by Sarah Rayne
‘That is – a very unusual story.’
‘She was a very unusual lady. Tales are told of how she travelled out of Italy and through many lands over many years, and how she played the music as she went.’ A faraway look crept into his eyes. ‘They say that at times during her lonely travels she sang into the still night, and it was so beautiful and so alluring a sound that men would wake from slumber and lie listening. They said she could call the dead out of their tombs with her songs, and also how at times she could ease the passing of the dying.’ He paused, and then said, ‘She is reputed to have had many lovers, that long-ago lady, but to her only son she bequeathed her lute and the devil’s music that she swore must be handed on. This—’ he touched the lute, ‘comes in direct line from her.’
Catherine thought that the assignation was not turning out quite as she had expected, but this was a fascinating story. She was unsure of precisely where Cremona was, but it would not do to say so. The lute was very beautiful. She turned it over in her hands and as she did so it gave the faintest shiver of sound. Sweet. What had he said? My ancestress bargained for the devil’s music . . .
Catherine said, ‘Why am I to have this?’
For a moment the minstrel did not speak. Catherine saw now that he was certainly nearer forty than thirty. There were lines at the corners of his eyes and about his mouth. And although his hair appeared to be a shiny cap of molten gold it was touched with silver gilt at the temples. She had the impression that he was unwrapping some fragile precious memory. But at last, he said, ‘Almost twenty years ago I sold this lute to a lady of the English Court. I did not wish to do so, but I was very poor at the time and very hungry. The lady to whom I offered it was lovely and gay and generous. She gave me a very good sum for the lute and I—’ A sudden smile so reckless and so filled with mischief that Catherine blinked. ‘I was able to eat again and pay for a bed for the night and for many nights afterwards,’ he said. ‘I stayed in England then; I was grateful to the lady and I was interested in her. I watched her rise to prominence. And then, five years ago, I watched her fall as well.’ He reached out to touch the lute’s smooth surface, and as he did so, his hand brushed Catherine’s bare wrist. A dozen white-hot wires seemed to pierce her skin, and she shivered.
‘Before she died, she sent for me,’ he said. ‘She returned the lute to me and made me promise that it should be passed to you.’
‘Why?’
‘Because she understood its power,’ said the minstrel. ‘Because she wanted you to have it.’
‘The lute? Or the power?’ said Catherine in a whisper.
‘The two go together.’ The minstrel touched the lute again. ‘My ancestress coaxed this out of the devil four centuries ago,’ he said. ‘And the devil taught her his music. Twenty years ago I taught that music to your cousin.
‘Anne Boleyn.’
Chapter Twenty-Six
Nicolas could remember it as clearly as if it had been yesterday. How she had sent that imperious message via one of her trusted servants – ‘You must come at once’ – and how he had gone instantly, almost without thinking about it. He thought that anyone she beckoned to would do the same. Yes, but would they have done so before she had the lute and before he had taught her Isabella’s music?
He had been taken in to the Tower by one of her women – there had been some jumbled plot about his having brought a message from her family – he could not remember the details, and he was not sure if he had ever known them. But he had been taken to her.
Even in prison she had been haughty. She had received him as arrogantly as if she had been still Henry’s pampered, cossetted Queen, and Nicolas had thought: madame, you have come a very long way from that eager young girl who bought from me the devil’s lute of my ancestress and who laughed when I warned of the music’s force.
She indicated to him to be seated and regarded him composedly. When she spoke, her voice was exactly as he remembered it: low-pitched and faintly husky.
‘You see, Minstrel, I have travelled a long road since we met.’
Nicolas jumped because her words had been uncannily in tune with his thoughts, and he remembered the vague rumours of witchcraft that had always surrounded her. But he said gently, ‘So you have, madame, and I am sorry for it.’
‘It does not matter now.’ For a moment the dark eyes that no painter had ever been able to capture were inward-looking, and Nicolas thought: she is going to break. She is going to break now and I am going to be the one to witness it. She has resisted cardinals and chancellors and kings without fear, but the fear is very close to the surface. It’s in her eyes. It’s like staring into a black abyss . . . As if I am seeing into her soul . . . And then Anne turned away and when she spoke again, he knew the moment had passed. She would not break now and he was glad. For I should like to remember her as she would wish: imperious, aloof. Untouchable. Touch me not, for Caesar’s I am . . . One of her admirers had written that to her, and Nicolas saw how true the words had been.
In her cool, low-pitched voice, she said, ‘There is one thing I will ask of you.’ The dark eyes flickered back to him. ‘It is the request of a dying woman.’ There was a glint of wry mischief.
Nicolas said, ‘Yes?’
‘The lute you sold to me so many years ago.’
‘Well?’
‘You remember it?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘I thought you would.’ She paused, as if weighing up two courses of action, and then said, ‘When she is old enough, I should wish the lute to be given to my cousin. Catherine – Edmund Howard’s girl. You are the only one I can trust to do it. Teach her the music you taught me.’ A pause. ‘Tell her it failed me, but it may not fail her.’ The dark eyes met his coolly, but Nicolas felt as if a velvet-covered feline paw had traced a caress down his spine. He remembered again the whispers of witchcraft and he remembered how, four hundred years earlier, Isabella Amati was believed to have trafficked with the devil. And for almost twenty years, this thin-faced, haunted-eyed woman had possessed Isabella’s music, and for at least fifteen of those years she had held a King in such thrall that he had turned England upside-down for her and slaughtered monks wholesale to have her in his bed. Touch me not, for Satan’s I am.
He said, ‘You trust me to do that?’
‘I do.’ She studied him and after a moment she smiled. ‘Yes, I do trust you,’ she said. ‘I have not travelled that long road without learning who to trust and who not. You will do what I ask.’
‘Yes. But it seems an odd choice.’
She caught his meaning at once; she said, ‘You think it should be my daughter who has it? But Elizabeth is too young.’
‘Yes?’
‘And I do not think she will need it,’ said Anne.
‘The devil’s lute and the devil’s music is to go to Catherine Howard. For I have no more need of it.’
Nicolas sat in the window-seat of Lambeth House and watched Catherine Howard turn the ancient lute over in her hands. Three years since he had accepted the odd secret task; three years since he had stood on the edges of the crowd on Tower Hill and watched that strange disconcerting woman go to her death.
He looked back at Catherine Howard. This one had not the elusive bewitchment of her dead cousin, but for all that, Nicolas was reminded of Anne. Something of the same quality in the eyes and in the expressive, graceful hands. And the slender, flower-stem neck.
A prickle of disquiet ruffled his mind, but after a moment, he said, ‘Your cousin wished you to know the music that has come down with the lute. You permit?’ He reached for the lute again and ran his hands across the strings.
Catherine, staring, thought: he is caressing the lute as if it was a lover. How would it feel . . .? No, he is twenty years older than I am, an old man, and I could never . . . Yes, but his hands are slender and soft and they would feel like silk on your skin . . .
It won’t do, thought Catherine determinedly. Think of going to Court, think of the people there – men,
young men. Listen to the sequence of notes he is playing. Cool, beckoning. Insistent. This is what she wanted me to know about – Anne. How very extraordinary.
And then Nicolas handed her the lute and said, ‘You play it,’ and Catherine, her mind tumbling with sensuous delight, stared at him and thought: it would not matter if he was forty or thirty or seventy.
She began to trace out the sequence of sweet, silvery notes that four centuries earlier had been played by another wilful wanton lady with red hair, and that a thousand years before that had seduced a High Priest from his sacred vows. The music drifted into the quiet room. Like quicksilver breaking up and running in tiny, glinting fragments, thought Catherine. Like icicles tapping against frosted glass. A beckoning. Follow me and do as I bid you.
The music was borne upwards, like swansdown, so that it trickled into the upper rooms of the great house.
In one of those rooms, within the silver coffin, Ahasuerus stirred.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
As Isarel and Ciaran came through the English Midlands and merged with the rushing motorway traffic, Isarel said,
‘Ciaran, why did you really enter a monastery? You can tell me to mind my own business if you want, I’m only an ignorant Jew after all. But I’m curious.’
Ciaran who was driving, paused for so long that Isarel thought he was not going to answer. I’ve gone over the line this time, he thought.
But then Ciaran said, ‘Well, do you know, I was called into God’s service twelve years ago.’
‘As long ago as that? Then,’ said Isarel, ‘you’re older than I thought. Or are you?’
‘You didn’t quite ask,’ said Ciaran. ‘But since you’re being so unusually polite, I’ll say I was thirty when I rebelled against the world and the devil and all his works, and the rest of the circus.’
‘How? I mean,’ Isarel asked, ‘what happened?’
Again there was the hesitation, as if Ciaran was weighing up his thoughts. Then he said, ‘There’d been too many years in courtrooms manipulating the truth so that slippery criminals could walk free. And I was getting bored with telling half-truths and spinning specious lawyers’ arguments. I had a sneaking suspicion I was getting too good at it as well. And,’ he added wryly, ‘there had certainly been too many females in my life. I’d really have to say there were quite a lot of them.’
‘That I do believe,’ said Isarel.
‘I woke up one morning – in a bed I shouldn’t have been in in the first place – and thought: what in God’s name am I doing here? And the answer, of course, was that it wasn’t in God’s name at all.’ He glanced across at Isarel. ‘I felt physically sick that morning. As if I’d surfeited on rich food for weeks on end. I suddenly found that what I really wanted was to drink clean, pure, spring water. Does that sound ridiculous?’
‘No.’
‘I was sick in the unfamiliar bathroom,’ said Ciaran, his eyes intent on the roads which were shiny with rain in the gathering dusk. ‘And I was half suffering with a migraine from too much wine and too much sex.’
‘Too much wine,’ said Isarel promptly. ‘Nothing to do with sex.’
‘I’ll accept your judgement. Anyway, after I finished throwing up, I began to realise that the jagged light chiselling through my skull wasn’t a migraine at all. The light was inside my mind.’
Isarel, staring, said, ‘Paul on the road to Damascus.’
‘Well, not literally. The idea of swapping over to a more worthwhile life had been stealthily creeping up on me for some time; I’d simply chosen to ignore it. But there were little threads and little shoots furtively unrolling in my mind. That morning was simply the moment when everything polarised. It was as if – as if a trapdoor or a skylight had opened up somewhere far above my head and light was pouring in.’ Ciaran pulled into the middle lane to overtake a Mini. ‘I bade farewell to the lady—’ The mischievous glint that made him so very unmonkish showed unexpectedly. ‘Actually there were two of them in the bed that morning,’ he said with a reminiscent grin. ‘Although I should point out that I hadn’t made a habit of tripartite copulation.’
‘No, quite.’
‘Entering Curran Glen monastery didn’t happen for a very long time,’ said Ciaran, his eyes on the road. ‘It took me ages to accept that moment for what it was. I resisted and I rebelled. Sometimes I’m still resisting and sometimes I’m certainly still rebelling.’
‘But – it’s still there? The light?’
‘Yes. Warm and golden and incandescent. The light of the world, the burning and shining light . . . Evocative, those New Testament writers, weren’t they?’
‘“A lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path,’” said Isarel, half to himself.
‘So you do know parts of the Christian Bible? Yes, exactly.’ He glanced at the clock on the dashboard, and when he spoke again, Isarel knew that the moment of confidence had gone.
‘There’s a good three hours yet before we’ll reach London,’ said Ciaran. ‘Shall we stop somewhere for a bite of supper?’
‘Yes, and then I’ll take over the driving for a spell. Do we know where we’re staying, by the way?’
‘There’s a smallish Franciscan House in London. Father Abbot was to phone ahead and ask could they offer hospitality for a time. You’ll be sleeping in one of the bastions of Christianity tonight, my Hebrew friend.’
‘That’ll raise the price of pork,’ said Isarel. ‘Where exactly is this smallish Franciscan House?’
‘As a matter of fact it’s at Greenwich,’ said Ciaran.
‘On the site of the old Royal Palace by any chance? Yes, of course it would be,’ said Isarel sarcastically. ‘I daresay it’s all of a piece with the rest of this madness. I should have guessed we’d end up following some ridiculous Irish will-o’-the-wisp legend.’
‘Have you never heard that there are circles in Time, Isarel?’
‘Oh, there are circles in Time and there are spirals and corkscrews as well, and if we’re in anything at all, we’re in a corkscrew,’ said Isarel, at once. ‘In fact, now I come to think about it, screw is the operative word here. I suppose you think Ahasuerus is tracing a circle out, do you? The next thing you’ll do, you’ll start talking about Wheels of Fortune and quoting Beothius.’ He slid down in his seat and scowled out of the window.
Ciaran said, with perfect composure, ‘The existence of the circle in Time is certainly something that can’t be ignored.’
‘Oh God, I knew you were about to wax philosophic. Well, let’s go to the original site of Henry Tudor’s Royal Palace, if we must. The place where – what did you call him – Brother Martin came in pursuit of Ahasuerus in Fifteen Hundred and something.’
‘It feels odd to be in England and chasing Ahasuerus,’ said Ciaran suddenly. ‘I wonder are we going into a Time spiral after all.’
‘I bet it’ll turn out to be a corkscrew.’
Brother Martin thought it felt odd to be in England.
Sir Rodger Cheke would probably go straight to Greenwich, to lay before Thomas Cromwell and the King the spoils of his trip to Curran Glen, which meant that Martin might have to infiltrate the Court before the coffin could be regained. Therefore, certain practical matters had perforce to be considered. Martin could hardly appear at the palace wearing his monk’s habit and expect to be asked in and given a favoured place at table; it was more likely that he would be hauled off to the dungeons and put in chains.
If he was to reach Ahasuerus, he would have to present an acceptable appearance, but it could not be an appearance that Cheke – if Martin should encounter him – would connect with the stern monk from Curran Glen. Martin would keep Cheke at a distance, but it was important to allow for every possibility.
He had deliberately not shaved during the journey, and a dark glossy beard now framed his face. His hair had already grown and thickened over the tonsure and he studied his appearance in a square of looking glass and thought he looked very unlike the man Cheke had met so briefly two weeks earlier
. Suitably garbed, he could pass as a respectably landed squire, although it would have to be an Irish squire because the Irish accent was impossible to hide. He set himself to think which of the prominent Irish families had not offended the King, and decided on the buccaneering O’Neills. The O’Neills were one of the few Irish families still being regarded with approval by the Court, and it was rumoured that the rebellious chieftain, Con O’Neill, was to be created Earl of Tyrone. Martin thought he could use the O’Neills as a wedge to get into the Court. He would be deliberately vague about the exact degree of the relationship and even slightly embarrassed, so that a bastard connection would be assumed and awkward questions would not be asked. This was risky but not as risky as all that: Henry Tudor’s Court would never tolerate a monk in their midst but the majority of them were in no position to look askance at a bastard.
It was easier than he had dared hope to keep Cheke’s party in his sights as he crossed Ireland. Cheke’s men were noisy and disruptive; they left a trail of drunken quarrelling and womanising, which Martin, deliberately keeping one village, one township behind, followed with ease. Once or twice he had to bribe an inn-keeper or a toll-keeper to pick up the trail, but he had been prepared for this. In any case he knew where Cheke was heading and he had no intention of trying to re-capture Ahasuerus on the journey.
He stopped at religious houses as he went, rather liking meeting other Orders; grateful for the unquestioning bed and board he was given, and the promises of prayers for his quest.
‘We do not ask you to divulge any secrets, Brother,’ said one bright-eyed Abbot on Ireland’s east coast. ‘But if you should be returning by this road it would be very interesting to hear your story – if,’ he added scrupulously, ‘it is a story you are permitted to tell. And, of more immediate moment, we have arranged for you to cross to England by fishing boat.’
