I had been called from my chambers at Lincoln’s Inn to see the Treasurer, Master Rowland. Despite my status as a serjeant, the most senior of barristers, Master Rowland disliked me. I think his pride had never recovered from the time three years before when I had been – justly – disrespectful to him. I crossed the Inn Square, the red brickwork mellow in the summer sunshine, exchanging greetings with other black-gowned lawyers going to and fro. I looked up at Stephen Bealknap’s rooms; he was my old foe both in and out of court. The shutters at his windows were closed. He had been ill since early in the year and had not been seen outside for many weeks. Some said he was near death.

I went to the Treasurer’s offices and knocked at his door. A sharp voice bade me enter. Rowland sat behind his desk in his spacious room, the walls lined with shelves of heavy legal books, a display of his status. He was old, past sixty, rail-thin but hard as oak, with a narrow, seamed, frowning face. He sported a white beard, grown long and forked in the current fashion, carefully combed and reaching halfway down his silken doublet. As I came in he looked up from cutting a new nib for his goose-feather quill. His fingers, like mine, were stained black from years of working with ink.

‘God give you good morrow, Serjeant Shardlake,’ he said in his sharp voice. He put down the knife.

I bowed. ‘And you, Master Treasurer.’

He waved me to a stool and looked at me sternly.

‘Your business goes well?’ he asked. ‘Many cases listed for the Michaelmas term?’

‘A good enough number, sir.’

‘I hear you no longer get work from the Queen’s solicitor.’ He spoke casually. ‘Not for this year past.’

‘I have plenty of other cases, sir. And my work at Common Pleas keeps me busy.’

He inclined his head. ‘I hear some of Queen Catherine’s officials have been questioned by the Privy Council. For heretical opinions.’

‘So rumour says. But so many have been interrogated these last few months.’

‘I have seen you more frequently at Mass at the Inn church recently.’ Rowland smiled sardonically. ‘Showing good conformity? A wise policy in these whirling days. Attend church, avoid the babble of controversy, follow the King’s wishes.’

‘Indeed, sir.’

He took his sharpened quill and spat to soften it, then rubbed it on a cloth. He looked up at me with a new keenness. ‘You have heard that Mistress Anne Askew is sentenced to burn with three others a week on Friday? The sixteenth of July?’

‘It is the talk of London. Some say she was tortured in the Tower after her sentence. A strange thing.’