Or Tyrrell could just be waiting for the tide to turn, thinks Nicholas. He remembers the line from one of Tyrrell’s papers: I have sent secret word to JL and PK, who were with me at the drawing-up of Her Majesty’s Will and testament…
‘Do the initials JL or PK mean anything to you, my lord?’
‘In connection with Tyrrell? Of course,’ Lumley says without hesitating. ‘John Lowell and Peter Kirkbie. They were both gentlemen of Queen Mary’s privy chamber – part of a cabal at court.’
‘What manner of cabal?’
‘Zealots. Young fellows fired with the desire to preserve the one true faith.’
‘Trusted by Mary?’
‘More than trusted, Nicholas. They helped draw up the lists of those to be burned for the blasphemies that had gone before. They counselled Mary against mercy. They gave her strength. To be honest, I thought they were insufferably sanctimonious. They seemed to think God spoke only to them, and always in words of fire.’
‘And Tyrrell was part of this cabal?’
‘On the fringes, never at its heart. Otherwise he’d never have risked staying after Mary’s death.’
‘And I take it that Lowell and Kirkbie are, as you put it, “presently living beyond our shores for their own safety”?’
‘The Brothers were abroad when Mary died, on an embassy to Philip of Spain. Given their history, it will not surprise you that they dared not return when Elizabeth ascended the throne.’
‘Brothers? Lowell and Kirkbie are brothers?’
Lumley laughs at Nicholas’s misinterpretation. ‘Brothers in Christ, Nicholas. At Mary’s court they called themselves “The Brothers of Antioch”. Antioch was where Christ’s disciples were first named Christians.’
Nicholas’s heart begins to beat faster. He almost dreads where his next question will lead.
‘Did you ever have sight of Mary’s Will, my lord?’
Lumley gives him a quizzical look. ‘Yes, I was with my father-in-law, the Earl of Arundel, when the Will was read before the ministers of her council, a few months before she died.’
‘Then you know Mary believed herself to be with child?’
‘I have an uncomfortable feeling about where this is leading, Nicholas.’
‘The question I need answering, my lord, is this: Was it true? Was there a child?’
For a moment Lumley does not reply. He looks around the courtyard to ensure he cannot be overheard. Then he speaks softly, as if he’s frightened even the birds might bear witness to his words.
‘You must understand, Nicholas, it was a time of great uproar and jeopardy. Mary had married a Spanish prince. That prince had become King. But Mary’s ministers refused to allow him to rule in England. Once he’d accepted that, Philip became an absent husband…’
‘But could there have been issue?’
Lumley raises a hand to calm Nicholas’s impatience. ‘Philip came to England for a brief while in the year before Mary died. He could have sired a child on her then. It’s certainly what she believed in early ’58. After he left, Mary declined with each passing day. She became ever more dispirited. We all knew it was just a matter of time. And so did she.’
‘She knew she was dying?’
‘That’s why she made her Will. But she would not give up hope that a child might yet be born. And nor would the more zealous of her advisors. Not until almost the very end.’
‘But you yourself witnessed no visible sign that she was carrying a child?’
‘We saw but little of her in those last months. I heard from those close to her that there was a swollen belly. But her first – in ’55 – had turned out to be nothing but a deceit of the body. We assumed the same malady was afflicting her then.’
Nicholas stares at the sky, marshalling his thoughts. ‘When did Philip depart England for the last time?’
‘July 1557.’
‘So if there was a child, it would have been born before the end of April ’58.’
‘Yes,’ says Lumley. ‘But in her Will, Mary denied the pregnancy. No infant was ever brought before her ministers.’
‘My lord, I’ve seen papers that suggest that denial was forged. They suggest that a daughter was born.’
Lumley’s long face is customarily pale. Now it looks to Nicholas like the face of a corpse. ‘Do you have these papers, Nicholas?’
‘I have access to them.’
‘Then I advise you to burn them at the earliest opportunity! On that matter, you are treading on thin ice, Nicholas. Keep walking and you’ll likely discover there’s very deep water beneath.’ Lumley takes his arm in a warning grip. ‘That’s my counsel. Burn them. Unless, of course, you’re content to be remembered as the man who opened the way to a civil war.’
13
The guildhall of the College of Physicians is a fine timbered building on Knightrider Street to the south-west of St Paul’s. Though modest in size, it exudes an air of almost Puritan rectitude. The learned Fellows who pass through its door are no less sober in dress and character. A bright ribbon tied around the knee, too extravagant a feather in your cap, and you’ll be taken for a dangerous renegade. Nicholas remembers how Eleanor used to tease him that one day she would wake up to find herself the wife of just such a staid and stern physician.
Eleanor had been the very antithesis of conventionaclass="underline" a lithelimbed, freckled meadow-sprite daughter of a neighbouring Barnthorpe yeoman, as hard to hold in one place as gossamer caught on a summer breeze. How could she ever have loved such a country dullard as I? he wonders. She’d had time enough, after all, to see his many faults – they’d known each other since childhood. Yet when he’d asked her to marry him – barely three years ago now, at the Barnthorpe May Fair – she’d coolly asked him why it had taken him so long to pluck up the courage.
Wondering if his imaginings in John Lumley’s orchard might have been somewhat premature, Nicholas rubs a precautionary hand across his eyes. He cannot enter this stolid place unmanned by tears.
Shown into a stuffy, low-ceilinged chamber on the first floor, Nicholas is allowed a moment’s enjoyment of the noise of carts passing by in the street and the smell of the wet-fish stalls, before a clerk in formal gown closes the window. The physicians would have the Lord Mayor expel the fishmongers from Knightrider Street, but the Fishmongers’ Guild was incorporated first – by a good two hundred years. So the physicians must either sweat or smell fish. The impasse does not bode well for Nicholas.
Behind a long polished table, their backs to the window, four Censors sit like hanging judges, resplendent in formal gowns and starched ruffs. Led by Arnold Beston, a wiry little man with a squint in his left eye that gives him a permanently doubting expression, they are charged with maintaining the College’s professional standards. It’s clear to Nicholas from the start that they consider him lacking in every single one.
‘Mr Shelby, where is your doctor’s gown?’ asks Beston.
‘I don’t have one,’ says Nicholas bravely.
‘You don’t own one – or you were never awarded one?’
From the other end of the line, Censor Frowicke stabs at a sheet of paper with a finger. ‘It says here – Michaelmas ’86, under Professor Lorkin.’
‘Then where is the gown, Mr Shelby?’ asks Beston.
‘I threw it away. Into the Thames. October last, if I recall. My memory of that time can be unreliable.’
Silence, save for the low rumble from the street. Thank God they can’t smell the fish, thinks Nicholas.
‘You threw your gown away?’ asks Frowicke in disbelief. ‘Whatever for?’