Lamentation (The Shardlake Series Book 6) (90 page)

A familiar figure shouldered his way through the lawyers and called a greeting. I had not seen Philip Coleswyn since the summer, but took his hand gladly as he led Nicholas and me to stand beside him in the front row. I asked after his family and he said all were well. He looked relaxed and content, his terrible anxieties over the summer long gone. When he asked after my health I said merely that I was well. Even though I wore my coif, and had the hood of my robe up against the cold like everyone else, Philip glanced at my head. Perhaps someone had told him that after that night in August my hair had turned completely white; first just at the roots, giving me the aspect of a badger, but growing out until only white was left. I had got used to it.

‘T
HEY
’
RE LATE
,’ Nicholas observed, stamping his feet.

‘There is much to organize at Westminster,’ Philip said. ‘There are near two thousand men going to Windsor, on horse and foot. Everyone will have to be in their correct place.’

‘And it is nothing to them if common folk are kept waiting,’ I snapped. Philip looked at me, struck by my bitter tone. I thought, I must be careful, people will be taking me for an Anabaptist soon, and that creed of equality would have no more of a place under the new regime than it had under the old, however radical the religious changes which might come. I looked up at the windows above the wide arches of the Holbein Gate. There was the King’s study, to which he had called me on that dreadful night. He would never watch his people from his window again. All at once, I felt free.

Philip asked, ‘I do not suppose you have heard how Mistress Slanning fares?’

‘I have, in fact.’ Guy had kept me informed. He had been furious with me that night in August, and rightly so, but in the weeks that followed, when I was subject to blacker moods than ever in my life, he helped take care of me, counselled me. His compassion won out over his anger, for which I was eternally grateful. I looked at Philip, wondering how he would take what I had to say: ‘She is gone to France, as people may since the peace. She has returned to the Catholic faith and entered a nunnery, somewhere out in the French countryside.’

‘A nunnery?’ He sounded shocked.

‘I do not know if she has taken any vows yet. There is a long preparation.’ I wondered if Isabel had, at last, made her confession. ‘I think it is best for her, she would find it hard now to face the world. She has given her worldly goods to the nuns. Edward’s share of that house will pass to his family, for she had none left living.’

Philip inclined his head disapprovingly. ‘However comfortable a refuge the papists may provide, she has lost any chance of salvation.’

Nicholas looked at him narrowly. ‘Then you believe that when she dies she will burn, sir, as Mistress Anne Askew did, but in her case for all eternity?’

‘God’s laws are beyond human understanding, boy,’ Philip answered firmly.

I spoke quietly, ‘If such are his laws, then indeed they are.’ I thought of Hugh Curteys, my ward. As the persecution of Protestants had intensified in Antwerp the previous autumn, Hugh had moved to Hamburg, and worked now with the German Hanse merchants. This great struggle between Protestants and Catholics all across Europe could now make anyone a refugee, a prisoner, or worse.

S
TILL THE PROCESSION
did not come, though officials had begun scurrying to and fro around the Holbein Gate, under which the procession would pass, one of them shivering in a clerical cassock. I remembered how the vicar had been late at the infinitely smaller ceremony a month before, when Josephine married Edward Brown. The wedding had been celebrated in the little parish church Edward attended; his family and friends from the Inn had come, together with Edward’s master. Josephine had no family and I had given her away; I had been proud to do so, though I would miss her greatly. They had moved to Norwich last week. I had hired an old fellow called Blaby, a grumbling creature, to look after my house until I found a new steward; apart from him, the household now consisted only of Timothy and myself. Gently, very gently, I was nudging the boy towards an apprenticeship with the Lincoln’s Inn farrier when he turned fourteen, which I would finance to give him a chance in life.

Then I saw them, for the first time in six months, near the front of the crowd a little way off. Barak and Tamasin. Tamasin wore a thick coat with a hood, but looked pale; I knew from Guy that, a fortnight before, on the night the King died, she had given birth to a healthy daughter. She should not be out in this cold so soon, but I imagined she had insisted.

Barak, beside her, still looked sick. There was a heavy puffiness to his features now, and he had put on weight. I saw, with a clutch of sorrow at my heart, how the right sleeve of his coat trailed empty. He glanced up and his eyes met mine. Tamasin looked up too; when she saw me her face stiffened.

‘They’re coming!’ Murmurs and an excited shuffling in the crowd, heads craning to look towards the Holbein Gate. From beyond, the sound of sung prayers in the clear cold air. But then, for another minute, nothing happened. People shuffled and stamped their feet, some beginning to mutter and grumble a little in the bitter cold.

A movement nearby. I turned to see Barak sidling through the crowd towards us. Tamasin stayed behind, glaring at me, fierce as ever.

Barak took Nicholas by the arm with his remaining hand. ‘How are you, Nick boy? I haven’t seen you since that night. Are you all right?’

‘Yes – yes. And you?’ Nicholas sounded surprised, as indeed he might, for when he had gone to visit Barak one night in October, Tamasin had slammed the door in his face. Money which I had sent to her via Guy had been returned without a word.

‘How’s he treating you?’ Barak asked, inclining his head towards me. ‘Keeping you busy?’

‘Yes – yes. We miss you at chambers.’

Barak turned to me. ‘How goes it with you?’ His eyes, like his puffy face, were still full of pain and shock.

‘Well enough. But I have wished for news of you – ’

‘Listen,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ll have to be quick. Tammy doesn’t want me talking to you. I just wanted to say, I’m all right. When I’m a bit better I’ve an offer from a group of solicitors to work with them; interviewing clients, finding witnesses, that sort of thing. Work where you don’t need two hands. So don’t worry.’

‘I am desperately sorry, Jack, desperately,’ I said. ‘Tamasin is right to think it was all my fault.’

‘Balls!’ Barak answered with something of his old vigour. ‘It was me decided to get involved with all that, me that told her lies about what I was doing. Am I not still a man with responsibility for my own decisions?’ A spasm of anger crossed his face and I realized that, in his own eyes, he was not fully a man any more. I did not reply.

‘How does the new baby fare?’ Nicholas asked. ‘We heard you have a daughter.’

Barak spoke with a touch of his old humour. ‘Can’t keep anything quiet within a mile of Lincoln’s Inn, can you? Yes, she’s lusty and healthy, lungs on her like her mother. We’re going to call her Matilda.’

‘Congratulations, Jack,’ I said quietly.

He glanced over his shoulder at Tamasin. ‘I’d better get back. Listen, I’ll be in touch when I’m working again. And this – ’ he gestured to his empty sleeve – ‘Guy’s making me some sort of attachment now the stump’s healed. It won’t be anything like a hand but I suppose it’ll be better than nothing. As for Tammy, give her time. I’m working on her. Easier for her to blame you than me, I suppose.’

There was some truth in that. Yet she had every reason to blame me for Barak’s maiming, as I blamed myself. He gave me a nod, then walked back to his wife. Tamasin had seen him speaking to me; the look she gave me now had in it something despairing, defeated, that cut me to the heart. I turned away.

The murmuring had ceased, the crowd fallen silent again. Beyond the Holbein Gate the singing of prayers was growing louder as it approached. People bared their heads. I lowered my own hood, feeling the icy air against my coif. Two officials on horseback rode under the main arch, looking up the roadway to ensure the way was clear. Then beneath the wide arches walked the choir and priests of the Chapel Royal, still singing. There followed perhaps three hundred men in new black coats, carrying torches. The poor men who, by tradition, headed the funeral processions of the great. Well, there were plenty of poor men in England now, more than ever there had been.

The men who came next, on horseback, dozens of them bearing standards and banners, were certainly not poor: the great ones of the realm, flanked by Yeomen of the Guard. I glimpsed faces I recognized – Cranmer, Wriothesley, Paget. I lowered my head in a pretence of mourning.

Eventually they all passed, and the great hearse approached. A lawyer behind me leaned round Nicholas, saying impatiently, ‘Aside, beanpole, let me see!’

The hearse was drawn by eight great horses draped in black, each ridden by a little boy, the children of honour, carrying banners. It was richly gilded, with a cloth-of-gold canopy covering the huge coffin, on top of which lay a wax effigy of King Henry, startlingly lifelike, though looking not as I had seen him last summer but as he was in the Holbein mural: in his prime, hair and beard red, body solidly powerful. The effigy was fully dressed in jewelled velvet, a black nightcap on its head. The face wore an expression of peace and repose such as I doubted Henry had ever worn in life.

Bells began to toll. People lowered their heads, and I even heard a few groans. I looked at the effigy as it passed and thought, what did he really achieve, what did his extraordinary reign really bring? I remembered all that I had seen these last ten years: ancient monasteries destroyed, monks pensioned off and servants put out on the road; persecutions and burnings – I shuddered at the memory of Anne Askew’s head exploding; a great war that had achieved nothing and impoverished the country – and if that impoverishment continued to deepen, there would be trouble: the common people could only stand so much. And always, always under Henry, the shadow of the axe. I thought of those who had perished by it, and in particular of one I had long ago known well, and still remembered: Thomas Cromwell.

Beside me Philip said softly, ‘And so it ends.’

I
T WAS A FORTNIGHT
later that the horseman brought the note to chambers, riding from Chelsea through the heavy snow that had lain for days. Henry was buried now, and little King Edward crowned. There was a tale that while lying overnight on the way to Windsor, Henry’s body had exploded, that stinking matter had dripped out and attracted the attention of a dog, fulfilling an old friar’s prophecy that the dogs should lick Henry’s blood as they had Ahab’s in the Bible. But that sounded too neat, and I doubted it had happened.

I was working in my room when the messenger arrived, while outside Skelly prepared a case for court and Nicholas laboured, inky-fingered, over a deposition. I recognized the seal at once. That of the Queen; the Queen Dowager, as she was now. I opened the letter, bright light from the snow-covered square outside making the copperplate lettering stand out on the white paper. It was brief, from a secretary, asking me to attend her the following afternoon at Chelsea Palace.