LITMIR.BIZ

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keeps him so close, for the old lord’s sake, but of course there are those who say –’

      Mrs Allen came in then, so I didn’t hear what others say, though naturally I could guess. It sounded silly to me – the earl was in his twenties, after all, and the queen must be more than sixty. I didn’t hear, then, what Dr Lopez had done to annoy Lord Essex, except maybe talk too freely. But I was of an age by now to pick up scraps of information when anything interested me.

      Advent didn’t bring us many callers – who sent out invitations to dine, when you had four weeks of fast days? – but when visitors did come on business I kept my ears open. I learnt that Lord Essex was white hot against the Spaniards, and anxious to lead an army off to war and make his fame that way. I learnt it was the Cecils, old Lord Burghley and his son, who were leaders of the peace party, and the queen, reluctant to spend blood or money, leaned their way in terms of policy. And that Lord Essex, pent up at home, was seeing Spanish spies under every bush, and claimed Dr Lopez – our Dr Lopez – had given house-room to Spaniards, or men in Spanish pay, plotting some dangerous conspiracy. Then Christmas came, and the feasting and the frost fair, and I forgot it all for the moment.

      Christmas wasn’t out when Dr Lopez was arrested. It was only the first of January, and the news spread like a sickness from feasting house to feasting house, quenching each little light of merriment as surely as if it had been touched by the plague, and as swiftly.

      ‘They’ve taken him to Essex House. But Lord Burghley and his son – you know, Robert Cecil, the hunchbacked one – have been sharing the interrogation. They’re reasonable men, the Cecils. He’ll be out before Twelfth Night, you’ll see.’ It was our most cheerful neighbour, a dapper tailor once from Le Havre. Jacob glanced at him sourly.

      ‘Reasonable men, you say. Are reasonable men going to fight with Essex over the welfare of a foreigner, and a Jew at that? What have they found to charge him with, anyway?’

      It was three days later when we heard. For two of those days Lord Essex had sulked – the Cecils had done the right thing, after all, they’d declared Lopez innocent, and the queen had believed them, to the earl’s fury – but on the third he had been busy. Lopez had been whisked into the Tower, and the earl set about declaring, beyond all doubt, a treasonable conspiracy, a Spanish plot to poison the queen, as her doctor could do so easily.

      Terrified and confused, Lopez himself seemed half to agree. (‘Of course he agreed! They showed him the rack,’ said Jacob indignantly. I saw one of the other men there, another foreigner, rub his shoulder as if an old wound pained him, and stir uneasily.) Lopez had actually agreed he’d once taken Spanish pay, but only on the instructions of English agents, to lead King Philip astray. But that was back in the days of Walsingham, the old spymaster, and now Walsingham was gone, and couldn’t say yea or nay.

      ‘Take heed of that,’ Jacob said. ‘It’s hard enough not to get caught up in intrigue, if you’re a foreigner in this country. But the men who try to hire you will leave you in the lurch – by dying, if they can’t do it any other way.’ Privately he told me he had not the least hope; something about a job Lord Essex wanted for a friend of his, and the queen had given it to someone else, on Cecil advice, so that she’d want to soothe Lord Essex by yielding to him in some other way.

      After the doctor and his associates were arraigned and sentenced, the little tailor took some comfort in the fact that the queen couldn’t bring herself to sign the death warrant at once.

      ‘She knows it’s wrong, she’ll let them out eventually.’

      ‘She knew it was wrong with her cousin, the Scots queen, but she still signed. Eventually –’ Jacob imitated the little tailor. ‘She’s the queen, isn’t she?’

      When the news came that she had signed, he grew ever more gloomy. Lopez was to be tried and hanged, he said, on Tyburn tree. It was from the streets that I heard the full story.

      ‘Hanged all right, but not till he’s dead, or not unless he’s very lucky. Then they’ll cut him down alive and hack off his privities, and slit open his belly and pull his guts out before his eyes.’ One lad with a lazy eye seemed to know all about it. ‘Sometimes, if they like him, the crowd yell to the executioners to leave it, to let the man die first, at the end of the rope, but they won’t do that for a Christ-killer, you’ll see.’

      ‘Anyway,’ another boy chimed in, ‘they say Jews are built differently.’

      The night before, Jacob told me he was going to watch. ‘I have to, the Lord knows why. Somewhere in that howling crowd, there has to be a friendly eye. But you’re to stay home – do you hear me?’

      I nodded, my eyes fixed on my plate. In the last weeks, the dream had been coming back to me. It wasn’t of the knife, or the hilt in the belly, not precisely. It was the running, and the knowing that I couldn’t run fast enough, and that they were going to die because of me. The next morning, I pretended to be asleep as I heard Jacob leave. In his absence I tidied his desk, and cleaned out his inkwell. I was going to sharpen him some quills, but the knife disturbed me. Instead I set myself to copying the various pages of figures he had left me – for I helped him in his paid work by now – and tried not to count the time passing slowly. In the end, the suspense got to me – and the curiosity. I had to know. I had to see.

      I left the house as quietly as a mouse leaves its hole with a cat there to pounce and, slipping surreptitiously from corner to corner, made my way towards Newgate, where the Holborn road leads west. It was one of those days, again, when everything seemed to move slowly. When each familiar sight of the streets struck me with unusual clarity. I suppose everyone in London can’t really have gone to see the sight, but that’s how it felt to me. As though I were a ghost – one of those spectres they used to paint for the casting down into Hell, mouth ever open in a silent scream – moving through an empty city. I saw Master de l’Obel, his face full of distress, but he did not see me.

      Past the looming bulk of Ely Place, past the great chains across the road, to seal the way to the City when necessary, and soon I was in open country. In this dank weather the fields were just a sludgy mass of brown, cold and uninviting. Starting out so late, I was far behind the mass of the crowd, but the state of the track showed how many had gone before me.

      I hadn’t realised it was such a distance. I’d been hurrying my steps, to try to catch up, and I’m not sure what it was that halted me. Maybe the smell brought back on the wind, or the sick low roar of the people pressing westwards ahead of me. I don’t really know what it was – the fire must have smelled like any other, even if they had lit it to burn the doctor’s privates, and the crowd was noisier for the football match every Accession Day. Maybe, as I started to find myself among squabbling families, and carts full of people as cheery as on market day, it was the look I saw on the faces of those others who were flocking that way.

      In the end I never even reached Tyburn. Just as well, maybe. I heard later that Dr Lopez died shouting out that he loved her majesty better than Christ, and that one of the men who died with him tried to fight off the executioner, and they had to hold him down to slash his belly open. Up until now, I’d only half understood things Jacob tried to teach me – about quarrel, and dispute, and the passion of belief. About how it made men do things in God’s name that in fact the Creator would weep to see. I hadn’t understood why – when Mrs Allen nagged him into getting me ordinary school books – he’d snatched the discourse on rhetoric back at once, having caught me showing off for her admiring eyes, imitating the kind of rhetoric class real schoolboys had every day. At the time, I felt reproved for my vanity, but later I came to understand more clearly what Jacob had muttered under his breath about convincing and convicting, and about the wrong-headedness of teaching children that the important thing in the world was to prove their point, however blunted it might be.

      Now I did understand, as I saw citizens’ kindly faces alight with a brutal glee. I stood there in the muddy track for a moment, cursing myself for folly. Then I turned back, and half ran towards the familiar streets. At the empty house I bent over the desk, trying to ignore the chill sickness inside, and took care not to look up when Jacob returned, his tread slower and heavier than when he had gone

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