Wednesday, February 5
As soon as Clarenceux was awake he got up and knelt on Awdrey’s side of the bed, praying for her. The ewer was empty, the basin filled with dirty water. The shirt in which he had slept was also several days old; he threw it in a corner—only to pick it up again when he remembered that there were no clean ones left in his clothes chest. Having put it on and fastened his breeches, he left the chamber.
On the landing he listened for any sign of the girl, Alice, who had come home with them the previous night. Silence. He went down to the hall. Fyndern’s bed had been tidied away and there was no sign of him either. Thomas had stacked his bedding to one side and was lighting the fire in the hearth.
“Where’s that boy?” asked Clarenceux. “I’ll hold you a shilling that he’s wasted no time with that strumpet we brought home yesterday.” Thomas brushed the old ash dust off his hands. “He is down in the stable, I believe.”
Clarenceux went down the back stairs. The back door was open, and Fyndern had already unbolted the stable door. Clarenceux’s suspicious mind took him in that direction. Neither of them were in the stable, however, nor even in the stable loft. Brutus snorted in his stall and Maud took some fresh hay from the supply in her manger. At least Fyndern saw to the horses first.
He returned to the house and went into the kitchen, where the smell of bread baking greeted him. Fyndern’s curly brown hair was near the floor, and the girl’s long dark hair not far from his. There they were, both down on their knees scrubbing. Immediately Clarenceux felt guilty; judging by the extent they had already cleaned, they had started before dawn. A burning candle stood on a table and another in a holder against the fireplace. The fire was alight too.
“Good day, Mr. Clarenceux,” said Fyndern, smiling brightly. “Alice is showing me how to bake bread.”
The girl rose to her feet and bowed. “Good morrow to you, Mr. Clarenceux,” she said, with what seemed to Clarenceux to be a Yorkshire accent. “I am grateful to you for bringing me home.”
Clarenceux hesitated. “If you can bake bread and clean you are welcome,” he said, ashamed of his earlier thoughts. “Where is your home parish?”
“I was raised in Halifax, in my father’s tavern,” she replied.
“What brought you to London?” he inquired.
“A man who claimed to be a friend of my mother’s. He found me begging after my mother died and promised he would marry me, if I came with him to London. That was last autumn.”
“Where is he now?”
She shrugged. “Drunk. Dead. Dead drunk. I neither know nor care. He deceived me.”
Clarenceux looked at Fyndern, who was gazing at the girl. Asking her to stay was tempting fate, but the opportunity seemed too good to miss. “Can you wash linen as well?”
“Do you have soap?”
Clarenceux pointed to an earthenware pot on a shelf. “Up there. If you will work, I’ll pay wages of a shilling a week, with meals and a bed in the attic.”
The offer was half as much again as most women earned in service. Alice bowed once more. “You are very kind.” She smiled.
Clarenceux could see that she was even younger than she had first appeared in the inn—as Fyndern had said. He took off his dirty shirt and placed it on the stone drainer to his right. “As soon as you can—I have run short. There are more in the buck basket in my daughter’s chamber too. Fyndern will show you where.”
Thomas came into the kitchen as Clarenceux, semi-naked, left. If the first sight did not surprise him, the second certainly did: Fyndern on his knees. “There’s nothing like a doe to make the heart leap,” the old man muttered. Then he said to Alice, “Watch out—he will have you dancing again in that black smock.”
***
In his study Clarenceux looked at the piece of paper on which he had charted the comings and goings of men in the house opposite. The very sight of it taunted him; he screwed it up and threw it into the cold fireplace. My Etheldreda, my love. The coldness of the room and the house touched him physically. He had no urge to soften it with warmth; he deserved the cold.
Taking another piece of paper, he started to write a few notes toward his plan for exchanging the document for his wife, but however he arranged things, it seemed awkward. Soon that paper too was in the fireplace.
It all came back to Thame Abbey. He was unable to rid his mind of the strategy that he had first thought of when reading Henry of Abingdon’s chronicle. It was the way forward: to take his enemies there, into the refectory with its wooden floor, give them the document, and let them send word for Awdrey and Mildred to be delivered to safety—and then to destroy the place, reducing all of them to ashes, as well as the document. But that secret place in the abbey described in Henry of Abingdon’s chronicle—what were the chances that it would outlast the smoke and fire?
It would take courage. The chances were that he would die in the flames. He shut his eyes and tried to imagine what it would be like. Many in the last reign had felt it—and some had even chosen to suffer death in that way. There was the case of John Badby in the reign of Henry the Fourth. He had been put on the pyre, and when he was screaming and his flesh turning black and the fat sizzling in his arms, Prince Henry had ordered the faggots pulled away and had offered him a pension and a pardon if he would renounce his heresy. Badby was just an ordinary craftsman who openly refused to believe in transubstantiation—and yet he would not admit he was wrong. Even when the prince told him they would pile the burning faggots around him again, he refused to accept the pension and the pardon, choosing to be burned to death. That was how courageous some men could be in the heat of the fire. But could he do it? Could he do anything like it?
He had been thinking about what he had to do, turning it over and over in his mind for more than an hour when he heard steps on the staircase and Alice knocked on the door of the study. She entered bearing a cleaned and folded shirt. She held it out to him. It was warm.
“How did you dry it so fast without making it smell of smoke?” he asked.
“In the oven,” she replied. “A trick my mother taught me.”
Clarenceux stood up and put on the clean shirt, feeling much the smarter for it. He looked at Alice. “How long were you at the Black Swan?”
“Three or four weeks.”
“Then you must have become well acquainted with Maurice Buckman?”
“The priest? He did not often show his face.” She noticed the collar of Clarenceux’s doublet was not straight, and reached out and corrected it.
“What about John Greystoke? Tall thin man with white hair, in his late twenties or early thirties—usually wears a sword.”
“No.”
“A dark-haired woman called Sarah Cowie? Ann Thwaite? Joan Hellier?”
The girl’s humor diminished with all the questioning. “I know none of those women. I just danced there for money and slept in the hall. May I go now, please?”
The city bells began to ring the hour. It was time for him to see Annie. “I am sorry for all the questions, Alice. I’m just a worried old man who needs to know more than he can remember.”
Alice bowed and went to the door.
“Alice, one last question,” said Clarenceux.
She turned around, still holding the latch with her right hand. “Yes?”
“What is your surname?”
“Vardine,” she replied.