Blood Ties (30 page)

Gianni pressed his face hard against the grille till the webbing marked his skin, became wet with his tears, listening to the silence from the other side.

‘Father?’

It was the word that did it. Suddenly, he knew. He ripped down the curtain in his haste.

The next cubicle was empty though the seat he ran his hand over was still warm. Behind him, down at the far end of the nave, he heard the small door, set within the cathedral’s huge oaken one, open and close. He ran to it, fumbled with the latch, burst out, knocking aside those who wished to enter. It was early evening and many people were about. Whoever he sought, was lost among them.

‘Father!’ he screamed, differently than he’d said it inside and men and women shied from his anguish.

It was hopeless. Jean Rombaud was gone. Sinking down on the stone step, careless of those around him, more tears came soundlessly.

In the mouth of an alley, peering over the crowd from its shadows, Jean watched his son. He wanted to go, take Gianni in his arms, try to reach across the chasm between them, but he knew it would be in vain. Compassion would turn his son swiftly to rage, back to his ‘mission’. The confession had told him that. When he’d followed Gianni from the Tower, where he’d kept constant watch since he had fled it the day before, he was hoping that maybe he could persuade him to help free Anne. When he’d seen him enter the confessional, it seemed like a chance to talk. But hearing his son call him ‘Father’, however it was meant, had stayed his tongue, had given him a way of seeing into the young man’s heart. And all he saw there was horror.

Gianni would not get him into the Tower. Yet, within its walls, Anne awaited the torment of the rack.

It was a place Jean dreaded above all others. He had no choice but to go there. And watching his son weeping before the huge wooden edifice of St Paul’s, a vision came to him of another parent, another child. That child was probably the only person in the entire kingdom who could help him now.

‘Forgive me, my son!’ he whispered into the night, across the measureless chasm between them. Then he turned down the alley toward the Thames, walking swiftly to a pier where wherrymen jostled for custom.

The cold of the flagstones had long since numbed his body. Though Thomas’s superiors no longer advocated pain to concentrate the mind, he felt this paltry discomfort helped. He had even chosen the most uncomfortable room in this half-repaired tower, the Martin, where no one else stayed, because it reminded him of the harsh monastic cells where he had learned to love Christ.

It had been hard to reach any clarity today. Injunctions of duty were sucked into a whirlpool, there to meld with long black hair, black eyes, with a woman floating clear of the road outside Siena. He had recognized Anne the moment he’d seen her at the burnings. And it was only after these long hours of meditation and prayer that he’d disentangled her from his answer. It lay in the weakness of his spirit, as usual, his former life of sin. When he had been a soldier, women were around, available, fought over; he had even believed he was in love once. All delusion, the Devil’s temptings. Ten years now he had shunned them, ten years as Christ’s Soldier in the Society of Jesus. This one, this Anne, was just a reminder of former days. Finally, he separated out his reaction to her flesh, and her undoubted spirit, from his desire to save her soul. By the time he heard the footsteps coming up the crumbling stair of the tower toward his chamber, he was ready for her.

She does not float so much now
, he thought.

Anne stood with her head turned to the side, her hair a dark veil over her face. Traces of dirt and straw were in it, matching the marks that discoloured her blouse and shift. Her arms were folded across her chest, the fists clenched.

‘Will you sit?’ he said, gesturing to where two chairs faced each other the same side of the small table.

She did not acknowledge that she had heard. Only when he repeated the question, made a small stiff move toward her, did she raise a face to him as dirty as her clothes. There was a bruise on her right cheek bone, livid, swelling.

He gestured toward it. ‘You have been mistreated. I am sorry. Please sit. Please.’

This is how it begins
, she thought.
I have heard of the ways of torturers. The foul cell. The guards, cruel, lustful. Then a gentler man, offering kindnesses. Finally, the man who so raged yesterday, returning with his order to hurt
.

Anne sat. Wine was poured, bread offered. She began to chew on the hard crusts, drank but only a little. She had not eaten in a day and a night.

Thomas watched her. When the second of the hard rolls had been consumed, he spoke.

‘Do you know why you are here, child?’

The food had restored her. ‘To continue my torment. To weaken me for what is to come.’

‘Do you think so ill of me?’

‘I do not think of you at all, sir. I do not know you.’

‘My name is Thomas Lawley. I am a member of the Society of Jesus. Does that mean anything to you?’

There were crumbs on the plate and she picked at them. ‘Yes. My brother studied with your order in Rome. You are the Pope’s janissaries.’

It took him by surprise, the old insult from her mouth. He laughed. ‘We may indeed be warriors for Christ, lady. Yet your remarkable brother is not of our order because, I think, he finds our methods not militant enough. He would burn the heretic to save them from their sin. We seek to persuade, not coerce.’

She looked him directly in the eyes for the first time. ‘So you would save me from sin?’

‘It would be a great joy to me.’

‘But I am not a heretic.’

‘Yet you are about heresy’s cause.’

‘I am about the cause of my family, sir, that is all. And how can I be a heretic if I was never a Catholic?’

‘You were not baptized?’

‘I was not. My father did not like what had been done in the name of religion. And my mother …’ She hesitated for a moment then went on boldly. ‘My mother is Jewish. She says that makes me one. So now you can hate me for that as well.’

‘Hate you?’ It was stunning news. This woman’s brother was the most virulent Jew hater he had ever met. And he had met many. Yet Gianni, through his mother, was himself a Jew.

He moved away from the table, looked at the bare wooden crucifix that hung upon the wall. With his back turned to her, he said, ‘Do you know what our dear leader, Ignatius Loyola, says about the Jews? “What! To be related to Christ our Lord and to Our Lady the glorious Virgin Mary!”’ He turned back to her. ‘No, I do not hate you for this. I honour you.’

Anne searched the man’s face. She knew she was there to be examined. Wasn’t this the way, to treat her well, entice her, feed her? Yet he seemed genuine. All the more reason to be on her guard. She couldn’t help her tongue though, for she had always found the certainty of religious men aggravating.

‘Yet I love the story of Christ, too. Not what the Church has made it. His story in his words!’

‘Child, it is not for you to interpret his words. That is the Holy Church’s task. Anything else is heresy. Do you not realize, a woman burned here yesterday for that sin?’

‘There you are,’ she said. ‘It seems I am a heretic after all.’

It was not going the way Thomas had hoped. It was time to change his approach.

‘I wish I had the time to loose you from your error. Alas, those hours are not there for us. My master here in England is an impatient man. He seeks information from you. His methods of obtaining it are very different from mine.’

Her voice came in a whisper. ‘Is it noble of you to threaten me, sir?’

‘I do not threaten, child. I tell you what will be, what I am powerless to alter. Unless …’

‘Yes?’

‘Unless you tell me now what we need to know. If you do, not only will your life be spared, but we may then get the time I’d need to save your soul as well.’

She could not tell if his honesty was mere deceit. With her eyes still downcast, she murmured, ‘What do you need to know?’

Thomas sighed. It was a beginning. ‘We must know everything about the hand of Anne Boleyn. Everything about its magical properties, its power to curse, to heal. Everything about the headsman, Jean Rombaud; what your father has told you of the hand, of his dealings with this queen of heresy and witchcraft. Open your heart to me – and, believe it, I will know if you withhold one jot of knowledge – be open and plain, and I will put myself between you and your fate.’

She didn’t know what she could tell him. What did she know after all? She would try to give him something. But not about her father.

‘I have never seen the hand but …’

‘Would you like to see it now?’

He realized he also wanted to see it again, now, here, for he had merely glanced at it once, when they first dug it up at the crossroads in France. It was a relic to him, nothing more, and he had his own unvoiced doubts about the collections of saints’ bones that filled the cathedrals of Europe, traded for piles of gold. He had no doubt though about the power of this symbol over the credulous. That was what men paid for. That power.

He went to the corner of the room to a bare oak chest. Opening it, he pulled a small casket from within and brought it back to the table. The key to it lay on a chain around his neck. He fitted it to the lock and opened the lid.

‘Here, child,’ he said, stepping back so he could watch her face. ‘Here is the source of so much effort and pain.’

With trembling fingers she drew back the velvet cloth. Then she cried out in pain.

It was nothing. The bones of a hand long since picked clean by the processes of decay.

It was everything. It wasn’t a skeleton or a symbol and it wasn’t the extra finger nestled in small beside what should have been the smallest. It was the instant blind-flash-touch of it, as flesh connected to bone and both Annes were suddenly there, joined across the years, across what was not possible and what could not be denied. A queen grasped her, black hair and blacker eyes, not frozen, not a portrait on a wall, but living, breathing … dying, a line ripped across the slender throat, a fracture spread across the bone-wrist she held, a cry cut off from two decades before.

To Thomas, her yelp of pain was the beginning and the end. She fell forward across the table, her hair covering her face. Beneath it he heard a sob.

‘What is it, Anne? Do you feel the evil there? Does the Witch-Queen seek your soul? Christ will protect you, child, have faith only in him. Here, I will hide it away from you. Here!’

He stretched over her to the box, managed to shut the lid, though the angle his body made in trying not to touch hers was awkward. It was when he tried to lift the oaken casket from the table that his knee, wound weakened and now cold from its long exposure to the floor, gave way. He heard the pop, cried out as he collapsed onto her.

She had not heard his words, still reeling as she was with her vision. She felt his weight on her suddenly, pressing her face down onto the table. She slipped from under him, rolled across the floor, came up in the defensive stance her parents had taught her, a leg braced back to kick, hands low, ready to strike. But Thomas lay where he had fallen, half on the table, a hand reaching down one leg, agony creasing his face.

‘Do not fear!’ he gasped. ‘It’s my knee. I … aah! I need to get to the bed.’

He tried to raise himself, to lean on the chair for support, but it slipped, drawing forth another cry. She knew his suffering was real. No matter that he was the enemy. He was in pain. She moved across the room to him.

‘Come,’ she said, ‘let me aid you.’

He grasped the outstretched hand. There was surprising strength behind it and he pulled himself up. Leaning on her, they made the short stagger across to his cot.

‘You see the sort of interrogator I make!’ His face was contorted by agony and the effort to smile.

She had placed a hand against his knee and he felt the first warmth there he had in an age.

‘What have you done to it? Come, tell me. I have some history of healing.’

He was about to protest, to reassert who was in charge. But her strong hands were moving around his injury and where they touched, though he could not believe it, there seemed to come some relief.

‘I was a soldier. It was broken at a siege, and never reset properly. I …’

‘Ssh!’ She laid a finger to his lip then resumed her probing. Twice she made him jump in sudden spasm. Gradually, though, he eased back, letting her fingers work. At last she sat back on the cot end and looked at him.

‘I have seen this sort of injury before. The bone of the knee is out, there is little to hold it in place. I can put it back but it will hurt.’

‘One doctor laid me on the rack while the pulleys tried to realign it. I am not afraid of pain.’

‘Good then. Lie still. And think holy things.’

He heard the smile as she said it and he smiled too as he lay back. It was not a smile that could last; sudden torment shot through him, turning all thought to mist, bringing oblivion.

She laid the leg down and looked up at the unconscious man. She would need to wind cloth tight around the knee if it was not to give again. One of the bedsheets was frayed and she swiftly ripped long strips out of it. As she raised the limb to slip the material under, Thomas gave out a groan. She was at his head in a second, a hand stroking gently.

‘Peace!’ she whispered softly, as she had to the boy soldier in the yard of the Comet, as she had to Guiseppe Toldo and a thousand more of the sick and the dying during the siege of Siena. And just like all of them, Thomas Lawley sank back into sleep at her touch, at the soft urgings of her voice.

The knee strapped tight, Anne sat back at the table. He would not sleep for long. And anyway, the door had been locked behind her.

She looked again at the casket that the Jesuit had knocked over in his agony. She set it upright but did not open it. She had seen all that she needed to see of the hand of Anne Boleyn. There was only one small hope for both Annes now. And only one bringer of that hope.

Elizabeth threaded through the thicket of ferns, her soft-soled shoes silent on the tiny, narrow track. The plants were taller than her by a good head, reducing vision to what her weapon could touch. Nonetheless, she moved swiftly, reading the signs as her father had taught her, here a broken stem, there the imprint of hoof in the mulch. The boar had crossed here, crossed back. When she came to some droppings that were still warm, she knew how close she must be.