Sacrilege

Chapter 4

The road out of London towards Kent, known as Watling Street, was still busy with traders and drovers, though the traffic of pilgrims had long since stopped. We set out early, but weeks without rain had baked the unpaved track hard as stone and before we had even reached Southwark my eyes and throat were stinging from the clouds of dust flung up by hooves and cartwheels. Every traveller we passed wore a cloth tied around his or her mouth and nose, and I resolved to buy something similar in whichever town we came to next.

Sophia rode beside me, the peak of her cap pulled low over her face. She had barely spoken since we set out and, though I could see little of her expression, the tense line of her jaw betrayed her anxiety at the journey we were now undertaking. Perhaps, after pinning so much hope on its outcome, she had finally begun to appreciate the grave danger she would face when she rode back through the gates of the city that wanted her arrested for murder. Now and again she would clear her throat and I would turn expectantly, waiting for her to speak, but she would only smile wearily and indicate the dust.

I had hired two strong horses at considerable expense, paid for partly out of the purse Walsingham had sent to cover my stay in Canterbury. Eventually he had relented, according to the messenger who had been waiting for me in the street outside the embassy with an encrypted letter two days after my visit to Barn Elms. In it Walsingham had included a fully stamped travel licence, without which I would risk arrest for vagrancy, and instructions that I was not to travel under my own name, nor was I to reveal it under any circumstances to anyone in Canterbury except Harry Robinson.

My host, the French ambassador, had been reluctant to let me go, but he acknowledged that he had no power to forbid me from travelling, since I did so (he believed) at his sovereign’s expense. He bade me farewell with genuine affection and regret in the midst of his own arrangements for moving the embassy household to the countryside, and I felt a pang of sadness at leaving, though it was outweighed by the delight on Sophia’s face as she flung her arms around my neck when I told her the news.

Now she was riding at my side as the sun climbed higher into a sky of untouched blue and the road stretched out before us, and I could not suppress a swelling sense of anticipation. Sophia’s future depended on the outcome of this journey; if I could clear her of the charges of murder, I could also clear my own conscience of the guilt that had hung heavy on any thought of her since the events in Oxford. Freed of these burdens, might we not begin again, as if on a fresh page?

There was also the prospect, after almost a year spent at a desk buried in books and astronomical charts, of proving my worth again to Walsingham and the queen. The goodwill of princes was fickle, as every courtier knew, and an ambassador could be recalled or expelled at a moment’s notice. I was certain that my own best prospects, if I wanted to go on writing my books without fear of the Inquisition, lay at the court of England, not France, but to ensure myself a future there I needed Walsingham to value me for my own skills and not merely for my useful connection to the French embassy.

Sophia’s horse gave an impatient little whinny and tossed its mane, making her start in the saddle. I turned, but she recovered her poise and purposefully ignored my expression of concern, her eyes fixed on the road. She rode competently enough, though she looked uncomfortable astride the horse, her long legs pressed tightly against its sides. I tried not to dwell on this thought. She was unused to riding like a man, I supposed, and the stiffness of her posture in the saddle could give her away. One more small trap to avoid, if her boy’s disguise were to hold up. I concentrated my gaze again on the tips of my horse’s ears. There would be danger in this for both of us; I was not so caught up in dreams of adventure as to pretend otherwise. If Sophia was recognised within the city walls of Canterbury, she would be arrested to await trial for her husband’s murder, and if my search for the evidence to vindicate her did not succeed before the assizes, she would face certain execution. There were other dangers; if the real killer was still in the city and thought he had escaped blame, he would not thank a stranger for asking awkward questions. Anyone who could strike a man down with such force that his brains spilled over the ground would surely not hesitate to dispatch those who seemed overly curious. And as for the legend of Becket’s corpse, I could not help but remember that my last attempt to infiltrate the underground Catholic resistance had very nearly ended fatally.

The one consolation was that no one knew me in Canterbury; I was free to present myself in any guise I chose. At my belt I wore a purse of money, with another inside my riding boots and another wrapped in linen shirts in the panniers slung over my saddle. Across my back I carried a leather satchel containing my travel licence and a letter sealed in thick crimson wax with Sidney’s coat of arms, recommending me as a visiting scholar to his former tutor, the Reverend Doctor Harry Robinson, and requesting that he make me welcome during my stay in Canterbury. The letter was a cover, naturally, in case I needed to explain myself to any inquisitive authorities along the road. Robinson had never been Sidney’s tutor, though he was apparently acquainted with the family of Sidney’s mother, but the Sidney coat of arms ought to be sufficient protection against the bullying of petty officials. So that I might travel anonymously if I should be searched, Walsingham had sent a fast rider ahead to Harry Robinson two days earlier with an encrypted letter explaining who I was and the true nature of my business in Canterbury, and requesting Doctor Robinson to assist me for Walsingham’s sake as best he could.

What I was to do with Sophia was another matter, I thought, glancing over at her as she rode, head bowed, teeth gritted. I had omitted to mention to either Walsingham or Sidney that I was planning to take her to Canterbury with me—I already knew all the arguments they would make against such folly. My belt held a sheath for the bone-handled knife that had saved my life more than once, and which a more superstitious man might have been tempted to regard as a good-luck charm.

The low, whitewashed taverns and brothels of Southwark, London’s most lawless borough, ended abruptly and beyond them the horizon opened up into a wide vista of drained marshland converted to fields now parched yellow, the Kent road threading through the bleached landscape, lost in the shimmering distance. As soon as we left the narrow streets behind, the fetid smells of the city receded to be replaced by the ripe scents of baking earth and warm grass. Despite the dust, I inhaled deeply, tasting for the first time in weeks air that was not thick with the stench of rot and sewage. Swallows looped patterns in the empty sky. Out here, the birdsong was loud and insistent, with a joyful lilt in its cadences, so different from the shrilling of gulls that I had grown used to, living so near the river. Along the way we passed travellers heading in the same direction, many with mules or carts piled with what looked like domestic possessions, and children precariously balanced on top—families fleeing the threat of plague.

“Where will they go?” Sophia wondered, as we passed one straggling group with a small donkey cart and several barefoot children who stared up at us with watchful expressions. One of the older children held a baby in her lap, and I saw Sophia’s eyes latch on to it. She spoke so quietly she might almost have been talking to herself.

“To relatives, I suppose.”

“What if their relatives will not take them in? Coming from a plague city?”

I shrugged. “Then they will have no choice but to return to London, I imagine.”

“To the plague,” she whispered, barely audible. She appeared stricken; I watched her for a moment as she turned back to take a last look at the child and the baby. She has a new understanding of what it means to be a refugee, I thought, a raw sympathy with the desperate, those who must throw themselves on the mercy of others. I remembered my own early days as a fugitive on the road to Rome and then north through Italy; how quickly I was exposed to the best and worst of human nature at close quarters. I was taught to survive by bitter experience, but I learned more about compassion in those months than I ever did in thirteen years of prayer and study as a Dominican monk.

“No one has yet seen any sign of plague,” I reminded her.

Sophia turned to me with a distant smile, as if seeing me properly for the first time since we had set out.

“So you would not believe there is plague in London until you see a man fall dead of it at your feet, is that it?”

“I would ask for some proof beyond marketplace rumour, if that’s what you mean.”

“And yet you will believe that the Earth goes around the Sun, and that the fixed stars are not fixed, and the universe is infinite, full of other worlds, all with their own suns? Where is your proof for that?”

“There are calculations based on measurements of the stars—” I began, until I noticed the smile of amusement playing at the corners of her lips. Her chin jutted defiantly. “Very well, you are right—I have no firm proof that there are other worlds. The question is, rather, why should we assume there are not? Is it not arrogance to think we are the only creatures in the cosmos who know how to look up at the night sky and consider our place in it?”

“The Holy Scriptures say nothing about any distant worlds.”

“The Holy Scriptures were written by men. If there are people who inhabit other worlds out there”—I gestured with one hand—“it is reasonable to suppose they would have their own writings, no? Perhaps their books have no mention of us.”

She smiled, shading her eyes with one hand as she turned to look at me.

“Have you put all this in your book for the queen?”

“Not all, no.”

“Just as well.”

She laughed briefly before retreating into her pensive silence again, but there had been warmth in that laughter. The brief exchange had offered a glimpse of the old Sophia, as if she had thrown me a scrap of what I had hoped for from this journey, the conversations we had known in Oxford, when I had sensed she wanted to sharpen her intellect against mine. Perhaps I had been a fool to imagine we would have the leisure for that kind of talk, with such a burden weighing on her shoulders. But to a hungry man, even a scrap is enough to quicken his appetite.

BY EVENING WE had reached the small market town of Dartford. As if sensing an end to the journey, the horses slowed their pace along the main street as I scanned the painted signs that hung immobile from the eaves of low timber-framed buildings in search of a suitable inn. The fierce heat of the day had begun to subside, but the air remained heavy and it was a welcome relief to ride into the shade of houses. At the end of the high street we found an inn that must have stood in that spot beside the river for more than a century; I pictured generations of long-dead pilgrims pressing through the wide gates into its yard, footsore and dry-throated, hoping desperately—as was I—that there would be a room.

I pulled my horse gently to a halt outside the gate and turned to Sophia. She had remained unusually quiet through the afternoon’s long hours of riding as the sun hammered down, the road affording little respite except for the few brief stretches where we passed between copses of beech trees. Now she raised her head to reveal a face streaked with dirt and sweat, lips crusted with the dust of the road.

“Don’t clean yourself up too much,” I remarked, quietly. “You look more like a boy with all that filth on you.”

She rubbed the back of one hand across her mouth. “I must smell appalling.”

“No worse than any other traveller in here.”

My body ached from the ride, my thighs, back, and behind sore and stiff from the hours in the saddle, but Sophia had not uttered a word of complaint, though I knew she was unused to riding and I had noticed in the last hour of our journey how she winced whenever she shifted position. My horse gave a little jog on the spot and whinnied with impatience; perhaps he could smell fresh hay from the inn yard. I looked down at my hands on the reins for a moment, then back at Sophia. There was one subject I had not dared to broach with her on the journey, but it could not be avoided any longer.

“I fear we will have to share a room tonight.” I had not meant to state it so baldly, but there was no point in being coy. She appeared not the least surprised by this; her expression, beneath the dust, seemed unperturbed.

“I know.”

“Because you are travelling as my servant, you see, and it would arouse suspicion if we did not,” I continued, speaking too fast. “Besides”—I tapped the purse at my belt—“we must use our money wisely. We don’t know how long we will need to make it last.”

Sophia nodded, as if all this had been understood and agreed; her calm only made me more flustered. It also brought a sharp pang of rejection; I realised that, for her, the prospect of sharing a room carried none of the implications it held for me. I looked away, sizing up the inn, scratching the damp hair at the back of my neck until I was sure my eyes would not betray me.

“We must take great care from now on, especially in the company of strangers,” I said, lowering my voice. “There may be people on the road looking for you, and we do not know if a reward has been offered in Canterbury for your capture. And your disguise is flimsy, to say the least.” I looked her up and down. “The best thing you can do is to speak as little as possible. Your voice is more likely to give you away than anything. You can always pretend to be simple.”

She smiled, and rolled her shoulders back to ease the stiffness.

“And you, Bruno, must remember to call me Kit. And don’t keep looking at me the way a man looks at a woman. If anything is likely to give us away, it is you.” She wagged a finger, pretending to chide, but I did not laugh. So she had noticed how I looked at her. Was she as indifferent to that as she sounded, or was she simply better at being practical than I in this situation, as women so often are? “Try to forget you ever knew me as Sophia,” she whispered, glancing around to make sure no one could overhear. “You must think of me as a boy all the time now.”

“I will do my best. Though you must understand, I don’t find that easy.”

She smiled again, and behind the exhaustion and the dirt I saw a gleam in those amber eyes that might have been an acknowledgement of my meaning.

“You had better call me by another name too,” I added, shifting my weight in the saddle to ease my back. “I travel as Filippo Savolino, scholar of Padua.”

“Why? Do you think your fame has reached as far as Canterbury?” The corners of her mouth twitched in amusement.

“Don’t laugh—my last book was very popular in Paris. It’s not impossible.” I smiled. “It’s just a precaution. There are people who would like to track me down too, don’t forget.” And not just the Inquisition, I added silently, thinking of the various enemies I had made in barely more than a year in England.

“Why that name? Is it someone you knew?”

“In a sense. It was the name I used in Italy after I fled the monastery. Filippo is the name my parents baptised me—I took Giordano when I entered the Dominican order. Savolino was my mother’s family name.”

She nodded slowly, her eyes narrowed as if reappraising me.

“So all this time, I have never even known your real name. What other secrets do you hide, Filippo?”

“Oh, hundreds. But I do not give them up to just anyone.”

I winked, and gently kicked my horse onwards towards the inn yard, pleased to think that I had in some small way intrigued her again.

THAT NIGHT, AFTER an uncomfortable supper in the inn’s crowded taproom, eaten almost in silence to avoid any more attention from the travellers, traders, and itinerants who regarded us suspiciously from beneath their brows, Sophia and I faced each other by the light of a candle across the narrow bed of our small room. For the first time all day she took off her cap and scratched violently at her sweat-plastered hair until it stuck up in tufts. An earthenware jug and bowl stood on a washstand under the one grimy window; she poured out a little water and splashed it over her face and neck. I turned abruptly, aware that I had been watching her too intently.

“You take the bed,” I said, sitting on it to ease off my boots. The money hidden there had rubbed my ankles raw and I hoped we would reach Canterbury undisturbed so that I could find a more secure hiding place at the house of Doctor Harry Robinson.

The inn was spartan, but by no means among the worst places I had endured as a traveller; it smelled strongly of the sweat of men and horses, but so did every place in this heat. I tugged my shirt out from my breeches and flapped it up and down. The room the innkeeper had given us was at the top of the house and the heat of the day was trapped under the eaves; even with the casement open, the air seemed to crush the breath from you. I glanced down at the small truckle bed that pulled out from under the main bed, meant for a servant to sleep alongside his master. I decided I would sleep in my underhose; even if Sophia had not been there, I had learned from experience that it was never wise to go to bed entirely naked in a roadside inn, however hot it might be. You never knew when you might need to leap to your feet at a moment’s notice.

I unbuckled the belt holding my purse and the bone-handled knife and laid them carefully on the floor before turning back to look at her. Her hair was spiked at the front from the water and her efforts at washing had merely succeeded in spreading the dust over her face in different patterns, giving her an endearingly impish look. She met my eyes, then wrapped her arms around herself awkwardly before glancing across the room. Her gaze fell on a cracked piss-pot in the corner and immediately I understood.

“I think I will just go and check on the horses,” I said quickly, pulling my boots back on. Poor Sophia—this was one of the hardest parts about her disguise, and the one most likely to betray her, I thought—that she could not piss like a man. Earlier in the day I had had to wait by the side of the road holding her horse’s bridle while she looked for a spot in some trees, away from the eyes of passersby. More than her voice, we must take care that her refusal to relieve herself on any street corner alongside other boys did not attract undue attention. “Latch the door behind me and don’t open it to anyone,” I added, standing up. I tucked the knife into the waist of my breeches, just in case. We had drawn stares in the taproom, I supposed because between us we looked so exotic. One day’s ride in the sun had tanned my Italian skin the colour of olivewood, making me look yet more foreign, and Sophia, for all her filthy clothes, was so striking as to make any man look twice. Even if no one suspected she was a woman, there were always plenty of men in any roadside tavern whose tastes were broad enough to include a pretty, soft-skinned boy.

Outside in the courtyard the day’s heat had ebbed away, leaving cool shadows and a gentle night breeze. It would be more comfortable to sleep out here, I thought, picturing Sophia lying alongside me among the hay bales stacked against the wall of the stable, under the stars. I wandered across to the open door of the stable building, to give her time to finish her ablutions in private, exchanged a few words with the stable-boy, gave him a groat to make sure our horses were well brushed down and fed for the morning, and strolled back slowly towards the inn, glancing up at the windows, some still lit by the flickering amber glow of candles. Occasionally the shadow of a figure would cross in front of the casement, and I looked up at the row of gabled windows in the attic storey, trying to work out which was ours. In one of those upper rooms, Sophia was undressing, unbinding her breasts, stretching out her long, aching limbs on the coarse sheets. I shook my head and tried to discipline my wayward thoughts. This business in Canterbury would be difficult enough without deliberately tormenting myself over Sophia and fantasies of what I could not—yet—have. The surest way to secure her trust and affection was to perform the role she required of me, which for the moment was that of trusted friend.

Between the bullying husband and his drunken, lusty son, she had seen enough of men whose only interest was what they could take from her. She had come to me because she believed I was different, and I wished her to see that she was right. Though I was a man like any other, I had learned during the years I lived as a monk to master the urges of the body that prove such a powerful distraction to men, especially those trying to concentrate on the life of the mind or of the spirit. As a sixteen-year-old novice I had served for a little time in the infirmary as assistant to the physician, and there I saw some among my brother Dominicans writhing in pain, burning up from within, clawing at festering sores, screaming every time they passed blood-streaked water, or sinking towards death in the incoherent ravings of madmen, all because of an ill-judged tumble with a whore or a serving girl. I had asked the brother physician what had brought these men—some of them not much older than me—to such a pass. “Sin,” he had replied emphatically, through clenched teeth. No further explanation was needed. These early lessons in the price to be paid for the fierce cravings of desire had led me to value my health and my sanity above the insistent clamour of my body; it was partly thanks to those poor tortured souls that I had chosen to devote myself to philosophy and worked hard to acquire the discipline needed to live the life of the mind. But Sophia was something different altogether; from the first moment I had seen her, across her father’s dinner table in Oxford, I had found her impossible to forget. Her return to me had all the irresistible force of an event decreed by the stars—or so I could almost believe.

I laughed drily at myself as I stopped to piss against a wall of the courtyard.

“Be another hot one tomorrow.”

I looked up; the speaker was a stocky man also relieving himself a few yards along from me. He nodded up at the cloudless sky.

“I think you are right,” I said, finishing my business and retying my breeches.

“We’ll have no harvest at all if we don’t get some rain soon,” he remarked, his stream still splashing vigorously against the stones. His words were slurred from drink and he swayed slightly as he continued to let loose the evening’s beer. I could not see his face in the half-light. Across the yard a horse whinnied, making me start. “Then there’ll be riots, you’ll see. Where you from, then?”

“Naples.” I took a step towards the inn, then added, “Italy,” when I saw there was no response. I had no wish to engage in small talk with this fellow, particularly about myself, but neither did I wish to give offence. Sophia and I were vulnerable enough without deliberately putting ourselves on the wrong side of fellow travellers.

“And the boy? What is he, your servant?”

It was a casual question, thrown over his shoulder as he finished, shook off the last drops, and tied himself away, but immediately I felt myself tense and the skin on my neck prickled. Whoever he was, he must have been watching us earlier and was sober enough to have recognised me. More than that, he had taken notice of Sophia.

“My assistant.” I answered him coolly enough, but my fists were clenched at my sides.

“Assistant, is it?” He laughed as he lurched towards me in the direction of the inn’s rear door. To my ear it sounded lascivious, though I knew I may have been oversensitive. “What’s he assist you with, then?”

“My business is books.”

“Oh, aye? Do you get much trade?”

“I make a living.”

Fortunately, it seemed he had little more to contribute on the subject of the book trade. He fell clumsily into step beside me as I made for the tavern door.

“Come and have a game of cards with us, my friend, you and your assistant. Too hot to sleep, night like this.” He clapped me on the shoulder; instinctively I flinched, though he was too drunk to notice.

“I thank you,” I said, moving a step away as we reached the threshold, “but we must make an early start tomorrow. Besides,” I added, trying to keep my tone light, “I’m afraid I am a hopeless card player, no matter what the game.”

“You’d be all the more welcome at our table, then,” he said, with a wheezing laugh that showed a few remaining brown stumps of teeth. I smiled and bade him good night, only realising as I climbed the stairs how I had been holding my breath. The man’s curiosity had seemed harmless enough, but it was further proof that Sophia and I made an odd sight travelling together, and one that attracted the eyes of strangers. We would need to be vigilant at every moment; one careless word or gesture, one instant of forgetting who we were supposed to be or failing to keep an eye over our shoulders, and our mission in Canterbury might be over before we even reached the city walls.

I gave a soft tap at the door. After a moment, I heard the lifting of the latch and slipped through into the warm darkness. The candles had been blown out; Sophia was standing behind the door, wrapped in a sheet from the bed. In the dim light from the open casement I saw that her shoulders were bare. Quickly I turned away. The room smelled faintly of sweat and something sharper, the private scent of a woman. I pulled my shirt over my head and lay down on the straw pallet, leaving my breeches on to hide my gently swelling erection, even though I knew she could see nothing in the soft blur of shadows.

“Tomorrow, as we ride,” I murmured, partly to distract myself, and partly to confirm, for my own benefit, that she was still awake, still conscious of my presence as I was of hers, “we must set to work. I need you to tell me as much as you can remember about your husband, every detail of his work, his habits, his friends, his enemies, his religion. No matter how insignificant it may seem. If we are to clear your name, we must first learn who else could have gained from his death.”

“His religion?” Through the dark, I could picture the quizzical expression that accompanied her tone; the slight wrinkling of the nose, the dip of the brows. “He was a lay canon of the cathedral, as I told you. Though his sense of Christian duty didn’t go beyond securing a position of influence for himself, as you also know.”

“But you and I know very well that a man’s public face does not always reflect the faith of his heart,” I whispered back. She remained silent. “Canterbury, like Oxford, is a place of tangled religious loyalties. The cult of the saint still holds many in thrall, I am told. And if your husband was a man with secrets, it’s not impossible that they involved matters of faith. It is, after all, a city with religion soaked into its stones.”

“My husband thought it all superstitious nonsense, the saint and the shrine,” she said, dismissively. “He regarded himself as a man of reason. Religion for him was a question of civic duty and social advancement. Whatever his secrets, I doubt they were concerned with faith.”

Since her voice implied that this was the last word on the subject, I turned over uncomfortably and closed my eyes. A timber creaked outside the room and I sat bolt upright, hand on my knife, muscles tensed. But whether it was a footfall or merely the old building shifting in its sleep, there was only silence. Sophia laughed softly.

“Sleep, Bruno. It’s like having a watchdog in the room.”

I lay back, staring at the ceiling, one hand still resting lightly on the knife. A watchdog. It was how I felt. The room settled into the muffled stillness of night. Beyond the casement, the lonely cry of an owl floated through the dark. Sophia’s breathing grew deeper and more regular, almost lulling me out of my watchfulness until, long after I thought she was asleep, I heard her whisper, “Bruno?”

“Yes?”

“From now on,” she said, “let us not speak about Oxford. The past is gone. I was someone else then. I want to forget everything that happened there. Those terrible murders,” she added, after a while, barely audible. “And then my husband. Violent death seems to touch everyone who comes near me.”

There was a slight break in her voice, a note of despair that restrained me from telling her not to exaggerate. Sophia had known more than her share of misfortune in her young life, but this century is indifferent in its cruelty, and we are taught to regard suffering as our due. Her father and her aunt would no doubt say that she had been the author of her own troubles, that they were a punishment from God because she would not be submissive as a woman should. Someone with less orthodox views—someone like me, for example—might more generously suggest that Sophia’s only fault was to be born with intelligence, an enquiring mind, and a yearning for independence in a world where those qualities are seen as positively dangerous in anyone, let alone a girl. There was only one woman in England who had the freedom to indulge her intellect and her passion, and even her throne could not protect her from daily threats upon her life. I said none of this.

“But your past has shaped who you are.” I turned onto my side so that I was facing her bed; despite the darkness, I knew she was looking at me. “You carry it with you, even if you would rather not.”

“No.” She spoke firmly. “I want only to begin again, once this is all over. I will be no one’s daughter, no one’s mother, no one’s sister, no one’s wife. Everyone has gone. I wish to live like you, Bruno, with no ties. It must be a wonderful thing, to have such freedom.”

I said nothing. She was twenty years old; how could I make her understand that exile was not freedom, that solitude was not necessarily liberty? I was tired of travelling; the yearning to belong somewhere, to rest in the knowledge of a secure position, seemed to grow stronger with every year that passed. What she saw as my freedom had been forced on me by the Roman Inquisition.

I shifted again onto my back, the straw pricking at my skin through the thin sheet, and watched the frail moonlight slowly spread across the ceiling. Sophia’s breathing slowed again; occasionally she gave a little moan in her sleep, a reminder of her warm presence, while I lay awake, tormented and watchful, my ears straining for any sound of a tread on the stairs.