The Perfect Sinner

Beth suppressed a feeling of irritation.

He went into the kitchen and she heard him filling the kettle. It still made precisely the same sound it had always made, the tinny drumming of the water into thin metal. He had always filled it through the spout with the tap on full. She heard him light the gas.

Nothing had changed inside the house. The parlour was a dark place with split leather armchairs and the old prints of clipper ships on the walls. She crossed over to the bookshelf to distract herself from her discomfort. There were all the bird books and the botanical guides, but there also, to her astonishment, was a spine she knew well, her own little book from last year, The Opportunity of Crisis. It was in her father’s political section sandwiched between Will Hutton’s The State We ‘re In and Christie Kilfillan’s Last Chance, as if keeping matter and anti-matter apart.

He came back in from the kitchen and caught her looking at them.

‘I thought I’d better read what you had to say,’ he said quietly and sat down. ‘Won’t be long. The kettle takes a minute or two.’

She almost said, I know that, kettles are the same everywhere, but she bit it back. ‘What did you make of it?’ she asked instead, caught between a reluctant pride in his interest and a flash of anticipatory irritation.

He thought. He had never minded waiting to get his words right and that had stretched out the hours of Beth’s childhood often to breaking point. ‘It’s a great achievement to write a book,’ he answered in the end. ‘You feel passionately about it. I admire passion.’

‘But you don’t agree with what it says.’

‘You wouldn’t expect me to, would you?’

‘I suppose not, but surely you can see…’

He held up a hand. ‘There are other things to talk about first,’ he said. ‘The world can wait until after we’ve had our tea.’

She stood there and watched him go back into the little kitchen. That had always been their relationship, him doing the job of both parents and her doing the job of one child. Until she’d left.

He came back with two mugs. Hers had a picture of an otter on it, which was no surprise.

‘You’re still not on the phone then,’ she said.

‘No need. The Turners take messages. Peggy bangs on the wall if it’s urgent.’

‘Is it often urgent?’

He looked at her as if trying to detect sarcasm. ‘We had an injured egret down in the marsh last week.’

Beth wasn’t entirely sure whether an egret was an animal or a bird. For the first time, a part of her found something valuable in the relentless simplicity of his life. Her mobile was switched off and nobody could reach her. Not one single person in the outside world had any idea where she was. No one outside Slapton even knew she had a father. Here she could be safe while she sorted everything out. London political gossip wouldn’t reach down here. Her own father didn’t even know exactly what she did, who she had been working for.

That was when, looking down into his tea, he said, ‘Tell me, love. How bad is it with this man Livesay?’

CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_43b62c8e-d7e1-5c7d-ad5a-5b082d5c07bf)

There is a chapel in the town of Ghent which owns a toe-bone of Saint Paul in a fine gold reliquary chest, and if you go to pray there, you may ask the priest for a twenty day notice. I went there alone as soon as I had seen to my men in their lodgings. The door had sagged so it caught on the sill and shook as I pushed it open, letting out a miasma of rotting cloth. Inside, it was very dark with only two candles burning and I didn’t see the priest sitting waiting at the confessional until he challenged me with a quavering voice.

‘Who are you?’ he demanded in the Flemish which I knew a little, and then in slower and imperfect French. ‘Are you a pilgrim? You don’t look like one.’

He probably thought I was a robber.

‘Tonight I’m a pilgrim,’ I answered, also in French. He stood up, held up one of the candles and looked doubtfully at my style of dress.

‘You have no scallop shell,’ he remarked.

‘I am not only on a pilgrimage,’ I said, ‘I am on the King of England’s business, but I intend to stop for prayer at wayside shrines along my way. I have come here to pray to your relic of the blessed Saint and to ask you for a certificate.’

That seemed to reassure him. ‘Do you need confession?’

Thank you, no. I have a priest with me. I make my confession to him.’

‘Have you sinned since your last confession to him?’

Had I sinned since the morning? I searched my memory and I couldn’t come up with anything immediate, so I said what I have always said when a strange priest asks me that.

‘Father, there is a sin I fear I have not yet confessed, the full weight of which is gradually becoming clear to me. Because I do not wish to confess less than the totality of that sin, I must wait before I ask forgiveness for it.’

He peered at me and in the dim light I could see his lips moving. He reached for a paper and held it out. It struck me he hadn’t understood a word of what I had just said.

‘I asked,’ he said doubtfully, ‘because tomorrow is our festival and if you come then I will give you forty days not twenty.’

‘Can I have twenty days now and another forty tomorrow?’ I asked, looking at the paper he had just given me.

He looked doubtful. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘It is one or the other.’

I gave it back to him reluctantly, thinking I would regret my action if I died that night. Forty days would take my sum of indulgences to a total of more than two thousand days. For a moment, my heart lifted at the thought of nearly six years less in Purgatory, then I remembered how much faster time moved there and I thought how many, many more certificates I would need to make much difference. My six years certificates might win me six years in the time of this world, but that would only be a few minutes of relief in the time they follow in Purgatory.

I gave him five coins for five candles and said I would be back in the morning, then I returned to the Boar’s Head Inn and joined my men sitting down at the long tables. William Batokewaye was on the far side of the room, with several women at his table. He told me once that he was a priest when he was in England but that it was a precious burden best left safe at home when he was travelling. I have known him for too long to question that, apart from wondering whether, even in England, he could be regarded as entirely priestly, but at the centre of that man is something so solid, so true, that I do not feel qualified to judge him. He believes he will be forgiven and I hope he is right because I would not wish him to pass an age in Purgatory. When he dies, there will be masses said in my Chantry for him, though he does not know it.

The food came in those huge chafing dishes with the boars’ heads at each end for which the Inn was named. Lentils in a spiced sauce and three different meats with spitted duck shredded over the top of them all. The fine gentlemen from Genoa didn’t like it. I thought it was excellent. When I’m travelling, I’m on campaign and when you’re out there scouring the countryside, you’re grateful for anything that keeps your belly button away from your backbone. The squire was getting the worst of their complaints and doing his best to explain to the landlord what they wanted to eat. It wasn’t going to get him anywhere. I knew the landlord, Garciot, from old times, and no one had ever got the better of him yet. Before he bought the inn with the proceeds of his ransoms, he’d been one of John Hawkwood’s men for many a year. Hawkwood always said Garciot scared him stiff and, coming from Hawkwood, that was saying something. They lived for fighting, Hawkwood’s bunch, but they always knew what was right and wrong. You might well call them mercenaries, and it was true that they fought for money but they wouldn’t take that money from just anyone. They lived by a tough set of rules, but they stuck to them.

The evening ran its predictable course. The Genoese persisted with their complaint. Garciot stared at them without expression, then he took their food away and came back with something that looked almost the same but smelt far, far worse. He winked at me as he put it in front of them and I wondered what he could possibly have added to it out of sight in the kitchen to make it quite so repugnant. He excused himself for a moment to deal with the two Brabanters at the end of the table who had been making a drunken nuisance of themselves. He held the larger of them off the ground with one hand, while he patted his pockets for dinner money with the other, then he put one under each arm and showed them how to fly into the street. After seeing that, the Genoese managed to eat a surprisingly large amount of whatever it was on their plates and left to go to their rooms as soon as they could get away.

My men went about their own business, drifting towards William’s table while Garciot came and sat with us, the squire and me.

‘What are you doing, travelling with pants-wetters like those?’ he asked.

‘King’s orders. King’s affairs,’ I replied, not wanting to encourage him. Familiarity is to be expected when you’ve spilt blood together, but it wasn’t for me or for him to question the nature of the business my sovereign had charged me with.

‘I hear the King’s in his dotage,’ he answered, ‘watching his debts mount up, piling jewels on to this ugly mistress of his and letting the upstart John lord it over the country.’

The squire stiffened and, unbelievably, I saw his hand go to the grip of his sword.

‘Enough, Garciot,’ I said, and I thought I had said it quite quietly until I saw how many turned to stare.

He raised a hand quickly. ‘My apologies, Sir Guy. While he commands your loyalty, he is still a great king.’

He turned to the squire and whispered something. The squire’s indignation drained out of him. My hearing is still sharp, but the room was full of the noise of feasting men and when Garciot had gone off to see to his guests I demanded to know what he had said.

‘Nothing bad,’ said the squire quickly.

I wasn’t sure I believed him. Garciot was certainly capable of a final sarcastic quip. ‘Then what?’

‘He told me I should study at your feet and mark every word you spoke.’