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.

I put down my pen, and stared over the garden, almost completely in shadow now. I thought of the Queen. That evangelism of hers, that desire to share her faith, had caused her to forget her habitual caution and common sense. She regretted it now, was full of guilt. The Lamentation itself might not be strictly heretical, but she had shown disloyalty to Henry by writing it in secret. That would not be easily forgiven. The King had not allowed her to be prosecuted without evidence, when Gardiner was after her, but if that manuscript were to be given to him – or, worse still, printed in public . . . I shook my head at the thought of what her fate might be then.

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Sixteen

THE NEXT MORNING, Monday, Barak called at the house early. Like Genesis, his black mare, Sukey, was getting older, I noticed, as we rode out along Fleet Street, under the city wall. The sky had taken on that white milky colour that can portend summer rain.