C.J. Sansom: Heartstone

I felt myself flush. 'That's not what she wants. How could she, after what happened to her?'

He shrugged again. 'That only makes some women keener, from what I'm told. What else do you think she's after?'

'I don't know. Some fantasy of courtly love perhaps.'

He laughed. 'That's an educated way of putting it. Tell her you're not interested. Make life easier for yourself and everyone else.'

'I can't do that, it would be cruel. I need to find some way out of this, Hob. I need to know who her family are.'

'I'm sure lawyers have ways of finding things out.' He narrowed his eyes. 'She is mad, you know. It's not just the refusing to go out. All these fake illnesses, and you can hear her crying and muttering to herself in that room at night. If you want my advice you should just walk away and not come back. Send that man of yours with a message that you're married, or dead, or gone to fight the French.'

I realized that in his own way Gebons was trying to advise me for the best. My best, though, not Ellen's. Ellen mattered nothing to him.

'What would happen to her if I did that?'

He shrugged. 'She'd get worse. But if you don't tell her, she will anyway. Your way is just more drawn out.' He looked at me shrewdly. 'Perhaps you're afraid of telling her.'

'Mind your place, Gebons,' I said sharply.

He shrugged. 'Well, I can tell you that once they get ideas fixed in their heads, it's hard to get them out. Believe me, sir, I've been here ten years, I know what they're like.'

I turned away. 'I will be back the week after next.'

He shrugged again. 'All right. Hopefully that will content her. For now.'

I left the office and went out through the main door, closing it firmly behind me. I was glad to be away from the fetid air of that place. I thought, I will find out the truth about Ellen, I will find some way.

I RODE BACK to my house, quickly changed into my best clothes, and walked down to Temple Stairs to find a boat to take me the ten miles upriver to Hampton Court. The tide was with us, but even so it was a hard pull for the boatman that sultry morning. Beyond Westminster we passed numerous barges going downriver laden with supplies—bales of clothing, grain from the King's stores, on one occasion hundreds of longbows. My sweating boatman was not inclined to talk, and I stared out at the fields. Normally by now the ears of corn would be turning golden, but after the bad weather of the last few weeks they were still green.

My visit to Ellen still lay heavy on my mind, especially Hob's words about lawyers having their ways of finding things. I hated the thought of going behind her back, but the present situation could not continue.

AT LENGTH the soaring brick towers of Hampton Court came into view, the chimneys topped with gold-painted statues of lions and mythical beasts glinting in the sun. I disembarked at the wharf, where soldiers armed with halberds stood on duty. My heart beat hard with apprehension as I looked across the wide lawns to Wolsey's palace. I showed my letter to one of the guards. He bowed deeply, called another guard across and told him to take me inside.

I remembered my only previous visit to Hampton Court, to see Archbishop Cranmer after having been falsely imprisoned in the Tower. It was that memory which lay at the root of my fear. I had heard Cranmer was down in Dover; they said he had reviewed the soldiers there on a white horse, dressed in armour. It sounded extraordinary, though surely no stranger than anything else happening now. The King, I learned from the guard, was at Whitehall, so at least there was no risk of seeing him. Once I had displeased him, and King Henry never forgot a grudge. As we reached a wide oaken doorway, I prayed to the God I hardly believed in any more that the Queen would keep her promise and that, whatever she wanted, it be not a matter of politics.

I was led up a spiral staircase into the outer rooms of the Queen's chambers. I pulled off my cap as we entered a room where servants and officials, most wearing the Queen's badge of St Catherine in their caps, bustled to and fro. We passed through another room and then another, each quieter as we approached the Queen's presence chamber. There were signs of new decoration, fresh paint on the walls and the elaborately corniced ceilings, wide tapestries so bright with colour they almost hurt the eye. Herbs and branches were laid on the rush matting covering the floor, and there was a heavenly medley of scents; almonds, lavender, roses. In the second room parrots fluttered and sang in roomy cages. There was a monkey in a cage too; it had been clambering up the bars but stopped and stared at me, huge eyes in a wrinkled, old man's face. We paused before another guarded door, the Queen's motto picked out in gold on a scroll above: To be useful in what I do. The guard opened it and I finally stepped into the presence chamber.

This was the outer sanctum; the Queen's private rooms lay beyond, behind another door with a halberdier outside. After two years of marriage Queen Catherine was still in high favour with the King; when he had been away last year, leading his armies in France, she had been appointed Queen Regent. Yet remembering the fates of his other wives, I could not but think how, at a word from him, all her guards could in a moment become jailers.

The walls of the presence chamber were decorated with some of the new wallpaper, intricate designs of leaves on a green background, and the room was furnished with elegant tables, vases of flowers and high-backed chairs. There were only two people present. The first was a woman in a plain cornflower-blue dress, her hair grey beneath her white coif. She half-rose from her chair, giving me an apprehensive look. The man with her, tall and thin and wearing a lawyer's robe, put his hand gently on her shoulder to indicate she should stay seated. Master Robert Warner, the Queen's solicitor, his thin face framed by a long beard that was greying fast though he was of an age with me, came across and took my hand.

'Brother Shardlake, thank you for coming.' As though I could have refused. But I was pleased to see him, Warner had always been friendly.

'How are you?' he asked.

'Well enough. And you?'

'Very busy just now.'

'And how is the Queen?' I noticed the grey-haired woman was staring at me intently, and that she was trembling slightly.

'Very well. I will take you in now. The Lady Elizabeth is with her.'

IN THE SUMPTUOUSLY decorated privy chamber, four richly dressed maids-in-waiting with the Queen's badge on their hoods sat sewing by the window. Outside were the palace gardens, patterned flower beds and fishponds and statues of heraldic beasts. All the women rose and nodded briefly as I bowed to them.

Queen Catherine Parr sat in the centre of the room, on a red velvet chair under a crimson cloth of state. Beside her a girl of about eleven knelt stroking a spaniel. She had a pale face and long auburn hair, and wore a green silken dress and a rope of pearls. I realized this was the Lady Elizabeth, the King's younger daughter, by Anne Boleyn. I knew the King had restored Elizabeth and her half-sister Mary, Catherine of Aragon's daughter, to the succession the year before, it was said at the Queen's urging. But their status as bastards remained; they were still ladies, not princesses. And though Mary, now in her twenties, was a major figure at court and second in line to the throne after young Prince Edward, Elizabeth, despised and rejected by her father, was hardly ever seen in public.

Warner and I bowed deeply. There was a pause, then the Queen said, 'Welcome, good gentlemen,' in her clear rich voice.

Before her marriage Catherine Parr had always been elegantly dressed, but now she was magnificent in a dress of silver and russet sewn with strands of gold. A gold brooch hung with pearls was pinned to her breast. Her face, attractive rather than pretty, was lightly powdered, her red-gold hair bound under a circular French hood. Her expression was kindly but watchful, her mouth severe but somehow conveying that in a moment it could break into a smile or laugh in the midst of all this magnificence. She looked at Warner.