The King at the Edge of the World by Arthur Phillips

Author:Arthur Phillips [Phillips, Arthur]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

4.

“SHE WOULD TAKE even this from me?” asked Moresby.

“My lord, her generosity to you is demonstrated every day.” Leveret pointed through the narrow window to the small chapel behind the house, in service to the family since the Conquest, with never a change to its content or fashion. He had forced the chapel door open the night he arrived, half a penny to the stabler to look away: the silver candlesticks, the carved crucifix, the painted statue of weeping Mary, the Latin Bible, the rood screen, the little box with splinters of wood and someone’s black fingernails, the wall painting of hell, paradise, purgatory, limbo.

Moresby’s sort of Catholicism was still common up north—Cumberland, Northumberland, Lancashire, the Scottish borderlands. Far from London, the old lies lingered, hellish embers in basements and chapels, old priests muttering superstitions, awaiting a savior king with Rome’s blessing. Things just wouldn’t stay quite clean up here in the northern mud, like a floor that needs regular scrubbing. Age-old families, whose wiser members prayed right and well in the queen’s company, dressed their house priests up north in surplices, elevated the host to transubstantiate it into the living Flesh, used the old mass books, baked their paste God wafers in the old kitchen. Elizabeth knew. She left them in mumbling recusant peace, if they had the good sense to keep quiet and not take up arms. Moresby should have been kneeling to her in gratitude for every day he wasn’t slit open.

And the baron had been careful enough. Enough of Cecil’s intelligencers—some previously Belloc’s—had come and gone through this house, stewards and poets and washerwomen, listening to table talk, fabricating what they hadn’t heard so as to have something to report, for which the men in London might pay a penny.

“You were Walsingham’s man, back in London,” moaned Moresby. “Tell me true.”

“I was.”

“And have you had men here? In my service.”

“I have.”

“Was the Turk one?”

“No. He served you from love and duty, I would say.”

When the day came—if the day came—that King James proceeded south to London, he would need a route that carried him from supporter to supporter, collecting strength as he descended. A chain must stretch from Edinburgh to Whitehall, and the first links must be found here, in the north, where Moresby’s land nestled up to the Scottish marches, where the old religion of popes and Bloody Mary and traitors had yielded hardly at all to cleaner ways. If James VI came to take the throne, he’d need to walk through these lands or sail past them. If James were to find love here, it would be because the northern lords thought he would be a friend: tolerant at least, a true Catholic at best. If he was Catholic, he’d raise in a day an army waiting to walk him the rest of the way south. Belloc could almost, with a squint, see James’s difficulty: The whole world was shouting at him to lie loudly, while pleading for him to whisper the truth to them alone.

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