S.J. Parris - Sacrilege

I bowed in reply, but said nothing. Behind Harry’s shoulder, Samuel’s eyes bored into me with silent resentment.

I PAID MY landlady at the Cheker fourpence extra to have a copper of hot water brought to my room—over the odds, but I was too tired and uncomfortable to haggle over the price. Once I had washed the grime of three days’ travelling from my hair and body and changed my clothes, however, I felt my spirits revive. As the cathedral bells rang out across the city for Evensong, I made my way downstairs to the taproom to take supper by myself and reflect on the few snippets of information I had gathered since our arrival.

John Langworth: I had only to picture the canon treasurer, with his angular face and grave, scrutinising gaze, for a chill to creep along my neck. I must be careful, I told myself; it would be all too easy for my enmity with Henry Howard to colour my judgement of Langworth, and I had been in danger of making such a mistake before. Was Langworth the reason Walsingham had insisted I use a false name? A known Catholic sympathiser, biding his time in Canterbury; if the French invasion which Henry Howard had been instrumental in plotting had succeeded last year, would Langworth have seized his opportunity, taken control of the cathedral, produced the corpse of Saint Thomas with a conjuror’s flourish, and rallied the town in a Catholic rebellion to greet the invading forces? It was not impossible to imagine. But the plot had failed, Howard was in prison, and Langworth had been beaten to the position of Dean of Canterbury; perhaps he was no longer a serious threat. Even so, I could not help wondering if Harry was watching him closely enough. The old man had certainly seemed defensive at my arrival; perhaps that was behind his insistence that I should not stir up any trouble around Langworth. But the latter’s friendship with Sir Edward Kingsley had piqued my interest. Was Langworth one of the powerful friends Sophia had mentioned, who had gathered at her late husband’s home to whisper behind closed doors?

The thought of her brought another sharp pang of longing; I would miss her presence in the room that night, despite the torments it provoked. After only three days it had come to feel quite natural; the rise and fall of her breathing in the dark, our instinctive modesty as we averted our eyes or covered ourselves, self-consciously trying to avoid the accidental intimacies that come from sharing a small space at night. I imagined her lying under the rafters of the weavers’ cottage and wondered if she would also miss me, but I had to close my eyes against the unbidden image of her by the light of a candle, turning the warmth of her smile on young Olivier and his pout.

Declining the entreaties of my landlady to stay and drink with her after my meal (it’s not every inn would be so welcoming to foreigners, she assured me, though for herself it was a rare treat to encounter such a well-mannered and handsome gentleman), I gathered a full purse and my bone-handled knife and set out into the dusty street. The heat of the day was abating as the sun slid down towards the horizon like a melted seal of crimson wax; at the corner of the street a group of children played a game that involved jumping over a crudely made grid scratched into the dirt. They fell silent as I passed and stared up at me with wide, unblinking eyes; one of the smaller ones crept behind an older child and peeped out with an expression very like awe.

“Where will I find the Three Tuns?” I called to the older boy.

He took a step back as I stopped, putting out a protective hand towards the little one clinging behind him. Mute, he pointed to his right.

“Watling Street.” His voice came out barely more than a whisper.

“Thank you.” I tossed him a penny; it landed in the dust at his feet, where he looked at it suspiciously for a moment before reaching down, never taking his eyes off me.

Their reaction puzzled me; did I look so unusual to them? I followed the direction of the boy’s pointing finger, and turned back at the end of the street to find them still staring, rooted to the spot. Children like novelty, I told myself, as I continued around the corner. But I couldn’t quite shake the uncomfortable sense that their response had been one of fear. Perhaps, even clean-shaven, I looked like one of the murdering Spanish pirates their mothers warned them about.

From the outside, the Three Tuns gave the impression that it had lost the will to keep up appearances; plaster cracked and peeled from the walls and the thatch of the roof suffered from threadbare patches. But the taproom was crowded, busy with the din of lively chatter, snatches of song, and the occasional shout of protest as one drinker knocked another in the crush; smoke hung thickly under the low beams of the ceiling, mixing with the yeasty scent of beer and warm bread. It was clearly not one of the better inns in the town, to judge by the dress and appearance of its customers, but its roughness held a certain appeal. I guessed it was the sort of place the law would knowingly overlook, where all manner of illicit activities might go on with a blind eye turned. There was an edge to the atmosphere, as if a fight might erupt at any moment.

In the corner farthest from the door, a group of young men were gathered around a long table playing cards. A pile of coins spilled across the board between them, glistening in a puddle of beer. I pushed through the drinkers standing around the serving hatch, fending off the attentions of a couple of bawds on the way, and found a spot where I could stand and observe the game alongside the handful of other onlookers. The six players had evidently been drinking for some time. I scanned their faces, waiting for the right moment.

A skinny young man with wild red hair knocked twice on the table and his fellows laid their cards faceup. A brief pause followed for calculation, then a cry went up from one curly-haired youth, who leaned forwards and scooped up the pile of coins. His friends cursed and thumped their fists on the table in a show of resentment as the red-haired boy gathered the cards, gave them a practised shuffle, and began to deal again. I was not a great connoisseur of cards—Sidney had tried to teach me without much success—but I knew enough to see that they were playing one-and-thirty, a reasonably simple game to follow. When each player had five cards, more coins were thrown into the middle, along with more spirited cursing and threats.

“If you keep on at this rate, Nick, you’ll have lost all your father’s legacy before you even get your hands on it,” remarked the young man with the curly hair, who had won the last hand. The boy opposite him glanced up sharply, frowning. He was unremarkable to look at, with light brown hair and a sparse beard over a solid jaw, thick eyebrows that met in the middle, and a nose that had once been broken. There was an angry cast to his features, as if he held a grievance against anyone who so much as looked at him.

“Don’t worry yourself about that, Charlie,” he said, slurring his words. “There’s plenty there to be going on with.”

“It’s not in your coffers yet, though,” said the red-haired boy, examining his new cards. He seemed the most sober of the lot.

“It will be as soon as they catch that bitch and burn her.”

“What if they don’t?”

“Jesus Christ!” The boy called Nick slammed his pot down hard on the table; beer sloshed across the cards. “I said I’m sick of talking about it. Are you going to play or sit there all night gossiping like a laundry woman?”

There was a smattering of laughter from the crowd, followed by a crash as the young man at the end of the table slumped sideways on his bench and fell to the floor.

“God’s blood! There’s Peter finished for the night. I’ve seen girl children hold their drink better than him.” The red-haired boy pushed his chair back reluctantly and knelt to haul his fallen comrade into a sitting position. “Leave him there, he can sober up in his own time. Damned if I’m carrying him home again.”