S.J. Parris - Sacrilege

“This might give you some idea,” Harry said. I looked up to see that he was holding out a letter, folded in quarters, unsealed. “I have not read it,” he said, quickly. “It was left on your mattress.”

“Thank you.” I took the letter and turned it between my fingers. “I—I think I will read it in my room. You should lie down. You look terrible.”

“Sleep won’t cure that,” he said, with an attempt at a grin, and shuffled away to the parlour, his breath rasping in his chest with every step.

The room was as she had left it, the bedsheet crumpled so that I almost fancied I could see the imprint of her body in it. I sat down and opened the letter.

Dear Bruno

By the time you read this your trial will be over. I cannot help but believe it will go your way; you can talk your way out of anything. Besides, you have a knack for survival, as I do. I had hoped you could talk me out of a murder charge and into my inheritance, but I see now that this was too much to ask. My best hope is to begin again, with a new name. I am growing so practised at this that I hardly know who I am any-more; I invent myself from day to day. You understand this, I think. You have understood me better than anyone, so you will understand, I hope, that just as I no longer have faith in God, neither can I trust in any man. Please do not think I am oblivious to everything you have done for me, and why. I do not think I can love again. The part of me that knew how to love was destroyed when my son was taken from me. You will say that I betrayed you; I still say you betrayed me in Oxford. You will find this hard to believe after what I have done, but I will miss you.

Perhaps we will meet again—I would like to think so. I cannot help but feel our destinies are tangled together somehow. Though if we do, I imagine you will want to murder me.

Yours

S.

I let the letter fall to my lap. To kill her? No. Perhaps. I placed one hand on the sheet beside me, as it might still contain some trace of her, and wondered where she would have run to with no money, no possessions … Then I closed my eyes. A cold realisation crept over me; I crumpled the letter in my fist and hurled myself across the bed to the corner where I had prised up the floorboard. The nails lay loosely scattered. I dug my fingers in and pulled the board away, tearing my fingernails in my haste. The wooden casket was gone. So was my purse, though it was a small consolation to see that she had left my little knife. I drew it out, weighed it in my hands for a moment. With a raw moan of rage I took the stairs two at a time; it was not too late to find them. I would go to Sidney, get him to order out the hue and cry; with men on every road out of Canterbury it would take no time to run them to ground like foxes, leave them cowering in a corner, begging for mercy. If she thought she could betray me twice, she would learn that I was not another of her doe-eyed boys, to be used and thrown away as it suited her. She would learn…

I stopped at the front door. If the hue and cry caught them, they would die for certain. In my anger I might wish Sophia to pay for deceiving me, but with her life? To exchange two young lives for a book; could I live with myself? I leaned my forehead against the wall, pushed my hands through my hair, called down all the curses I knew in every language I had ever learned until they all merged into incoherent, racking sobs. I did not lift my face away from the wall even when I heard that familiar shuffle-and-drag and felt a hand rest on my shoulder.

Harry did not speak until I had exhausted myself into silence.

“You will mend, son,” he said, looking past me to the window. “I did. Safer, in the end, to travel alone.”

Morning light in jewel-coloured patches on golden stone; the cool hush of the cathedral before Holy Communion. I stared at a bare patch of floor; the wavering shadows on an empty wall, and tried to picture Thomas Becket standing where I now stood, when he was just a man like any other, but perhaps more stubborn, before England turned him into a conjuring show encrusted with gold. When he looked towards that door on his left to see the knights thundering towards him, swords drawn, he could never have imagined how his death would ripple out through four hundred years of history.

“ Pax vobiscum , Thomas,” I whispered. “Wherever you are.”

Sidney appeared at my shoulder.

“Praying to saints, Bruno? Do I need to call the pursuivants? We could make room for you in the cart beside Langworth if you’re slipping back into popery.”

I forced a smile and craned my neck up to the vaulted arches a hundred feet above, their tracery fanning out like some great stone forest in a legend.

“Do you think he’s still here somewhere?”

“Becket?” Sidney sniffed. “If he is, Langworth will tell us where. If not, the queen will speak directly to the archbishop, tell him to get down here and have some care for his See. They’ll have every last tomb in this place torn up, if that’s what it takes. She won’t want Becket lurking like a snake under a stone ready to jump up and bite her at any moment. Listen, Bruno.” He turned, suddenly serious. “The girl. If Walsingham should ask …”

After supper the night before, when the two of us had sat up late in Sidney’s room at the Cheker, I had told him about Sophia, Olivier, the book, Kingsley, Sykes. I had asked his advice.

“Let them go,” he had said, when he had heard me out. “No one should die for a book, Bruno—though I’ll wager you would, if it came to it. What will she do with it? She can’t read it, can she?”

“She will sell it,” I had replied. “And then there is no knowing whose hands it might fall into. It’s my own fault—I should not have told her it was valuable.”

“You should not have done a lot of things where she’s concerned,” he had said. “But it is done now. What matters is protecting you from Walsingham’s wrath. Her crime was not political, but he is scrupulous on points of law. He won’t like to think you let a murderer go free because your softer feelings mastered you.”

“Say only that she has gone her way,” I said now, looking back to the floor where Becket’s brains had once been scattered.

“I have been thinking,” he said, lowering his voice. “The servant Samuel will be in no state to contradict anything that is put to him. A confession will be eased from him as soon as he is fit to sign his own name. I don’t see why he can’t be made to confess to the murders of Kingsley and Sykes on Langworth’s orders as well as the apothecary. It would leave things tidy.”

“Falsify a confession?”

“He’s going to die anyway, Bruno, either at the end of a rope or from that crack in his skull Harry fetched him. Come on. It’s not as if we’d be condemning an innocent man.”

Seeing me hesitate, he clicked his tongue impatiently. “If you lose Walsingham’s trust, you lose any hope of a place at the English court. I cannot do it for you.”

I nodded. “I understand.”

“Good. That is settled, then. Take my advice now, Bruno, for what it is worth.” He took me by the shoulders and bent his knees to look me straight in the eye. “You have risked your life for her twice, and twice she has deceived you. Wherever she has gone, whoever she is with—forget her.”

I looked away.

“You think it is that simple?”

“No,” he said, suddenly vehement. “No, I don’t. Of course I don’t.” He let his hands fall abruptly and stalked off towards the door. After a few paces he turned back, his face full of an emotion I had not seen in him before. “Penelope Devereux,” he said, in a quieter voice.