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.
“
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.”
Seeing me hesitate, he clicked his tongue impatiently. “If you lose Walsingham’s trust, you lose any hope of a place at the English court. I cannot do it for you.”
I nodded. “I understand.”
“Good. That is settled, then. Take my advice now, Bruno, for what it is worth.” He took me by the shoulders and bent his knees to look me straight in the eye. “You have risked your life for her twice, and twice she has deceived you. Wherever she has gone, whoever she is with—forget her.”
I looked away.
“You think it is that simple?”
“No,” he said, suddenly vehement. “No, I don’t. Of course I don’t.” He let his hands fall abruptly and stalked off towards the door. After a few paces he turned back, his face full of an emotion I had not seen in him before. “Penelope Devereux,” he said, in a quieter voice.
“Who?”
“The one I can’t forget.”
I looked at him for a moment, the agitation in his face. I had read enough of Sidney’s poetry to know that the braggadocio covered finer feelings, but he had never spoken to me directly of any unrequited love.
“And where is she now?”
“Married to someone else. I can’t change that. Do what I did, Bruno. Write her a fucking poem and learn to live with it.”
“Will it help?”
“No.” He grinned, but there was still pain in his eyes. “But it fills up the time. Come, the horses are ready at the gatehouse. Let us shake the dust of this place off our heels. There have been no certified cases of plague in London, you know. Another two weeks and the court will return.”
“There is one thing I need to do before we leave,” I said. “Lend me one of your armed men, will you?”
THE DOOR OF the weavers’ house was opened by Olivier’s father, who flinched when he saw me as surely as if I had struck him. I saw his eyes flit fearfully over my shoulder to where my companion stood at a discreet distance with his pikestaff.
“
“Listen, Pastor Fleury,” I said, in French, “I know enough to put your whole family in front of the justice if I choose. He is still at the Cheker. You know the assize is not officially closed until he leaves town?”
“What do you want?” he asked, looking at my foot as if he would like to spit on it.
“I want to speak to Hélène.” I nodded over my shoulder to the guard. “He will stay out there.”
“For all the neighbours to see.” Fleury closed the door behind and heaved a great sigh. A lifetime of fear was written into the lines on his face; I was sorry to contribute further.
“I wish you no harm,” I said.
He looked at me with infinite pity.
“Monsieur, you are the kind who brings harm without meaning it. You and that girl. I will take you up to my daughter now, but please do not trouble us for long.”
He led me to a small parlour on the first floor, where Hélène sat with her mother, dressed in mourning black. Madame Fleury rose when she saw me, her expression appalled, but she exchanged a glance with her husband and left the room. Hélène did not seem surprised to see me.
“I am glad you came.” Her voice was flat, her eyes calm. “I wanted to thank you. You found him.”
I bowed my head.
“I am so sorry, Hélène. If I could have spared you that—”
“No.” She cut me off with a wave of her hand. “Better to know. Now we can mourn him, and bury him. And I have this.”
She reached inside her collar and showed me the Saint Denis medallion on its chain. “You will think it strange that a Protestant should care about saint’s medals, I suppose?”
“If I am honest, it has not been the question uppermost in my mind.”
