C Sansom - Sovereign

‘Well, I am meeting her tomorrow evening at the singing, as we arranged.’

‘Is that wise? Maleverer was not happy about what she did.’

‘He’s not one to care what dalliances men and women may have so long as there are no political implications.’ He looked at me hard again. ‘Do you disapprove?’

‘ ’Tis not for me to approve or disapprove,’ I replied defensively. I still had doubts about the girl, but I realized too that I was jealous, not of Barak for having a pretty girl chase him, but of her for taking the attention of one of the few real friends I had. I changed the subject, asking Barak if he had seen Master Wrenne.

‘In the courtyard when I went in to Maleverer. Only in the distance – he was making for the gate and did not see me.’

‘Did he look all right?’

‘Yes. He was walking towards the gate. I thought I caught a slight smile on his face.’

‘Thank God. I feared Maleverer might take him in for rough questioning.’

‘I told you he could look after himself.’

‘Ay.’ I got up. ‘Well, I shall go for a walk, I think. I need some air.’

‘Want some company?’

I smiled. ‘All right.’

OUTSIDE A WIND had got up, and I smelled rain in the air. ‘Autumn is well on here,’ I observed. My head felt clearer, but with the clarity came apprehension. I watched the people passing to and fro and thought, somebody here, one of these people, attacked me. Will they try again? I was glad of Barak’s company.

We walked past the animal enclosures. Two big metal cages had been set up to one side; in each a huge brown bear crouched, staring out through little red eyes full of fear and anger.

‘There’s to be bear-baiting among the public entertainments for the King,’ Barak said. ‘I dare say you’ll steer clear of that.’ He smiled slightly, for he found my squeamishness about such things odd.

‘Yes,’ I replied shortly.

‘A whole lot of fighting cocks were being brought in when I was in the courtyard earlier. Games for the soldiers and workmen. They’re not allowed in the city in case they fight with the Yorkers. They’ve put the birds in the chapterhouse, I was told.’

I shook my head. ‘How the world is everywhere turned upside down.’

We walked down the side of the church to the main courtyard. Men on ladders were fixing pennants to the pavilions now, in the green and white Tudor colours, the red-on-white cross of England and, I saw to my astonishment, blue flags with a slantwise white cross. I pointed. ‘Look! Isn’t that the Scotch flag? Jesu, King James must be coming here! That is what all this is for!’

Barak whistled. ‘A meeting of kings.’

‘So King Henry has come to make his terms with the Scots as well as the Yorkmen. He’s after a peace treaty.’ I shook my head. ‘King James would be mad to abandon his alliance with the French, it’s all that’s ever stopped us overrunning them.’

‘Maybe he’s offering James a choice between peace terms and invasion.’

‘If this is what it is all about, perhaps Queen Catherine is not pregnant after all.’

I looked round the courtyard, less crowded now the building work was finished. Men were loading surplus building material on to carts, while more flagstones were being laid near the manor house, covering the earth so the King – the Kings – should not get their robes muddy. I shivered, feeling tired again. ‘Come, let us go back through the church. We can see how the horses are doing.’

The monastic church was also full of workmen. Row upon row of wooden stalls had been set up along the nave now for the horses, and men were piling up bales of hay for fodder and setting straw in the stalls. The banging down of the bales, the swish of the straw being laid, echoed round the place. As we walked down the church another sound became audible, an angry crowing from the chapterhouse. There must be hundreds of fighting cocks, I realized, and wondered what they made of the holy statues, whether they took them for real men as Barak had. I looked around. For all the great vaulting arches this was the corpse of a church, a corpse set out to be mocked and desecrated as they said Richard III’s was after the Battle of Bosworth. I felt suddenly giddy, and went over to a bench that someone had left in the middle of the nave. ‘I must rest a moment,’ I said.

Barak joined me. We sat in silence for a minute, then I turned to him, wincing at a spasm in my neck.

‘I wonder if I am safe now,’ I said.

‘You mean your assailant would have killed you had Craike not interrupted him?’

‘I’m not sure Craike did interrupt him.’

‘You mean he was the attacker?’

‘No. Otherwise the cudgel, or whatever else he used, would have been found on him when he was searched. And those damned papers. No, I mean my assailant had already left the room when Craike arrived in the corridor. Think about it. That is a long corridor, whoever attacked me would have heard Craike’s footsteps as he arrived at the far end. He could not have left the room and run down the other staircase without Craike seeing him. And Craike said he heard footsteps descending, not running.’

‘So the attacker thought he had killed you.’

‘Unless he did not mean to kill me, just knock me out.

Say he entered the room just as I lifted that confession by

Blaybourne from the box, and hit me before I could read it.’

‘If it’s that important, surely he’d kill you to make sure.’

I sighed. ‘Yes, unless he thought I was already dead. If

so, he showed carelessness. And when he sees I am alive, he

may try again.’

‘But the damage has been done. You’ve told Maleverer everything you saw.’

‘The attacker may not know that.’ ‘Then we’ll have to keep watch,’ Barak said. ‘Thank you for the we. I wonder what those papers signify. An orthodox-seeming family tree, a copy of the Mouldwarp legend, an Act of Parliament Maleverer says is a fake and a confession by someone called Blaybourne whose name appears to strike terror into the hearts of the mighty. There were other papers too, quite a few, they looked like statements of some sort. And who was the thief? A conspirator, trying to keep the papers out of the King’s hands? But if so, why did Oldroyd not give them to him – I am assuming that was why he was killed.’

‘I don’t know. Jesu, I wish we could go home.’

‘So do I.’ I shivered in a cold wind that came through an empty window-arch. I looked through it at the grey sky, just beginning to darken. Oldroyd would have removed that glass. I wondered what would happen to his house and business; he was another who had died without heirs.

‘What are you thinking of?’ Barak asked.

‘How since we got here my mind has run on genealogies. Those like the King’s that have heirs and those like Wrenne’s and Oldroyd’s that have run out. And mine, perhaps.’ I smiled sadly. ‘Your tree I suppose will go back to Abraham, through your father’s Jewish blood.’

He shrugged. ‘And we all go back to Adam, the first sinner. I am my father’s only child too. I would like the line to go on.’ He smiled mirthlessly. ‘The secret line of Jewish blood.’ He turned back to me. ‘You could still marry. You are not yet forty.’

‘I will be next year. Then people will start to think of me as an old man.’

‘Ten years younger than the King.’

I sighed. ‘After Lady Honor, last year-’ I changed the subject. ‘So, you have made up with Tamasin?’

‘Yes.’ He smiled, then looked at me seriously. ‘She was frightened at being hauled up before Maleverer, I think, though she tried to hide it. She said Mistress Marlin was sharp with her, but has promised she will not tell Lady Rochford.’