secret as you have asked me, and I likewise ask you to keep mine. You alone know that I am a Gassonet, and you alone know that the strange blood of Vectis flows through my veins.
Michel Nostradamus, 1555
Chapter 24
1581
Wroxall
Edgar Cantwell looked and felt like a very old man. At age seventy-two everything had turned gray, his hair, his beard, even his shriveling, silvery skin. He was bothered by painful ailments from his abscessed jaw all the way down to his gouty toe, and his disposition was chronically sour. His main pleasures were sleeping and drinking wine, and he spent the lion’s share of his days in both pursuits.
His daughters Grace and Bess were solicitous to him, and their husbands were tolerable fellows, he supposed. His youngest boy Richard was a good, studious lad, already proficient in Greek and Latin at the age of thirteen but he could not look upon his fair head without thinking of the boy’s mother, who died of puerperal fever when he was only two days old.
But it was his oldest son, John, who was the bane of his existence, a source of anger and irritation. The nineteen-year-old had progressed to be no more than a drunk and a braggart who seemed to treat everything Edgar held sacred with an air of contempt.
He dimly recalled that in his day he had been a rebellious lad with a streak of licentiousness, but he had always obeyed his father and acquiesced to his wishes, even toddling off like a dumb lamb to slaughter to attend that horrible Montaigu.
His son did not subscribe to this kind of filial respect and obligation. He was a child of the times, his head turned by the trappings of Elizabethan modernity-dandyish clothes, frivolous music, theater troupes, and a far-too- cavalier approach to the serious business of God and religion. As far as Edgar was concerned, his son had more respect for a jug of wine or a lass’s rump than his father’s desires. If only Richard were the eldest, he would not have so dreaded the state of his legacy.
His legacy, he felt, was especially worthy of protection because he had labored so assiduously his entire life for Crown, for country and for Cantwell, and he was not about to blithely hand over his hard-acquired influence to a drunken fool. Thrust into baronial responsibilities immediately upon the untimely death of his father, he had begun a career as a public man who was forced carefully to navigate the treacherous waters of state politics.
When he returned to England in 1532, King Henry had already, unbeknownst to Edgar and indeed most of his subjects, secretly married Anne Boleyn, and thus begun his great conflict with Rome, seeking an annulment of his first marriage to Catherine. These were busy days for Edgar, who committed himself to taking charge of his estate, building his private chapel, his miniature Notre Dame, as a tribute to his murdered father, assuming a position befitting his legal education on the Council of the Marches, and finding a suitable wife.
The breaking of the chains that bound England to Rome occurred little by little, a succession of political moves and countermoves that culminated in Edgar’s first great crisis when, in 1534, Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy making it high treason to refuse to swear that Henry was the Supreme Head on Earth of the Church of England.
Edgar pledged his affirmation especially quickly because he was aware of rumblings at Court about the papist shrine he was erecting at Wroxall. He was a good Catholic, to be sure, but his years at Paris, his friendship with Jean Calvin, and his secret knowledge of the certainty of predestination made him sufficiently “protestant” to convince himself he was not condemning his soul to damnation and hellfire by siding with the king in his Great Matter.
King Henry prodded Cromwell, and Cromwell prodded Parliament, and link by link the chain between England and Rome was separated until it was done in 1536. The Act Against the Pope’s Authority drove the last nail into the coffin. England was the Reformer’s country now.
Edgar married Katherine Peake, a homely woman from a substantial family, but she died in stillborn childbirth and left him a childless widower. He threw himself into his work and became in succession a judge at the Quarter Sessions Court, then the Great Sessions Court, where he rose to chief judge. To a degree, his fortunes swelled and deflated with the rise and fall of King Henry’s third wife, Jane Seymour, since the Seymour family had blood connections to the Cantwells. But when her son, Edward, ascended to the Crown in 1547 and Jane’s brother, Edward Seymour, became Lord Protector, Edgar was blissfully elevated to the House of Lords and the Privy Council.
King Edward’s Reformation was harsher than his father’s, and all vestiges of the Papacy were purged from the countryside. The business of dismantling Catholic churches was completed in an orgy of shattered stained glass, broken statues, and burned vestments. The clergy were released from celibacy, processions were banned, ashes and palms were prohibited, stone altars were replaced by wooden communion tables. Edgar’s friend Calvin, in far- off Geneva, was exerting a profound influence on the English Isles. Edgar’s tiny Notre Dame chapel survived the tumult only because it was on private land, and he was a powerful and discreet noble.
For a time, the pendulum swung in the other direction when Queen Mary succeeded her brother and reigned for five brief years. Mary zealously sought to restore the Catholic faith. So it was Protestant men who were being seized and burned at the stake. Edgar deftly rediscovered his papist roots, marrying his second wife, Juliana, who hailed from a Stratford-upon-Avon family of closeted Catholics. Juliana, almost fifteen years his junior, began to bear him children, and his two daughters were ushered into the world as Catholics.
Then the pendulum moved once again. In 1558, Mary was dead, her sister, Elizabeth became queen and England once again became a Protestant reign. Edgar shrugged it off and became Protestant again, closing his ears to the entreaties of his wife, who nevertheless, continued to take secret mass in their chapel and educate her daughters with the Latin Bible. Though advanced in years, he finally sired a son whom his wife baptized, John, in a clandestine Catholic ceremony. Five years later, Richard was born, and Juliana’s life was lost amidst Edgar’s salty tears.
Now, in his old age, the exertions of living a life as a political and religious chameleon had taken their toll. He was hobbled by infirmities and rarely left Cantwell Hall. He hadn’t been to Court in two years, and he supposed the queen had forgotten he existed. But most of all, he obsessed about his ne’er-do-well son.
It was a hot summer day, but Edgar was perpetually cold. He insisted on sitting by his small bedroom fire, his shoulders covered by a shawl, his legs wrapped in a blanket. His appetite was naught, and his bowels were persistently liquid, which he attributed to the remedies his dolt of a country apothecary was administering for the gout. If the old healer Nostradamus were still alive, he would have begged him to travel to England to attend to his maladies.
From the garden below his window, he heard a burst of male laughter and cavorting, and when he clenched his infected jaw in anger, the pain almost toppled him from his chair. He drank the rest of the wine from his flagon in quick, large gulps, staining his chin red. Better his brain be dulled than to suffer this mental and physical anguish. He wished he possessed the book from Vectis, which contained the date he would die so he could know how much longer he had to suffer. His son was laughing again, prattling on like a girl.
John was drunkenly enjoying a glorious high-summer day where the grass was thick and green, the sun hot and yellow, and the flowers in the garden a blazing inferno of color. He was playing at archery, the hay-stuffed targets safe from his misguided arrows. Each time he missed, his friend literally fell to the grass in hysterics.
“Bugger yourself, Will,” John cried. “You can do no better!”
John, though young, already had the thick body of a commoner-a drinker and a brawler rather than a gentleman or scholar. Like some of the youths of the day, he was clean-shaven, which as far as his father was concerned, made his face look naked. The Cantwell chin looked better under a beard, and the young man was no beauty. The beaky Cantwell nose didn’t sit well between his watery eyes and fleshy cheeks, and his lips were pursed in a perpetual leer. During his woeful two years at Oxford before he was expelled for rioting, the ladies at his brothel dreaded being chosen by the violent oaf.
His friend was a more genteel sort. He was seventeen, wiry and muscular with an intelligent face and the
