my life,” she said, with unexpected feeling. As she spoke, she met my eye with a smile and my anxieties almost melted away.
Tom arrived, good as his word, and when we were certain that there was no one about on the path to see us, he and I bundled Sophia between us close to the boundary wall of the cathedral and along as far as the conduit house. The outbuilding was added onto the back wall; its roof was threadbare in patches and was clearly used by gulls as a roost, judging by the quantity of guano spattered over the remaining tiles and the walls. The door was not especially sturdy but was secured by a rusting iron padlock, which Tom unlocked from a key on his belt. Inside the place smelled of mould. A decayed gardening implement leaned against one wall, and the remains of some sacking lay rotting in a corner.
“Never say that I do not take you to the finest places,” I murmured, as Sophia reluctantly stepped inside
