Sovereign

by C. J. Sansom

  ‘We shall have true faith back again,’ he said with a sudden cold fierceness. ‘True faith and a rightful monarch.’

  ‘And the fire for Cranmer. And how many more? Even if you win you will create a mirror-image of the world we have, perhaps a worse one.’

  ‘I should have realized.’ Wrenne sighed deeply. ‘You are not a man of faith. But knowing the King is not of royal blood, does that count for nothing with you?’ His tone was almost pleading.

  ‘Not enough to countenance drowning England in fire and blood, no. Not enough for that.’

  ‘Then let me go quietly. I will not trouble you again. I will leave you to your peaceful life.’ There was angry bitterness in his voice now.

  ‘If you give me the papers,’ I said, ‘I will let you walk free.’

  He leaned back in his seat, casting his eyes down. He seemed to be reflecting. But I knew he would never give up the documents, not having come so far.

  He looked at me again, his eyes still fierce though his voice was quiet. ‘Do not make me do this, Matthew. I cannot give you the papers. It has taken me so long —’

  ‘I will not join you.’

  Then in a movement I had been half-expecting, but more speedily than I could have imagined him capable of, Wrenne leaped up, grasped the bowl of pottage and threw it in my face. A terrible growling noise came from his throat, fury and sorrow somehow mixed together. I cried out, jumping up. Half-blind, I grabbed at Giles but he twisted away and tumbled out of the door. I heard his heavy footsteps as he went out to the hall in a sort of shambling run, then a curse as he hauled uselessly at the locked front door. He turned again, gasping as he ran for the door to the garden. I felt a gust of cold air as it was thrown open.

  I stepped into the hall. The garden door yawned wide, giving on to a blackness through which a curtain of rain fell. Apart from the rain there was silence. Joan must be asleep in her room at the front of the house. I stared out into the darkness and the hammering rain.

  Chapter Forty-eight

  LITTLE WAS VISIBLE beyond the doorway, the light from the parlour window showing only the rain, still falling hard and straight as ever, and the dim shapes of bushes and trees. My face smarted, but the pottage had not really scalded me. It had been standing for some time and had cooled. My hand went to my dagger. I pulled it from my belt. I shivered again, violently.

  ‘Giles!’ I called out. ‘You are trapped! There is no way out of the garden except the gate to the orchard, and the door from the orchard to Lincoln’s Inn is locked at night! Surrender yourself, it is all you can do.’ There was no reply, only the relentless sound of the lashing water.

  ‘For pity’s sake, man,’ I called. ‘Come out of the rain!’

  I could wait, here in the doorway, till Barak returned. But what if Wrenne managed to climb the orchard wall? He was old and ill but he was also desperate. If he got away with those papers – I stepped outside.

  It was hard to see. I kept to those parts of the garden where there was some illumination from the windows and the open door, watching lest he run at me out of the darkness. The rain appeared to be lessening at last but it was still hard to see and I stumbled and nearly fell against a bench. I walked to the back of the garden, feeling my boots squelch into mud as I approached the orchard gate – the water was now seeping under the wall, as I had feared. I saw the gate was open; large footprints in the mud showed that Giles had gone through. I saw the key was in the lock and pulled it out. Passing through, I locked the gate behind me, put the key in my pocket and stood with my back against it, inside the orchard. I began to shiver again.

  Looking up, I caught a faint white glow of moonlight through the still-roiling clouds. Even so, I could see little in the orchard beyond a vista of black mud.

  ‘Giles!’ I called again. ‘Giles! I am armed! You cannot escape!’ I looked at the high walls separating the orchard from Lincoln’s Inn. No, Wrenne could not scale those. He was in here with me, somewhere.

  The clouds parted and the full moon appeared, showing a sea of undulating mud broken by the water-filled holes where the trees had been. Up against my wall there was now a pond thirty feet across, little ripples dancing in the moonlight. I squinted and stared out across the mud.

  Then I thought I saw something move slightly. I leaned forward, staring at a dim shape in the mud by the pool. Holding the knife firmly, I began moving carefully towards it. My boots sank deep into the mud, making squelching sucking sounds. The shape did not move again. Had Wrenne collapsed here, the strain too much for him? I reached the figure and bent carefully, ready for a sudden spring. If I had to I would stab him. Then I gritted my teeth as I saw a surface of uneven bark and realized I was staring at a log half-buried in the mud.

  He struck from somewhere behind me, his weight sending me tumbling to the ground and making me drop the dagger. I gasped as I hit the mud, the breath knocked from my body. A knee crunched into my back, then I felt Giles lean over to one side to grab the dagger. So he would kill me. I bucked and heaved to throw him off balance, and he toppled sideways. As I hauled myself to my feet I saw his bulky shape rising too, slowly, the knife gleaming in his hand. I could not see the expression on his face because it was black with mud, no more than a dark circle with two glinting eyes.

  ‘For pity’s sake, Giles,’ I gasped, ‘surrender the papers. We cannot end like this.’

  ‘We must.’ He stepped forward, his arms held wide, the knife glinting in his right hand. ‘Unless you let me go. Please, Matthew, let me go.’

  He thrust at me suddenly. I jumped aside and hit out with my manacled wrist. The iron caught him hard on the side of the head; he gasped and dropped the knife. I must have half stunned him for he reeled away, staggered into the margin of the pool and fell over with a splash. He hauled himself up and sat, a dark shape up to its waist in water. Then the moon vanished, leaving us once more in darkness, and the rain began pelting down again.

  I threw myself at him before he had time to rise, gasping at the impact of the cold water. And now it was Giles who struggled and bucked underneath me, and he was starting to weaken, his resistance feeble as I put both hands round his neck and forced his head under the water. I knew only one of us could come out of that cursed swamp alive. I kept his head under, ignoring the horrible gasps and gurglings he made.

  Giles’s struggles ceased, he went limp. A ghastly sucking sound came as he breathed water into his lungs, a sound I still hear in dreams; there was a last frantic spasm and then he went limp as a rag doll. But I did not move; I realized I was weeping, warm water mingling with the cold on my cheeks. For minutes more I knelt there holding him fast, sobbing in the darkness as the rain lashed relentlessly down on me.

  I do not know how long it was before I got shakily to my feet. I was trembling from head to toe, but I made myself bend down and turn Giles over so he lay face down. Then I put my hands under the water, lifted his sodden robe, and felt through his pockets. I found a purse, and a thick pack of papers wrapped in oilskin. I took them and staggered away, without looking back.

  BARAK AND TAMASIN returned an hour later, dripping wet for it was still raining. Tamasin looked upset, as though she had been crying. I was sitting by the fire in the parlour; I had banked it up with logs and sat stirring it with the poker, trembling and sweating for the fever had come on me properly now. They stared at me in horror, covered from head to foot in mud as I was, steam rising from my sodden clothes. They ran over to me.

  ‘Sir!’ Barak exclaimed. ‘In God’s name, what has happened?’

  ‘Giles Wrenne is dead,’ I said quietly. ‘We were eating and he seemed to lose his senses, he ran outside calling for his nephew.’ I looked directly into Tamasin’s blue eyes; I had thought this story through carefully and the lie was to protect them as well as me. ‘He ran into the orchard. I followed. I found him in that pool of water, almost a lake it is now. He must have collapsed and drowned.’

  Tamasin’s hand flew to her mouth. ‘His mind gone too?’ />
  ‘It must have been his illness, affecting his brain. I had to give him bad news this afternoon. His nephew Martin Dakin died two years ago.’

  ‘The poor old man,’ Tamasin whispered. How full of compassion she had always been, I realized – for Wrenne, for Jennet Marlin, for me under the copper beech in York.

  ‘Where is he?’ Barak asked.

  ‘Still out there. He was too heavy to bring back, and I – I think I am unwell.’ I heard my voice break.

  ‘I’ll go and look,’ Barak told Tamasin. ‘Wait here.’

  She knelt by me, put a cool hand to my brow. ‘You are burning up, sir. You must go to bed.’

  ‘I will now. I am sorry, Tamasin.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘How I have treated you sometimes.’

  She smiled weakly. ‘I deserved it by starting with that foolish trick.’

  ‘Perhaps. I lost a friend tonight,’ I added quietly.

  She laid her other hand on mine, my manacled hand. ‘It took us a long time to find Jack’s locksmith. But he will come tomorrow morning with his tools, have you released from that horrible fetter.’

  ‘Good. Good. Thank you.’

  ‘Is Mistress Woode asleep?’

  ‘Ay, Joan slept through it all. There is no need to disturb her.’ I looked at her. ‘You have been crying.’

  ‘Jack has found my father, sir. He is a professional man, as Jack said. He is a cook in the royal kitchens. A man with a fine opinion of himself, Jack says. He does not want to know me.’ She took a sobbing breath and bit her lip, but held back her tears.

  ‘I am sorry, Tamasin.’

  ‘It was a childish fantasy. It is better to know the truth.’

  ‘Yes.’ I thought of Giles. ‘But lonely.’

  We sat in silence a few minutes longer. Then Barak returned, shaking water from his hair. The look he gave me held calculation as well as concern.

  ‘Can you leave us, Tammy?’ he asked quietly.

  She nodded and rose. ‘Goodnight, sir,’ she said quietly, and left the room. I looked at Barak. He drew my dagger from beneath his doublet and laid it on the table.

  ‘I found this outside, by the pool.’

  ‘It must have fallen from my belt.’

  ‘The mud round where he lay was all churned up, as though there had been a struggle.’ He knows, I thought; he has guessed it was no accident.

  ‘His face was terrible, a wild desperate look on it.’

  I was glad I had not seen that. I met Barak’s gaze. ‘We must tell the coroner of his death first thing tomorrow. There will be no doubt of the finding. He drowned.’

  Barak looked at me, took a deep breath, and nodded slowly. The matter was closed.

  ‘Tamasin says you found her father?’

  ‘Ay. A cook. When I went to see him he railed at me, said he would deny all. He thought Tamasin was after his money.’ He laughed grimly. ‘A fine professional gentleman.’

  ‘Poor Tamasin.’

  ‘Ay. But I decided to tell her. Best to know the truth, is it not?’

  I glanced at the dagger. ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘She will get over it. She’s tough. That’s one of the things I admire about her.’

  ‘Families and claims of rank, by Jesu they cause much trouble, do they not?’ I laughed bitterly, then shivered violently. Barak looked at me.

  ‘You should come to bed. You look a sight.’

  ‘All right. Help me up.’

  As he stepped towards me I took the poker and stirred the fire, where a last fragment of paper had failed to burn. The flames took them, and the name of Edward Blaybourne disappeared for ever.

  Epilogue

  February 1542, three months later

  I STOOD AT the window of my room in the little inn, watching the sun rise. A hard frost had held the countryside in its grip for a week and as the blood-red orb appeared it turned the landscape first pink then white; the grass and the trees and the roof of the little church opposite all outlined in frost.

  I wondered if Queen Catherine had watched the icy dawn from the Tower three days before, the morning of her beheading. Thomas Culpeper and Francis Dereham had been executed back in December but legal necessities had kept the Queen alive for two more months. They said in London she had been too weak with fear to mount the scaffold unaided; they had had to half carry her up the steps. Poor little creature, she must have been so cold, there on Tower Green with her head and neck bare, exposed for the executioner. Lady Rochford had followed her to the block; she had gone quite mad when she was arrested and the King had passed a law allowing insane persons to be executed. Yet the balladeers said that at the end Jane Rochford had composed herself and made a speech confessing a lifetime of faults and sins, standing bravely before the block from which the Queen’s blood still dripped. It had been a long speech and the crowd had grown bored. I remembered her at York, that strange mixture of arrogance and fear. Poor woman, I thought. What drove her to weave those endless meshes of deceit which in the end could only trap her too? I hoped they had found peace now, she and the Queen.

  BARAK AND I had left London the day after the executions. It was a cold ride to Kent but fortunately the frost kept the roads dry and we reached Ashford by evening. We had spent the next day nosing through various archives, and I had been pleased to find evidence to back Sergeant Leacon’s claim that his parents’ land was indeed held under a valid freehold grant. I suspected the landlord had falsified a document somewhere, and I was looking forward to meeting the landlord’s lawyer tomorrow in Ashford, along with young Leacon and his parents. That left a free day, which I had told Barak I needed for some private business. I had left him in Ashford the previous afternoon and ridden the ten miles to the village. A small, poor place like a hundred such hamlets in England; a few houses straggling along one street, an inn and a church.

  I stepped quietly outside, pulling my coat around me tightly, or at least as tightly as I could for it was loose now; I had lost weight in the fever I had caught in November. I had spent three weeks in bed, delirious at first. When the fever subsided it had amused and touched me to see how Joan and Tamasin argued over who should bring my food.

  It was bitterly cold. My breath steamed in front of me as I crossed to the little church and stepped round the side to the graveyard. My feet crunched in the frozen grass as I walked among the headstones, searching.

  It was a small, poor stone, hidden right at the back and shaded by trees from a little wood behind. I bent and studied the faded, lichened inscription:

  In memory of Giles Blaybourne

  1390–1446

  his wife Elizabeth

  1395–1444

  and their son Edward

  died in the King’s service in France, 1441

  I stood there, lost in thought. I did not hear the light footsteps approaching, and jumped violently at the sound of a voice.

  ‘So Edward Blaybourne gave his son his father’s name. Giles.’

  I turned to find Barak grinning at me.

  ‘God’s death,’ I demanded, ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I guessed where you must have been going. It wasn’t that difficult. Somewhere less than a day’s ride from Ashford. It had to be Braybourne village. I left before sun-up this morning and rode down. Sukey is tied up behind the church.’

  ‘You nearly gave me a seizure.’

  ‘Sorry.’ He looked around him. ‘Not much of a place, is it?’

  ‘No.’ I looked at the gravestone. ‘Poor Blaybourne’s parents, they did not live long after their son disappeared. Cecily Neville must have had him declared dead.’ The import of his words earlier suddenly struck me. ‘Wait – you said – you know Giles Wrenne was Blaybourne’s son?’

  ‘I guessed. And there were some things you said, when you were delirious.’

  My eyes widened. ‘What things?’

  ‘Once you shouted out that Wrenne was England’s true King, and should be set on a great throne. Then you wept. Another
time Tamasin said you were shouting out about papers that burned in Hell. I remembered you sitting poking at the fire when Tamasin and I came in that night, and put two and two together.’

  I looked at him seriously. ‘You know how dangerous that knowledge is.’

  He shrugged. ‘Without those papers, who can prove anything? You burned them all, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes. I did not want to tell you, it is better no one else knows the truth.’

  He nodded slowly, then looked at me again. ‘You killed him, didn’t you? Wrenne?’

  I bit my lip and sighed deeply. ‘It will haunt me till I die.’

  ‘It was self-defence. There was no alternative.’

  ‘No.’ I sighed again. ‘I held his head under the water until he drowned. Then I turned the body over so he lay face down and it would look as though he had fallen in and drowned himself. That was how you found him, Jack. With the great lump they found inside him, it was enough for the coroner.’

  ‘Who was Wrenne going to give the papers to?’

  ‘He was going to look for supporters of the conspiracy in London. Ironically his original contact was Bernard Locke.’

  ‘I suppose there still are some conspirators in London.’

  I shrugged. ‘I suppose so. Perhaps the King in his foolishness and tyranny will create another opportunity for them to gain support. Perhaps not. Either way I want nothing to do with it.’

  We stood looking in silence at the old gravestone. Then Barak asked, ‘Why come here? Curiosity?’

  I laughed sadly. ‘When I recovered from my fever and learned Wrenne had been buried in London with none but you and Tamasin and Joan at his funeral, I had a crazed idea of having the body exhumed and burying him again down here. Guilt, I suppose.’ I pointed at the gravestone. ‘They were his grandparents, after all. And King Edward IV’s,’ I added.