Tombland (The Shardlake series Book 7) Page 9

  He sighed. ‘I don’t know. But hunting a helpless child as though he were a rabbit – that does not surprise me.’ His round face was set now, and angry. And indeed there had been a coldness about those boys that chilled me. He continued, ‘A few months ago they took part in the scuffle with Leonard Witherington’s men over the estate boundary. They mix with a crowd of gentlemanly ruffians, some of them Sir Richard Southwell’s servants. They’ve hired themselves out more than once to landlords who want to get tenants off their land. There’s stories of cattle maimed, ricks set on fire, people hurt.’

  Nicholas asked, ‘How did that one – Barnabas, is it? – get his scar?’

  ‘There’s a story that has gone about for years, though nobody knows if it is true.’ Lockswood took a deep breath. ‘Apparently, Edith Boleyn, God save her soul, was no good mother to the boys. As soon as they were born she handed them over to a wet-nurse and wanted nothing more to do with them. As they grew up she ignored them as much as possible, although both of them took after her, fair-haired, strong in build.’ I remembered Parry telling me the woman who had visited Hatfield had been thin and scrawny, but also the story that sometimes Edith starved herself. Lockswood continued, ‘She never behaved like a mother, for all they sought her attention. All she did was criticize and chastise them, and one thing that made her angry was that she was unable to tell them apart. One day they were pestering her in the kitchen and she said she’d give anything to tell one from the other, to know who to punish when one was rude to a servant or reported for stealing apples. Apparently, the boys went outside into the yard. A servant saw them talking, heads together, then one took a couple of pieces of straw from the yard and held them out to the other. He picked a straw, and it turned out to be the short one. Then there was a flash of metal and a scream. A moment later the boys reappeared in the kitchen doorway, standing side by side, only Gerald had ripped Barnabas’s face open with a knife taken from the drawer; he was covered in blood. Edith screamed, asking what they had done now, and Gerald just said, “We did it for you, so you can tell us apart now.” ’

  Nicholas gave an uneasy laugh. I looked at Lockswood, aghast. ‘Do you think the story true?’

  He shrugged. ‘It’s what people say, the common fame of the district. But the twins never talk about how Barnabas got that scar, they don’t like people asking. They’re such devils, perhaps they started the tale themselves. All I know is they were the despair of their father. People have often said those two were born to hang. Yet it is their father in gaol on a charge of murder.’

  Nicholas and I looked at each other. If that was what their childhood had been like, it gave the twins a twisted motive to kill Edith Boleyn, and I could easily imagine them capable of leaving her body in a position of grotesque humiliation. Yet I was aware of how much I had heard was gossip and ‘common fame’, and knew how a story can become embedded like a rock in its neighbourhood of origin, when it contains but a wisp of the truth.

  *

  WE LOCKED UP the house, and Lockswood left to find the constable and ensure a close eye was kept on the property. We arranged to meet him on Monday morning at the Moorgate, to commence our journey to Norwich.

  Nicholas and I walked slowly back to Temple Bar; he was to return to his lodgings, while I decided to take the opportunity to go and see Guy. The visit to Boleyn’s house had given us both food for thought.

  ‘There seem to be more and more people with a possible motive to kill her,’ Nicholas said. ‘John Boleyn, his second wife Isabella Heath, his neighbour, and now those boys. But everyone would have been safer if they’d just buried her.’

  I said, ‘Those boys are hardly’ – I struggled for a word – ‘normal.’

  ‘No, they’re not.’

  ‘If that story of them drawing lots to see who would get his face carved, just so their mother could tell them apart, is true, that needed an extraordinary degree of control. Was it a gesture of love, I wonder. Or hate?’

  Nicholas shook his head. ‘It seems they consider themselves gentlemen, but they behave like ruffians.’

  ‘What do you think of Lockswood?’

  ‘A loyal servant, and not afraid to stand up to those boys.’

  ‘And his master, friend Copuldyke?’

  He laughed. ‘A lazy fat slug.’

  I said, ‘I wonder how Lockswood stands him.’

  Nicholas shrugged. ‘Copuldyke pays his wages. And Lockswood gets paid for putting up with it. ’Tis the way of things.’

  I smiled. ‘Then perhaps I’ll start talking to you like that.’

  He matched my mocking tone. ‘Ah, but I am more than just a clerk.’

  ‘You weren’t when you started with me.’

  ‘Perhaps Lockswood will rise in the world. Copuldyke’s indolence means Lockswood has the contacts, the knowledge of Norfolk affairs, and that’s a saleable quality.’

  ‘He’s going to be useful to us, I know that. The more I learn of the Boleyn family and their neighbours, the more grateful I am to have a guide through this cesspit.’ I shook my head. ‘I will ask him what he thinks might have happened to Edith during the nine years after she vanished. We are hobbled by being unable to mention that she ended up at Hatfield just before her death.’

  ‘Those were Parry’s conditions.’

  ‘I wonder if we will be able to be loyal both to the Lady Elizabeth and to discovering the truth. By Jesu, I pray that we will.’

  Chapter Seven

  We reached Temple Bar; Nicholas then returned to his lodgings, while I went to visit Guy. I walked down Cheapside. At the busy market stalls with their striped awnings, the usual frantic haggling was going on between the stallholders and the goodwives in their white coifs. These days, though, frequently it was not the good-natured haggling of earlier times but desperate, angry arguments as buyers tried to persuade stallholders to part with their goods for at least a good part of the face value of the new shillings. Amidst the old cabbage leaves, rotten apples and other discarded rubbish, I noticed a pamphlet, and picked it up. It was one of the many anti-enclosure pamphlets, exhorting the King:

  . . . truly to minister justice, to restrain extortion and oppression, to set up tillage and good husbandry whereby the people may increase and be maintained. Your godly heart would not have wild beasts increase and men decay, ground so enclosed up that your people should lack food and sustenance, one man by shutting in the fields and pastures to be made and a hundred thereby to be destroyed.

  I put the pamphlet in my purse.

  Guy lived in the apothecaries’ district, in the maze of alleys between Cheapside and the river, the apothecaries’ shops displaying stuffed lizards from the Indies and curled horns they claimed were from unicorns. Guy was a licensed physician and could have afforded somewhere much grander than his little shop with rooms above, but he had lived there for years and, like many old men, disliked change. I saw his shop windows were shuttered; for the last couple of months, since he had been ill, Guy had taken on no new patients. It was a worrying sign, for his profession had always been the centre of his life.

  I knocked at the door, which was answered immediately by Guy’s assistant, Francis Sybrant. Like Guy, Francis was in his mid-sixties, and like him was a former monk. Always inclined to plumpness, he had grown very fat this last year or two. He carried a satchel over his shoulder.

  ‘Master Shardlake,’ he said. ‘God give you good morrow. We were not expecting you.’ He looked a little flustered to see me.

  ‘Good morrow. How fares your master?’

  ‘The same, sir,’ he said sadly. He looked tired. ‘No change. If you will excuse me, I have to deliver remedies to some of his patients.’

  ‘I thought he was taking on no more.’

  ‘The existing ones still pester us for remedies and cures, and I make them up at Master Guy’s instruction. If you forgive me, I am late – there is so much to do – please, go up and see him. He is awake.’ He bowed me inside, then waddled off up the street.

>   I stood a moment in Guy’s consulting room, looking at the neatly labelled jars and flasks of herbs on the shelves, then climbed the stairs to his bedroom. My old friend lay in bed reading in a nightshirt, his big old Spanish cross with the carved figure of Christ above his head. Such crosses had been taken from the churches now and burned; even displaying one in a private house might earn official suspicion, but Guy remained resolutely Catholic.

  He looked up and smiled, with teeth that were still white. Otherwise he looked bad. He had always been slim but now the bones of his temples and his large, thin nose stood out. Even his brown Moorish skin seemed to have a sickly, yellowish cast. He had always been prone to fevers, which he blamed on the bad air of the marshland on which his former monastery had stood, but recently he had had one after the other, with only brief periods of respite, and I could see they were wearing him out. I could only hope they would pass.

  ‘God give you good morrow, Guy,’ I said.

  ‘Matthew. I was not expecting you today.’ He hesitated, as though about to say something else, and glanced briefly at the door, but then smiled again.

  ‘I have just got back from Hatfield, and thought I would call. How are you?’

  He raised a thin hand, then let it fall to the quilt. ‘Weak, and tired. And physician though I am, I have no idea what to do about it.’ He smiled wearily. ‘I have been reading.’ He held out the book. ‘Thomas More. A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation. I know you never liked him, but he had great learning.’

  ‘A great burner and torturer of heretics.’ It was an old argument between us. I took the book and glanced at the page Guy was reading. I quoted, ‘ “The rich man’s substance is the wellspring of the poor man’s living.” Ah yes, that theory, that as the rich grow richer their wealth trickles down to the poor like sand. Well, I have been practising law twenty-five years and all I have seen is it trickle ever upwards.’ I remembered the pamphlet I had just picked up earlier. ‘See,’ I said, handing it to him, ‘this writer makes just complaint.’

  Guy looked at it. ‘Enclosures have been going on for years. Thomas More wrote against them.’

  ‘And when Cardinal Wolsey tried to enforce the laws against them in court, More ruled against him.’

  Guy laughed gently. ‘Ah, you are such an arguer, such a lawyer. But I am too tired for debate just now.’

  ‘Forgive me. Have you been out of bed today?’

  ‘Only to visit the jakes. At the moment even sitting in a chair tires me. Well, at least I shall not be expected to go to church on Sunday, to listen to Cranmer’s English Communion service in a bare church.’ He shook his head. ‘I never thought England would come to this.’ Tears welled in his brown eyes.

  ‘I saw a church being whitewashed on my way back from Hatfield,’ I said quietly. ‘It seemed – cold, heartless somehow, even with the Scripture verses on the walls.’

  ‘So,’ he said gently, ‘things have gone too far now for you, as well?’

  ‘Yes. I think they have.’

  ‘What were you doing in Hatfield?’

  ‘Visiting the Lady Elizabeth.’

  He smiled wryly. ‘Ah, the Protestant Princess. But no, she is still just the Lady, like her sister Mary. Both their mothers’ marriages annulled. Unlike Jane Seymour’s. I wonder if her brother the Protector is making a point by denying them the title of Princess.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Are you still working on the Lady Elizabeth’s lands?’

  ‘Yes. In fact, I have to go to Norwich on Monday, Guy, on business for her.’

  ‘Norwich?’ He sounded surprised. ‘What sort of business is it?’

  I hesitated, but I had always valued Guy’s insights. ‘Unusual. A distant Boleyn relative of the Lady Elizabeth is on trial for murder at the Assizes. She wishes me to investigate, quietly, and ensure justice is done.’

  Guy looked at me keenly. ‘It is a long time since you have involved yourself with such a matter. Not since Jack Barak lost his hand.’

  ‘This is quite different. It involves the Norfolk gentry, not high politics.’

  ‘Will you take young Nicholas?’

  ‘Yes. He wishes to go. And frankly, Guy, so do I. I am tired of pen-scratching. And this man may have been accused unjustly of his wife’s murder, though I do not know that yet.’

  A spark of interest came into his eyes. ‘Do you want to tell me the story? I could do with distraction.’

  I was glad of Guy’s interest, and I briefly recounted the facts, leaving out Edith Boleyn’s appearance at Hatfield. When I had finished, Guy lay back, and I thought perhaps I had tired him, but he had only been thinking, for he said, quietly, ‘Perhaps the twins’ pranks as small boys were done to gain their mother’s love, or at least her attention. Drawing lots for one to disfigure the other may have been a last, frantic attempt to do that.’

  ‘Frantic indeed.’

  ‘And yet her reaction was anger?’

  ‘So I am told. Though all I have heard so far is at second and third hand.’

  ‘If she reacted to one child disfiguring himself only with more anger, perhaps that led the boys to think the shedding of blood a light thing.’ He considered. ‘What is the father like? The man accused of killing his wife?’

  ‘I do not know. He scandalized his neighbours by moving in a woman who served at an inn after his wife disappeared. And he also has a quarrel over land with one of them. And the name Boleyn still carries a stigma. All those things may go against him with the local jury. I will learn more next week.’

  ‘Come back safe,’ Guy said quietly.

  ‘I will, to see you well again.’

  He raised a thin brown hand, then let it fall. ‘I wonder if my pilgrimage on earth is nearly over. I am sixty-six now.’

  ‘The Bible allows three score years and ten.’

  ‘Few enough reach that, as we both know. Seeing what England has become, the church to which I gave my life finally, completely destroyed, perhaps it is time.’

  ‘Nonsense.’ I spoke with deliberate lightness. ‘You have your patients to treat. I confess, I have not been doing my exercises diligently. I will suffer for it on the way to Norfolk, and may need to consult you again when I come back.’

  He looked at me. ‘When you ride out, remember to sit high in the saddle, on the bones of your pelvis. Do not stoop nor cast your eyes down, I know the cast of your body inclines you to do that but you should look up, proudly.’

  ‘I will try.’ I leaned forward and grasped his hand, which felt like little more than bones. There was a moment’s silence. Then I heard a knock at the door. Guy flashed me a quick look, in which I saw apprehension, but called, ‘Come in.’

  Tamasin Barak stepped into the room, holding a full basket in one hand and leading a little fair-haired boy by the other. She said, ‘I have everything you asked for—’ She broke off at the sight of me. Her pretty, full-lipped face, framed by a white coif from which strands of blonde hair drifted, turned, in a moment, as cold as ice.

  I had not seen her in three years, and I saw that she had aged, new lines around her mouth and eyes. Her little boy George, nearly four now, was officially my godson; he had been born before the breach between us. I had never seen her daughter. George stared at me with wide-eyed curiosity.

  I said quietly, ‘God give you good morrow, Tamasin.’

  She turned to Guy as though I were not there, and spoke in a hard, flat voice, ‘I will take these things into the kitchen, and leave the meat and vegetables out for Francis to prepare a pottage when he returns. The meat is scraggy, the price has gone up again and I did not have enough money for a good cut.’

  ‘Matthew called unexpectedly,’ Guy said. ‘I did not tell him you were out shopping for me. I thought that perhaps if you saw him again—’

  She cut across him, a tremble in her voice now. ‘I have to get back. Mistress Marris is looking after Tilda—’

  ‘Tamasin, Tamasin,’ Guy said beseechingly. ‘Matthew is about to go on a jou
rney to Norfolk, it would delight my heart if the two of you could reconcile before he leaves. Remember Christ’s injunctions to us to forgive.’

  There was a moment’s silence. Then little George piped up, ‘Who is that man in the black robe?’ He pointed to me. ‘His body is bent. Is that a hunchback?’

  ‘Tush, George,’ Tamasin said, pulling the child to her. Then she turned to face me, her face still cold, her voice low but harsh. ‘I can never forgive the injury my husband suffered because you led him into danger. Every evening I remove that wretched device he has for a hand, rub oils into that cruel stump. I see the pain he is often in. Then sometimes I think of you, but not forgivingly.’ Her voice trembled slightly.

  ‘Jack made his own decision,’ Guy said.

  ‘It was I that led him into that, I know,’ I said to Tamasin. ‘But we were friends once. Cannot we be so again – or at the least be civil to each other?’

  ‘Would you want that?’ she asked. ‘Civility, when all my heart feels is anger?’ She looked at Guy. ‘You should have told him I was coming, and asked him to leave.’ She turned her gaze back to me. ‘So, you are going to Norfolk?’

  ‘Yes. A case is taking me to Norwich.’

  ‘My husband will be there, for the Assizes. You had best leave him alone. I shall ask him if he has been with you when he returns, and by God, he had better answer that he has not. Now, I shall go to the kitchen.’ She turned, and as she left the room with George, the little boy looked over his shoulder at me. Guy slumped back in his bed, defeated.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘She has been shopping for us, all the work is too much for poor Francis. I hoped if you were brought together –’ He shook his head. ‘I should not have mentioned Norfolk, I forgot Jack was going there.’

  I sighed. I was smarting inwardly with shame, and hurt, but also the stirrings of anger.

  ‘Tamasin has ever had an obstinate streak,’ Guy said.

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘she has.’

  He shook his head slowly to and fro on the pillow. ‘And since what happened to him she has been over-protective of Jack. I think he begins to resent it. I should have told you she was coming, given you the chance to leave. Selfish of me.’