C Sansom - Sovereign

‘Sir!’ Barak exclaimed. ‘In God’s name, what has happened?’

‘Giles Wrenne is dead,’ I said quietly. ‘We were eating and he seemed to lose his senses, he ran outside calling for his nephew.’ I looked directly into Tamasin’s blue eyes; I had thought this story through carefully and the lie was to protect them as well as me. ‘He ran into the orchard. I followed. I found him in that pool of water, almost a lake it is now. He must have collapsed and drowned.’

Tamasin’s hand flew to her mouth. ‘His mind gone too?’

‘It must have been his illness, affecting his brain. I had to give him bad news this afternoon. His nephew Martin Dakin died two years ago.’

‘The poor old man,’ Tamasin whispered. How full of compassion she had always been, I realized – for Wrenne, for Jennet Marlin, for me under the copper beech in York.

‘Where is he?’ Barak asked.

‘Still out there. He was too heavy to bring back, and I – I think I am unwell.’ I heard my voice break.

‘I’ll go and look,’ Barak told Tamasin. ‘Wait here.’

She knelt by me, put a cool hand to my brow. ‘You are burning up, sir. You must go to bed.’

‘I will now. I am sorry, Tamasin.’

‘What for?’

‘How I have treated you sometimes.’

She smiled weakly. ‘I deserved it by starting with that foolish trick.’

‘Perhaps. I lost a friend tonight,’ I added quietly.

She laid her other hand on mine, my manacled hand. ‘It took us a long time to find Jack’s locksmith. But he will come tomorrow morning with his tools, have you released from that horrible fetter.’

‘Good. Good. Thank you.’

‘Is Mistress Woode asleep?’

‘Ay, Joan slept through it all. There is no need to disturb her.’ I looked at her. ‘You have been crying.’

‘Jack has found my father, sir. He is a professional man, as Jack said. He is a cook in the royal kitchens. A man with a fine opinion of himself, Jack says. He does not want to know me.’ She took a sobbing breath and bit her lip, but held back her tears.

‘I am sorry, Tamasin.’

‘It was a childish fantasy. It is better to know the truth.’

‘Yes.’ I thought of Giles. ‘But lonely.’

We sat in silence a few minutes longer. Then Barak returned, shaking water from his hair. The look he gave me held calculation as well as concern.

‘Can you leave us, Tammy?’ he asked quietly.

She nodded and rose. ‘Goodnight, sir,’ she said quietly, and left the room. I looked at Barak. He drew my dagger from beneath his doublet and laid it on the table.

‘I found this outside, by the pool.’

‘It must have fallen from my belt.’

‘The mud round where he lay was all churned up, as though there had been a struggle.’ He knows, I thought; he has guessed it was no accident.

‘His face was terrible, a wild desperate look on it.’

I was glad I had not seen that. I met Barak’s gaze. ‘We must tell the coroner of his death first thing tomorrow. There will be no doubt of the finding. He drowned.’

Barak looked at me, took a deep breath, and nodded slowly. The matter was closed.

‘Tamasin says you found her father?’

‘Ay. A cook. When I went to see him he railed at me, said he would deny all. He thought Tamasin was after his money.’ He laughed grimly. ‘A fine professional gentleman.’

‘Poor Tamasin.’

‘Ay. But I decided to tell her. Best to know the truth, is it not?’

I glanced at the dagger. ‘Perhaps.’

‘She will get over it. She’s tough. That’s one of the things I admire about her.’

‘Families and claims of rank, by Jesu they cause much trouble, do they not?’ I laughed bitterly, then shivered violently. Barak looked at me.

‘You should come to bed. You look a sight.’

‘All right. Help me up.’

As he stepped towards me I took the poker and stirred the fire, where a last fragment of paper had failed to burn. The flames took them, and the name of Edward Blaybourne disappeared for ever.

February 1542, three months later

I STOOD AT the window of my room in the little inn, watching the sun rise. A hard frost had held the countryside in its grip for a week and as the blood-red orb appeared it turned the landscape first pink then white; the grass and the trees and the roof of the little church opposite all outlined in frost.

I wondered if Queen Catherine had watched the icy dawn from the Tower three days before, the morning of her beheading. Thomas Culpeper and Francis Dereham had been executed back in December but legal necessities had kept the Queen alive for two more months. They said in London she had been too weak with fear to mount the scaffold unaided; they had had to half carry her up the steps. Poor little creature, she must have been so cold, there on Tower Green with her head and neck bare, exposed for the executioner. Lady Rochford had followed her to the block; she had gone quite mad when she was arrested and the King had passed a law allowing insane persons to be executed. Yet the balladeers said that at the end Jane Rochford had composed herself and made a speech confessing a lifetime of faults and sins, standing bravely before the block from which the Queen’s blood still dripped. It had been a long speech and the crowd had grown bored. I remembered her at York, that strange mixture of arrogance and fear. Poor woman, I thought. What drove her to weave those endless meshes of deceit which in the end could only trap her too? I hoped they had found peace now, she and the Queen.

BARAK AND I had left London the day after the executions. It was a cold ride to Kent but fortunately the frost kept the roads dry and we reached Ashford by evening. We had spent the next day nosing through various archives, and I had been pleased to find evidence to back Sergeant Leacon’s claim that his parents’ land was indeed held under a valid freehold grant. I suspected the landlord had falsified a document somewhere, and I was looking forward to meeting the landlord’s lawyer tomorrow in Ashford, along with young Leacon and his parents. That left a free day, which I had told Barak I needed for some private business. I had left him in Ashford the previous afternoon and ridden the ten miles to the village. A small, poor place like a hundred such hamlets in England; a few houses straggling along one street, an inn and a church.

I stepped quietly outside, pulling my coat around me tightly, or at least as tightly as I could for it was loose now; I had lost weight in the fever I had caught in November. I had spent three weeks in bed, delirious at first. When the fever subsided it had amused and touched me to see how Joan and Tamasin argued over who should bring my food.

It was bitterly cold. My breath steamed in front of me as I crossed to the little church and stepped round the side to the graveyard. My feet crunched in the frozen grass as I walked among the headstones, searching.

It was a small, poor stone, hidden right at the back and shaded by trees from a little wood behind. I bent and studied the faded, lichened inscription:

In memory of Giles Blaybourne

1390-1446

his wife Elizabeth

1395-1444

and their son Edward

died in the King’s service in France, 1441

I stood there, lost in thought. I did not hear the light footsteps approaching, and jumped violently at the sound of a voice.

‘So Edward Blaybourne gave his son his father’s name. Giles.’

I turned to find Barak grinning at me.

‘God’s death,’ I demanded, ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I guessed where you must have been going. It wasn’t that difficult. Somewhere less than a day’s ride from Ashford. It had to be Braybourne village. I left before sun-up this morning and rode down. Sukey is tied up behind the church.’