Lamentation

‘Perhaps. Or if they were sacramentarians they might have feared the attentions of Bishop Gardiner’s men. If that is the case, the Lord alone knows where they are.’

I remembered young Hugh’s letter, the story of the refugees arriving in the Low Countries, fearing persecution. And Vandersteyn hailed from Flanders.

Cecil continued, ‘Then I decided to call on the apprentice Elias’s mother, to see what news she had, or whether perhaps he had come home. I found her outside, on her knees, frantically washing blood off the wall of the alleyway.’

‘Dear God.’

‘She has two little daughters. Her husband died of quinsy last year.’

‘Perhaps that was why Elias took another job rather than leaving the district as the others seem to have done.’

‘Mayhap.’ Cecil took a deep breath. ‘Elias’s mother told me that in the small hours of last night, she heard her son shouting for help outside. She rushed out, like a good mother.’ He sighed again and shook his head. ‘She saw him killed. Let her tell you the story herself. She has taken the body into the house. Jesu, the sight of it turned my stomach.’

‘Has she told the authorities?’

‘No. Because of what Elias said to her before he died.’

‘The name Anne Askew?’

‘Yes.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Quiet now, look there.’

We were passing along Paternoster Row. All the shops were shut for the Sabbath. However, a man in a black doublet was walking slowly along the sunlit street, peering into the shop windows. Cecil smiled sardonically. ‘I know him. One of Bishop Gardiner’s spies, trying to spot forbidden titles no doubt, or dubious-looking visitors to the printers.’

We walked past him. Looking back at him from a safe distance, I asked Cecil, ‘Have you worked for the Queen’s Learned Council for long?’

‘Two years only. Lord Parr has been good enough to favour me.’

For Cecil’s abilities, I thought; there was no doubting those. And for his reformist sympathies too, most likely. ‘Where are you from?’ I asked. ‘I thought I caught a trace of Lincolnshire. My pupil is from there.’

‘Well divined. My first wife came from there, too, like me, but sadly God took her to Him in childbirth, though He left me our son.’

I looked at him. His was an unremarkable face, but for those powerful, protuberant eyes which I had noticed seldom blinked, and that line of three moles running down one cheek. Yet he had been married, widowed and remarried, and become a confidant of the highest in the land, all by his mid-twenties. For all his ordinary looks and reserved manner, William Cecil was a man out of the common run. ‘We turn down here,’ he said abruptly.

We walked into a narrow alley, made darker by the shadow of the cathedral, onto which it backed. Chickens pecked in the dust. Cecil stopped in front of a door with flaking paint. Beside it, almost blocking the dusty alleyway, stood a cart, a tarpaulin slung over it. Cecil knocked gently at the door: two short raps then a long pause till the next, obviously a prearranged signal.

The door was opened by a woman in her forties, as short and spare as Elias had been large and burly. She wore a shapeless grey dress and had not even put on a coif, her dark hair hastily knotted behind her head. Her eyes were wide with horror and fear. On her cuffs I saw flecks of red. She stared at me, then Cecil. ‘Who’s this?’ she asked him fearfully.

‘Master Shardlake. A lawyer. And, like me, one who would not have people persecuted for their opinions. May we come in, Goodwife Rooke?’

Her shoulders slumped helplessly, and she nodded. She led us into a poorly furnished parlour where two thin little girls of about eight and nine sat at table. The younger had her mother’s small, birdlike features, the elder Elias’s heaviness of face and body. Both stared at us in fear. I noticed a bucket and scrubbing brush on the floor, a discarded apron, stained red, rolled into a ball beside it.

‘Girls,’ Goodwife Rooke said gently. ‘Go and wait upstairs in our bedroom. But do not go in your brother’s room. Do you swear?’

‘I swear,’ the elder girl said. She took her sister’s hand and they sidled past us. Their footsteps sounded on a wooden staircase. Goodwife Rooke sat down.

‘It is no thing for his sisters to see,’ she said. ‘Nor a mother either,’ she added, her voice breaking.

‘Do the girls know?’ Cecil asked gently.

‘Only that Elias has been hurt, not that he is dead. I had a mighty job keeping them in our room last night, while I was heaving his body up the staircase. The noise made the girls call out to ask what was happening.’ She rested her brow on a trembling hand for a moment, then looked at us desperately. ‘I don’t know what to do, sirs.’

Cecil said, ‘We shall try to help you. Now, can you tell this gentleman what happened?’

‘If it is not too much,’ I added reassuringly.