Lamentation

After breakfast I walked up to Lincoln’s Inn, wondering how Nicholas and Barak were, and whether they had come in. I thought, I should have visited them instead of going to Coleswyn’s yesterday.

Barak was at his desk, working through some papers clumsily because of the heavy bandage on his left hand. Skelly looked at him curiously through his glasses. I could see no sign of Nicholas.

‘Young Overton not in?’ I asked with false jollity.

‘Not yet,’ Barak answered. ‘He’s late.’

Skelly looked up. ‘Mistress Slanning called first thing this morning She was in a — troubled state. She says she is going to a new lawyer.’

‘Yes. I thought that might happen.’

‘Should I send her a final bill?’

‘Yes, we had better. If we don’t she will take it as an admission of guilt or wrongdoing. With luck we shall not have to see her again.’

‘She said she was going to take the case to Master Dyrick, whom you had dealings with last year.’ Skelly looked at me curiously.

‘Really? Well, if she wants someone to run a hopeless case with the maximum vigour, and charge her for the pleasure of it, she could not do better than Vincent Dyrick.’ I turned to Barak. ‘Come through, would you, Jack?’

He followed me into my office and I motioned him to sit. ‘Dyrick again, eh? Well, they’ll suit each other,’ Barak said, managing a wry smile.

‘I am only glad to be out of it. And I doubt Dyrick will encourage her to make trouble for me; remember, I know things about him.’ I took a deep breath. ‘Jack, I am more sorry than I can say for what happened yesterday.’

‘I knew what I could be getting into.’

‘I would have come round last night, but I thought you were best left to tell Tamasin — to tell her — ’

‘A pack of lies,’ he finished heavily. ‘Yes, you are right. So far as she is concerned I had an accident at the office. I was making a hole in a pile of papers with a knife, to thread a tag through, when my hand slipped. Tammy was full of sympathy, which makes it worse. Listen, when Nick gets in we need to meet to make sure we have the story straight between the three of us. You’ll be seeing Tamasin next week at George’s party. Please.’

‘Yes, we will do that.’ I closed my eyes a moment. ‘Once again, I am sorry.’

He gave me his most piercing look. ‘I just wish I knew what was going on.’

I shook my head. ‘No. Safer not. How is your hand?’

‘Sore as hell. But I have to play it down for Tamasin’s sake, that’s why I came in today. I’ll survive,’ he added.

‘Any word from Nicholas?’

‘He got but a flesh wound,’ Barak said unsympathetically. ‘By the way, there’s a message for you, from Treasurer Rowland. He wants you to see him this morning. Before ten; he has a meeting then.’

‘I’ll go now. He did mention he had another task for me.’ I got up. ‘Dear God, I hope it’s nothing like what he had me do last week.’

Rowland was seated behind his desk again, writing. He raised his head, a cold look on his thin face. He had worn a similar expression when I had reported back to him after Anne Askew’s burning, complimenting me on finding a place at Smithfield where my presence would be noted. I had, of course, not told him of Rich’s glare at me. Looking at his white hair and long beard, I wished that, like Martin Brocket’s old employer, he would retire. But he was the sort who savoured power, and would probably die at his desk.

‘Serjeant Shardlake,’ he said. ‘Sit down.’ He tapped the paper on his desk with a bony, inky finger. ‘You knew the late Brother Bealknap, I believe. Had more than one passage of arms with him, I think.’

‘Indeed I did.’

‘I have just been composing a note to send round the Inn about his funeral. I am having to make the arrangements; his executor is not interested and there is no family. It will be in two days’ time, the twenty-fourth, in the chapel. I doubt many will come.’

‘No.’ Certainly I would not, after Bealknap’s piece of deathbed spite.

‘You will appreciate this,’ Rowland said. ‘Bealknap left a vast sum of money to build what amounts to a mausoleum in the Inn chapel. With a marble image of himself, decorated and gilded and heaven knows what. He paid the Inn a good deal of money to agree to have it done.’

‘So he told me. I saw him the day he died.’

Rowland raised his white eyebrows. ‘Did you, by Mary?’

‘He asked me to visit him.’

‘A deathbed repentance?’ Rowland’s eyes narrowed with malicious curiosity.

‘No.’ I sighed. ‘Not really.’

‘You remember all the rumours that he had a great chest of gold in his chambers? Well, it was my duty to go and look for it. That chest did indeed exist, and contained several hundred sovereigns. But it wasn’t at his chambers. Bealknap had had the sense to deposit it with one of the goldsmiths, for security. According to this goldsmith, Bealknap used to go there and sit with it of an evening.’

‘He was a strange man.’