‘Is that so?’ says Vaesy, wondering why Burghley’s son is telling him the sort of trivia the vergers usually reserve for tourists.
‘It is believed St Paul’s is built upon a pagan temple, Sir Fulke – a place where sacrifices were performed. And shall I tell you what happens on the saint’s day, even now, in our modern times?’
Vaesy knows Robert Cecil is going to, whether or not he’s interested.
‘The head of a buck – antlers and all – is paraded at the front of the procession! Paraded like some heathen trophy! Do you see now, Sir Fulke, how long it takes to eradicate heretical belief?’ Robert Cecil’s stare is so fanatical that Vaesy wonders if he’s in the grip of some spiritual paroxysm. ‘The roots we must tear out – if our new religion is to survive – they go deep indeed. Very deep. So, Sir Fulke, if you wish to be numbered amongst those who kept our queen’s faith alive, against all the legions the Antichrist in Rome could send against her, I suggest you redouble your efforts.’
If an alderman’s clerk and the warder of the Queen’s Bench won’t listen, perhaps a church officer might. The following day Nicholas seeks the help of the vestrymen at St Saviour’s, the Bankside parish church. It’s their responsibility to administer to the poor and vagrant of Southwark. Perhaps they will take an interest in what he has to say.
But instead of a spirit of selfless Christian charity, what he actually finds is a clique of comfortable burghers whose idea of looking after the destitute is to ensure that as few of them as possible settle in the ward and become a drain on its coffers. This, they tell him vehemently, is best achieved by a whipping and scourging of biblical proportions, a task for which they are only too ready. Twice on Sundays, if necessary.
‘But young Jacob Monkton was no vagrant,’ Nicholas protests. ‘His father’s a poulterer on Scrope Alley. His brother is the mortuary porter at St Thomas’s. He deserved the protection of the law as much as you or I.’
One of the vestrymen is a prosperous little pug of a man named Cheyney. Nicholas has seen him frequenting the Turk’s Head, the tavern across the lane from the Jackdaw. Cheyney, he knows, is a haberdasher, a man of some considerable standing in his guild. He considers himself the arbiter of parish morals, and he has a deep and very partisan understanding of the Poor Laws. Cheyney tells him bluntly, ‘The Monkton lad went missing for over a month. Is that not so, Master Shelby?’
‘So I am told.’
‘Then he was out of the parish without licence. Ergo, the boy is a vagrant, as defined under the Vagrancy Act, passed by our sovereign lady’s Privy Council in Parliament.’ His beady eyes gleam in bureaucratic triumph. ‘And just between you and me, Master Shelby, you really ought to consider whether it’s in your long-term interests to cleave quite so closely to an employer like Mistress Merton.’
Under a pale sky streaked with white mare’s tails of cloud, Lizzy Lumley returns to Nonsuch accompanied by Francis Deniker and a groom from the Lumley town house behind Tower Hill. Gabriel Quigley has remained in London on his master’s business. Lord Lumley assembles the household in the inner court to welcome her, the grooms and servants along one wall, the maids and scullions along the other. It’s what he always does when his wife comes home: makes an occasion of it.
‘An uneventful journey, I trust, Mouse?’ he enquires of his wife as the stable lads lead away the mud-splattered horses.
‘We crossed the river at Richmond, on the ferry, Husband,’ says Lizzy, accepting her husband’s kiss on the back of her hand with a gentle smile. ‘It was an unusually smooth passage for the season.’
‘Lizzy, you know how much it troubles me when you cross by ferry,’ John says, a concerned frown on his face. ‘The river is very strong at this time of year. What if the ferry had been carried away?’
‘Husband, the ferry is perfectly safe. Had I crossed by the London Bridge, you’d be waiting here in the cold till nightfall. And the Portsmouth road is a veritable swamp the other side of Morden.’
‘I would have sent a coach.’
‘You don’t have a coach, Husband.’
‘Then I shall get one, Mouse. One like Robert Cecil’s – from Italy, full of plump cushions.’
I wonder if you would have thought to send a coach for Jane? she asks him in her private thoughts. Probably not. Jane FitzAlan could have walked from Nonsuch to Constantinople and back without the need of a coach. And she’d have presented you with another child on her return. She lifts a gloved hand to his cheek and says, ‘I’m just happy to be home.’
With Lizzy Lumley returned to Nonsuch, Kat Vaesy has time on her hands. Time to do what she so often does when she’s alone at Cold Oak with none but her maid and cooks for company: dwell amongst her memories.
She sits by the window of her privy chamber, looking out at the beehives in the orchard. It’s been months now since the last insect dawdled sleepily along the window ledge. When they come again, it will be spring.
She’s been rummaging through her small collection of books: psalters, uplifting tracts on the duties of women, pamphlets on modesty, all the tedious constraints her father had sought to impose upon her so she would make Fulke Vaesy the sort of wife he expected.
One book had stood out amongst the others, like a signal from a time before her misery had begun. It lies open on her lap now: Pliny’s Naturalis Historia.
Twenty long years ago Jane FitzAlan, John Lumley’s first wife and – at that time – Kat’s closest friend, had plucked this very book from a shelf at Nonsuch and thrust it into her hands. Every time she goes there, or Lizzy comes to visit, Kat always intends to return it. Yet somehow she’s never quite got round to it.
As Kat stares at the tight line of print, she is transported back to that hot summer’s day: she and Jane in the library, John away in London, the gleaming white walls of Nonsuch sending blazing light through the high windows.
‘You have to give me something – a book I’ll understand enough to sound clever,’ she is saying to Jane, her voice tinged with desperation.
‘Don’t be so foolish, Kat,’ Jane says, sounding as though she wants to shake the young Katherine by the collar of her stammel shift. ‘You are clever. That’s one of the reasons he loves you.’
‘Jane, I mean it. Please. Look – that one there, with the red leather binding.’
‘You’re wasting your time,’ Jane says as she picks the closest book she can reach. ‘I’ve never seen a man so reduced by passion. You’ve won him, Kat, and quite without recourse to’ – she glances down at the cover – ‘Master Pliny.’
Reluctantly, Kat Vaesy puts away the memories and slowly closes the book. She rises from her chair and takes up an ornate wooden Bible-box that she keeps by her bed. It has an intricate pattern of entwined leaves carved into the side. Jane – dead for over a decade now – gave it to her for a wedding present. Fulke has always believed she keeps her psalter in it. She takes a key from the bundle she carries on her belt and opens the box. Reaching in by instinct, just as Bianca Merton had done with her own box of mysteries, Kat touches her treasures with trembling fingertips. She feels the tightly wound swaddling sheet; the coral-handled bell whose gentle trilling would have lulled her daughter to sleep; the length of hollowed-out horn through which she would have blown soap bubbles, to delight… What would it really matter if her husband knew of this sad cache of lost hopes? He’d call it the over-sentimentality of women. He’d say she’s kept them because she’s too bitter to forget.