Final Sacrament (Clarenceux Trilogy) (33 page)

Clarenceux sat at a table in a dark corner at the back of the Mermaid Tavern on Cheapside. Thomas sat opposite him, his hands folded across each other on the tablecloth. Two tankards of beer were placed before them by the landlord’s daughter who smiled at them. “Thank you,” Clarenceux said.

Thomas watched her leave. His old face was as lined as ever but his eyes were red. “I cannot believe it. After all these years of service: an end.”

“Thomas…” Clarenceux began, but then he sighed and stopped. “What am I to do? The Bible tells us we should forgive our enemies and turn the other cheek. But when I think of forgiveness I think of Awdrey’s loveliness, and I see Rebecca, and I smell the stench of the woman’s head boiled, and I see the gun pointed at Annie. I cannot turn the other cheek. My family means too much to me.”

“Then have him arrested.”

“We have been through that. We do not have much time left. The code—a summer month for good news, and a winter one for bad…”

“And then what? With Greystoke there, and the door locked and the building burning? I do not believe you are simply going to throw yourself into the flames. I know you, Mr. Clarenceux. I know you well—better than anyone except Awdrey. You are hiding something.”

Clarenceux closed his eyes.

“Look, Mr. Clarenceux, when you said before that if you survived, I could not continue to serve you, I accepted it. But I believed you would fight and not just surrender yourself. You said there was a chance. Just tell me you are not going to kill yourself.”

Clarenceux lifted the tankard and supped the beer. Thomas was staring at him, and the man’s iron frown bored into his mind.

“Tell me.”

“No.”

“Tell me—for the sake of the years I have served you, and for the sacrifice of my great-nephew, who died in your service, and for all the problems we have faced.”

“On Monday it will be the end for this Clarenceux King of Arms. No more running, no more pain, no more memories, no more heraldry, no more house in Fleet Street, no more making love with Awdrey, no more eating and drinking beer with you.”

“You told me that before. But your obligation to the truth makes you a very poor liar. This is not the whole truth.”

Clarenceux sighed. “No.”

“I will never tell a soul.”

Clarenceux was silent for a long time. He drank again and looked around. No one was near. Eventually he said, “Let me tell you a story. One hundred and fifty years ago, in the time of the Lollards, there were a number of these men gathered at a house in London. Several of them were knights and very well connected. On the night in question they heard their host, a rich merchant, speak of the pope as the antichrist—and they heard passages read to them from a heretical book. A servant boy was listening secretly, and it so happened that he knew how to read. The boy also knew that these men were breaking the law. When his master dismissed him for some minor infringement of a house rule, which the boy considered most unfair, he went to the mayor and reported the things he had heard that night. He also produced his master’s book, which proved to be scandalous. Three bishops read it, condemned it, and ordered it to be burned. The boy also named those who had heard the book read aloud. The merchant himself was arrested, tried, and burned at the stake. A search was undertaken for the others. Some were caught, but two knights were tipped off just in time and they escaped. They rode toward Oxford. But at Thame they turned off the road and went to the abbey. There they spoke to the almoner, saying they needed sanctuary. The almoner spoke to the abbot and the abbot, suspecting they were heretics, denied them entrance. Desperate, one of the men threatened to reveal a secret hiding place built inside the abbey, which had been constructed a generation or two earlier, to hide the precious objects of the abbey from the king’s tax gatherers. Only the abbot and the treasurer knew about it; when one died, the survivor was supposed to tell the new abbot or treasurer and no one else. The abbot was thus appalled that their hiding place was known. In order to keep it secret, therefore, the abbot allowed the men to take shelter on condition that, if they got away, they were never to repeat what they knew. They swore solemn oaths. They hid, and the abbey was searched, but they were not found.”

“I am glad to hear it. I am so glad.” A smile spread across Thomas’s face, and he drank a large measure of his beer.

But Clarenceux shook his head. “It is one thing to tell a story, Thomas. It is quite another to kill Greystoke and then ignite a barrel of gunpowder, burn down a building, and survive. And even if it all goes according to plan, I can never come back to London. I have had my fair share of scrapes over the years. I know I have been lucky. But now, at best, everything changes. That is why I am serious when I say that this is where things really do come to an end for me. By Monday night there will be no more Mr. Clarenceux. There will be no more William Harley. I will be just another of God’s nameless creatures scavenging a living at the margins of society. If I survive.”

“You will survive, Mr. Clarenceux. You always do.”

Saturday, February 15

Clarenceux did not speak as he closed the door to his bedchamber for the last time, nor as he walked through the house to his study. He said nothing as he checked the kitchen and the buttery. Only when he came back up to the hall and saw Thomas and Alice did he utter the few words, “Let us go,” before leading them down to the front of the house, locking the door, and taking Brutus’s reins from Fyndern. His silence continued as they rode toward Thame—he in front, Thomas a short distance behind him, Fyndern and Alice at the back. Every so often he would check to make sure they had not fallen behind; then he would nod and continue.

They reached Chipping Wycombe late in the afternoon and settled at an inn. Still Clarenceux did not speak. He sat in his chamber by himself, staring out of the open window. After it was dark he sat in a wooden chair with a tankard of beer that Thomas brought up for him. He said he was not hungry. Thomas ate in the hall, sitting apart from Fyndern and Alice, leaving them to their conversation and flirtation. It was long after dark when he went back to the chamber to check on his master.

Clarenceux was still sitting in the same chair when Thomas walked in, carrying a candle. He set it down on the table.

“I didn’t think it would end like this,” said Clarenceux. “I recall my father in his last years, staying alive desperately. There was an occasion when a priest came to his house, and he asked my father to tell him about his life. My father responded by saying where he was born, and what the status of his father was, and where he had grown up and whom he had married. And then he started to talk about when he fell ill. Within four sentences he was describing his sickness. Where and when he first experienced each symptom, how much the symptoms hurt, which seasons and phases of the moon caused the most pain. What things he had had to give up doing and how he was managing despite his incapacities. Each subsequent sentence was more about his illness than him. He had
become
his illness. His body had become the church in which his illness worshipped.”

“That is not your fate.”

“I feel the same inward-looking desperation.”

“You have set yourself upon a path, but how you resolve it is still up to you. You can still turn off that path—you know that; you are still a free man.”

“The killings, Thomas—the spying, the fear. The hurt. I remember asking Henry Machyn whether, by taking his chronicle into my house, I was risking any danger to my family. He knew I was—but even he could not have imagined how much. And I remember him asking me why I was a Catholic. That is something that has been much on my mind recently; I suspect that it is about loyalty. The more I think about it, the more it strikes me that loyalty has been the driving force of my life and betrayal my greatest fear. My whole life as an antiquary and herald is about the truth, and loyalty to the truth, whether that be the truth of the past or now. The young can betray each other and they can turn against the past, but we must be loyal—to our wives and to our queen, and also to our God and to ourselves.”

“I think the young also have a sense of loyalty. Fyndern would follow Alice to the Gates of Hell, and maybe even a few steps further.”

“Love is not loyalty. Fyndern has the makings of a good man—but not if he slavishly follows his desires and allows himself to be manipulated. Alice is a little vixen; she has barely got a loyal bone in her body.”

There were many things Thomas wanted to say; among them that Clarenceux was a poor judge of young women for the simple reason that he distanced himself from them; and also that a woman like Alice could be just as devoted as a young man. He had noticed the looks the girl had cast toward Clarenceux. But the latter was clearly not in a mood to be argued with, so Thomas let the matter rest, and returned to the hall.

Much later, Fyndern had tried showing off his card skills to two travelers staying at the inn—but he was tipsy and made so many mistakes they were left distinctly unimpressed. They quickly beat a path to their chamber and left him alone with Thomas and Alice in the hall. Thomas urged him to go to bed but the boy wanted to stay up all night, he said, and drink with his friends.

“Go to bed,” commanded Clarenceux suddenly from the doorway, looking across the candlelit hall.

He was standing in his shirt and breeches with bare feet and no doublet, but his sword was at his belt. His hair, longer and more unkempt than it had ever been before, was now half-gray. His untrimmed beard was even more gray than his hair.

“Fyndern, tomorrow you will get little or no rest. You must sleep now.”

Fyndern got up from the table, unsure whether to trust his impulse to laugh at Clarenceux or his instinct to obey. He looked at Alice. “Mr. Clarenceux, you must not light that fire at the abbey,” he said with a slur to his voice. “You will die in the flames—and Alice will too.”

Clarenceux raised his voice. “Fyndern, go to bed
now
!”

The confidence of the beer vanished. Clarenceux stared at him as he bowed to Thomas and Alice and made his way past him, and went up to his chamber.

When he had gone, Clarenceux took a seat.

“Should we not all be going to bed?” asked Alice.

Clarenceux leaned on the table. “Yes,” he replied.

Alice said, “Good night,” and left.

Thomas looked at Clarenceux’s brooding face. “Don’t place any faith in what the boy says,” he told him. “He has no vision this evening. He made many mistakes with the cards.”

Sunday, February 16

Even after a full day traveling, when they arrived at the Saracen’s Head, Thomas could see that Clarenceux remained guarded. He wore a constant frown, his eyes looking at everything. But he did not speak. A few words of greeting to the stable boys when he left Brutus with them, and to Simeon in the hall, and that was all. There was too much pain and tension in the man; he was not speaking to people because he could not.

“Thomas,” he whispered finally as they stood in the hall. “Place my bag in the same room in which you and Alice will sleep. Fyndern and I will not be staying here this night.”

An hour later they assembled for supper in one of the chambers. The table board had been set up and was draped with a linen cloth; embroidered cushions were placed on the benches and a great many candles were set around the room. There was a flagon of wine on the table and several pewter platters of baked and smoked fish—herring, eel, and even salmon. A salad of herbs and greenery was set out next to the fish dishes: cod with mustard, pike in galantine sauce, and baked turbot.

Clarenceux stood to welcome Thomas and Fyndern. Alice was already by his side. “It is Sunday. Let us feast,” he declared with a smile. He gestured enthusiastically for them to take their places. Alice rose to her feet; Clarenceux said grace, and they all sat. Thomas was startled at Clarenceux’s good humor—how lighthearted and easy he seemed all of a sudden. He spoke to Alice of what food she liked and to Fyndern of how the lad imagined himself as head of a household meeting his future wife’s expectations of a rich spread on a Sunday. He talked of his childhood and the meals then, and of the regime at school. He spoke of the long, cold dormitory in which more than a hundred boys slept, each with his chest beside his bed. He spoke too of his university years, and how the scholars of his day would sneak out to enjoy the pleasures of the town, in food, drink, women, and song. In those days it seemed that everything worth pursuing in life was to be found outside the high walls of the college. Had the lecture halls been full of roast meat and wine, music and pretty young women, he would have been far more enthusiastic about his studies. Simeon joined them for part of the meal, leaving the serving of wine and the clearing of platters to his servants.

In this manner, the meal continued for two hours. At the conclusion, fruit fritters were passed around and Simeon produced some fine Cypriot wine. This caused them to debate whether Ancient Greek wine would have tasted as good, and whether things Roman—roads and architecture particularly—were necessarily any better than they were in the modern world.

“After all, we know more than the ancients,” reflected Simeon.

“What do we know now that they did not?” asked Fyndern, ever curious.

“Forty-five years ago, a Spanish ship sailed all the way around the world.”

Fyndern was confused at first; later, when it had been explained to him that the world is a globe, he was astounded. He had never considered that it had a shape, still less that one could sail off to the east and arrive from the west. “You sail that way,” he said, holding out his right hand, “and come back from that way,” holding out his left.

“If only the human spirit were shaped like the world,” said Clarenceux, savoring the sweetness of the Cypriot wine.

***

Late that night, Clarenceux donned his cloak and gloves, and joined Fyndern in the inn yard. Simeon was there to open the gate for them and lock it behind them. They set out on foot with no lantern. The stars and first quarter of the new moon offered little light, but Clarenceux reassured Fyndern that this was to their advantage; it meant less light by which they could be seen.

They walked for most of the way along the road toward the abbey—until they heard the voices of men coming toward them. Clarenceux grabbed Fyndern’s cloak and pulled him back into the darkness beneath the wall of a barn. As the men approached and were only a few feet away from them, they heard Walsingham’s name mentioned.

“We have got to get off the road,” whispered Clarenceux, once they were alone again.

They moved around the barn to a hedge running away from the road. The weak moonlight allowed Clarenceux to lead Fyndern, slowly and carefully, across the middle of the field, along the balks between recently ploughed strips of land. They felt a breeze on their faces. At the end of the furlong they followed the balk between the next series of strips, which were parallel to the road.

It was only a mile to the abbey by road but it took Clarenceux and Fyndern most of an hour. Even at the gatehouse there were men posted. The dark shadows of trees loomed just to the north; it was a small wood, planted long ago for the now-vanished monks to have timber on hand for rebuilding their roofs and outbuildings. At the foot of an old elm they waited, listening in the darkness.

“I explored this way last time,” whispered Fyndern, steadying himself against the elm. “I followed the stream from the fishponds up to the gatehouse there—it runs along the edge of these woods.”

Fyndern now led the way, tracing the stream by listening to its trickling sound and looking for the moon’s reflection in its surface. The cold night raised the smell of damp earth; sticks cracked under their weight and the bushes brushed their cloaks, clawing at them. Clarenceux heard the leaves rustling above him; he crossed himself and prayed that the sounds they were making would not carry.

“Shhh.” Fyndern had stopped. “Listen.” He paused, and slowly stepped to the edge of the stream.

Clarenceux could hear an owl hooting and the stream flowing. An animal rustled in the undergrowth on the bank. In the distance, pinpoints of light indicated that men were moving in and out of the abbey. There were about a dozen of them. There was a barn a hundred yards away, and men were waiting there too.

“Walsingham did not follow my instructions,” whispered Clarenceux. “He was meant to come after dawn. I told him. How far is it to the drain?”

Fyndern bit off the broken part of a fingernail and spat it out. “It is in the southeast—it empties into the long fishpond.”

“Have you got the tinderbox?”

“Yes—yours and a spare from the inn.” Fyndern began to tread carefully through the wood again.

Fifteen minutes later, they came to the southeastern edge, where the trees met the great monastic fishponds which formed the eastern border of the abbey precinct. The ground here was lower, and the dark roofs of the abbey buildings, three hundred yards away, could be clearly seen against the starry sky. A duck, disturbed by their movement, quacked and flapped its wings, splashing the water, as it took flight. Fyndern and Clarenceux both crouched down and looked across the undulating ground, but there was no one to be seen. They proceeded cautiously along the bank of the pond. When they came to a tree they sheltered in its shadow and listened. Soon they were within forty yards of the east end of the church. But Fyndern went on further, until they were ninety yards southeast of the abbey.

“It’s near here,” whispered Fyndern. He took off his boots and thrust them inside his doublet, then let his feet slip down the bank into the shallows of the pond. He moved carefully, one hand on the bank. He stumbled and stepped into a deeper part and swore, but continued searching for the opening. A minute later they both heard the trickling of water and Fyndern placed his hands on the square stone mouth of the drain.

“This is it.”

Clarenceux looked up at the abbey, silhouetted against the stars. “Do you feel brave?”

“No.”

“Good—you’d be mad to feel brave at a time like this.”

There was a pause. Neither of them said anything.

Fyndern crouched down and looked into the blackness. The drain was about two feet high and although there was only a trickle of water running through it, it was oppressive. Also, it smelled foul. “I hope you are going to tell someone to reward me for this if everything goes according to plan.”

“I will tell Thomas.”

“How much?”

“That will be up to Awdrey. I will tell Thomas I promised you ten pounds.”

Fyndern stood up. “I told you I was worth more than two pence a day.” He looked at Clarenceux’s crouched outline against the stars above him and swallowed. “We will not meet again, will we?”

“No, we will not meet again, Fyndern. But I am glad I met you.”

“And me too, I am grateful,” said Fyndern in the darkness. “No one has ever trusted me as much as you, and made me feel worth something—more than just a trickster.”

“Prove it now, Fyndern. Do this well and you will help stop a war and thereby save countless lives. Use all your skills and senses. Remember, go under the shaft from the refectory, find your way into the kitchen drain. The door to the undercroft is behind it. You have the key. Don’t put the boots back on until you are out of the water; we don’t want to leave tracks. And remember, everything now depends on you lighting that flame at the right time. When I send the signal. And when you are sure that the fire is going, get out quickly. Swim the pond if need be.”

Fyndern reached forward and grabbed Clarenceux’s hand. He shook it vigorously and long. Then he let go, crouched down again, and plunged headlong into the stone tunnel.

Clarenceux waited until he could hear no more sounds from the drain. When it was quiet, he turned and made his way back along the bank, moving quickly. Looking at the monastery, he could make out the curve of the moon reflected in the glass. A single light seemed to be burning in the upper chamber of the abbot’s house. But the window of the refectory itself was black.

***

Thomas, Simeon, and Alice were all waiting for him in the hall, gathered around a large fire. Simeon shut the gate behind Clarenceux, locked it, and showed him into the warm.

“I thought you would have gone to bed,” said Clarenceux, as he unbuckled his sword and laid it and the belt on the top of a barrel.

Simeon poured him a tankard of beer.

“How can you expect us to sleep?” asked Alice. “We want to know what is going on. We’re worried.”

“Well, Fyndern is in,” replied Clarenceux, taking the tankard. “But Walsingham is trying to control the scene. There are too many soldiers there already. And I suspect more are on their way.” He pulled out a pistol from his doublet and set it beside the sword.

“I don’t believe that Greystoke will walk into the abbey,” said Thomas, “even if his life is at stake. He cannot trust Walsingham.”

Clarenceux supped his beer. “We have gone a long way beyond trust. Nothing is left except the politics of desperation. Walsingham still has to use him. I can refuse to surrender the document to Walsingham but I cannot refuse it to Greystoke because of Awdrey and Mildred. Even if Walsingham intends to arrest Greystoke the moment he has possession of the document, he has to allow him entrance to the abbey.”

“But what is Greystoke’s plan for getting the document out?” asked Alice.

“I don’t know. But he will have worked out something. That is why it is so important that Fyndern lights the fire. Greystoke’s plan will go up in smoke with the rest of him.”

“What about Father Buckman?” asked Thomas.

“He is just the middle man. Much as I would like him to be there, he is going to leave this to Greystoke. He has nothing to gain from being there in person tomorrow.”

“And you?” Alice asked.

Clarenceux did not answer. He supped his beer.

“Everything is ready here, for your wife, as you requested,” said Simeon.

“Good,” replied Clarenceux. “Now, Alice, I want you to go to bed. Tomorrow is going to be a long and tiring day.”

Alice took her leave of them. Simeon stayed for a short while and then he too retired. Clarenceux and Thomas sat by the fire.

“If Fyndern manages to light the fire, you must tell Awdrey to reward him,” Clarenceux said. “I have put in my letter to her, which is with Sir William, to pay him; but I said to him tonight that I would give him an extra ten pounds. I have also made provision for you in that letter.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Thomas said. “I trust Mistress Harley not to let me starve. But what about you? How will we know about you?”

“Thomas, you won’t. You will have to accept things as they are. A conflagration. A funeral without a body. A new Clarenceux—someone else.”

“I will have difficulty accepting that last change.”

“You have to. For Awdrey’s sake, for the girls’. For my sake too. Whatever happens tomorrow, my one abiding hope is that it is not in vain.”