Final Sacrament (Clarenceux Trilogy) (17 page)

“Greystoke was on the scene quickly.”

“He was.” Clarenceux watched Awdrey move the blanket again, to see if the wound had indeed stopped bleeding. After a long minute’s silence he said, “It is clear he expected an attack. He was waiting outside before we left the house and he was there when we came home. Did you notice how quickly he found his way up the back stairs?”

“Now you come to mention it, yes.”

“I thought that curious. As far as I know, he has not been in this house before.”

Monday, January 6

Clarenceux stayed up until very late before stumbling into his bedchamber. Awdrey was sleeping on the floor of Annie’s room, so he was alone in the bed. Barely able to comprehend the day’s events, he lay down and reflected on the killing of the woman. That forced him to focus on what he now deemed most important: who was John Greystoke—and whose side was he on?

He awoke feeling cold, but the daylight around the shutter told him that he had slept long. He was immediately shaken back to the events of the previous day. Hearing a cry from the adjacent chamber, he leaped out of bed. Awdrey was on her knees cradling Annie, crying. For a moment Clarenceux thought their daughter was dead, but then he saw that Annie too was crying, and moving her hand feebly.

“Get her some food, William.”

At the foot of the stairs he saw Nick. “We need bread,” he stammered. “Annie likes capon and milk. We need to feed her, to give her strength.” He fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a gold angel. “Buy lots of white bread and capon.”

Clarenceux then sank down on the back stairs and put his head in his hands. Feeling powerless and anxious, he prayed for Annie. He was still in this state when there came a loud hammering at the front door. Stirring himself, he walked along the corridor as Thomas went down by the front staircase. Clarenceux stood in the dark corridor, listening to the exchange of words.

“Right heartily I greet you. May I speak with the householder?”

“About what business?” answered Thomas.

“About his forthcoming visitation,” replied the messenger, a young clean-shaven clerk.

Clarenceux moved forward to stand behind Thomas. “What is it?”

“Mr. Garter sends his greetings, Mr. Clarenceux, and asks that you deliver a reply to this letter by me.”

Clarenceux accepted the letter, breaking the seal. He opened it and started to read:

To Mr. William Harley, Clarenceux King of Arms, from Sir Gilbert Dethick, Garter King of Arms, greetings. It has not escaped our attention that you are overdue in making your visitation of the county of Oxfordshire, as agreed in our earlier conversations. On account of it being the Christmas season, we have forborne to press this matter, but now that Epiphany is upon us, it is required of you to set a date for the speedy expedition of your duty. You will please us by making known to the bearer of this letter the date you intend to commence, or, if it be a question of unavoidable delay, the date by when you will have begun the visitation…

Clarenceux stopped reading and thrust the letter back toward the bearer. “Domesday,” he said. “I will have set out by Domesday. And if that is not good enough an answer, tell Mr. Garter to take his letter to the privy and wipe his arse with it.”

The messenger looked aghast. “Mr. Clarenceux, I will tell Mr. Garter no such thing.”

“And if he doesn’t like
that
response, tell him he has a choice between his arse and mine,” snapped Clarenceux. “I have no time for this. My daughter is—” He stopped himself and glanced up at the windows of the house across the street. “Just go. I apologize for my profanity. I am tired and I am worried for the safety of my family. It is not something I can explain now.”

He turned wearily from the door, waving away the messenger and climbing the stairs to the hall. Thomas closed the door.

“Thomas.”

“Yes, sir?”

“I want you to go to Mr. Cecil’s house and ask to speak to Sir William. They will not allow you within, but ask when you might come and give him a message from me. I need to know whether Walsingham really did send Greystoke to guard me or whether the man is just presenting a bold front. If he did send him, I would like to know why Walsingham trusts him so much. I do not trust Walsingham himself to tell me these things—but he will not lie to Sir William. And ask Sir William one final thing. If Sir William trusts Walsingham and Walsingham trusts Greystoke, can Sir William guarantee his loyalty?”

Sarah Cowie was laying on one of the three mattresses in the candlelit chamber when Joan Hellier entered. “What went wrong?” she asked, looking up, her dark hair loose across her face.

Joan shrugged. “It doesn’t matter now, does it?”

Sarah sat up.

“Of course it matters. Jane was sent to that house with a specific plan and now she is dead. One of us will be next; what will our mission be? To give our lives for him as well?”

“Not for him. For our daughters.” Joan walked across the room to a flagon standing on a small table and poured the beer into a tankard. She swallowed half of it and handed the tankard to Sarah.

“Who is Father Buckman?” asked Sarah before she drank.

“I am not supposed to tell you.”

“It is well and good that he sends women like Jane to get killed, but you may not mention him?” She passed the tankard back to Joan.

“Maurice Buckman is a priest. No one ever sees his face. You go to the Black Swan in the parish of St. Dionis Backchurch and ask the landlord if he sells a beer called Old Faithful. If the priest is not there, he says he is out of that brew at the moment, but he can ask the brewer to make some more in the near future. If he is in, the landlord takes you to the back of the tavern, pretending to show you the cask, then sends you upstairs. You have to talk to the priest in darkness, or near darkness.”

Sarah’s thoughts returned to Jane. The mattress where the dead woman had slept the previous night was neatly arranged. Beside the bed was a leather bag, a folded smock on top. “She should not have had to die. She was innocent.”

“I suspect that her innocence was why the priest picked her out. Not you, not me—her. In God’s name, if this all comes to an end, and I am alive, I am going to make sure Lady Percy gives her Agnes a good start in life. She deserves that at least.” Joan drained the tankard. “That double beer’s good stuff.”

Sarah got up, took the tankard from her, and refilled it from the flagon. “It’s been harder for Jane and me. We weren’t used to the life. Jane was caught in a household where her lady decided to get rid of her; her mistress accused her of theft and then paid the constable to rig the jury. She did not know how to act. I’m not much better. I admit I stole. Five pewter plates, worth two shillings and six pence; a salt cellar worth a shilling; and a candlestick worth eight pence—that’s what I took. I ran the risk, and I got caught and was sentenced to hang. But it wasn’t something I was doing all the time. Jane and me, we weren’t to know whom to say yes to and whom no. Most of the time we weren’t given much choice.”

“My heart bleeds for you,” Joan said, watching Sarah drink. She walked to the far side of the room, opening the shutter and breathing the cold air of the night. “But we all need to be harder than that. We cannot afford to feel pity or sorrow, or regret.”

“I cannot remove the image from my mind of us killing that woman at Lady Percy’s house. I remember all three of us scrabbling with her, to get her on the ground, and you lifting her skirt to have something to strangle her with. And then the sight of her legs kicking, the hairs on her legs, and her red petticoat, her grubby linen socks in those old shoes, just kicking, kicking as you held the hem around her neck.”

Joan closed the shutter. “It was something we had to do. Now we have got another task, equally unpleasant. When it is over we can run away and pretend it never happened. And won’t that forgetting be blissful. God’s wounds—you haven’t had to cut off a woman’s head.” She took the tankard that Sarah offered and swigged the beer. “When you slice through the throat and see the phlegm that you know is just like the phlegm that you are swallowing, and when the blood oozes slowly out of the tubes, it doesn’t just turn your stomach; it turns your soul. But then you’ve got to drive that knife through the bones of the neck and cut it all, just cut everything, with the woman’s eyes staring into infinity, as if she can see God and you cannot. You cannot do it without desperation. You have to make it seem as if it’s nothing.”

“It sounds like butchery.”

“No. Butchery is much more refined.”

Clarenceux looked at Annie as she lay in her bed. If there was too much bleeding internally, Mr. Knott had said, she would be in a worse state by now. But poisoning could happen at any time. Rapid breath, quick pulse, very high or low temperatures, and fever were the signs that the body was unable to cope with the intrusion of the bullet and that the humors were out of balance. If that happened, she should not be bled by a surgeon. She had already lost too much blood for the normal prophylactic of bloodletting to work.

Small feet came running up the stairs. Mildred was standing just outside the door in her night rail, peeping into the candlelit room.

“You should be in bed, daughter of mine.”

“Is Annie going to be better tomorrow?” asked Mildred.

“Not tomorrow but maybe in a few days. Do you want to come in and say good night to her? She is still awake.”

Mildred came in with her straw doll and gently kissed Annie’s arm. She then returned to her own bedchamber. A few noises came up the stairs from the kitchen and the hall. Clarenceux looked at his daughter’s face on the white sheet, her milky blue eyes, and he felt as if nothing mattered now but his family’s safety, their wholeness.
If
I
could
give
up
the
document
to
Lady
Percy
to
save
Annie, I would do so.

He picked up the New Testament that was lying on the floor and leafed through it to the point at which he had stopped reading earlier in the day. The heavy black Latin text reprimanded him for his weakness; the sternness of the lettering told him that using the Bible in this way was hiding. At a time like this, he should not be reading just for his own benefit. He whispered to Annie, “I will be back shortly.” Five minutes later he was back at her side with a large tome, which he opened near the end and leafed through. “‘This is the book of the generation of
Jesu
Christe
, the son of David, the son of Abraham,’” he began. “‘Jacob begat Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was borne Jesus—even He that is called Christ…’”

Late into the night, Clarenceux read from the gospels, long after Annie had fallen asleep and Awdrey had taken her leave of him to sleep in their bed. She listened to his voice in the next room and was lulled by the reliability and security of his words and his faith.

Tuesday, January 7

Cecil walked through the garden of Cecil House with Walsingham in the early morning mist. All around them were plants frozen in frost, with icy tendrils and leaves like frozen glass.

“Were you aware that the woman that Clarenceux was so close to has been killed?” Cecil asked.

Walsingham felt the cold, and his gloved hands were holding each other for warmth. “Yes, of course. She was called Rebecca Machyn. His mistress, I believe.”

“How do you know about her death?”

“My watchers told me.”

“Ah yes. Your spies,” said Cecil, looking across the low hedges of the garden, laid in squares. “Would one of them happen to be a Mr. Greystoke, a gentleman with white hair, from the north?”

“John Greystoke, from Cumberland.”

“Have you known him long?”

“Ten years. When I was in Padua, he was one of the English émigrés there. He is a fervent, passionate man: an expert swordsman and a fine shot with a gun. He is also a scholar—Dante is his great love.”

“You have no doubts about him, none at all?”

Walsingham paused. “What are you driving at, Sir William?”

Cecil stopped by a wall-climbing rose bush, its leaves frozen white against the brown brick. “Mr. Clarenceux has great difficulty accepting that you might have sent a man to watch over him. For reasons of security he has asked me to check that you have done so; he also asks that I give him my word that the gentleman in question, John Greystoke, can be trusted. I am hopeful that I can give him that reassurance.”

“Damn Clarenceux! Why does he not just hand over that document and be done with it. It would make all our lives easier.”

Sir William looked askance at Walsingham. “Would you, in his shoes?”

“Of course. It is the dutiful thing to do.”

“Don’t pretend he is a fool, Francis. He is an intelligent man, and his family is in jeopardy. Moreover, his mind is concentrated on the situation in a way we cannot match.” Cecil paused. “You know about his daughter?”

“What about her?”

“She was shot. In Clarenceux’s own house, on Sunday. By a woman.”

Walsingham shook his head. “Greystoke has yet to report it to me. He has probably taken further safeguards. I am sure he will today.”

“When he does, see whether he reveals who killed the woman. I would like to know whether he volunteers that information.”

Clarenceux was sleeping when Sir Gilbert Dethick called. He had spent the night attending to Annie, reading to her from the Bible, tending her when she cried out in pain, which she often did, and mopping her brow when she was hot. Awdrey had taken over from him at first light and Clarenceux had crept off to sleep. Now, as the city bells chimed ten and Sir Gilbert Dethick, Garter King of Arms, knocked on his door, he was snoring in his bedchamber.

Thomas did not know Dethick well. He did know who he was, however, and that Clarenceux trusted him even less than he trusted Francis Walsingham, and liked him even less than that man too. Their verbal fights were famous. Clarenceux would inevitably rise to the bait, with wall-shaking eloquence, and would throw down some impossible gauntlet to the superior herald that, while it left a profound impression, also made him seem both a maverick and unreliable in the eyes of those watching. Part of the problem was that Clarenceux refused to like Dethick on principle. Dethick’s grandfather had been a German armorer and Dethick had lied about his birth to gain English denization, even changing his name from Derrick to Dethick to claim a false ancestry. Clarenceux objected to the highest heraldic office in the kingdom being awarded to such a man. It did not help that Dethick’s father had married a Dutchwoman and Dethick himself had also married a foreigner. It was not their foreignness that Clarenceux objected to so much as their willingness to do anything to advance themselves. It was as if there was no principle to which they would remain firm, no single truth to which they were loyal.

Clarenceux was honest enough to admit that he also resented the foreigner being given several important diplomatic missions to Germany and Holland instead of him; that did not make him feel any warmer to the man. It did not help either that Sir Gilbert Dethick was particularly good-looking. Although nineteen years older than Clarenceux, he looked more handsome even now, in his late sixties. With his mustache preened, “devilish” was not an inappropriate term to describe his looks.

“I wish to speak with Mr. Clarenceux,” announced Dethick from his horse, sheathing the sword with which he had struck Clarenceux’s door.

“He is not well, Sir Gilbert,” said Thomas with a bow. “But I shall go and inquire if he is well enough to wait on you.”

Thomas met Awdrey on the stairs and explained that Dethick had arrived. “Like the fly that settles on an open wound,” she whispered, heading down to the door while Thomas went to rouse Clarenceux.

When shaken awake, Clarenceux blinked and tried to go back to sleep. He heard Dethick’s name and ignored it. Only when he thought of his daughter did he awake. “How is Annie?” he asked, getting out of bed.

“She is unchanged, Mr. Clarenceux.”

He put on his breeches and rinsed his face. “You know, Thomas, over the last few years I have been chased along the top of London Wall in the snow, been attacked in the street, fought a duel in a cavern, been dragged through the sea behind a pirate ship, climbed through Sir William’s latrine, and fought a naval battle against impossible odds. And now I would rather do any of those things again than have to speak to Dethick.”

“I am sure he holds you in equally high affection, sir.”

Clarenceux smiled. He drew a clean shirt from his clothes chest and put it over his head. “Well, let us see.”

Clarenceux stepped out from his front door and looked at Dethick astride his horse, wearing his sword openly, which he was permitted to do as a knighted gentleman. Across the street, Greystoke was leaning against the front door of the house in his usual white shirt, with a sword in his belt—worn openly despite the law. Above there was a man watching from the first-floor window.

“Sir Gilbert, greetings. How might I assist you?”

Dethick tugged at the reins as his horse shied away from Clarenceux. “You can help by doing what you have promised to do, what you have been asked to do, and what you are obliged to do on behalf of her majesty. You cannot simply put off the visitation until it is convenient to you. You have a duty to perform.”

There were few people in the street, and no one who looked as if they were eavesdropping except Greystoke. “A woman broke into this house on Sunday,” Clarenceux said. “She had two guns: one loaded, the other unloaded. The unloaded one she fired at me. The loaded one she fired at my daughter, who is now lying in bed, suffering from the wound. If the guns had been reversed, to whom would you be addressing your comments? Because it certainly would not be me. The College would have no Clarenceux.”

“Do not tempt me, Clarenceux. You know you need to do this work. Tell me when—that is all we need to discuss.”

Clarenceux shook his head. “In all sincerity, I will set out when the bullet wound in my daughter’s shoulder has healed—and not before. Is that clear enough?”

Dethick did not answer. He looked down disdainfully on the upstart herald while his horse jittered in a circle and, without a word, rode off down to Fleet Bridge.

“Tell me,” called Greystoke from across the street, “are all the heralds like you? I would hate to be your employer.”

Clarenceux walked across to him. “Garter herald is not my employer,” he said, looking down the street and watching Dethick cross the bridge and ride up the hill through Ludgate. “He is responsible for the administration of the College of Arms but he has no right to dictate to me.” He looked Greystoke in the eye. “I want to talk to you. I want you to come with me.”

A short while later, when he was properly dressed, Clarenceux led Greystoke up Shoe Lane to St. Andrew’s Church, where they turned right to Holborn Bridge. There the road divided around a single rickety house: the left-hand lane went around the city to the north and the right between the merchants’ houses straight to Newgate. They took the right turn, passing long lines of timber-fronted houses. All the way, he questioned Greystoke and Greystoke answered without hesitation. He explained where and how he had met Walsingham—at the house of Signor Giuseppe Buzzaccarini in Padua, in the company of the earl of Devon. They had both been twenty-three. Walsingham had been eager to know more about Italian government. From Padua they had traveled to Venice together in the company of the earl of Bedford. Walsingham was fascinated by the machinations of the Venetian noblemen and their elaborate safeguards against plots. They had been guests at the doge’s palazzo together, and Walsingham had supported Greystoke when he had been forced to fight a duel with the husband of a woman who had fallen for his readiness to whisper lines from Dante in her ear.

All the while they were moving toward the great church now called Christ Church—once the home of the London Greyfriars. At the gate, Greystoke was surprised to find that the church itself was the building to which Clarenceux was leading him. He obligingly removed his sword and left it leaning against the wall behind the door. It was no warmer within than it had been outside: the huge echoing space only grew warmer when the parishioners crowded in on Sundays and feast days. They spoke in low voices. But Clarenceux walked on until he came to a particular arch in the nave.

Greystoke pointed up at the stained-glass window above them, which included a number of coats of arms. “You are testing me, Mr. Clarenceux.”

“I am.”

“The answer to the question is that the Greystoke arms therein were in memory of my great-uncle, another John Greystoke. He was buried in the north aisle. Obviously the tomb has now gone.”

“Does that not make you yearn for the return of the old religion?”

Greystoke shook his head. “If we have learned anything from the events of our own time, it is that England has started to change again. Every five hundred years it experiences a revolution. You can see it in the chronicles of Britain. Two thousand five hundred years ago, Brutus came to these shores. Five hundred years after that, Gorboduc’s sons pulled the kingdom apart in a civil war. Five hundred years on, the Romans invaded. Move on another five hundred years, the Saxons invaded. Five hundred years after that, the Normans invaded. That was exactly five hundred years ago. Now, England is torn over a matter of faith. It is like an invasion from within, tearing ourselves apart—as in the days of Gorboduc. There will be war, if we do not guard against it.”

“Your mother’s family was Dacre, was it not?” replied Clarenceux. “
Argent
three
escalopes
gules
, yes?”

Greystoke pointed to the Dacre coat of arms in the window further along the nave. “There.
Gules
,
three
escalopes
argent. You see, Mr. Clarenceux, I am what I say I am. I am John Greystoke and I have been sent by Francis Walsingham to protect you. Ask him yourself.”

“I already have,” replied Clarenceux stiffly, moving back to the door. “But I don’t trust him any more than I trust you.”