Dark Fire

I raised a hand. 'You compliment me too highly. I am a mere jobbing lawyer.'

She smiled again and raised a hand. 'No, sir, I hear you are more than that. A bencher, who may be a serjeant one day. I shall send you an invitation to one of my sugar banquets. You live further down Chancery Lane, I believe.'

'You are well informed, madam.'

She laughed. 'I try to be. New information and new friends stave off a widow's boredom.' She looked round the quadrangle, studying the scene with interest. 'How marvellous it must be to live beyond the foul airs of the City.'

'Brother Shardlake has a fine house, I hear.' There was a slight edge to Marchamount's voice, a glint in his dark brown, protuberant eyes. He laughed, showing a full set of white teeth. 'Such are the profits of land law, eh, Brother?'

'Justly earned, I am sure,' Lady Honor said. 'But now you must excuse me, I have an appointment at the Mercers' Hall.' She turned away, raising a hand. 'Expect to hear from me shortly, Master Shardlake.'

Marchamount bowed to us, then led Lady Honor back to her litter, making a great fuss of helping her inside before walking back to his chambers, stately as a full-rigged ship. We watched as the litter made its swaying way to the gate, her ladies walking sedately behind.

'Forgive me Godfrey,' I said. 'I was going to introduce you, but she gave me no chance. That was a little rude of her.'

'I would not have welcomed the introduction,' he said primly. 'Do you know who she is?'

I shook my head. London society did not interest me.

'Widow to Sir Harcourt Bryanston. He was the biggest mercer in London when he died three years ago. He was far older than her,' he added disapprovingly. 'They had sixty four poor men in attendance at his funeral, one for every year of his age.'

'Well, what's so wrong with that?'

'She's a Vaughan, an aristocrat fallen on hard times. She married Bryanston for his money, and since his death she's set herself up as the greatest hostess in London. Trying to build up her family name again, which was trampled down in the wars between Lancaster and York.'

'One of the old families, eh?'

'Ay. She specializes in setting reformers against papists over her dinner table, takes a perverse pleasure in it.' He looked at me earnestly. 'She's invited Bishops Gardiner and Ridley and started a conversation about transubstantiation before now. Matters of religious truth are not to be toyed with like that.' A sudden hardness entered his voice. 'They are for hard reflection, on which the fate of our eternal souls depend. As you used to say yourself,' he added.

'Ay, I did.' I sighed, for I knew my loss of religious enthusiasm these last few years troubled my friend. 'So she's in with both factions then?'

'She has both Cromwell and Norfolk at her table, but she's no loyalty to either side. Don't go, Matthew.'

I hesitated. There was strength, a sophistication about Lady Honor that stirred something in me that had been quiet a long time. And yet being in the middle of such arguments as Godfrey described would not be comfortable, and for all he might have kind words for me I had no wish to see Cromwell again. 'I'll see,' I said.

Godfrey looked over to Marchamount's chambers. 'I'll wager the good serjeant would give much to have a lineage like hers. I hear he is still pestering the College of Arms for a shield, though his father was but a fishmonger.'

I laughed. 'Ay, he likes mixing with those of breeding.' The unexpected meeting had lifted me from the concerns of work, but they returned as we entered the dining hall. Under the great vaulted beams I saw Bealknap sitting alone at one end of a long table. He was shovelling food into his mouth with his spoon while reading a large casebook. Friars Preachers v. the Prior of Okeham, no doubt, to quote against me at Westminster Hall in a week's time.

Chapter Five

THE OLD BAILEY COURT is a small, cramped building set against the outer side of the City wall opposite Newgate. There is nothing of the panoply of the civil courts in Westminster Hall, although judgements here deal not with money and property, but maiming and death.

On Saturday morning I arrived in good time. The court did not usually sit on Saturdays, but with the civil-law term starting the following week the judges would be heavily occupied and the London assize had been brought forward to get the criminal business out of the way. I passed inside the courtroom, clutching my file of precedents, and bowed to the bench.