The Perfect Sinner

‘They’re pressing him hard. The Genoa deal is something to do with it. He has promised them agreement by the end of February, otherwise he is in default.’

I knew all too well what default would mean. Humiliation for the English crown. We all remembered the last time he’d had to pawn the crown and the shame that brought, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn he’d done the same again. I loved my king, but sometimes he behaved like a complete idiot.

I rubbed my brow, suddenly aware of the enormous practical difficulties of this whole enterprise.

‘Three days to get all this ready? I don’t even know if Hawley’s in Dartmouth and the Michel hasn’t left his mooring since October.’

‘Hawley’s ready. I saw him on the way. The King’s messenger got that far, at least.’

‘Well, he didn’t get here. Oh, wait a minute. They found a man on the rocks below Strete. He’d been thrown off the cliffs, stripped of everything but his jerkin.’

‘That was him. Someone’s killed a King’s messenger in your lands. There’ll be a big fuss about that.’

‘There’s no time to lose. Is Hawley provisioning the ship?’

‘Yes. I told him to do it well. I can’t eat that vile stuff you usually serve on board.’

I stared at him in astonishment. ‘You’re coming to Dordrecht?’

‘No, no. What would be the point of that? I’m coming all the way to Genoa.’

‘Why?’ The thought of getting William’s great bulk over the Alps in the snow was appalling.

‘It sounded like fun,’ was all he would say, then before I had a chance to argue, the priest played his trump card.

‘I also hear, if the masons are to be believed, you’re going to leave your message on the walls here for all to see, and as far as the future of your soul and come to that, your neck, is concerned that seems to me to be the more pressing concern right now.’

That made me blink. ‘You know about that?’ I had thought the Declaration was a secret. There was nothing of it yet to be seen. It was all still forming in my head and the words had to be right before I would let the carver pick up his chisel. Second thoughts are best avoided when you set your words in stone.

‘I get to hear most things. Is that something to do with the clerks? I keep wondering why a Chantry needs all those clerks.’

He was a perceptive man and he knew me better than any now alive, perhaps better than anyone bar Elizabeth ever had done.

‘To a point. I have a great work in mind. The message, as you call it, is a small part of it. The clerks will work to draw together the thoughts that lie behind it.’

‘Has it struck you that the only ones likely to have learning enough to read your message are also the ones most likely to disapprove?’

‘I don’t care.’

‘And if the King reads it?’

‘Does the King know about it?’

‘Not yet, but when he does…’

‘All the better.’

‘Where’s it going to go?’ he asked. ‘If it’s going to be displayed on my church for all the world to see and disapprove, then I’d better know.’

‘I’ll show you.’

The plaque lay ready on the stonecutter’s bench. Its surface was smooth to the touch and the border had been chased out in folds to frame it.

‘Either you’ve got a lot to say or it’s going to be carved in big letters,’ said the priest. ‘What exactly is it going to say?’

‘You can read it when it’s finished. It’s too close to me, too raw. I can’t tell you yet.’

‘You don’t trust me?’

How could I not trust him, the man who came closest to understanding, the man who had risked the King’s fury to back me up in the days when we were all young, when he was a mere deacon, without the age and reputation to keep the royal wrath at bay?

‘I’ll tell you the first line,’ I said.

‘I’m listening.’

Elizabeth’s words came to me fresh. ‘Senes qui domi manent, nolite juvenes verbis belli accendere.’

‘Oh dear,’ said the priest. ‘I was afraid it would be something like that. Where exactly is it going?’

I turned around and gasped as the old wound in my knee caught at me. I pointed at the chapel porch. ‘Right above the door,’ I told him, ‘for all to see.’

The priest looked where I pointed and then cocked his head up to follow the height of the tower as it soared high into the air.

‘I predict trouble,’ he said. ‘If you want to enjoy a quiet old age, you should put it higher up.’

‘How much higher?’

The priest looked at the rooks wheeling around the summit of the tower, a dizzy height above us.

‘What about up there,’ he suggested, ‘right at the top. That might just save your neck.’

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_cc4cbcae-7d3f-5e7c-b4c3-cb5c4c4284b7)

This is not a complaint, but I have spent more than half my life away from my own bed and probably a quarter of it away from any bed at all. This past year I have served Edward mostly at sea in the Channel against the Castilian galleys and I have now been granted the extra responsibility of Admiral of the Western seas. Oh, and I also had to address Parliament on his behalf, asking them for still more money. The King is no longer quite the active man he was, but a year or two ago he told me that if I had wanted a quiet life, I should have taken care to seem more of an idiot and more of a coward. I think it was a compliment.

When I began to notice the discomfort, I realised the King’s business took me along some well-worn routes and there was no good reason why I should put up with strange beds. I have therefore bought myself houses on some of those frequented paths, personal hostels for a personal pilgrim carefully spaced at a day’s travelling distance and now, most of the time, I can sleep in one of my very own beds. That’s England I’m talking about. Now we were going abroad and it was back to the bad old ways.

I was brooding on that when the Michel took a wave right over the bow and staggered almost to a halt. He is a good ship and he’d been built just the way I wanted him. He can go further to windward than any other ship I know, but it was asking a lot to expect him to fight his way up-Channel in a down-Channel gale. I called him after my dear old horse, the first of my chargers, killed under me by a Frenchman’s sword in his throat, and in truth they behaved the same way, the ship and the horse. The first Michel was there with me through thick and thin just as long as I kept him properly fed and properly shod and didn’t ask him to charge straight into a low sun. He didn’t like it when blades came at him out of the glare. He carried me for six years in the King’s service, which is quite a record when you think how much of that time was spent at the exact places where two armies were colliding. We talked to each other a lot, Michel and I. The second Michel, the wooden one, felt the same way about the wind as the first one felt about the low sun. The weight of the water forced his head further and further off course and the big sail slatted and cracked. I had seen this one coming and braced myself on the backstay, but the King’s squire, face down on the deck, short and fat with his head in a bucket, hardly seemed to care about the distinction between air and water any more. He was already soaked through before the wave hit him, so that the flood only lifted and swelled his sodden woollen jerkin as it passed. The priest was braced against the weather rail as ever, glaring at the vague horizon as if he were hoping for a fight. It was the fourth day of our three-day passage up-Channel, and I only minded the delay because William wouldn’t perform the office of Mass in any kind of storm. It was one of his few orthodoxies. He said he had seen too many people vomit up the Host and that was definitely disrespectful and possibly blasphemous. I was standing behind the steersman, staring forwards beyond the port bow, to where the sea blurred into the low, cantering clouds. White-caps were whipping from the wave tops in the wind that came driving from behind him again as the bow swung back on course. We had seen no sign of the sun for many hours and, though there should be nothing ahead of us, who could tell for sure whether it was wind, rock or sandbank that broke and frothed the sea?

My sailing master caught my eye and jerked his head down towards the well-deck. Hawley was not known for his soft heart or his thoughtfulness for those who didn’t share his complete indifference to the discomforts of the sea, but he seemed to like the squire. They had made friends in Dartmouth before we sailed. Not many people ever managed to make friends with Hawley. He didn’t like to cheat his friends, which may have been why he chose to have so few. The young man was showing signs of movement, doing his best to get to his knees. I dropped down the ladder and stood beside him. ‘How are you?’ I asked, and he swung his head to one side and then the other as if he could not quite locate me.

I’m still breathing,’ he gasped, ‘at least when there’s air to be had. The rest of the time I’m drinking. Are we nearly there?’

‘Visibility’s bad. I can’t see land at the moment,’ I said, knowing a fuller answer might nip this brave attempt at recovery in the bud.

The squire made a huge effort and reared his head higher than it had been since dawn. The Channel never seemed this wide before,’ he said uncertainly. ‘How far is it?’

I could not evade a direct question. ‘We’re a little west of where we started, doing what we can against a north-east wind.’