Heresy (27 page)

His stare was so disconcerting that I lowered my own eyes, anxious not to provoke any confrontation, but it was clear that this was not a place where a stranger could take a quiet drink without his presence arousing an unspoken but palpable reaction. When I looked up again, a sturdy woman of perhaps forty in a stained apron was standing in front of me, her arms folded. She had stringy greying hair scraped back from her square-jawed face and her brown eyes were sceptical.

“What’ll you have, sir?”

“A pot of ale?”

She nodded curtly, but continued to stand there appraising me. “You are not a familiar face, sir. What brings you to the Catherine Wheel?”

“I was hungry, I saw your sign and thought to stop for dinner.”

Her eyes narrowed further. “You are not from hereabouts, I think.”

“I was born in Italy,” I said, meeting her stare as frankly as I could.

She pursed her lips and nodded. “Friend to the pope?”

“Not personally,” I said, and finally her face softened a little and she almost smiled.

“You understand my meaning, sir.”

“Will my answer determine whether or not you bring me the beer?”

“Just like to be sure we have the right kind of people here, sir.”

I looked around the taproom; a less salubrious crowd it would be hard to picture. I was reminded of the roadside inns I had been forced to make use of during my flight from San Domenico.

“I was raised in the church of Rome,” I said, evenly. “I don’t know if that makes me the right kind of person, but I promise it does not affect the coins in my purse.”

She seemed to concede then, and half turned as if to go. “What do you call yourself?” she asked, as an afterthought.

“Filippo,” I said, surprised at the ease with which the name slipped out; it had come almost as a reflex. Perhaps it was the memory of those years as a fugitive, when I had travelled under my birth name, knowing that to own my identity could be fatal. Here, in this gloomy tavern among the sidelong glances and murmurs, instinct had prompted the same need for caution. “Filippo il Nolano.”

The landlady seemed satisfied. She nodded, unfolded her arms, and made a slight dipping movement which might almost have been a curtsey. “Joan Kenney, widow, at your service. Will you eat, sir?”

“What have you?”

“Pottage,” she said firmly.

I had by that time been in England long enough to know that pottage was a sludgy concoction produced by mixing oatmeal with the juice left
over from stewing meat, something that should rightly be served to livestock but which the English seemed to find an indispensable addition to any table.

“No meat?” I asked hopefully. “It is Sunday.”

“We have pottage, sir. You may take it or leave it.”

Reluctantly, I said that I would take it.

“Humphrey!” she called, and a door opened beside the serving hatch to admit a young man with fair curly hair holding a dirty dishcloth in his hands. Though he was at least six feet tall and probably in his twenties, he looked first at the landlady and then at me with the blank, open face of a child eager to please, and I guessed he was probably slow-witted.

“Fetch Master Nerlarno some pottage and a pot of ale quick as you can, and don’t even think of imposing on him with your idle chatter,” she snapped, and Humphrey nodded furiously, with exaggerated up-and-down movements of his head as a child might, twisting the cloth in his hands as he looked at her. “He’s Welsh,” the landlady added darkly, as if this explained much.

While the boy disappeared to the kitchen, the woman crossed the room and leaned over the table to whisper something to the earless man, who inclined his head and nodded sagely without taking his eyes off me.

The boy, Humphrey, returned promptly with a bowl of tepid grey slurry which he slopped half across the table, and a wooden cup of beer topped with a film of grease, and stood by the table smiling energetically down at me.

“Thank you,” I said, eventually, and when he still didn’t leave, I wondered if I was supposed to tip him.

“Are you from Italy?” he asked, in a lilting voice, crouching so that he was at my eye level and considering me with his head tilted to one side.

“That’s right,” I said, poking the contents of my bowl with a piece of bread. They seemed to have congealed already.

“Say something in Italian then,” Humphrey said, as if challenging me to impress him, the way a child might challenge a street conjuror. I thought for a moment.

“Non darei questo cibo nemmeno al mio cane,”
I said, smiling pleasantly but keeping my voice low, just in case. His eyes lit up with as much wonder as if I had produced a coin from the air and his broad face creased into a smile.

“What does it mean?”

“Oh—it is hard to translate directly. It was a compliment on your delicious food.”

He leaned in very close, so that his breath was tickling my ear. He smelled overwhelmingly of onions. “I don’t know Italian,” he whispered, “but I do know Latin.”

“Good for you,” I said indulgently, expecting a string of nonsense, for it was impossible that a simple-minded potboy could truly have been educated in Latin. He nodded hard, his face serious.

“
Ora pro nobis,”
he hissed into my ear, then drew back to look at me expectantly, proud of himself, awaiting my approval.

I felt my own eyes widen then, and fought to keep my face steady; a faint light of understanding was beginning to spread over the questions that jostled in my mind.

“That is very good, Humphrey. Do you know any more?” I whispered back. He beamed and leaned in again, but at that moment the landlady’s shrill voice broke in.

“Humphrey Pritchard! Did I not tell you to leave the poor gentleman alone? Ha’n’t you got work to do? He don’t want to listen to your foolishness—let him enjoy his meal in peace.” With this misplaced optimism, she appeared suddenly at Humphrey’s shoulder, cuffed him lightly around the back of the head, and shoved him toward the kitchen; though he was twice her size, his face crumpled with guilt and he scurried away, his big body hunched miserably.

The landlady wiped her hands on her apron and forced a smile. “He wasn’t saying anything, ah …offensive, I hope?” she asked, but I thought I caught a note of anxiety in her voice.

“Not at all,” I said. “He was only asking if the food was all right.”

Her eyes narrowed. “And is it?”

“Mm. Thank you.”

She looked at me for a moment as if she wanted to add something, then nodded curtly and disappeared into the kitchen, where I heard the sound of muffled voices, hers berating poor Humphrey and his raised in protest.

Dinner was an uncomfortable affair; I forced as little of the grim stew as possible through my clenched teeth, conscious all the while of the level stare of the earless man and his cronies in the corner. I half hoped he would at least come across and confront me, perhaps explain why he looked at me with such interest or familiarity, but he remained in his seat, stirring only occasionally to lean across and murmur something to one of his companions.

I kept my eyes on my plate, my mind chasing after fragments of conversation.
Ora pro nobis
. Pray for us. The words written in code in the back of Roger Mercer’s almanac. A prayer of intercession, a fragment of the Ave Maria or the Litaniae Sanctorum, for where else would an uneducated man like Humphrey learn Latin except from the responses of the Mass? So young Humphrey Pritchard had either overheard or taken part in Catholic liturgies. Had he heard those words through association with people he knew from the tavern? That would explain why his employer was so keen to keep him from talking to strangers. And why had Roger written out that same phrase in code? A password, perhaps, or a sign to be recognised among co-conspirators. Was the Catherine Wheel some kind of meeting place or safe house for secret Catholics—was that what my enigmatic correspondent at Lincoln College was trying to steer me toward?

I realised that I had been staring at the earless man as I contemplated this. Almost as if he had been stirred into life by my thoughts, at that moment
he rose to his feet, brushed down his doublet, and called to the landlady to settle his bill.

“Alas, Widow Kenney, I must leave you for now—though it is the Sabbath, business presses as always,” he announced, and I was surprised to hear that he had an educated accent. It made a disconcerting contrast with his appearance, which gave him the look of a common criminal. Once again, I had to reprimand myself for making hasty judgments on a man’s manner or looks. I waited until the door had swung shut behind him before following suit. If Widow Kenney saw anything suspicious in my haste to leave, it was indistinguishable from her habitual expression, and she thanked me flatly as I threw some coins on the table and hurried out of the door, craning my neck in both directions along the street in the hope that I would still have the earless man in sight.

I was in luck; he had almost reached the top of the street by the church. Keeping again to the shadow of the buildings on my left, I told myself that this pursuit was far more worthy of one of Walsingham’s agents, and I found I was relishing the drama of the moment and the rush of adrenaline in my veins.

The earless man crossed the broad street and passed under the north gate, by the church of St. Michael and the Bocado Prison. I followed him at a safe distance along Sommer Lane, past the front of Exeter College and the rear wall of the Divinity School; at one point, I had the sense that someone was following me and turned sharply, but there were only a handful of people in the street, all going about their business without apparently taking any notice of me, so I put it down to heightened nerves and kept my eyes fixed on the earless man.

At the corner of the university schools, he turned right into the narrow lane called Catte Street, where the houses stood closer together, the timber-framed upper storeys overhanging the road so that it stood in shadow, keeping the ground still wet underfoot. From the abundance of painted signs
jutting out from the buildings, groaning gently in the wind, it was clear that this was a commercial street; closer inspection revealed businesses catering to the needs of an academic community: printers, stationers, makers of robes and regalia, and a number of book dealers and binders, all shuttered and closed.

The earless man slowed his pace and I followed suit, just as I noticed a figure coming toward us from the other direction, dressed in a black academic gown and velvet cap. He carried himself stiffly, like an old man, and his steps were halting, as if he found walking effortful. The earless man stopped in front of a narrow shop front with grimy windows and raised a hand in greeting; the figure in the cap made a small gesture of acknowledgement in return. I ducked into a doorway just as he drew level with the shop and removed his cap, checking the street as if anxious not to be seen, and I realised then that it was Doctor William Bernard. Without speaking, the earless man removed a ring of keys from his belt and unlocked the dingy shop. I shrank back farther out of sight as, with a last glance in both directions up the street, he held the door open for Doctor Bernard and followed him in through the low doorway. The door closed and I heard the lock click behind them. The shop had no sign above, but as I stepped out from the doorway and drew as close as I dared, though it was unlikely that much of the street could be seen through the thick film of dirt encrusting the diamond panes of the only window, I saw that painted above the doorway, in small but carefully wrought letters, were the words
R. JENKES, BOOKBINDER AND STATIONER
.

Turning from the shop, I slammed straight into a tall man with a hat pulled down low on his face, almost causing him to fall over.

“Scusi,”
I said instinctively, as he too muttered an apology and hurried away up the street. The sight of his retreating back left me oddly unsettled; I wondered that I had not noticed him in the street before. Could he have stepped out from one of the shops? It seemed unlikely; all were closed, and I remembered the moment before I turned into Catte Street, when I had
sensed I was being followed. The man turned down a side alley without looking back. I had seen almost nothing of his face except that he had a dark beard. I could not recall if any of the earless man’s companions from the Catherine Wheel had had a dark beard, but I had not observed them closely and they had been sitting with their backs to me. Why would I have been followed from the tavern, I wondered, unless it was because my presence there alone had aroused their suspicions, or because I had made it so obvious that I was in turn eager to follow the earless man?

I made my way back down Catte Street toward the city wall, my thoughts spinning. Who was that earless man, who had associates among both the tavern lowlifes and the doctors of Lincoln College? If he was Jenkes the bookbinder himself, that might explain his connection with the academics, but it was curious that Bernard should choose a Sunday to do business with a stationer; indeed, the old doctor had looked very much as if he hoped not to be seen. And if I were to seek the most obvious explanation, I might reason that if the Catherine Wheel was a known meeting place for recusants, and Bernard, as I had seen, was a sympathiser with the old faith, and the one man who linked the two dealt in books, was it not highly likely that I had stumbled upon some connection to the city’s underground trade in banned books, of which Walsingham had spoken with such fury? Except that I had not stumbled upon it, I reflected; someone had deliberately and cryptically pointed me to this discovery, someone who had also made sure I linked it with Roger Mercer’s death, and I must find out the source of this information, and what he feared from making himself known.

I walked back past the Divinity School and turned left into St. Mildred’s Lane; the gatehouse tower of Lincoln College loomed up on my left, squat and pale against the sky. As I passed through the main gate and under the tower arch, I heard a knocking on the window of the porter’s lodge and looked around to see Cobbett waving for me to come in.

“Feller come looking for you just now, Doctor Bruno,” he said, wheezing furiously, as if he had been the one carrying the urgent message. “Servant
from Christ Church, wanted to know if you’re going hunting at Shotover this afternoon.”