S.J. Parris - Sacrilege

Angry at myself, I left the parcel on the floor where Langworth had thrown it and concentrated on securing the secret room behind me. My fingers moved more deftly with my own knife and this time I succeeded in turning the lock. I climbed through the broken casement unobserved, at least as far as I could tell (those opaque windows of the building that backed on to Langworth’s house seemed to bear down on me with accusatory stares, though I told myself not to be foolish). But as I was rounding the corner of the row of houses in sight of the cathedral once more, I almost collided with a black-robed figure heading in the opposite direction. I apologised, flustered, and looked up; to my surprise, it was not a cleric, as I had thought, but a woman.

“Oh. Mistress Gray—forgive me, I didn’t see you.”

She appraised me in silence from beneath her veil, then glanced over my shoulder, as if to judge where I might have come from. I met that look as confidently as I could, wondering for my part where she was going; there was nothing at the end of the path except Langworth’s house. We stood for a moment, looking at each other. Finally her eyes flickered briefly upwards to the sky.

“We shall have a storm, I think,” she observed, her tone pleasant, as if I were an old acquaintance. I followed the direction of her gaze to see that the layer of cloud had thickened into scalloped rows, pressing the heat down like a blanket. To the east, above the rooftops, the sky had taken on an edge of steel grey. I nodded, unnerved by the way she studied my face. What was her connection to Edward Kingsley? Why had he left her money? I wanted to ask her questions but could not think how to broach the subject without causing offence.

When it seemed that she intended neither to speak nor to move, I touched my forefinger to my fringe in an awkward salute, bowed my head briefly, and walked quickly away, with the uncomfortable sensation of her eyes on my back until I had turned the corner.

Robin Bates and his companions were waiting outside the Three Tuns after supper as they had promised, playfully jostling one another or leaning against the hitching posts, spitting into the dirt. The boy named Peter, whose place I had taken at the card game the night before, picked up a stone and threw it at a scrawny cat, who yelped and scurried away, belly low to the ground. Bates nodded as I approached, and I noticed two of the others lean their heads together and whisper, eyes fixed on me, knowing smirks playing about their lips in a way that made me immediately wary.

“Have you brought a full purse, my Italian friend?” Bates said.

I smiled, patting the moneybag I carried at my belt. The thought had occurred that, once outside the city limits, these boys could simply take my coins by force and leave me in a ditch, though I brushed the idea aside; they might choose to fight me for sport, but their youthful aggression was straightforward, not calculating. I was clearly there to be the target of their jokes, but I did not think they would deny themselves an evening’s entertainment by robbing me before we reached the card table. Bates slapped me on the back approvingly. I smiled again and laid a hand over the purse at my belt, feeling the reassuring shape of the keys I had copied from Langworth’s. I was content to play the joker for these young fools if it gave me access to Edward Kingsley’s house. The old priory held some secrets, that much was certain; secrets important enough for Langworth to fear that Walsingham had sent me from London to uncover them.

We walked through the town, crossing the Buttermarket and heading along Sun Street in the direction of the North Gate. The boys talked and cursed loudly, keen to draw attention to themselves with their swaggering gait and playful fighting; I noticed all carried swords in elaborate scabbards swinging at their sides. I wondered how much skill they possessed in the use of them. My little dagger, hanging at my belt, looked inadequate by comparison, yet I suspected I was probably more efficient with it than these boys who carried their fine blades as ornaments of their wealth. People scowled and turned away from them; I kept my head down as best I could and hoped we might avoid any trouble inside the city walls. It would not help my reputation in the town to be seen in the company of notorious brawlers, as I guessed these young men were known to be.

To distract him from looking too provocatively at a group of men who stood by the gate of a tavern, eyeing the boys with dislike, I turned to Bates and nodded in the general direction we were walking.

“Are you sure your friend Nicholas will be happy to see us? I gathered last night he is still in mourning.”

Bates laughed.

“Mourning? Not he. Nick hated the old devil almost as much as he hated that whore he married. Though he’d have bedded her himself, given the chance. We all would.” He gave a lascivious grin and I flexed my hands quietly into fists at my side, as I smiled in complicity. “No—if Nick seemed unwilling, it is only because he is afraid he will jeopardise the legal process. His father’s property is not his in law yet.”

“Then whose? His widow’s?”

“Well, that is just the point.” He turned to me, his eyes gleaming with the excitement of a story. “Nick was cut out of his father’s will and everything left to the wife. But if it was she who killed Sir Edward, then naturally her rights are forfeit and all should return to Nick. The difficulty is that she cannot be tried because she has fled.”

“Is that not as good as a confession of her guilt?”

“Eventually, I suppose, if she does not return. But she cannot be tried in absentia. Meanwhile Nick has a house, lands, income, and a full cellar he has been instructed by his attorney not to touch, and we his friends grow very impatient with the business. We had thought his father’s death would make him a wealthy man. In fact, I believe we have you to thank for his agreement tonight—he did not want to lose face in front of a stranger.” He punctuated this sentence with a friendly punch to my upper arm, which I received with good humour, inwardly gritting my teeth.

“But you said if the wife killed Sir Edward. Is it not certain, then?” I prompted.

Bates darted a quick, lizard glance sideways at me.

“They found her gloves, all bloodied. The next day she was gone, with a purse of his money. Hard to see how it could be anyone else. Mind you,” he added, assuming a thoughtful expression, “if she had not as good as confessed by running, there are plenty who might have pointed the finger at Tom Garth—the big fellow who tried to make trouble at the Three Tuns last night.”

“I remember him,” I said. “You think he could have done it?”

“He had reason. I’m not saying he did it. But he wasn’t the only one glad to see Nick’s father go to his grave.”

“Including Nick himself?”

He turned slowly, with a knowing smile.

“He was glad all right. But Nick is all talk, he could never have done it. He’s a coward at heart.”

I almost pointed out that a coward may well attack a man from behind in the dark—Tom Garth had said as much—but decided it was not in my interest to keep pressing the possibility of Nicholas Kingsley’s guilt while I was a guest in his house.

We crossed under the North Gate, which was no more than a small chapel built across the road, supported by wooden pillars, with room for a carriage to pass beneath. Beyond it, the streets opened up into orchards and fields, baked yellow by the heat. A wide avenue followed the line of the city wall, edged with fine houses, taller and more generously spaced than those nearer the centre of the town. As we walked, my hair was lifted from my face by intermittent gusts of a hot breeze that whipped and eddied around us, churning the heavy air. Gulls circled, calling mournfully. I squinted upwards; the sun was a malevolent eye glaring through the cloud.