by Alys Clare
He smiled. ‘You’re not, but I must talk to you. I’ll try to be brief.’
I waited.
‘I have heard what’s happened,’ he said presently. ‘I know about the deaths at Wrenbeare, and quite a lot about how it all came about. Theo Davey’s been to see me.’ He paused. ‘There are, however, one or two gaps in the tale, and I believe I can fill them in.’
I was very surprised. How could Jonathan know anything about past events in the Fairlight household? He had only been in the area for a few years, and had arrived long after Sir Thomas’s death. But I could tell from his pallor, the hollowness of his face and his general demeanour that whatever matter had been so deeply troubling him was still very far from being resolved. If anything, his suffering seemed to have intensified.
Trying not to show my anxiety, I drank some ale and said, ‘Shouldn’t you be filling in these gaps for Theo?’
He shook his head. ‘No. Well, I should, but I’m not going to.’ Again he hesitated, and I sensed the struggle in him. ‘What I’m about to say is in the nature of a confession, Gabriel, and before you say anything, no, it’s not something I will ever share with another priest.’ He looked down at his hands. I noticed again how well-shaped they were.
‘There is an incident in my past and known, I believe, only to me, and it weighs heavy. Because of what I learned from it, I am convinced that the deaths at Wrenbeare are very closely linked with the St Luke panels, although I do not think anyone else could possibly have perceived the connection.’
‘Ah.’ As I heard his words I was momentarily surprised. But within an instant it was as if a quiet voice inside my head said, You were aware of this; you knew that somehow the one matter was bound up in the other. I waited. Then I said, ‘How did you know the panels were hidden in a woody dell in Tavy St Luke’s?’
I watched Jonathan’s face. Several expressions seemed to cross it in swift succession. Then he sighed, put his hands over his eyes and said, more to himself than to me, ‘Why not tell? Would it not be a relief, after all this time?’
I didn’t speak.
After a time, Jonathan lowered his hands, sat up straight and began.
‘I told you a while ago that I was haunted by the ghost of a man I’d once briefly met.’
‘I remember.’
‘He was once the parish priest of Tavy St Luke’s. Not my immediate predecessor, but the incumbent before that.’
‘You told me your predecessor was a tall, thin, aesthetic-looking man stooped with arthritis. The one before,’ I added softly, ‘was he a tubby little man?’
And Jonathan, with a groan of despair, said, ‘Yes.’
His name, I could have added, thinking back to Paulus Fiske’s story, was Martin Oude, and a long time ago he was Thomas Fairlight’s parish priest.
But I kept quiet, and let Jonathan tell me what was tormenting him so relentlessly in his own time and in his own way.
For some moments he didn’t speak. Then, with a glance at the jug of beer, he said apologetically, ‘Is there any more of that in your kitchen? It’s a long tale that I’m going to tell you, and it’ll be thirsty work both talking and listening.’
Without a word I went out to the pantry and refilled the jug. I topped up our mugs, then sat down again and waited.
‘I trust you will indulge me,’ Jonathan began, ‘if I go back rather a long way, but I want you to understand why I—’ But it seemed he couldn’t finish whatever he’d been about to say. ‘I want you to understand.’ He shot me a pain-filled look, his green eyes boring into mine. Then, visibly bracing himself, he said, ‘I’m Cornwall-born, and I was the third son of a family with considerable prestige in their local area. As is the case with many third sons, the career options for me were slim, but I showed early intelligence and at first it was decided I should train for the law. The concept appealed to me very well but circumstances which I do not need to go into led me instead into the priesthood, and that too was more than acceptable, especially when, once I had gone up to Trinity Hall in Cambridge to read canon law, I began to understand that there were many roads open to me in addition to that which led to becoming a vicar. I perceived very early the overwhelming power of the Church.’ He stopped, shot me a brief, intense look and added quietly, ‘They say that power seduces, and in my experience that is true. I was, however, a very willing partner in my own seduction.’
I studied him, willing him to go on. My shoulder was throbbing in time to my heartbeat and I longed to go to bed, but already Jonathan Carew’s tale had begun to draw me in.
‘Throughout the 1580s,’ he went on, ‘there was a constant threat of Catholic invasion, and men were fearful of some sort of attack from Spain, and of plots to assassinate the Queen. Then the last decade of the century began, and Francis Walsingham’s spy network stepped up to full efficiency. Catholic plots had been discovered, far too frequently for the spymasters’ peace of mind, and the plots were by no means all as simple and doomed to disaster as the most infamous ones.’
I knew something of the matters to which he referred. Although I had been at sea until late in the decade, you would have had to be blind, deaf and stupid not to perceive the dangers faced by the Queen and the country.
‘And the spy network,’ Jonathan said heavily, ‘was ever on the lookout for new recruits.’
With a sense that all of a sudden I had an idea of what might be coming, I forced myself to ignore the pain in my shoulder and my arm and gave him my full attention, allowing the smooth flow of his words to take me back into the past.
And this is the story he told me.
Jonathan Carew has been spotted.
The Cambridge college where he studies with such intensity is a place of high-browed, thin-faced men who mutter to themselves, who maintain silence even at mealtimes as they frown deeply and, in the privacy of their own heads, continue to work on the abstruse problems of church law that obsess them. Some of them are lost deep inside their own thoughts and they fail to notice those who watch them so closely. But watchers there are, and they have a variety of motives for their careful attention. Some hope to learn secrets. Some hope to uncover conspiracies, and by so doing, gain advancement, wealth and prestige, even though it probably means betrayal and a terrible end for someone else.
The rumour of what happens in the dark, secret cellars where the interrogators do their work is enough to strike fear in the most courageous heart. The rack. The Scavenger’s Daughter. The Iron Maiden. The Iron Boot. And every sinister device is designed to inflict agony, the very fear of which can drive a man to spill the words he believes his tormentors want to hear, whether they are true or not.
Among those who observe from the shadowed recesses are agents of the spymaster. They are constantly on the lookout for the right sort of men, for the need is unceasing; in fact, it is increasing. So says the spymaster. So said the spymaster, for now in April 1590 Francis Walsingham lies on his deathbed in the London house on Seething Lane and is past all speech.
The network of spies that he set up, however, is as strong and as solid as ever, and new young blood is constantly recruited to replace those who for whatever reason – quite often death, for it is a hazardous profession – can no longer perform their duty. Walsingham had two main fears: that Catholicism would return to tear England apart, and that someone would sneak in under his constant vigil and take the life of the Queen he had served so loyally, so devotedly and so well. Those who have inherited the spymaster’s crown feel as fervently as he did, and the fight goes on unabated. Catholic priests do indeed arrive in England, far too regularly, and, until the execution of Mary Stuart after the failure of the Babington Plot three years previously, there was the constant fear that the Catholic faction would rally behind her, kill Queen Elizabeth and put Mary on the throne.
Thanks to Walsingham and those who saw with the same vision, this did not happen. Elizabeth lives and reigns still, and the men of Walsingham’s network intend to keep it that way.
They
are never short of work. In such anxious times, Catholic conspiracies can be suspected all too easily, and it is quite often all but impossible to separate genuine, accurate intelligence from malicious rumour. A man has long held a loathing of a neighbour who cheated him of a few acres of pasture, for example. So what better revenge can there be than to drop a word in the right ear suggesting that the neighbour has been seen to open his door by night to mysterious black-garbed strangers arriving from the coast? Strangers who mutter Latin prayers and carry the rosary …
A particular sort of mind is required to sort the time-wasters from those who bear genuinely useful information. And, on this spring day in Cambridge, the spymaster’s agent believes he has found a young man who possesses such a mind. So, as Jonathan Carew finishes his sparse midday meal and gets up to return to his studies, the agent falls into step beside him and mutters an invitation in his ear. Not very long afterwards – men don’t refuse this particular invitation, and the path has been cleared by the authorities for Jonathan’s unobtrusive disappearance from the college – he is on his way to London.
The old priest is brought in six weeks later.
Jonathan has been kept busy, and he has fulfilled the promise that the agent saw in him. He is horrified by what he sees. Had he known, had he had an inkling, he would have run away from the spymaster’s agent as if the fires of hell were opening at his feet. He is not often summoned right into the dark chambers where the torture is done, but not often has already been far too frequent.
He does not know what to do.
The old priest is called Martin Oude and he is in his seventies. He was born in King Henry’s reign and, until the King did away with the monasteries, he was a monk. He became a priest; he had been a devout and sincere Catholic and then, when the world changed, he was an obedient Protestant. He endured the destruction of so much that was precious and beautiful, first under Henry and then under the boy king who followed, and he meekly bowed his head before the storm. Then came Mary, eyes burning with such a fervour that it leapt out and ignited the terrible bonfires, and so many died, hands clasped in a desperate, final prayer as they howled their agony. The world changed yet again with the ascent of Elizabeth, and Martin Oude, like many others, began to think that tolerance had come at last.
But it hadn’t.
They have told Jonathan that Martin Oude is suspected of sheltering a Catholic priest newly arrived from France. Martin is the vicar of a tiny Devon parish not many miles inland from Plymouth, and it has been reported that he takes in strangers in need, helps them, feeds and sometimes houses them, and doesn’t ask nearly enough questions as to where they have come from and what they propose to do now that they are here.
And in this nervous England, where the paranoid men who claim to know look constantly and fearfully over their shoulders for the next foreign spy and the next Catholic plot, being kind to needy strangers and feeding them when they are hungry, clothing them when they are naked, tending them when they are sick and taking them in when they need shelter – doing, in fact, exactly what Christ exhorted all his children to do – is sufficient cause, apparently, to throw suspicion on a man.
And the suspicion is enough to have him arrested and brought in to answer the paranoid men’s questions.
Martin Oude, a tubby, cheerful sort of a fellow when he first arrived and apparently with little idea of what awaited him (for if he had even suspected, he would have ceased being cheerful and the happy smile would have turned into a rictus of terror), has been altered to his very core by nearly a week in the deep dungeons.
A week of answering questions.
And, naturally, all that goes with it.
Jonathan Carew has not been required to ask the questions, to wield the terrible instruments, to throw pails of water over the tubby priest when the pain makes him pass out before he has finished answering.
All that Jonathan has done is to listen from a corner of the dungeon and try to determine if the words that come out of Martin Oude’s crushed and bloody lips are the truth, or whether he is merely gabbling out anything and everything he can think of purely to stop the pain.
That is the trouble with torture, as Jonathan can so plainly see and as he thinks his lords and masters, if not the cold-eyed men wielding the terrible devices, ought also to realize.
It’s so very hard to tell.
On the evening of the sixth day Jonathan goes to visit the prisoner. He has not been ordered to do so: he goes of his own volition, for something in him has broken free from the obedience and the wish to conform, and not question his superiors, that have hitherto bound him.
He can no longer stand by and do nothing.
It is his country that has asked this service of him; his Church that sanctions the methods, for they are deemed to be worth the damage they do, to the souls of the perpetrators almost as much as to the bodies of the victims. Jonathan is in Holy Orders, and he knows he owes obedience to his Church, his masters, his Queen.
But he is sick to the depths of his being, and he knows that he must act because otherwise he will wither away and die.
Martin Oude lies in the damp and stinking straw on the cold stone floor. He cannot get comfortable, for he has nothing to support his head and the racking has done something serious to the muscles and the joints between his shoulder and his neck.
Jonathan has brought two soft, plump feather pillows. Gently he eases up the old man’s head and puts the first pillow under it. The old man lets out a sigh.
Jonathan has realized from the brief touch that Martin Oude is feverish. His skin is burning and he twists and turns in pain. He is delirious.
‘So beautiful,’ he murmurs. ‘The physician with his patient, and amid the flowers preparing his herbs. The nuns, so blissful in their simple goodness. The wonderful colours of the borders, and, joy of them all, Our Lord and the lilies of the field. They labour not, neither do they spin, yet I say unto you that Solomon himself in all his royalty was not clothed like one of these. Oh, how beautiful, how exquisite!’ He takes a sharp and clearly painful breath. ‘How innocent,’ he whispers.
He remembers favourite verses from the Bible, thinks Jonathan.
‘Beautiful, yes,’ he agrees softly.
The old priest tries to reach for his hand but there is a broken bone in his wrist and he cries out sharply. Jonathan stretches out and very gently puts his cold fingers against the hot flesh.
‘I saw no harm in them, d’you see?’ the old man pleads. ‘They were so lovely! It was as if they were washed with the warmth of the sun and empowered by the enchanting power of the moon and stars! Why should they be evil when they held such beauty? Things of beauty come from God, when all is said and done. And the face of Our Lord, his profound eyes full of love, his smile so kind! Why was that suddenly an object of repugnance? Tell me that, please! And tell me, too, what the loving Christ says when he looks down on the deeds of his children, who he loved so much that he gave his life for us! Did he not tell us that his greatest commandment to us was to love one another?’
There is more; a lot more.
Martin Oude is lost in the past, defending himself not against the accusations that are currently being hurled at him – and of which Jonathan knows without doubt that he is entirely innocent – but against something from long ago; a crime which the spymasters don’t even suspect him of having committed, and which surely nobody cares about any more …
The old priest rambles on, quite often forgetting he’s meant to be a Protestant vicar now and going back to the faith of his youth. He talks of vaguely Catholic images of saints and wonders, of relics, of miracles at shrines, of well-dressing and ancient folk traditions.
He is old, he is forgetful, he confuses events of his own past with the legends and tales told to him by others, Jonathan thinks. His heart aches with pity for he can see, despite the dim light in the cell, what has been done to Martin Oude.
But presently he realizes the old man is repeating himself; saying the sam
e thing, over and over, with increasing insistence: as if he is desperate for Jonathan to hear and to understand. And Jonathan begins to suspect that the old man really is hiding a secret.
He is.
What is on his mind, so powerfully that it gives him no rest, is the thought of those panels he took from the wall of his church forty-three years ago and hid safely away until such time as the danger was past. For he can still see them, those five panels, and their beauty, their magic and their mystical power all remain as strong in his ageing mind as the day he hid them.
He is not guilty of anything else, for he is a true innocent. But Jonathan begins to understand that this matter that so preys on Martin Oude’s mind is there for his interrogators to pick up.
And that in all probability they have already done so.
He’s guilty of something, they’ll mutter to each other. And they’ll be quite right, although the something can present no danger to Queen or state, or even, surely, to the Church. Having detected this pathetic little secret, they will not rest until they get it out of their victim, and when they do, even they will appreciate that it’s trivial and unimportant.
And, even knowing this, then they will kill him.
All of this runs wildly and painfully through Jonathan’s mind. But the old man is still muttering – his voice is all but inaudible now – and Jonathan goes on listening.
And what he hears he will never forget.
At last, after what seems a very long time, the old priest has exhausted himself. The delirium has passed and he seems to have forgotten all about the matter that obsessed him such a short time before. Now he lies back on the cold, wet floor, his head on the soft pillow, and he looks up at Jonathan in full awareness.
‘They will come for me again tomorrow, won’t they?’ he asks pathetically. Tears of pain, fear and despair run from his bloodshot eyes.
‘Yes,’ Jonathan agrees. ‘I’m afraid they will.’
There is quite a long silence.
Then, his voice clear and strong, Martin Oude speaks two words.
