Sacrilege

Epilogue

HAMPTON COURT PALACE

NEW YEAR’S DAY, 1585

“Viens.”

Michel de Castelnau, ambassador of France to the court of Queen Elizabeth, adjusted his silk doublet, arranged his short cape over his shoulder, and rolled his shoulders back, drawing himself up to his full height. He touched me lightly on the elbow and ushered me forward. I took a deep breath, pausing to tuck the book under my arm so that I could wipe my sweating palms on my doublet. My eyes remained lowered as protocol demanded, so that as the ambassador and I walked the length of the hall all I saw was the synchronised step of our leather boots across the flagstones, but I felt the many eyes trained on us, felt the hairs on my neck prickle at the sense of exposure, as if I were standing naked before the sceptical gaze of the highest nobles in England. All the while I reminded myself to breathe, slow and steady, and to concentrate only on not tripping or dropping the book. One of the court musicians picked out a tune quietly on a lute and from all around came the murmur of conversation and the whisper of rustling silks, but all I heard was the pounding of the blood in my own ears.

The queen kept the twelve days of Christmas at her palace of Hampton Court some miles to the west of London, on the banks of the river. Here the Great Hall was wreathed in garlands of holly, ivy, pine, and yew, and smelled of cloves, logs, and good beeswax; outside, in the damp air, the scent of spiced wine drifted into the courtyard from the kitchens and the light from the blaze of candles warmed the early dark. All across London there had been an edge of manic relief to the festive celebrations; plague had not, after all, come to London in the summer, the queen was still alive and well and England’s shores mercifully free from foreign invasion. None of the year’s dire forecasts had come to pass, and the city was determined to fete its own survival.

The queen’s own Christmas festivities were organized by the Earl of Leicester, Sidney’s uncle, and for her noblemen and ambassadors, attendance at Hampton Court during the season was not a matter of choice but of duty. The tradition of New Year gifts was more than a formality; for her courtiers, it presented an opportunity to make or mar their fortunes for the coming year, depending on whether or not their gift impressed her. Sidney was pleased with himself; over the past months, at various ambassadorial receptions and diplomatic meetings, he had managed to insinuate to Castelnau that the queen was curious to read my new book, until the ambassador had become convinced that presenting it to her was his own idea. Still eager to regain her favour, he had paid from his own pocket for the handsome black Morocco binding, with gilt edges and Elizabeth’s own coat of arms embossed on the cover in gold leaf, and had rubbed his hands with delight at the prospect of presenting me—and the book—at the New Year celebrations.

“She imagines herself a great champion of knowledge, the English queen,” he had said, tracing his fingers lovingly over the leather binding before we had set out that morning, “but she fills her court with peacocks in crimson silks. Now she shall see the calibre of philosophers France maintains.” I doubted he had actually read the book, but he was certainly pleased with its cover.

I felt his fingertips rest lightly on my back, guiding me as we neared the dais where the queen sat on a vast carved throne with her most favoured courtiers to either side and her maids seated at her feet on velvet cushions. From somewhere to my left, a stifled growl rumbled through the crowds, causing the few ladies present to squeal and the boy choristers of the Chapel Royal to gasp in excitement. Some foreign dignitary had seen fit to bring the queen a leopard for her exotic menagerie at the Tower and the poor beast now strained at its leash in a corner, its jaws bound tight with leather straps. The queen had declared herself delighted, but her eyes held a certain weariness; perhaps after twenty-five years on the throne, one has seen enough leopards. It had seemed dazed during its five minutes of royal favour; I guessed it had been given some kind of sedative which was now wearing off. Above all I pitied Master Byrd, the queen’s master of music, obliged to keep a choir of young boys focused on performing his new Christmas compositions while competing for their attention with a leopard.

Beside me, Castelnau’s steps halted. I followed his lead and we knelt, eyes still fixed to the ground. Ahead I could see the wooden scaffolding that supported the raised platform where she sat, appraising us.

“Rise,” she commanded, at length.

I stood slowly, knowing not to look up until I was addressed directly. I took in the vast skirt of plum-coloured velvet immediately in front of me, so dark it was almost black, with a central panel of intricate gold thread sewn with cherry-red garnets, tiny seed pearls, and lozenges of onyx that glittered blackly in the candlelight. I raised my head enough that my eyes were level with the white hands folded in her lap, heavy with gold rings and holding a fan of ostrich plumes, the handle decorated with the same stones in the same arrangement as those on her gown.

“Well, Monseigneur de Castelnau,” the queen said, raising her voice so the whole court could hear the amusement in her tone, “your counterpart from Bohemia brings me a leopard. Can you better that?”

“I hope so, Your Majesty,” Castelnau said, in the special ingratiating tone he reserved for diplomacy. “A leopard is a wonder of nature, it is true, but I bring you the wonders of the heavens.”

“An extravagant claim. And is this he?” The ostrich feathers waved in my direction. A ripple of laughter spread through the audience. I felt myself blush. Castelnau seemed unruffled.

“This, Your Majesty, is Doctor Giordano Bruno, author of the most original and provocative book to be published in Europe since the Pole Copernicus printed On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres.”

“He sounds more dangerous than a leopard. Come, Doctor Bruno—let me look at you.”

I swallowed hard, raised my head, and looked her in the eye for the first time.

She was fifty-one years old, but her face in its white mask of ceruse with pencilled brows and scarlet painted lips seemed ageless, like the face of a statue or a character in a classical play. It was a long face, stern and imperious, perched above its wide lace ruff, entirely fixed in its self-possession. Only the dark eyes betrayed the vivacity she was apparently famed for in her youth. They raked my face now as you might scan a page of text and returned to hold my gaze, steady and unblinking. According to Walsingham, it was she who had expressed a wish to see me in person after hearing about the events in Canterbury, and he, through Sidney, who had contrived this means of presentation without compromising my place in the ambassador’s household.

“I have heard of you. You are King Henri’s tame philosopher, are you not? The one who upsets the Catholic Leaguers and the learned doctors of the Sorbonne every time you open your mouth.”

“This is true, Your Majesty. In Paris, King Henri had to keep me muzzled like your leopard, lest I offend.”

She laughed.

“Perhaps I should try that with some of my courtiers. And is your book as radical as Copernicus?”

“More so, Your Majesty,” I said, stepping forward in my eagerness. “Copernicus did not follow his argument to its logical conclusion. If the Earth and the other planets revolve about the Sun, we may also posit that the fixed stars are not fixed. That is to say, there may be no limit to the universe. And who is to say there might not be other suns out there, with other worlds?”

From behind me, I heard disapproving intakes of breath. Queen Elizabeth only nodded, her jewels catching the light, and I thought suddenly of Mistress Blunt and Rebecca, and how much they would give to be standing in my place.

“Would they be identical to ours, do you suppose, these other worlds? What do you think, Robin?” She turned to her right, where the Earl of Leicester sat beside her on a carved chair several inches lower than her own. Another man might have been made awkward by this deliberate reminder of status, but Leicester, still impeccably handsome in his fifties, with his close-cropped grey hair and angular jaw, merely arranged himself across the chair, stretched out his long legs to the edge of the dais and smiled. “Would I still be queen?”

“Your Majesty—it is impossible to imagine a world in which you were not queen,” Castelnau cut in, with a sweeping bow.

“Really?” The queen arched one thin brow. “There are plenty of your countrymen in Paris, Michel, who, together with my cousin Mary, find it all too easy to imagine such a world.” Sycophantic laughter bubbled around us and died away. “Here, let me look. Robin, hold this.” She passed the ostrich fan to Leicester, who folded it in his lap. I caught his eye and he gave me the briefest of nods. I wondered if he was remembering, as I was, the last time he and I had met in a royal palace, when one of the queen’s young maids of honour had been found murdered. The queen held her hands out for the book and I placed it into them, bowing as I did so. She laid her hands flat on the cover without opening it.

“But if the universe is infinite, sir—if we are but one world among many,” she said, in a softer voice, no longer performing for the crowd, “how do we understand our place in God’s design? What is our worth, if we are no longer the masterpiece of Creation?”

I hesitated; my answers to these questions were complex and, perhaps even to this intellectually curious woman, potentially heretical. I weighed my words carefully before responding.

“Does it not rather increase our worth when we consider the enormity of Creation with new eyes? To realise that we are no longer prisoners of a fixed order, but citizens of infinity?” I could have gone further, but there was a warning light in her eyes.

“The cosmos demands order, sir, just as society demands it. If people were no longer certain of their place in the grand design …” She left the thought unfinished, but I understood. If the Earth can be so easily deposed from the centre of the cosmos, if Man can lose the sovereignty over creation that the Holy Scriptures tell us he has by God’s gift, people might lose their respect for the divine order, and a real sovereign could be toppled with the same apparent insouciance.

“Nevertheless, I shall read your book with great interest, Doctor Bruno, and perhaps we shall have the opportunity to discuss it further. I should like that. Of course,” she added, her eyes glinting in the frozen white of her face, “you know Copernicus had the good sense to wait until he was dead before committing his theory to print.”

“He did not have the good fortune to live in Your Majesty’s more enlightened realm,” I countered, permitting myself a smile that was almost flirtatious. I had noticed the same tendency in Castelnau. Despite her age and the absence of beauty, she had a curious ability to inspire among her male courtiers the same desire to impress that beauty commands.

Instead of acknowledging this as the flattery it was meant to be, she tilted her head to one side, considering the truth of it.

“Enlightened. Perhaps. Even so, there are limits.” She ran her fingertips over the embossed design on the cover. “Still, it is a brave man who will cling to his ideas in the face of all opposition. We should never have seen the New World were it not for men like that.”

“Your Majesty, my aim is to chart the unknown universe just as your explorers and cartographers have mapped this terrestrial globe,” I said, perhaps too boldly. Behind me, the whispering gradually fell silent.

“I see you are ambitious, whatever else you are,” she said, with a twitch of her brow. “Very well, then, Doctor Bruno—we shall look forward to your dispatches from these unknown territories. What think you, Lord Burghley?” She turned to her left, the strings of pearls around her neck tinkling gently against her jewelled gown with the movement. “Should you like to have infinity mapped for you?”

Beside her, the lord high treasurer smoothed his white hair and looked at me, his round face creased in consternation. I wondered if he were also remembering the murders last year, when we had first met.

“I confess the very thought of infinity makes me a little dizzy,” he said, running a hand over his velvet skullcap. “I have not the mind to comprehend it.”

“Only a fearless mind would attempt it,” the queen said. She was watching me with an expression that was difficult to read, though I fancied the ghost of a smile was hovering around the painted lips. “But remember—there is a fine line between courage and recklessness. Perhaps only time allows us to distinguish the one from the other.” She held up the book and fixed me with a significant look. “England is grateful to you, Doctor Bruno.”

I held her gaze for a moment, understanding that this was the closest she was likely to come to acknowledging the service I had rendered her. Walsingham’s foot soldiers, his army of informers scurrying back and forth across the country carrying their nuggets of intelligence like ants, were supposed to be invisible to her. But I was no longer anonymous; she had seen me, she held my book in her hands. Perhaps my dream of finding a permanent home, and a patron who would understand the scale of my ideas, had moved a step closer. Without quite intending it, I found myself smiling broadly, and the painted line of her mouth curved slightly in response, a maze of tiny filigree cracks appearing in the white veneer like the glaze of antique porcelain.

I felt Castelnau’s fingers lightly on my sleeve; together we knelt again, then backed away into the crowd as the leopard gave another strangled growl and the next dignitary was called forward.

“SHE ADMIRES YOU,” Walsingham said, some days later at Barn Elms, when Twelfth Night had passed and her courtiers were allowed to return to their own homes and families.

“She said so?” I looked up from the restless dance of the fire. There were pinecones burning among the logs and the room was filled with a warm scent of resin.

“Not in so many words. But she sent this.” He crossed the room and placed into my lap a small wooden chest that chinked as he set it down. Surprised by the weight of it, I lifted the lid cautiously. Inside was a heap of gold sovereigns. I stared at Walsingham.

“Close your mouth, Bruno, you look like a codfish. Thirty pounds. In recognition of services rendered.”

“Not a reward for the book, then?”

He smiled. “Perhaps your reward for that is yet to come. She is reading it, you know. She likes to dabble in controversy. But only in the shallows, mind,” he added, catching my eye. “You have a certain reputation, Bruno. If she would not give John Dee a formal position at court in all the years he served her faithfully, for fear of the rumours of magic that followed him, you should not raise your hopes too high. Not for the present, anyway. Besides,” he said, gathering up a sheaf of papers and crossing to the door, “we need you inside Salisbury Court now more than ever. My sources in France say Mary of Scotland’s agents there are busy recruiting new couriers among the exiled English Catholics, and Mendoza and the Duke of Guise are inseparable. I need to know the contents of every letter that passes through the embassy from now on, understood?”

I nodded. He rested his hand on the latch and a shadow of great weariness passed over his face. “It never ends, Bruno.” He looked drawn and the creases around his eyes seemed deeper. “We must not relax our guard, not even for a moment. For every John Langworth we bring in, a hundred more are waiting out there.” He nodded towards the window, as if he expected hordes of Catholic assassins to breach the garden wall at any moment. He pointed a finger, the dark eyes boring into me. Then he nodded briskly and swept out of the room.

“He has not mentioned Sophia once,” I said to Sidney, when the door had clicked shut behind Walsingham.

“He is exercising diplomatic restraint.” Sidney leaned against the mantelpiece and peered into his wineglass as he swirled its contents.

“Does he even know she was in Canterbury with me?”

“Oh, I should think so. He knows everything. I told him you had decided to go your separate ways. He didn’t press me any further, but I’m sure he has worked it out.”

“That she was behind the murder of her husband?”

“That too. But he won’t bring it up unless you give him reason.”

“He is angry with me,” I said, downcast.

“If anything, I think he is relieved,” Sidney said, draining his glass and examining the dregs. “I think he was afraid you would want to marry and settle down and he would lose you. You have become valuable to him, though he never quite says it.”

I smiled, not meeting his eye. “That is some consolation, I suppose.”

“Will you go after her?”

I made a wry face. “I don’t see how I can go back to Paris unless King Henri recalls me. If Paris is even where she is.” Every day was like this now, a battle of will against desire. A thousand times an hour I vowed not to think about Sophia’s betrayal, and from the moment I woke until I reluctantly submitted to sleep, it was all I thought about. I smacked my fist into the palm of my hand. “But I have to get the book back, Philip. Just that. I have to make her understand she can’t just …” The threat trailed away to nothing.

Sidney sighed. “The book and the girl—they’ve become the same obsession in your mind, Bruno. Something you can’t quite possess, but you won’t rest until you do. You’ve grown thinner,” he added, tracing a circle around the rim of his glass with a forefinger, before looking up, his face serious. “Unless you let them both go you will end by losing your mind. And as Her Majesty pointed out, your mind is unique. It must be preserved for the nation.”

I smiled, shifting position in my chair. “And you? Are you still determined to go to war?”

He shrugged, and pursed his lips. He had grown a beard since the summer and it made him seem more adult, more careworn. “The queen is still havering over whether to intervene in the Netherlands. The Canterbury business made her think twice about the wisdom of depleting her armies here. Meanwhile, I must stay at Barn Elms and see if I can get myself an heir before the year is out. Walsingham will not hear of my going anywhere until that is achieved.” He pushed a hand through his hair. “Sometimes I think I shall have to disregard them all and simply run away.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“How do you know?” He looked at me, eyes flashing dangerously. “You could come with me.” For a moment, something of his old spark seemed to light him up.

“I have been running away for eight years.”

“Sorry, Bruno. I didn’t think.”

For a few moments the only sound was the rhythmic crackle of the flames and the occasional pop and hiss of a log subsiding.

“You know they never found Becket?” Sidney said, at length.

“Langworth couldn’t be persuaded to tell them?”

He shook his head.

“Not a word, despite Walsingham’s best efforts.”

I shuddered; we both knew what those efforts would have involved.

“He went to his execution still clutching his secrets. He was a ruthless man, but at least he had the courage of his convictions. You have to admire that.”

I looked up at him. “I don’t have to admire anything about a man like Langworth.”

Sidney shrugged: suit yourself. “Mayor Fitzwalter, on the other hand, pissed himself and blurted out everything he knew before he even got a look at the rack.” The disgust in his voice suggested that, for Sidney, cowardice was more despicable in a man than murdering children.

“Was any of it worth hearing?”

“He confessed to being the fourth guardian, said he had been blackmailed into it, recanted any connection with the Catholic Church, all the usual stuff. But he swore blind he knew nothing about what Langworth had done with Becket’s bones. Walsingham believed him. He had spilled all he knew.”

“So Thomas Becket is still out there somewhere, waiting.”

“We must suppose so. At least the legend will live on. But the English are always waiting for some past hero to come back from the dead and restore a golden age,” he added, with disdain. “Thomas Becket, King Arthur …”

“Christ Himself.”

“Careful, Bruno.” He looked at me from under his brows. “One day your irreverence will land you in real trouble.”

I had been told this before, more than once, but I had never been good at heeding advice. Sidney went on talking—about the war in the Netherlands, the necessity of English intervention—but his words began to wash over me as I continued to stare into the restless flames. I would go after the book. Despite Sidney’s warning, I could not let it end like this. If Sophia had taken the book to Paris with the intention of selling it, I must find a means to hunt it down. Hunt her down. We had unfinished business, and I knew I could have no peace of mind until I had done everything in my power to resolve it. Call it stubbornness, call it pride; I preferred to think of it as tenacity. Whether Queen Elizabeth saw fit to patronise my book or not, I knew that nothing I wrote would ever truly live until I had unravelled the secrets of that book, and I also knew that I was the only one who could do it. I would not rest until I had it in my hands again—and until I had made Sophia understand that she was wrong.