Nicolas could remember it as clearly as if it had been yesterday. How she had sent that imperious message via one of her trusted servants – ‘You must come at once’ – and how he had gone instantly, almost without thinking about it. He thought that anyone she beckoned to would do the same. Yes, but would they have done so before she had the lute and before he had taught her Isabella’s music?
He had been taken in to the Tower by one of her women – there had been some jumbled plot about his having brought a message from her family – he could not remember the details, and he was not sure if he had ever known them. But he had been taken to her.
Even in prison she had been haughty. She had received him as arrogantly as if she had been still Henry’s pampered, cossetted Queen, and Nicolas had thought: madame, you have come a very long way from that eager young girl who bought from me the devil’s lute of my ancestress and who laughed when I warned of the music’s force.
She indicated to him to be seated and regarded him composedly. When she spoke, her voice was exactly as he remembered it: low-pitched and faintly husky.
‘You see, Minstrel, I have travelled a long road since we met.’
Nicolas jumped because her words had been uncannily in tune with his thoughts, and he remembered the vague rumours of witchcraft that had always surrounded her. But he said gently, ‘So you have, madame, and I am sorry for it.’
‘It does not matter now.’ For a moment the dark eyes that no painter had ever been able to capture were inward-looking, and Nicolas thought: she is going to break. She is going to break now and I am going to be the one to witness it. She has resisted cardinals and chancellors and kings without fear, but the fear is very close to the surface. It’s in her eyes. It’s like staring into a black abyss . . . As if I am seeing into her soul . . . And then Anne turned away and when she spoke again, he knew the moment had passed. She would not break now and he was glad. For I should like to remember her as she would wish: imperious, aloof. Untouchable. Touch me not, for Caesar’s I am . . . One of her admirers had written that to her, and Nicolas saw how true the words had been.
In her cool, low-pitched voice, she said, ‘There is one thing I will ask of you.’ The dark eyes flickered back to him. ‘It is the request of a dying woman.’ There was a glint of wry mischief.
Nicolas said, ‘Yes?’
‘The lute you sold to me so many years ago.’
‘Well?’
‘You remember it?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘I thought you would.’ She paused, as if weighing up two courses of action, and then said, ‘When she is old enough, I should wish the lute to be given to my cousin. Catherine – Edmund Howard’s girl. You are the only one I can trust to do it. Teach her the music you taught me.’ A pause. ‘Tell her it failed me, but it may not fail her.’ The dark eyes met his coolly, but Nicolas felt as if a velvet-covered feline paw had traced a caress down his spine. He remembered again the whispers of witchcraft and he remembered how, four hundred years earlier, Isabella Amati was believed to have trafficked with the devil. And for almost twenty years, this thin-faced, haunted-eyed woman had possessed Isabella’s music, and for at least fifteen of those years she had held a King in such thrall that he had turned England upside-down for her and slaughtered monks wholesale to have her in his bed. Touch me not, for Satan’s I am.
He said, ‘You trust me to do that?’
‘I do.’ She studied him and after a moment she smiled. ‘Yes, I do trust you,’ she said. ‘I have not travelled that long road without learning who to trust and who not. You will do what I ask.’
‘Yes. But it seems an odd choice.’
She caught his meaning at once; she said, ‘You think it should be my daughter who has it? But Elizabeth is too young.’
‘Yes?’
‘And I do not think she will need it,’ said Anne.
‘The devil’s lute and the devil’s music is to go to Catherine Howard. For I have no more need of it.’
Nicolas sat in the window-seat of Lambeth House and watched Catherine Howard turn the ancient lute over in her hands. Three years since he had accepted the odd secret task; three years since he had stood on the edges of the crowd on Tower Hill and watched that strange disconcerting woman go to her death.
He looked back at Catherine Howard. This one had not the elusive bewitchment of her dead cousin, but for all that, Nicolas was reminded of Anne. Something of the same quality in the eyes and in the expressive, graceful hands. And the slender, flower-stem neck.
A prickle of disquiet ruffled his mind, but after a moment, he said, ‘Your cousin wished you to know the music that has come down with the lute. You permit?’ He reached for the lute again and ran his hands across the strings.
Catherine, staring, thought: he is caressing the lute as if it was a lover. How would it feel . . .? No, he is twenty years older than I am, an old man, and I could never . . . Yes, but his hands are slender and soft and they would feel like silk on your skin . . .
It won’t do, thought Catherine determinedly. Think of going to Court, think of the people there – men, young men. Listen to the sequence of notes he is playing. Cool, beckoning. Insistent. This is what she wanted me to know about – Anne. How very extraordinary.
And then Nicolas handed her the lute and said, ‘You play it,’ and Catherine, her mind tumbling with sensuous delight, stared at him and thought: it would not matter if he was forty or thirty or seventy.
She began to trace out the sequence of sweet, silvery notes that four centuries earlier had been played by another wilful wanton lady with red hair, and that a thousand years before that had seduced a High Priest from his sacred vows. The music drifted into the quiet room. Like quicksilver breaking up and running in tiny, glinting fragments, thought Catherine. Like icicles tapping against frosted glass. A beckoning. Follow me and do as I bid you.
The music was borne upwards, like swansdown, so that it trickled into the upper rooms of the great house.
In one of those rooms, within the silver coffin, Ahasuerus stirred.