Final Sacrament (Clarenceux Trilogy) (3 page)

“That is my understanding, Your Majesty,” answered Cecil quietly. “Your mother’s sacrifice was the last thing left to her. Through her death, she saw she could save you. And even though Cromwell betrayed her, she did save you. Everything would have turned out as she hoped, had it not been for one problem. Despite her final speech and confession, there was documentary proof of her previous marriage. It passed from Lord Percy at his death to the man who conducted his funeral, Henry Machyn, an ordinary man. Machyn gave the document to Mr. Clarenceux. That is the problem we face now. At the time of his death, Mr. Clarenceux had possession of that proof.”

Elizabeth’s mood shifted instantly from one of regret and sadness for her mother to one of cold alarm. “Then where is it now?”

Cecil looked at Walsingham. “I too would very much like to know.”

Walsingham looked reluctant to speak. But he had no choice. “Mr. Clarenceux went to Thame Abbey two days ago supposedly to hand the document over to a Catholic conspirator. As Sir William is aware, he gave us prior warning. I was greatly alarmed and had a large number of men standing guard. But as I watched, the building burst into flames—with Clarenceux and his Catholic contacts inside. There was nothing we could do. There were explosions. We formed a chain to bring water from the fishponds to fight the blaze, but the refectory and everything inside it was lost in the intense heat. It was when I heard the explosions that I knew that the fire was not accidental. Clarenceux had led his contacts there to destroy them. The girl whom we found confirmed these things.”

Elizabeth was silent. “And the document? The supposed proof?”

“Mr. Clarenceux certainly took it into the abbey. But there were two other people with him, besides the girl: a gentleman by the name of John Greystoke and a woman, whom the girl informed me was called Joan Hellier. Both must have perished in the flames. I presume the document was destroyed with them.”

“Presumption is not enough, Mr. Walsingham.”

Sir William broke the uneasy silence that followed, shifting in his chair and wincing with the pain in his foot. “I can say nothing about the document but I can say something about the late Mr. Clarenceux. He may have been a supporter of the old religion, but he was not a revolutionary. He did not want to use that document to further the Catholic cause. If that had been his plan, he could certainly have done so to good effect. But he refused. He came to me recently; he was distraught. Seeing the danger, I insisted that he surrender the document to me rather than risk it falling into his enemies’ hands. He would not. I told him he had no other option but to bring the business to a final conclusion. It now appears that he has done exactly that. That is why I too presume he took the document into the fire with him.”

Walsingham spoke. “A message was taken to Clarenceux in the abbey by the girl just before the fire. It was a date, the thirtieth of June last year—but what it signifies, I do not know.”

The logs on the hearth crackled. “We need to know,” Elizabeth said, walking around the back of Cecil’s seat. “We want to know everything—what happened, whether this man was loyal or a traitor. We must know if that document has been destroyed. Interrogate anyone who had dealings with him—anyone to whom he might have slipped it before he climbed onto his heretical pyre.”

“Your Majesty, it will be done,” said Walsingham, looking at Cecil. “To that end I shall now take my leave of you, with Your Majesty’s permission.”

“You have it.”

Walsingham bowed and left the chamber.

The sound of the door closing echoed away. Elizabeth walked back to the fire. “We see that he remembers his manners when taking his leave.” She resumed her seat and sat in thought. “Sir William, it is not just the document we need to know about. It is the truth—the whole truth. We feel naked. No matter what clothes we use to adorn this royal body, the truth makes us feel that we are open to the view of all our subjects. ‘The queen is this, the queen is that.’ We cannot escape their suspicions, their name-calling, their disrespect. We can pretend that lies do not touch the woman inside us, but the truth—the truth strips us of all defenses and leaves us exposed. If this document is indeed reflective of what happened all those years ago, and we are illegitimate, then we have no right to rule. The truth in time will overwhelm us, and we will be destroyed, clinging to our crown for the sake of our own personal safety. But we do not believe it. We believe we have a right to rule, and we believe that our rule—though it be sometimes affected by our weaknesses—is that of God, and that people trust us to rule in the eyes of God. You must find out whether our self-belief is justified or not.”

“You are England’s ordained queen; no one can doubt that,” Sir William replied carefully. “Moreover, you are your father’s only surviving child. No one can doubt your right to rule—neither for dynastic reasons nor in the name of God.”

“Every Catholic in England doubts it. Our cousin Mary doubts it. Her late husband Lord Henry Stewart doubted it.”

“Ah, yes. Lord Henry. We will need to send someone to the Tower to tell his mother. My wife knows her. I will ask her to perform that duty.”

Elizabeth approached Cecil. “You are avoiding our question, Sir William. Perhaps we did not express it sufficiently clearly. Tell us, in truth, did our mother marry Lord Percy?”

Sir William felt as if he had been struck in the chest. Words failed him. He tried to force himself to tell the queen what she yearned to hear, but then he looked up at her and could not bring himself to lie.

“I believe so.”

Elizabeth was silent for some seconds. “It exposes our humanity, does it not?”

“I do not know what you mean.”

Elizabeth closed her eyes. “It reveals our fears and anxieties so clearly, and so fully. A political life is one of an intensified conscience, in which all the worries of the painful day and the tumult of the soul are thrown together, and we have to exist between them, from moment to moment. We despair, Sir William. A man can be a king in every way but a woman who is expected to perform the functions of a king…no. She has to bear the twin weights of her womanhood and the crown which she is not physically capable of bearing. She has to be ruthless where a man would be ruthless, strong-minded where a king would be stern—and yet she has to be a woman too. A king can have children and remarry if his wife dies in childbed, but can a queen make that same reckless decision? We think not. That is why we despair.”

“Your Majesty, do not despair. On your shoulders England’s salvation rests. If you despair, then England despairs. In churches they will despair of the righteousness of their faith. At sea, mariners will despair of the safety of their vessels. Merchants will despair of the fairness of their trade. I cannot counsel you as to what passed between your mother and Lord Percy. However, I do know this. Your reign is founded on hope, not despair. You are the hope of the kingdom—and without you and your faith in yourself as well as in God, England will lose its way.”

“Then let us hope that that part of the past which suddenly causes us so much grief and doubt was consumed in the flames with Mr. Clarenceux. For, as we surmise, if it still exists, it is no longer in his hands, but in those of a Catholic rebel. And then our private doubts will become public fears, and we will be called an impostor queen—without just right or divine grace. And then…” She paused and looked at Cecil in the candlelight. “Then our father’s destruction of our mother will have been nothing but selfishness—the cruel machinations of his ministers—and her self-sacrifice will have been in vain.”

“Your Majesty…” Cecil began, instinctively trying to reassure her. But he had nothing more to say. She had just said it all.

Two months earlier
Thursday, December 19, 1566

William Harley, Clarenceux King of Arms, sat at the table in his second-floor chamber, carefully cutting a goose quill. He fumbled as he tried to hold the feather steady, his fingers stiff with cold. Every so often, he looked out the window at the house on the other side of Fleet Street, watching for movement. The uneven quarrels of glass slightly distorted his view, but by shifting his position he could recognize the men coming and going. That house was a three-story, timber-framed building, not unlike his own, but in the middle of a row rather than at the end of one, and southfacing. It had a window in the gable facing the street—very similar to the window he was looking out of, except that it was unglazed. Even though it was sunny today, the shutters were not wholly open. They never were. They seemed never to be wholly closed either. If you compared it with the houses to the left and right, both of which were occupied by couples, there was a marked difference in the pattern of their opening and closing. This was what had alerted Clarenceux four months ago.

Since then he had kept a record of the people who came and went from the house. They were almost all men. A woman brought two pails of water once a week on a yoke over her shoulders and stayed for about two hours each time. No other woman ever entered the building—not even as the companion of one of the men who lived there. Once he had seen his own stable boy, Nick, go into the house. That had greatly alarmed him. On being questioned, Nick had pleaded innocence—saying that he went there simply to borrow a hand saw. Clarenceux had banished him from the house, forcing him to sleep above the stables, and had prohibited him from speaking to the men again. He had no doubt that they were watching him, and that they were working for Francis Walsingham.

Despite there being a small fire in the hearth, he could still see the clouds his breath made in the cold air. He breathed on his fingers to warm them, then pulled out a sheet of paper hidden under a heavy leather-bound volume on the corner of the table. He dipped the newly cut quill into an open inkwell and marked two short downward strokes on the paper, one under a column marked “GrB” for “Greybeard” and the other under a column marked “ShF” representing the shortest of the men who came and went regularly and who had fair hair. He put the date in the right-hand column and waited. A few minutes later, the unpleasant old man who called himself Tom Green, and whom he had once encountered, left the building and started walking back east toward the city gate. Clarenceux turned the previous day’s line for “Tom Green” into a cross. He watched. No one else left. That meant there were three of Walsingham’s men in the house for the moment.

Clarenceux set down his quill. For four months it had been just one man changing stations on an irregular basis; for the last three weeks it had been two, every day. Something had happened. If the windows revealed that these men were watching him, their new pattern of attendance revealed that Walsingham was employing a different strategy, and that meant a different objective or different circumstances.

The door of the house just to the right opened and Mistress Knott stepped out. Her maidservant came with her, holding a wooden pail. While the maidservant started to clean the two steps up to the front door, Mistress Knott walked to the city with a scarf around her head and a basket under her arm. The Knotts were a Dutch couple originally called Annoot; they had come to London as refugees the previous year, fleeing the Spanish persecution of Protestants under the duke of Alva. Her husband was a physician of some fame. At first he had had great difficulty finding work, due to his lack of a license to practice in England, but things were better for them now. Mr. Knott had treated enough prominent people with sufficient success that his business and status were assured. Clarenceux had helped, finding out for himself how efficacious the Dutch physician’s remedies and cures could be and recommending “Mr. Knott” to his friends and acquaintances.

In the city, the bell of St. Martin le Grand began to ring nine o’clock. Then another chimed. A moment later, all the city churches began to ring the hour. Nearby, the great bell of St. Bride’s Church also clanged out. Clarenceux went back to studying the manuscript volume he was reading: the chronicle of Henry of Abingdon, which had been lent to him by Sir Richard Wenman. This was, as far as Sir Richard knew, the sole surviving manuscript. Clarenceux was sure Sir Richard was right; he had never heard of another copy. That it was unique was not surprising: Henry was a tedious writer, more concerned with ecclesiastical doctrine than people’s lives. Nothing gave him greater pleasure, it seemed, than recording at length the proceedings of the church council at Constance, which he had attended from 1415 to 1417. However, the chronicle also contained a wealth of information about the Lollard knights—the ardent gentlemen supporters of the church reformer, John Wyclif. Many Lollards had been imprisoned for heresy and some had been burned at the stake. Clarenceux could not help but reflect on the comparison with his own time, having seen, heard, and smelled the terrifying burnings of Protestant Christians under Queen Mary, just ten years ago.

Clarenceux was not reading Henry of Abingdon for the history of Lollardy, however. It was because he had been forced by his superior, Sir Gilbert Dethick, Garter King of Arms, to undertake a visitation of Oxfordshire after Christmas. This would entail an inspection of the rights of all the gentlemen in that country who claimed to be esquires: to determine whether or not they truly were entitled to bear a coat of arms. To establish that right, they needed to be able to demonstrate that they were descended from a knight. Henry of Abingdon had been a Warden of Merton College in Oxford; hence many of his Lollard knights came from Oxfordshire, presumably inspired by followers of Wyclif, who had been a teacher at the university.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the door to the spies’ house open. A tall, thin man with long hair left. Clarenceux marked the “ThLH” column of his paper accordingly, and returned to his chronicle.

Until the ringing of the next hour he made himself read the neat lines of Latin, his eyes skipping past justifications for the Church claiming certain revenues and fees, and the responsibilities of absent rectors and vicars to their parishioners; he was looking for names of prominent men. He had already found references to two marriages of Lollard knights, by which he could determine the legitimacy of a number of claimants to coats of arms. A salacious story about a knight and his retinue seeking accommodation at a nunnery and taking a fancy to one of the nuns, then abducting her and leaving her pregnant, was equally useful: illegitimacy ruled against inheriting a coat of arms. The various stories of how Lollards evaded their pursuers amused him. They had made use of natural features of the landscape: hiding in the boughs of trees in summer, above their pursuers’ heads, or under the surface of a river, breathing through a hollow pipe or bundle of reeds while a cap floated downstream, distracting the chasing men.

Between every passage his attention flicked across to the spies’ house.

When the hour was up, he placed a smooth horn ruler between the pages of the chronicle and closed it. He stood up and took off the thick robe he usually wore in his study in winter, and hung it on a peg projecting from a beam. Opening the door, he went down the wooden steps to the hall on the first floor, hearing the boards creaking beneath his weight. The staircase was old and needed replacing; the whole front of the building was somewhat warped and decrepit. He did not mind it that way; old things delighted him. The luxury items he had bought for the house after it was damaged by Francis Walsingham’s men three years earlier were mostly those that his wife, Awdrey, had demanded. The exception was the glass in the front windows: this was a rarity in any house, let alone one as old as this. It dated back to his first days as Clarenceux, when signs of ostentation had been important to him. These days he saved his money. He did not know when but he was sure that, sooner or later, there would be reason to call upon it. Too many people knew that he was the man who had once had possession of Lord Percy’s marriage agreement. The fact that it was no longer in his house meant nothing. He was the way to it. One day, he might have to flee with his family—might find his house set alight. That was what Walsingham’s spies were doing now: keeping watch on him and his house lest anyone take action to seize the chronicle. Hence his concern that the number of around-the-clock watchmen had increased.

Standing at the bottom of the stairs to his study, he gently closed the old wooden door. At the back of the house one of his daughters shrieked with laughter and he heard the maidservant, Joan, telling her to give something back. He smelled the oak wood burning slowly on the hearth, at the end of the hall. There were two chests, one on either side of the fireplace, with rich red carpets draped over them. Three new painted cloths that Awdrey had asked him to buy hung on the walls. In the middle of the hall was an oak refectory table that he had bought from a merchant who had taken it from the Dominican Friary at the time of the Dissolution. A small square looking glass and a new painting of Awdrey hung on either side of the door that led to the main staircase, which in turn led down to the front door. The looking glass was not as lavish as the beautiful round mirror he had once owned, and which Walsingham’s men had smashed—but then, he thought, there was less pleasure in looking at himself now. In two years’ time he would be fifty. Would he last those two extra years? He hoped so—he had his beautiful young wife to keep him going—but he knew he was not his former self. His hair was turning gray and he constantly felt tired. And there was something in his tiredness that told him he could no longer outrun his enemies. His right hip ached regularly. That was one of the reasons why he had started going to Giacomo Girolamo’s school of defense at the Belle Savage Inn.

He looked to his right. Here, overlooking the street, was the main window. Beside it stood his elm table, with a single silver candlestick. He ran his fingers along the oval rim of the tabletop. As a boy he had played with carved wooden soldiers on its surface, and had rolled glass beads over the ridges formed by the grain of the wood. He had learned to read sitting at it, and regularly he and his brother Thomas had eaten off it, when their parents had entertained guests at their main table. Along with his father’s old sword, it was one of the few family possessions that had survived the destruction of his house by Walsingham’s men. At ten years of age he had been beaten by his father for carving his name on it and had had to file away the offending letters. The file marks were still there, patinated now. One day their story would be lost. Most tables were rectangular, and a very few were round.
His
table was oval. It was unusual, well-made, solid, and dependable—all the things he approved of. There was nothing frivolous about it. It was more than a little like him.

He heard the running of his daughters’ feet down the staircase at the back of the hall and turned as Annie ran toward him. Her shoulder-length brown hair bounced as she ran, then hung down, framing the handsomeness of her face. She was in her eighth year now, and showing every sign of a sharp, contrary intelligence, like her father. Her younger sister, Mildred, who followed her as fast as her short legs would allow, had just passed her fourth birthday. She was tiny, very pretty, and very outgoing. Both girls were wearing plain woolen cream dresses and soft leather shoes. Mildred had the finest fair hair, like her mother, and was clutching a straw doll wearing a similar dress to her own. Joan followed them, folding her arms as she watched from the doorway at the end of the hall. Clarenceux noticed Awdrey behind her.

Annie rushed out her message in a torrent, looking up at her father with great blue eyes full of excitement. “We were upstairs playing with Mildred’s doll Elizabeth and she said that she loved her doll Elizabeth more than anyone else in the world except for Mam, and Mam heard us talking and said, ‘What about your father? Don’t you love him just as much?’ And Mildred said she did love her dad, and so Mam said we should tell you we love you when you come downstairs because she said you would like to know that we do.”

“I love you,” said Mildred, looking up at her father.

Clarenceux smiled and knelt down to hold both girls. He stroked Mildred’s cheek. “That’s good to hear. And I’m glad you love your mother more than your doll.”

“I love
you
more than my Elizabeth as well,” Mildred said happily. Annie, in high spirits, echoed her little sister. “I love
you
more than…capon.”

“More than green cheese!” exclaimed Mildred.

“Enough,” Clarenceux said. “I feel much loved…”

“More than warm milk,” shouted Annie.

“Enough,” he repeated, getting back to his feet.

“More than God!” said Mildred.

Clarenceux shook his head. “Mildred, no. No. You must not say such things. You cannot love me more than God.”

“But I do.”

Annie looked at him disapprovingly. “But she is telling the truth, and you say we should always tell the truth.”

Clarenceux saw the disappointment in Mildred’s eyes and the crossness in her sister’s. Mildred was uncertain, waiting anxiously for a kind word from him. He knelt down again and put an arm around her, hugging her. He put an arm around Annie too, and spoke to both of them. “You must love God most of all. For we pray that God looks kindly on us, do we not?”

Mildred nodded, her blond locks bobbing as she did so, her eyes moist.

Clarenceux wiped away a tear running down the little girl’s cheek and kissed her. He stood again and patted Annie on her head. Then he looked at Awdrey. “I am going out.”

“Where?”

He said nothing.

“William, it is very early to be going to swordsmanship. Too early.”

Still he said nothing. He walked toward the door through to the main staircase.

“Tell me you are not going to watch Sir John,” she said, coming after him. “Promise me you will not go!”