‘But, my lord, this man is an informer, I’m sure of it. I’ve had my fears about him since he arrived,’ Quigley calls back.
‘And I should have heard them, Gabriel. But what is done is done. Let Dr Shelby and I speak awhile.’
Quigley hesitates. He wants to ram the dagger into Nicholas’s back as deep as the hilt will allow.
‘Gabriel–’
‘Very well, my lord,’ says Quigley reluctantly. He steps back. But not before he gives Nicholas a parting jab with the tip of the blade. Nicholas feels a hot, sharp pain low down on his right hip, and a warm trickle of blood running down over his right buttock. ‘You’re lucky, spy,’ Quigley rasps in his ear. ‘If this were not a holy place–’
The stinging pain stays with Nicholas as he descends the stairs at Lumley’s command. Reaching the bottom, he steps out into the candlelight as bravely as he can.
‘Merciful heaven, Husband. We are utterly undone,’ Lizzy Lumley whispers when she sees him.
‘That rather depends on Dr Shelby, Mouse.’
Francis Deniker is packing away his vestments in the pine reliquary like a travelling haberdasher at the close of a country fair. Perhaps he thinks he can make Nicholas un-see what he has seen. His hands are shaking and his skin has the pallor of a man about to face the axe – which is almost a certainty, if Nicholas survives to tell Robert Cecil what he has witnessed.
‘I should have taken more heed of Gabriel, Mouse,’ Lumley says with a slow shake of his head as he helps his wife to stand. ‘We’ve been at this young man’s mercy since the moment he arrived at Nonsuch. Isn’t that so, Dr Shelby?’
Nicholas doesn’t know how to answer.
‘I always knew my enemies would send someone here to shatter all this,’ Lumley says, the merest hint of a wry smile on his lips. ‘The question is, Dr Shelby, which one of them was it?’
Lady Katherine Vaesy.
Bianca has heard Nicholas speak only of Sir Fulke, the great but apparently incompetent anatomist. Is Katherine his wife? Or his winsome daughter? A fair cousin, perhaps? Whatever her connection, Bianca imagines her suffocating in silk, crushed under a weight of pearls, troubled by nothing worse than which of her many maids to call upon first to comb her hair.
But you can’t claw like a Veneto maid when she’s faced with a rival, Bianca tells herself with a tight smile. You’d be as much use with a blade as Vaesy himself, if what Nicholas says about you is true. In a dark piazza in Padua, surrounded by a bunch of over-enamoured gallants, you’d have no idea which bit of them to kick first.
She scolds herself for this jealousy, which will not let her be. She thinks, you’re probably just a decent woman who gives alms to the distressed poor at the Magdalene. So why do I care what ceremony you performed with Nicholas Shelby when I wasn’t there to protect him from himself?
But why has he still not written?
‘I care not for myself, Dr Shelby,’ says Lizzy Lumley in astonishment when Nicholas has recounted in full the true story of how he has come to be at Nonsuch, ‘but to think you would betray my husband to save a tavern-mistress!’ She seems uncertain whether to regard him with compassion or fury.
Nicholas stands there like a felon pleading his case before the bench. The jab from Quigley’s dagger makes him want to massage his hip, but he thinks that would simply make him appear furtive. He wonders if he’s dripping blood on the chapel floor.
‘Bianca Merton saved my life, Lady Lumley,’ he tells her, giving the only defence he can – the truth. ‘When my wife and infant died, I was utterly lost. I would have committed the sin of self-destruction, had not Mistress Merton taken pity on me. How could I then abandon her? I bear neither you nor your husband malice of any sort. Your faith is of no concern to me. I’ve already lost mine.’
John Lumley walks to the chapel windows, draws the hangings and stares pensively out at the setting sun. ‘From what he’s told us, Mouse, he could have done no less and kept his conscience clean. And Robert Cecil is adept at coercion. We know that only too well.’
‘I assure you, my lord, there was no deceit in my original letter,’ Nicholas says. ‘I really was seeking your help. But then Robert Cecil got his talons into me and all went awry.’
‘Do the Psalms not tell us that a man who deceives shall not abide in God’s house, Dr Shelby?’ asks Lizzy Lumley, less forgiving than her husband.
‘Madam, that is a place in which I have not dwelt for some considerable time,’ Nicholas replies softly.
Lumley turns back from the windows and appraises him silently. Then he says, ‘For Lizzy and myself, I am not overly troubled by what you have discovered here, Dr Shelby. The queen knows of my adherence to the old faith. She tolerates it as the eccentricity of a man living in the past. I suppose the Privy Council might persuade her to a fine–’
‘You can’t afford a fine, Husband,’ Lizzy protests angrily. ‘You owe enough to the Crown already! Francis, tell him he can’t afford a fine.’
‘Hush now, Mouse. If not a fine, then perhaps a few months in the Tower. That can be less tiresome than it sounds. I’ve been there before – as I suspect you already know, Dr Shelby. I’ll survive. It is gentle Francis I fear for most.’
Nicholas understands that fear only too well. It’s not just their altars and their vestments – the outward trappings of their hated religion – that damn these Jesuits to a traitor’s death. It’s not their taking of confession or their dispensing of indulgencies. It’s not even their Masses. It’s the fact that they carry with them the Pope’s message to all the English: that God will excuse them when they rise up and overthrow their heretical, excommunicated queen.
‘You underestimate the danger to yourself, my lord,’ says Nicholas. ‘I’m sure I don’t have to remind you that hiding a Jesuit priest is a felony. And to hide one in a place the queen visits often, to allow him to give the Mass in a chapel she herself may even pray in, is tantamount to treason. If Robert Cecil has his way, it will mean the scaffold not just for Master Deniker, but very probably for you, too.’
‘The question is: are you going to tell him?’ asks Lizzy Lumley. ‘Will you condemn these two good souls to the torment their enemies will demand – all to save this tavern-mistress of yours?’
Before Nicholas can answer, Francis Deniker says ‘That is a fate I have been prepared to suffer since I first entered a seminary. I am prepared, and strengthened.’ He glances at Lumley. ‘But I would beseech you, sir, do not be the cause of this good man’s destruction.’
Nicholas takes a deep breath, gathering up his conscience with it. He imagines the fate in store for Deniker and Lumley: dragged through the city streets so that good men and women of the new faith may spit upon them; half-hanged on the gibbet, then cut down to enjoy with the baying mob the spectacle of what follows: their disembowelling, their privy parts burned before their dying eyes, mercy coming only when the axe slams into their limbs for the final quartering. ‘None of you need fear me,’ he says. ‘Robert Cecil will never learn from me what I saw here. You have my word on it.’ Then he offers up a silent promise to Bianca that he will find some other way to protect her from Burghley’s hunch-backed son.
‘Thank you, Dr Shelby. My trust in you was justified,’ says Lumley, exhaling in relief. He takes his wife’s arm and draws her close. ‘I think we may consider our own devotions at an end, Mouse – for today. But that does not absolve us of our duty. If Dr Shelby is right, there is someone else here at Nonsuch much in need of our prayers.’