It took a few lines for someone to realize they had been joined by an extra voice.
The result couldn’t have been more dramatic. Joanna stopped dead in her tracks, as though she’d forgotten the words. Someone gasped. Every bowed head lifted and turned towards the girl. And then everyone was urging her on, as though they feared that if she stopped, the old impenetrable silence would come back to reclaim her.
And after that: much hugging and dancing and singing, which Joanna avowed was a most ungodly way to behave after the Lord’s Prayer, but joined in with anyway. Followed – at least for Elise – by the sleep of the saved.
But enough of the old wariness – the alert stringing of the senses for the faintest hint of danger – remains with her. Some two hours after she first closed her eyes she awakes to the murmur of voices in the corridor. The first she recognizes at once. It is Joanna’s.
‘Mercy, what time is this for you to be calling for the child again? She’s asleep. Let her rest.’
The answering voice is less familiar to her, and in her drowsiness she struggles to give it a face. ‘This cannot wait until morning. The child is to come now. Wake her, please.’
‘And what am I to tell the poor chub when I do?’
The voice is low and full of a dark urgency. ‘It is a privy matter, Mistress Joanna.’
‘Well, good or ill, it can wait until morning,’ says Joanna protectively.
‘Do you defy Lord Lumley?’
‘In no measure. But if he wishes to disturb the well-deserved sleep of our little talisman, he can come and speak to her here. She’s not a dog to be woken from the hearth whenever a body feels like making a pet of her. Have you any idea of the hour?’
Elise does not hear the reply, if indeed there is one. The call of her dreamless sleep is irresistible.
A full moon hangs in a sky rent with fragments of scudding cloud. In the lapping of its light, the Nonsuch mews lie along one side of the kitchen yard like the pale wreck of a ship cast upon a reef. In this simple wooden cloister Lord Lumley’s falconer keeps his master’s birds of prey. Nicholas wonders why Francis Deniker has chosen here, of all places, to meet.
The priest’s note has set his mind racing. How can Deniker possibly know the identity of the killer? Surely he can’t be here at Nonsuch – Elise Cullen would have bolted like a startled hind at the first sight of him. And if he is, why has he not taken care to remove the one soul who can identify him?
And then he remembers Quigley reading from Elise’s testament in John Lumley’s study: Lord Lumley asks the child if the Devil manifested himself to her. Her reply: ‘No, sir, he did not.’ Elise Cullen hasn’t seen the face of the killer. But nor has the killer seen hers.
And then another thought occurs to him: what if the note is a lie? It could be nothing more than a morsel of bait laid to lure him here. The Jesuit might appear a gentle fellow on the surface, but the brave words he spoke in the Lumley chapel will bring him little ease in the face of martyrdom on the scaffold. With Nicholas dead, Francis Deniker would be safe.
But try as he might, Nicholas can’t cast Francis Deniker in the role of assassin. And anyway, if it is a trap, he’s forewarned. The priest is no match for a Suffolk yeoman’s son.
Cautiously, he opens the door and enters the mews. There’s a soft rustle of feathers as the birds wake from their sleep. They make a strangely gentle sound, these creatures of talon and razor-sharp beak. Like cats meowing. Has he disturbed their dreams of aerial slaughter – or do they just think he’s come to feed them?
Shafts of moonlight penetrate the unshuttered windows. Scattered across his path are streaks of white mute – hawk-shit. The birds stand upon low wooden blocks like executioners waiting for a commission. They watch him with fierce yellow eyes that hold no discernible emotion other than the desire to kill. One of them hops down onto the ground, skips to the limit of the long leather cord that secures him by one leg, spreads his wings and disgorges a small pellet from his beak. Nicholas can smell a pungency of digested shrew and mouse, of coney flesh, of blood and gore. He thinks, thank God these birds don’t work for the Cecils, or we’d all be dead.
The storeroom lies at the end of the mews, almost invisible in the darkness. Nicholas feels his way along one wall, past shelves containing the paraphernalia of the falconer’s world: punches and shears for cutting the leather jesses that hang from the birds’ talons, imping needles for repairing broken feathers, rolls of padding and wire for the construction of bow perches. Reaching the end, he stumbles over a knee-high pile of dusty sacking, before recovering his balance and trying the storeroom door.
It’s unlatched and ajar.
‘Deniker, are you there?’ he calls softly. ‘It’s me, Nicholas – Nicholas Shelby.’
The only reply is a short, unearthly mewling from one of the falcons. He calls again.
Still no reply.
Nicholas pushes the door open a little further. It yields into utter blackness. A musty smell from within reminds him of the ancient threshing barn on his father’s farm in Suffolk. It comforts him, helps keep his breathing calm. He steps cautiously inside, almost blind in the darkness.
And as he does so, he senses a sudden disturbance in the night air – the sleepy stretching of a hawk’s wing somewhere behind him. He turns to look back over his shoulder, assuming Deniker has entered the mews.
And then a blinding white light floods into him. The moon has fallen from the sky, crushing him, forcing his senses into the unyielding Surrey clay, driving him down into black nothingness.
41
‘What if Shelby is lying to us? He’s done so before,’ says Lizzy, sensing John shifting fitfully in the darkness against the bolster of the great bed. ‘We can’t let him destroy us, Husband. Not after all you’ve been through.’
‘I trust him to keep his word, Mouse. I think he’s an honest man.’
‘Who lied to you from the very beginning!’
‘That’s not true – he swore there was no deceit in his first letter, remember?’
‘And you believe him? A man who works for Robert Cecil?’
‘He does not work for Cecil. He was coerced by him. I thought you liked him.’
‘I thought him charming when he came here. Now I’m not so sure.’
‘Did you not witness him with Elise, Mouse? Those weren’t the actions of a man whose soul is chained to the Cecils’ ambition.’
‘But there’s something about him – I fear he may carry chaos in that smile of his.’
‘Hush, Mouse. Sleep awhile.’
‘How can I, when all I can think of is what might yet happen to you and Francis, if he’s lying? And when I’m not thinking of that, I can’t free myself from imagining how that poor young girl has suffered – her brother and the others, too.’
‘Nicholas Shelby is an honest man, Mouse. From what he’s told us, has he not grieved enough to win your trust?’
Lizzy sits bolt upright in bed. ‘You’re right. I need to lay these fears of mine to rest. I shall start with a clear conscience – I’ll have Francis hear my confession.’
‘Now? It’s not even dawn, Mouse,’ John says, turning over yet again. ‘Give the poor man his rest. Let him hear what’s in your soul when the sun is up. Our sins are easier borne in the light.’
Bianca stands in the physic garden, pale as death in the pre-dawn moonlight. She’s come to hear her thoughts. It’s easier to do so here.