by C. J. Sansom
‘I saw you look away when Lust was suddenly struck down during the play.’
‘Ay. It frightens me, Matthew.’ Suddenly he looked vulnerable, like a little boy. I pressed his arm.
In recent weeks Roger had several times unexpectedly lost his balance and fallen over, for no apparent reason. He feared he was developing the falling sickness, that terrible affliction where a man or woman, quite healthy in other ways, will periodically collapse on the ground, out of their senses, writhing and grunting. The illness, which was untreatable, was regarded by some as a kind of temporary madness and by others as evidence of possession by an evil spirit. The fact that spectacular symptoms could erupt at any moment meant people avoided sufferers. It would mean the end of a lawyer’s career.
I pressed his arm. ‘Guy will find the truth of it, I promise.’ Roger had unburdened himself to me over lunch the week before, and I had arranged for him to see my physician friend as soon as possible - in four days’ time.
Roger smiled crookedly. ‘Let us hope it is news I shall care to hear.’ He lowered his voice. ‘I have told Dorothy I have been having stomach pains. I think it best. Women only worry.’
‘So do we, Roger.’ I smiled. ‘And sometimes without cause. There could be many reasons for this falling over; and remember; you have had no seizures.’
‘I know. ’Tis true.’
‘Dorothy tells me you have had some new idea,’ I said, to distract him.
‘Yes.’ He smiled wryly. ‘I was telling friend Loder about it, but he seems little interested.’ He glanced over his guests. ‘None of us here is poor,’ he said quietly.
He took my arm, leading me away a little. ‘I have been reading Roderick Mors’ new book, the Lamentation of a Christian against the City of London.’
‘You should be careful. Some call it seditious.’
‘The truth affrights them.’ Roger’s tones were quiet but intense. ‘By Jesu, Mors’ book is an indictment of our city. It shows how all the wealth of the monasteries has gone to the King or his courtiers. The monastic schools and hospitals closed down, the sick left to fend for themselves. The monks’ care was niggardly enough but now they have nothing. It shames us all, the legions of miserable people lying in the streets, sick and half dead. I saw a boy in a doorway in Cheapside yesterday, his bare feet half rotted away with frostbite. I gave him sixpence, but it was a hospital he needed, Matthew.’
‘But as you say, most have been closed.’
‘Which is why I am going to canvass for a hospital funded by the Inns of Court. With an initial subscription, then a fund for bequests and donations from the lawyers.’
‘Have you spoken to the Treasurer?’
‘Not yet.’ Roger smiled again. ‘I am honing my arguments on these fellows.’ He nodded towards the plump form of Loder. ‘Ambrose there said the poor offend every passer-by with their dangerous stinks and vapours; he might pay money to have the streets cleared. Others complain of importunate beggars calling everywhere for God’s penny. I promise them a quiet life. There are arguments to persuade those who lack charity.’ He smiled, then looked at me seriously. ‘Will you help?’
I considered a moment. ‘Even if you succeed, what can one hospital do in the face of the misery all around?’
‘Relieve a few poor souls.’
‘I will help you if I can.’ If anyone could accomplish this task it was Roger. His energy and quick wits would count for much. ‘I will subscribe to your hospital, and help you raise subscriptions, if you like.’
Roger squeezed my arm. ‘I knew you would help me. Soon I will organize a committee—’
‘Another committee?’ Dorothy had returned, red-faced from the heat of the kitchen. She looked quizzically at her husband. Roger put his arm round her waist.
‘For the hospital, sweetheart.’
‘People will be hard to persuade. Their purses smart from all the King’s taxes.’
‘And may suffer more,’ I said. ‘They say this new Parliament will be asked to grant yet more money for the King to go to war with France.’
‘The waste,’ Roger said bitterly. ‘When one thinks of how the money could be used. But yes, he will see this as the right time for such an enterprise. With the Scotch King dead and this baby girl on their throne, they cannot intervene on the French side.’
I nodded agreement. ‘The King has sent the Scotch lords captured after Solway Moss back home; it is said they have sworn oaths to bring a marriage between Prince Edward and the baby Mary.’
‘You are well informed as ever, Matthew,’ Dorothy said. ‘Does Barak still bring gossip from his friends among the court servants?’
‘He does.’
‘I have heard that the King is after a new wife.’
‘They have been saying that since Catherine Howard was executed,’ Roger said. ‘Who is it supposed to be now?’
‘Lady Latimer,’ Dorothy replied. ‘Her husband died last week. There is to be a great funeral the day after tomorrow. ’Tis said the King has had a fancy for her for some years, and that he will move now.’
I had not heard that rumour. ‘Poor woman,’ I said. I lowered my voice. ‘She needs fear for her head.’
‘Yes.’ Dorothy nodded, was quiet for a second, then raised her voice and clapped her hands. ‘Dinner is ready, my friends.’
We all walked through to the dining room. The long old oaken dining table was set with plates of silver, and servants were laying out dishes of food under Elias’ supervision. Pride of place went to four large chickens; as it was still Lent the law would normally have allowed only fish to be eaten at this time, but the freezing of the river that winter had made fish prohibitively expensive and the King had given permission for people to eat white meat.
We took our places. I sat between Loder, with whom Roger had been arguing earlier, and James Ryprose, an elderly barrister with bristly whiskers framing a face as wrinkled as an old apple-john. Opposite us sat Dorothy and Roger and Mrs Loder, who was as plump and contented-looking as her husband. She smiled at me, showing a full set of white teeth, and then to my surprise reached into her mouth and pulled out both rows. I saw the teeth were fixed into two dentures of wood, cut to fit over the few grey stumps that were all that was left of her own teeth.
‘They look good, do they not?’ she asked, catching my stare. ‘A barber-surgeon in Cheapside made them up for me. I cannot eat with them, of course.’
‘Put them away, Johanna,’ her husband said. ‘The company does not want to stare at those while we eat.’ Johanna pouted, so far as an almost toothless woman can, and deposited the teeth in a little box which she put away in the folds of her dress. I repressed a shudder. I found the French fashion some in the upper classes had adopted for wearing mouthfuls of teeth taken from dead people, rather gruesome.
Roger began talking about his hospital again, addressing his arguments this time to old Ryprose. ‘Think of the sick and helpless people we could take from the streets, maybe cure.’
‘Ay, that would be a worthwhile thing,’ the old man agreed. ‘But what of all the fit sturdy beggars that infest the streets, pestering one for money, sometimes with threats? What is to be done with them? I am an old man and sometimes fear to walk out alone.’
‘Very true.’ Brother Loder leaned across me to voice his agreement. ‘Those two that robbed and killed poor Brother Goodcole by the gates last November were masterless servants from the monasteries. And they would not have been caught had they not gone bragging of what they had done in the taverns where they spent poor Goodcole’s money, and had an honest inn-keeper not raised the constable.’
‘Ay, ay.’ Ryprose nodded vigorously. ‘No wonder masterless men beg and rob with impunity, when all the city has to ensure our safety are a few constables, most nearly as old as me.’
‘The city council should appoint some strong men to whip them out of the city,’ Loder said.
‘But, Ambrose,’ his wife said quietly. ‘Why be so harsh? When you were younger you used
to argue the workless poor had a right to be given employment, the city should pay them to do useful things like pave the streets. You were always quoting Erasmus and Juan Vives on the duties of a Christian Commonwealth towards the unfortunate.’ She smiled at him sweetly, gaining revenge perhaps for his curt remark about her teeth.
‘So you were, Ambrose,’ Roger said. ‘I remember it well.’
‘And I,’ Dorothy agreed. ‘You used to wax most fiercely about the duties of the King towards the poor.’
‘Well, there’s no interest from that quarter, so I don’t see what we’re supposed to do.’ Loder frowned at his wife. ‘Take ten thousand scabby beggars into the Inn and feed them at High Table?’
‘No,’ Roger answered gently. ‘Merely use our status as wealthy men to help a few. Till better times come, perhaps.’
‘It’s not just the beggars that make walking the streets a misery,’ old Ryprose added gloomily. ‘There’s all these ranting Bible-men springing up everywhere. There’s one at the bottom of Newgate Street, stands there all day, barking and railing that the Apocalypse is coming.’
There were murmurs of agreement up and down the table. In the years since Thomas Cromwell’s fall, the King’s patronage of the reformers who had encouraged him to break with Rome had ended. He had never fully endorsed Lutheran beliefs, and now he was moving gradually back to the old forms of religion, a sort of Catholicism without the Pope, with increasingly repressive measures against dissentients; to deny that the bread and wine of the sacrament were transformed into the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ was now a heresy attracting the death penalty. Even the doctrine of purgatory was becoming respectable again. All this was anathema to the radicals, for whom the only truth was to be found in the Bible. The persecution had only driven many reformers towards the radical fringes, and in London especially they were daring and vocal.
‘Do you know what I saw in the street today?’ another guest said. ‘Outside one church people were laying branches in the snow for the Palm Sunday ceremonies tomorrow. Then a rabble of apprentices appeared and kicked the branches away, calling out that it was a papist ceremony and the Pope was the Antichrist!’
‘This religious radicalism gives apprentices another excuse to run wild,’ Loder observed gloomily.
‘There could be trouble tomorrow,’ Roger said.
I nodded. On Palm Sunday the traditional churches would be having the usual ceremonies, the churchwardens dressed as prophets and a child riding in on a donkey, while the radical preachers in their churches would be calling it papist blasphemy.
‘There’ll be another purge,’ someone said gloomily. ‘I’ve heard rumours Bishop Bonner is going to crack down hard on the Bible-men.’
‘Not more burnings,’ Dorothy said quietly.
‘The city wouldn’t stand for that,’ Loder said. ‘People don’t like the radicals, but they like burnings less. Bonner won’t go that far.’
‘Won’t he?’ Roger said quietly. ‘Isn’t he a fanatic too, on the other side? Isn’t the whole city becoming divided?’
‘Most people only want a quiet life,’ I said. ‘Even those of us who were once radicals.’ I smiled wryly at Roger. He nodded in acknowledgement.
‘Fanatics on both sides,’ old Ryprose said gloomily. ‘And all we poor ordinary folk in the middle. Sometimes I fear they will bring death to us all.’
THE COMPANY broke up late, and I was one of the last to leave. I stepped out into a night that had become colder again, refrozen slush crunching under my boots. My mood was much less cheerful after the conversation round the dinner table. It was true that London was full of both beggars and fanatics now, an unhappy city. And a purge would make things worse. There was, too, something I had not told the company; the parents of the boy in the Bedlam were members of a radical Protestant congregation, and their son’s mental problems were religious in nature. I wished I had not had to take the case, but I was obliged to deal with the Requests cases that were allocated to me. And his parents wanted their son released.
I paused. A quiet footstep, crunching on the slush behind me. I turned, frowning. The precincts of Lincoln’s Inn were supposed to be secure, but there were places where entry could be gained. The night was dark, the moon half hidden by clouds, and at this hour only a few lighted windows cast squares of light on the snow.
‘Who’s that!’ I called.
There was no reply, but I heard the slush crackling again as someone walked rapidly away. Frowning, I followed. The sound came from the far end of the building where the Elliards lived; it adjoined the rear wall of Lincoln’s Inn. I put my hand to my dagger as I rounded the corner of the building. The outer wall was ahead of me. Whoever was there was trapped. But no one was there. The little square of ground between the buildings and the twelve-foot-high rear wall, lit by the windows of the Elliards’ apartment, was quite empty. A shiver trickled down my spine.
Then I saw the snow on top of the wall had been disturbed. Whoever it was had climbed over. I stood and stared; to scale that wall would require a good deal of strength and agility. I was not sure I would have said it was possible, but the empty yard and the disturbed snow told their own tale. I frowned and turned away; I would tell the watchman that broken glass should be set atop the wall.
Chapter Two
NEXT MORNING I set out early for my chambers; the parents of the boy who had been put in the Bedlam were due at nine. The details the Court of Requests had sent me were sketchy, but enough to be worrying. The Privy Council itself had put him there, ‘for blaspheming true religion in his madcap frenzy’, as their resolution put it, without even an indictment in the bishop’s court. The matter was therefore political, and dangerous. I tried to reassure myself again that any involvement I had would be in a purely legal capacity, but cursed the luck that had sent this case to me rather than to my fellow-pleader.
The papers described the boy, Adam Kite, as the son of a master stonemason and a communicant at St Martin’s church, Creek Lane. I had got Barak to investigate and he had reported back that the vicar was, as he put it, a ‘great railer and thunderer’.
This was unwelcome news. In the dealings I had had with the godly men I had found them difficult to deal with, crude hard men who drove at you with biblical verses like a carpenter hammering in nails.
I was jerked from my worrisome thoughts as I slipped on a patch of slush and almost fell over. Somebody laughed.
All over the city, church bells were ringing for the Palm Sunday services. These days I only went to church when it was expected; next Sunday I would have to take Mass and make my annual confession. I was not looking forward to it. The topsy-turvy weather was warmer again, and Chancery Lane was muddy as a farmyard. As I passed under Lincoln’s Inn Gatehouse I wondered if the Treasurer would do anything to secure that wall. I had told the gatekeeper to inform him of my near-encounter last night.
I felt something wet hit my face; another drop followed and I realized it was raining, the first rain after two months of snow. By the time I reached my chambers it was coming on heavily and my cap was soaked. To my surprise, Barak was already in the outer office. He had lit the fire and sat at the big table, getting papers in order for tomorrow’s court session. Plaints, affidavits and statements were piled around him. His handsome, impish features looked tired, his eyes bloodshot. And his face was stubbly.
‘You need to get a shave, or the judge will be calling you out for a disrespectful demeanour.’ Though I spoke roughly, Barak and I had a fast friendship. We had originally come together on an assignment for Barak’s late master, the King’s Minister Thomas Cromwell. After Cromwell’s execution three years before, Barak had come to work for me, an unorthodox assistant but an efficient one.
‘All right,’ he said grumpily. ‘The madwag’s parents are due soon.’
‘Don’t call him that,’ I said as I looked through the papers he had prepared. Everything was in order, annotations made in Barak’s spidery handwriting. ‘In on Sunday?’ I aske
d. ‘You were here yesterday too? You are neglecting poor Tamasin.’
‘She’s all right.’ Barak rose and began filing away books and papers. I looked at his broad back, wondering what was wrong between him and his wife that he should thus drag out his time at work and, by the look of him, stay out all night. Tamasin was a pretty girl, as spirited as Barak, and he had been happy to marry her last year even though they had been forced into a speedy wedding by her pregnancy. Their son had died the day he was born and in the months since, though Barak had been as cheerfully irreverent as ever, there was often something forced about his banter, at times something haunted in his eyes. I knew the loss of a child could bring some couples closer, but drive others apart.
‘You saw Adam Kite’s parents yesterday when they called to make their appointment,’ I said. ‘Goodman Kite and his wife. What are they like?’
He turned back to me. ‘Working people, he’s a stonemason. He started on about God’s mercy in allowing them to take their case to Requests, how He doesn’t abandon the true faithful.’ Barak wrinkled his nose. ‘They look like some of the busy Bible folk to me. Though the godly folk I have seen mostly seem very satisfied with themselves, and the Kites looked like a pair of squished cats.’
‘Not surprising given what’s happened.’
‘I know.’ Barak hesitated. ‘Will you have to go there, among all the lunatics tearing their clothes and clanking their chains?’
‘Probably.’ I looked again at the papers. ‘The boy is seventeen. Brought before the Council on the third of March for frantic and lewd behaviour at the Preaching Cross in St Paul’s churchyard, railing there “with strange moans and shrieks”. Committed to the Bedlam in the hope of a cure. No further order. No examination by a doctor or jury of his state of health. That’s improper.’
Barak looked at me seriously. ‘He’s lucky they didn’t arraign him for a heretic. Remember what happened to Richard Mekins and John Collins.’
‘The Council are more careful now.’
