by D. K. Wilson
‘Then you must know who was behind Robert’s murder and this attack.’
‘Know?’ He shook his head. ‘The enemy is hydra-headed. At court there is the Duke of Norfolk, the new queen and her whole Seymour brood and, of course, old Wily Winchester Bishop Gardiner. None of them would scruple to hire an assassin. They are all in league with Chapuys, the Emperor’s ambassador. He is as slippery and twisted as an adder. He has spies everywhere and the gold to pay for all manner of mischief. Then there’s Stokesley and his priestly crew. They still have more loyalty to the pope than the king and some of them are fanatical enough to commit murder and believe they do it in the name of God.’
‘A gloomy catalogue,’ I observed. If Robert had such an array of powerful enemies what chance did I have of getting at the truth – assuming that I survived?
‘Aye, but all is not lost. There are many Gospel-lovers around the king and he has complete trust in Thomas Cromwell. Norfolk and Gardiner hate Cromwell with a primal passion but they cannot dislodge him and he is a favourer of the Gospel.’
‘Robert always spoke well of Cromwell.’
‘Aye, he was in Master Secretary’s confidence and often carried messages for him when he travelled abroad. So, young man,’ Locke concluded, ‘you see what a mire you have stumbled into.’
Indeed I did. Now I could understand why Augustine had tried to dissuade me from my quest. It may have been partly concern for my own safety but he and his friends also did not want people like me stirring up trouble and drawing attention to them and their plans.
Later, as I lay in Locke’s comfortable guest chamber, I thought over the day’s dramatic and revealing events. One thing was clear: I no longer had the luxury of deciding whether or not I would investigate Robert’s murder. My involvement was already known to his associates and to his enemies. The only conviction they all shared was that Thomas Treviot should keep his nose out of what did not concern him. But the only choice before me now was either to unmask the assassin or wait for him to make another attempt on my life.
The next morning I arrived back in Goldsmith’s Row to find the whole house in a state of great agitation. The servants rushed out to greet us as soon as we clattered into the yard. I had scarcely tethered the young bay Master Locke had generously lent me before John Fink stood before me, anxiety and relief chasing themselves around his youthful, fresh-complexioned face.
‘Master, Master,’ he gasped, ‘are you all right? When you failed to return, we…’
‘All’s well, John,’ I said reassuringly.
‘But, Master, what happened?’
‘Someone tried to waylay us on our way home.’ I walked briskly into the house.
The apprentice followed, close on my heels. ‘Was it the same villain who shot Master Packington?’
‘I don’t know, John. He disappeared in the dark. Now, I have to leave again within the hour. I’m needed at Hemmings and this incident has already made me late.’ I strode through the kitchen.
Fink was still close behind me. ‘What if he tries again, Master?’
‘Who?’
‘The assassin.’
‘Then we must make sure we’re ready for him.’
As soon as I and my two servants had refreshed ourselves and I had given such instructions as were necessary, we set out again. At St Swithun’s House Ned was with difficulty concealing his impatience. ‘I wondered whether you might have reconsidered,’ he said, with a hint of reproach.
‘A promise is a promise,’ I replied. ‘I was… unavoidably delayed. If you are ready let us be on our way.’
We travelled over frost-hardened ground on a crisp, brittle morning, the low sun etching long black shadows across the track. Wherever the ground was not too hard and treacherously deep-rutted we cantered the horses. Otherwise, we were constrained to proceed at an ambling gait. As we journeyed I gave my companions a censored version of the previous day’s events. They would hear about Il Ombra’s attempted ambush sooner or later and I would rather they received a version that was as bland as I could make it.
Ned received the news sombrely. ‘I suppose this terrible experience has left you quite unchastened,’ he said.
‘Well, you did warn me,’ I replied.
He shook his head. ‘That gives me no satisfaction. I can only hope that what Lizzie has to tell you will deflect you from your stubborn path.’
At Otford we fell in with a group of devout travellers on the old pilgrimage route to Canterbury. As we jogged between ploughed fields whose ridges were being broken down by the frost a lean priest on an even leaner horse bemoaned the changing times.
‘Belike this will be our last chance to pray at St Thomas’s shrine.’
‘Why so?’ I asked.
‘The king means to bring it down,’ he replied with a sage nod of the head. ‘I have that on the best authority.’
‘That is right enough.’ The speaker was a lady in a fur-trimmed hood, who travelled with her chaplain and three of her women. ‘My cousin attends His Majesty in his chamber. According to him, that wretch Cromwell is forever urging him to lay his hands on the devout offerings presented to the saints. He claims this would make him the richest king in Christendom.’
‘A curse on the Jostler! A curse on the unholy trinity!’ The thin priest raised his piping voice in an outraged cry.
I turned to Ned, a questioning look on my face.
It was Jed who explained, with a raucous laugh. ‘Surely you’ve heard of the unholy trinity, Thomas?’
‘No.’
‘Its members are the Jostler, the Ostler and the Whore.’
‘The Jostler, I take it, is Cromwell.’
‘Aye,’ the priest agreed. ‘He is a nobody; the son of a Putney brewer and violent lawbreaker, who has jostled his way into the king’s council and elbowed aside greater men like Thomas More.’
‘And now,’ Ned added bitterly, ‘he is jostling monks and nuns out of their homes and honest men on to the gallows.’
‘So much for the Jostler,’ I said, in an effort to lighten the conversation. ‘Who is the Ostler?’
The priest sneered. ‘Why, that is Cranmer, His Grace of Canterbury. “Disgrace” more like. He’s better fitted to a groom’s apron than an archbishop’s pall.’
‘But why do you call him the Ostler?’
‘Why, the hypocrite is a twice-married man and his first wife was the daughter of a Cambridge innkeeper. His second he brought over from heresy-land – Germany. They say he hides her away in his manor at Ford and when she must travel she does so in a locked chest.’
I laughed. ‘What lurid yarns enmity spins. I’ve heard the self-same story told of at least two abbots.’ I pointed ahead along the road. ‘Our ways part at the top of that hill.’
I was not to be allowed to divert them from their complaint. The lady spoke again.
‘And the whore, of course, refers to the Boleyn creature. If it had not been for her and her Frenchified wiles we should not be in this mess.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘she can do no more harm now, wherever she is.’
‘Oh, we know where she is,’ the lady replied with a fragile laugh bordering on the hysterical. ‘Burning in hell. Would that I were there to stoke the fire.’
‘Perhaps one day you will have that privilege.’ I spurred my horse and rode on ahead of the company.
Minutes later we said goodbye to our companions of the way and turned on to the narrow lane towards Ightham.
‘You were a little hard on them,’ Ned said as we rode side by side.
‘I think they would not have been so piously indignant if they had been on Tower Green last May. I was there. What I saw was no scheming, painted strumpet. She was a frightened young woman who died with dignity and, to my mind, Christian fortitude.’
Ned threw back his hood. ‘I am glad to hear that. Yet, I can only think that England is the better for her absence.’
‘Because she urged the king to close monasteries and turned you out of your
comfortable living?’ It was an unworthy attack but I was feeling far from charitable.
Ned answered my question calmly, ignoring the innuendo. ‘Who knows what a woman may drive a man to when he is in the grip of lust? Many evils are born in the conjugal bed.’
‘You can hardly speak from experience,’ I retorted with a sneer.
He did not respond to the barb. ‘’Tis common knowledge that the late queen introduced her husband to books by Tyndale and other heretics that told him what he wanted to hear – that he could flout the ancient laws of Christendom, turn his back on the pope and take upon himself powers God never intended kings to wield.’
‘If these trees had ears,’ I said, ‘you might find yourself on a treason charge.’
He laughed but there was a bitter edge. ‘Oh, I will do whatever His Majesty ordains. I am not made of the stuff of martyrs. I hope the same is true of you, Thomas.’
I pondered his words for some moments. ‘Yesterday you told me not to go to the stake for Robert Packington. What did you mean by that?’
Ned shook his head. ‘Forget it. I spoke rashly, angrily. I was upset by Lizzie’s message.’
‘Yet you meant something.’
He was silent for a long time, then said, ‘You understand gold, Thomas. You can tell its purity by feel, by appearance, by weight. You know true coin from false.’
‘In most instances, yes.’
‘It has taken long years of training to achieve this mastery of your craft. If someone tried to deceive you with counterfeit coin you would be angry.’
‘Yes, but —’
‘Bear with a stupid old monk, Thomas. I do have a point. Is it right, do you think, that counterfeiting is punishable by death?’
‘Certainly.’
‘Which is worse, in your opinion, to strike and circulate false money or to make and circulate false religion?’
‘That sounds like a scholar’s trick question,’ I grumbled.
‘Only to someone who doesn’t want to face the answer.’
There was another long pause before he continued, ‘Our prior in the monastery was a strict but wise disciplinarian. He had a varied store of punishments. For minor misdemeanours, such as oversleeping or talking in choir he prescribed learning by rote long passages from the Church fathers. I’m afraid I accumulated several such theological bits and pieces and my head is still full of them. One of them is from the writings of Irenaeus, a very early Christian scholar. What he said about heretics was this: “they upset many, leading them away by the pretence of knowledge from him who constituted and ordered the universe”. Well, upset many this unholy trinity certainly have. They would tear up our entire culture. Is not that the worst kind of counterfeiting, Thomas, and worthy of death?’
‘What has all that to do with me?’
He turned his head to stare at me before saying quietly, ‘Thomas, you know the answer to that question, even if you will not admit it to yourself. Your friend – your true, good friend – was a propagator of false religion.’
‘You mean he was a heretic?’ I was trying hard to control my temper.
‘Heretic is a word for church lawyers to bandy about. I mean only that Luther and Tyndale and their disciples cannot be content with what Christians have believed for fifteen hundred years.’
‘Are we not told to judge a man by his deeds rather than his words? Search those fifteen hundred years and you will not find a better Christian man than Robert Packington.’ I glared at Ned and threw the words out as an angry challenge.
‘Believe me, Thomas,’ Ned replied, ‘I do not say this to pain you but to save you from sharing your friend’s fate. It is my opinion…’
I did not stay to hear Ned’s opinion. I dug my heels into the bay’s flanks and rode forward, preferring my own company until we reached the gates of Hemmings.
I went straight to my mother’s chamber to pay my respects and was met by a curious scene. The old lady and Lizzie were sitting by the fire, with Raphael on Lizzie’s lap and they were singing. I recognised the childish ditty.
Man in the Moon, where have you gone?
I saw you peep around the ash
But then you ran behind the barn,
Fell in the pond without a splash.
Man in the Moon, where have you gone?
Engrossed in the old rhyme and helping the child with the actions, they did not hear me enter. As I gazed at them I was reminded of an altar painting in St Peter’s West Cheap of the Virgin and Child with St Anne. It was Ralph who saw me first. He pointed at me, his tiny face creasing into a frown.
‘Dad-dy,’ Lizzie prompted. But the boy turned his head away. I reached out to stroke his hair, then quickly withdrew my hand. ‘He doesn’t know me yet,’ I said with a shrug.
‘How should he?’ Lizzie said, giving me one of her dark looks. I noticed that her fingers still went often to the white scar across her cheek. Was it my presence, I wondered, that made her conscious of her disfigurement? Would she ever stop blaming me?
I stooped to kiss my mother but her response was as negative as my son’s. She was still crooning the song in a low voice.
‘She likes singing,’ Lizzie explained. ‘She only has four or five ditties but she sings them most of the time.’
‘Does she never speak… converse… order the servants?’
‘She retreats into herself much of the time but her head is clear sometimes, like someone coming to a window and looking out from time to time.’
‘Perhaps she doesn’t like what she sees.’
‘She’s not alone in that. This is a dreadful place.’
‘So dreadful that you ran back to St Swithun’s House.’ I tried not to sound annoyed. ‘Now tell me what has been happening here. Ned said there were new problems.’
Lizzie looked up. ‘New? No. Just old ones getting worse.’ She stared out of the window. The only sound was my mother softly humming another song which reminded me of my childhood. ‘At St Swithun’s we were all shunned,’ Lizzie said at last, ‘but only by respectable people. Priests and god-fearing citizens kept well away – until they wanted to get between our legs. But here? Here everyone avoids us. Some of the servants can’t take it. Two scullions left yesterday and we can get no one to take their place. Everyone’s saying Hemmings is like a plague house.’ She paused, a thoughtful frown on her face. ‘Yes, a plague house, but one smitten with an even more deadly disease. Shall I tell you what they call you? “Treviot the heretic whoremaster”.’
Her words struck me like a douche of icy water.
‘What! That’s ridiculous! They have no grounds for such slander.’
‘Village people don’t need grounds for malicious tittle-tattling.’
‘But there must be someone spreading lies about me.’
‘Oh aye. There’s a snooping priest who’s the hub of it all. Chaplain to the Everards over at Cotes Court and very hand-and-glove with the vicar here. Between them they won’t let anyone from the house go into the village church and they stop any of the parishioners having dealings with us. The steward has to send into Ightham and beyond for provisions and, as often as not, the children throw stones and rubbish at them as they go to and fro. They say Sir Hugh Incent actually stands by and encourages the little hell-pups.’
‘Who did you say? Incent?’
‘Aye, he’s the Everards’ chaplain. For the last couple of months he and his crony have done nothing but stir up trouble. They look for Lutherans under every bush and snoop around people’s houses to see if they have forbidden books. I think it’s only a matter of time before they force their way into Hemmings. If you were here…’
I had stopped listening. I was trying to jog into place ideas that were rattling around in my head. Incent!
‘Lizzie, describe this chaplain to me,’ I demanded.
Although she had only seen him a couple of times, her description was good enough for me to hazard a reasonable guess that this Hugh must be a younger brother of the heretic-scourge at St
Paul’s. That would explain how news of my interest in Robert’s death had reached this quiet corner of Kent. Did it also suggest that John Incent had, indeed, been involved in Robert’s murder, as some people seemed to believe? Here was another lead to be followed up.
