Lamentation

I leaned back, thinking of those I had questioned at Whitehall. I could not see either of the pages or Mary Odell taking the book. But I was not so sure of Jane Fool. I had a feeling she was less stupid than she pretended, though that in itself was not proof of guilt. And she served the Lady Mary as well as the Queen. I remembered Mary Odell’s account of the strange behaviour of the guard on duty the night the manuscript was stolen. I must see what Lord Parr turned up there.

I looked up at the green branches of the large old elm beside the pavilion. The leaves moved in the faint breeze from the river, making a kaleidoscope of pretty patterns on the pavilion floor. I looked over at the house, shaking my head. For the most important question remained unanswered: how could anyone have learned that the Lamentation existed at all?

I wrote down the next important date. The 10th of July. The murder of Armistead Greening; the stolen manuscript of the Lamentation grabbed from his hand by two men who had come to kill him and hide the deed by setting his shed on fire. Different men from the earlier attack, on the 5th, though again young and roughly dressed. One of the earlier attackers seemed to have worn an embroidered sleeve, the mark of a gentleman. I remembered what Okedene’s old servant had said about the man from the first group, who was missing half an ear. It looked like a slash from a sword, not the great hole you get from having your ear nailed to the pillory. So he had probably been in a sword fight; and the only people who were allowed to carry swords were those of gentlemen status, like Nicholas. I thought, what if both attacks were carried out by people of high status, dressed like commoners to escape notice? What if all four attackers were working for the same person? Yet that left unresolved the central problem that, at the time of the first attack, the Lamentation had not yet been stolen. Could both sets of attackers have been after something else and found the Lamentation by chance?

After Greening’s murder, his associates had, except for Elias, fled. They had first been questioned by the constable, and all had alibis. Had they left because they were frightened of religious persecution, I wondered, or for some other reason? Only poor Elias had stayed because his mother and sisters needed him, and he had been killed by the same people who killed Greening.

And then there was that new mystery: Elias’s dying words to his mother. Killed for Anne Askew. I wondered, had Greening’s group had some association with her before her capture?

I thought more about Greening’s group of friends. According to Okedene, apart from Greening himself and Elias, there had been one or two people who came from time to time, but the core of the little fellowship remained the three men who had vanished. I wrote down ‘McKendrick, the Scottish soldier. Curdy, the candlemaker. Vandersteyn, the Dutch trader.’ Religious radicals, meeting for potentially dangerous discussions. Possibly sacramentarians, or even Anabaptists. And somehow, the Lamentation had come into Greening’s hands.

The radical groups were well known to be disputatious, often falling out among themselves. Okedene had overheard them arguing loudly. I thought, what if they had somehow stolen the manuscript and planned to print it as proof that the Queen sympathized with religious radicalism? They might even have thought it would stir up the populace in support of their stance, so popular was the Queen. Of course, the notion was mad — the only result would be the Queen’s death. But the religious radicals were often ignorant and naive when it came to actual political realities.

I stood up, pacing to and fro. This, I told myself, was pure speculation. And the person Okedene had heard them arguing over just before Greening’s murder was not the Queen, but this mysterious Jurony Bertano, that they called the ‘agent of the Antichrist’, who was soon to arrive, but about whom nobody at court appeared to know anything. I wrote the name down phonetically, as I was unsure of the spelling, and decided I would ask Guy about the possible nationality of its owner.

Then I wrote another, final name: Bealknap. What he had said was a complete mystery, and a worrying one. He had seemed certain that both the Queen and I had an ill fate in store. But I crossed out his name; his deathbed words had, surely, referred to the heresy hunt and his hope to live to see me and the Queen caught up in it.