Sacrilege

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.”

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.

“Non, monsieur,” he faltered, shrinking, and made as if to close the door in my face, but I stuck my foot in the gap and leaned in.

“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.”

She smiled. “My best friend in Paris was a Catholic. She sent me this when Denis was born. I kept it for her sake. Now I wear it for him. My beautiful boy.” Her eyes filled with tears and she swiped them away with the back of her hand, as if she were tired of their interruption.

I looked at the medal glinting between her fingers.

“Did your brother give you that?”

She nodded.

“Before he left?”

Another nod.

“Where have they gone?”

“I don’t know.” Her eyes slid to the window.

“Hélène, please.” I knelt in front of her. “I need to know. They have taken something of mine … Sophia has taken something.”

She looked down at me, her liquid eyes full of sympathy.

“Your heart,” she said solemnly. “Ours too. My father can hardly bear it. My son dead, his own son gone.” She bit her lip and looked back to the window.

“At least Olivier gave you justice, of sorts. He could not have stayed, after what he did.”

Her face froze, shocked. “Do you—”

“Do I know? Yes. But no one else does. They will think Doctor Sykes was killed on John Langworth’s orders.” I paused, nodding to the window. “That little jetty at the back of your property must have been useful.”

She pressed her lips together. “Why would you keep our secret, monsieur? What do you gain?”

“Because …” I ran a hand through my hair. “Because I find that in my heart—what is left of it—I cannot condemn your brother for wanting justice.”

“Then I will tell you something else, monsieur,” she said, leaning down close enough that I could feel her breath on my face. “My brother put him in the boat, but he did not hold the knife.” She looked me straight in the eye when she said this, her face inches from mine, fire flashing in her look. No man should underestimate the ferocity of a mother, I thought. I imagined that fiery glare was the last thing Sykes saw as the light faded for him. Well, I could not pity him.

“And the stone? Whose idea was that, to reference the Scripture?”

She frowned.

“What Scripture?”

“The millstone.”

She looked blank. “It was not a millstone. It was just—a stone. To weight him down.”

I gave a wan smile. Sophia was right; sometimes things are no more than they appear. I stood, bowing my head in farewell.

“Goodbye, Hélène.”

“God will pardon me,” she said, defiantly. “It is the least He owes us.”

As I reached the door, she called me back.

“Monsieur? Olivier always used to say he would not be afraid to live in Paris. He was only a boy when the massacre happened, he thinks it would be different there now.”

I watched her as she twisted the medal between her fingers.

“Thank you.”

At the front door, Jacques Fleury leaned in and kissed me once on each cheek in the French manner.

“Do not think me discourteous, monsieur,” he said. He spoke as if every word required a supreme effort, as if it had to be dragged up from the depths of his being like a stone. “You gave us back our boy. For that I thank you. But please, monsieur, I ask you one favour.”

“What?”

“Do not come back to Canterbury.”

I smiled. “Have no fear on that score, Pastor Fleury. I will not look back.”

“Dieu vous garde, monsieur.”

“Et vous.”

From a room somewhere above, I heard the sound of a woman crying.