James Forrester - Sacred Treason

Draper hesitated. Then he went.

“My friends, you are free,” said Clarenceux. “And you have your property back. I am glad for you.”

None of the four men said anything until Nicholas Hill stepped forward. “It is fine for you to say it is all over, Mr. Clarenceux, but speaking for us, it is not. We undertook once, many years ago, to guard a document with our lives. If we lose that document and have no control over its whereabouts, we will have failed.”

Clarenceux had not expected this. He took a moment to collect his thoughts. “You are living in a daydream, Mr. Hill. The majority of this country has turned against the old religion. They will not accept a Catholic queen now. Their experience of the last one-with all the burnings and killings in her name-has shown them that whatever the faith of their queen, it is peace that matters most of all.”

“But it is God’s will! It is a matter of legitimacy, the right line,” insisted Nicholas Hill.

“I would strongly counsel you not to make an enemy of Sir William Cecil. Today he saved all our lives, mine included. He could just as easily reverse that.”

But Nicholas Hill was angry. “You talk about Mr. Draper betraying us-but you have betrayed us, Mr. Clarenceux. You gave the chronicle to Francis Walsingham. We could have hidden it; we could have fought…”

Clarenceux slammed his fist down on the table. “Don’t be a fool! Do you think that that book is worth all our lives?”

“But you gave it up,” said the blacksmith Robert Lowe. “Walsingham has it now. What is to stop him simply picking us off one by one?”

“It looks as though you are the fool, Mr. Clarenceux,” said Nicholas Hill.

Clarenceux glared at each of the men before him. He started to undo his doublet, wincing with the pain in his shoulder and ribs. “I doubt that any of you would ever have discovered Henry Machyn’s secret. It was never in your grasp. If all of you had gathered together: Sir Lancelot, Sir Owain, Sir Reynold, Sir Dagonet, Sir Percival, Sir Ector, Sir Reynold, King Clariance, and Sir Yvain; and if you had realized that your names all spelled LORD PERCY; and if you had put all your dates together and realized that they pointed to the death of Lord Percy in June 1537; and if you had all agreed that the key to the secret lay in the wording on Percy’s tomb in Hackney Church, then you would still be none the wiser. You would not have found the document.”

“How do you know?” asked Michael Hill.

“How many of you can quote the book of Job to me in Latin? Chapter seven, to be precise, beginning at the first verse.”

There was silence.

“Any of you? No? Well then. There is a long passage of Latin on the side of Lord Percy’s tomb that ends with the strange phrase Numquid mare sum ego aut cetus quia circumdedisti me carcere. That means roughly ‘Am I a sea or a whale that you surround me in prison.’ Only if you had seen the chronicle would you realize that it had a sea and a whale embossed on it. But even that would not have been enough. Only if you were intimately familiar with the whole of that passage from the seventh chapter of the book of Job would you have realized that there was a mistake in one of the verses. It should have read cutis mea aruit et contracta est -‘my skin is wrinkled and contracted.’ The inscription on Lord Percy’s tomb does not. It reads cutis mea irrupuit et peccatum aperitum est -‘my skin is broken and a crime is revealed.’ Henry told me when he gave me the chronicle that only I would understand the secret-and now I see why.”

“So,” snapped Nicholas Hill, “where is the document? You still gave Walsingham the chronicle. He will now find it…”

Clarenceux pulled a large piece of vellum from his doublet. It was heavily folded and smeared with blood. “This is your document-the original marriage agreement between Lord Percy and Anne Boleyn. Witnessed by a notary public and two bishops.” He tossed it onto the elm table.

There was silence. Each of the men peered forward, none of them daring to say anything or even to touch it.

“Where was it?” asked Michael Hill.

“Until this morning, it formed the vellum binding of Henry’s chronicle. Henry had it bound around a blank book to hide it in the year 1550. That same year, he started writing a day-to-day account of his life inside the book to ensure it and its precious cover would be kept in perpetuity. His chronicle did contain a secret-only it lay in the binding, not the text.”

All four men approached the table. James Emery picked up the document and held it reverently. “This amounts to proof that Queen Elizabeth is illegitimate?”

“Practically. It is proof of a pre-contract of marriage on the part of one of her parents-and that was good enough to remove Edward the Fifth from the throne eighty years ago.”

“In that case, we should publish it immediately.”

“Then you would be a fool. All of you would be publicly executed and so would I. And our deaths would amount to nothing-for Sir William Cecil would immediately deny that the document is genuine. He would simply label it a forgery.”

“But it is proof , you said so yourself. It is true,” said Nicholas Hill.

Clarenceux shook his head. “What is proof? You think it has anything to do with the truth? Believe me, no one has as little respect for the truth as those in power. Men like Sir William Cecil suppress unpalatable truths every day, and they only admit something is proof when it suits their purposes.”

“Then what do you intend to do with it?” Emery asked, still holding the document.

“Exactly what Lord Percy wanted.”

“What was that? How can you know?” asked Michael Hill.

“A fair question. The answer lies in the fact that the story behind this document is a tragedy. Lord Percy met and fell in love with Anne Boleyn. And she loved him. But the king stole her and she proved fickle. She grew to love the king because he wooed her with power. Lord Percy, who had known high status and power all his life, could see that she was being manipulated and knew that the king would tire of her one day, but she turned against him. It drove him mad, and the king started to manipulate him too in his madness. At the end, after he had been forced to sentence his own true love to death, he simply had one wish: that this story not be forgotten. He gave the document to Henry Machyn to look after, not so there would be a revolution against the king but simply so that someone would know that the woman he had loved all his life was his wife, that she had been stolen from him, and that once she did love him.”

No one spoke.

“We will keep it from now on,” said Nicholas Hill coldly, taking the document from James Emery. “We were entrusted to guard it and we will continue to do so.”

Clarenceux did not move. “No. You will leave it with me. I gave Sir William Cecil a promise that I would look after it in return for your lives and property. If it leaves my possession, none of us will be safe or trusted ever again.”

Emery broke away from the group and walked across to the window. It was beginning to grow dark. Clarenceux glanced at Rebecca. She had not moved but sat staring ahead. Nicholas Hill looked closely at the document, but he could not read it in the dying light. He passed it to his father, who glanced at it and set it carefully back on the table in front of Clarenceux.

“I think Mr. Clarenceux’s counsel is wise,” said Michael Hill. “We are not men of action. Nor are we revolutionaries. None of us can use this document.”

Robert Lowe looked at Rebecca. “I wish you and your husband had never met. You and he have made me feel like a gullible, easily led man. I don’t expect to get an apology from you in this gentleman’s house, but next time we meet…” He looked at Clarenceux, bowed briefly, said “Good day to you,” in a polite but cold voice, then turned and walked to the door.