C. Sansom - Lamentation

We rode back to the main road. It was hard merely to keep my balance. My face throbbed from where I had been elbowed. Stice’s confederates walked one on either side of us; Stice, leading the horse which had carried Barak, rode in front, still dabbing at his face with his handkerchief. We came out onto Smithfield and passed the front door of the hospital. I wondered if Guy was working within.

We were stopped at Newgate by a constable. Lifting his lamp and seeing our bound hands and Stice’s bloody face, he asked Stice sharply what was happening. But Stice took out a seal, thrusting it into the man’s face. ‘Official business,’ he snapped. ‘Two traitors to go to Whitehall for questioning. As you’ll see from my face, they made a fight of it.’

The London constables knew the different seals of all the great men, it was part of their training. The man not only withdrew, but bowed to Stice as he did so.

We rode on through the quiet streets, past Charing Cross and down to Whitehall. I wondered why we were being taken there rather than to Hampton Court. Surely, apart from the guards, there would be only a few servants left to maintain the place? Yet such considerations hardly mattered in comparison to what had happened to Barak. I was sitting tied up on the horse, my back was excruciatingly painful and my face throbbed. A wave of exhaustion washed over me, and my head slumped forward onto Nicholas’s back. He took the weight, saying over his shoulder, ‘Stay awake, sir, or you will fall.’

‘Just let me rest against you a little.’ Then I said, ‘I am sorry, sorry.’ He did not reply. Whatever happened now, I must try to save Nicholas at least.

As expected, Whitehall Palace was dark and deserted, only a few dim lights visible within. But the guard at the gatehouse had obviously been told to expect Stice, for as we rode up he stepped forward. Stice bent to speak to him; there were some murmured words and then I heard the guard say, ‘He’s waiting in the Privy Council Chamber. Rode here from the Hampton Court celebrations half an hour ago.’

Two more guards came out of the gatehouse. Stice dismounted and quickly scribbled a note, and the first guard ran into the building with it. No doubt it was to inform Stice’s master that he had come back not with Brocket, but with me.

The two guards accompanied us across the courtyard, the horses’ hooves clattering loudly on the cobbles. We came up to the wide doors of the King’s Guard Chamber. Stice dismounted and cut the ropes binding us. Nicholas helped me to dismount, and I stood a little shakily at the bottom of the steps. Stice, bloodied handkerchief still held to his face, turned to Daniels and Cardmaker. ‘Thank you, goodmen, for your work these last two months. Your money is in the gatehouse. Leave London for a while, find some alehouses and brothels in another town to spend your wages. But keep in contact, in case you are needed again.’

The two murderers bowed, then turned away without another glance at us. I watched them go, the men who had killed Greening and Elias and those others. Hired murderers, strolling cheerfully to collect their reward. I looked at Stice, who glared back at me. ‘I will leave you as well now, Master Shardlake. I need to get your handiwork on my face seen to. I doubt you will leave here alive, which is a comfort. If you do, watch out for me.’ Then he followed his henchmen back to the palace gatehouse. Nicholas and I were left with the two guards. One inclined his halberd towards the doorway of the Guard Chamber. ‘In,’ he said brusquely.

I looked at Nicholas, who swallowed hard. Then we mounted the steps, one guard ahead of us, one behind.

The magnificent staircase leading up to the King’s Guard Chamber was quiet and barely lit, only two men posted at the top; the torches in their niches showing empty spaces on the wall where paintings had been removed to Hampton Court. One of the guards at the top said we were to be taken to the Privy Council Chamber, where I had stood and sweated the week before. ‘He’s not ready yet, you can wait in the Privy Chamber. It’s empty as the King’s not in residence here.’

We were led through a series of dim rooms until we reached a large chamber. The walls were almost bare here too, everything no doubt removed to the Privy Chamber at Hampton Court. We were ordered to stand and wait, a guard staying with us. I looked at the opposite wall, and saw that it was covered from floor to ceiling by a magnificent wall painting, irremovable, for it was painted directly onto the plaster just like the Cotterstoke family portrait. I had heard of Holbein’s great mural, and now, in the dim flickering candlelight, I looked at it. The other large wall painting I had seen at Whitehall had shown the present King and his family; this one, however, was a magnificent display of dynastic power. The centrepiece was a square stone monument, covered in Latin words which I could not make out from where I stood. The old King, Henry VII, stood on a pedestal with one lean arm resting on the monument, his sharp foxy face staring out. Opposite him was a plump woman with arms folded, no doubt the King’s mother. Below her, on a lower step, stood Queen Jane Seymour. I thought again how Prince Edward resembled his mother. But it was the present King, standing below his father, who dominated the mural: the King as he had been perhaps half a dozen years ago: broad-shouldered, burly but not fat, his hand on his hip and his bull-like legs planted firmly apart, with an exaggerated codpiece jutting from the skirts of his doublet.

This image of the King had been reproduced many times and hung in countless official buildings and private halls, but the original had a life and power no copyist could imitate. It was the hard, staring, angry little blue eyes which dominated the painting, whose background was in sombre colours. Perhaps that was the whole point of the mural, to make those who were waiting to see the King feel as if he were already watching and judging them.

Nicholas stared open-mouthed at the mural and then whispered, ‘It is like looking at living people.’

Another guard came in then and spoke to the first. We were taken roughly by the arm, and led out, through a second and then a third magnificent chamber, before we reached a corridor I recognized; the Privy Council Chamber. We came up to the door. The guard standing before it said, ‘Not the boy. He says to put him somewhere till he knows whether he needs to question him.’

‘Come on, you.’ The first guard pulled Nicholas’s arm, leading him away. ‘Courage, Master Shardlake,’ Nicholas called back to me. Then the remaining guard knocked at the door, and a sharp voice I recognized called, ‘Enter.’

I was pulled inside. The guard left, shutting the door behind me. There was only one man in the long chamber, sitting on a chair at the centre of the table, a sconce of candles beside him. He looked at me with hard eyes set in a slab face above a forked beard. Master Secretary Paget.

‘Master Shardlake.’ He sighed wearily. ‘How much work and effort you have made for me.’ He shook his head. ‘When there is so much else to do.’

I looked at him. ‘So you were behind it all,’ I said quietly. My voice sounded thick and muffled, my face swelling now where I had been struck.

His expression did not change. ‘All what?’

Recklessly, far beyond deference now, I answered, ‘The murder of those Anabaptists. The theft of the — the manuscript. Spying on me for the last year, I know not why. Nor care.’ I gulped a breath, my voice breaking as a picture came into my head once more of Barak dumped on that rubbish heap.

Paget stared back at me. He had the gift of sitting still, focused, like a cat watching its prey. ‘ Murder ?’ His tone was admonitory, accusing. ‘Those men were heretics, and traitors too, who would gladly have killed me, or the King, or you for that matter, to advance their perverted notions. They had easier deaths than they deserved, they should have been burned. They were stupid, though. When my spies among the radicals warned me of a nest of Anabaptists in London, my man Curdy infiltrated it with ease. Now there was a loyal servant, and he was murdered.’ Paget drew his heavy eyebrows together in a frown.