Dissolution

* * *

I went down the corridor, past my old room, to where I knew Alice's room was located. There was a strip of candlelight under her door. I knocked and opened it.

She sat on a truckle bed in the little windowless room, stuffing clothes into a big leather pannier. When she looked up at me there was fear in those large blue eyes. Her strong square face seemed to sag with it. I felt a desperate sorrow.

'You are going on a journey?' I was surprised at how normal my voice sounded, I had half-expected a croak.

She said nothing, just sat there with her hands on the straps of the pannier.

'Well, Alice?' Now my voice did tremble. 'Alice Fewterer, whose mother's maiden name was Smeaton?'

Her face flushed, but still she did not speak.

'Oh Alice, I would give my right hand for this not to be true.' I took a deep breath. 'Alice Fewterer, I must arrest you in the king's name for the foul murder of his commissioner, Robin Singleton.'

Then she spoke, her voice shaking with emotion. 'No murder. I did him justice. Justice.'

'To you it must seem so. I am right then, Mark Smeaton was your cousin?'

She looked up at me. Her eyes narrowed, as though she was calculating something. Then she spoke in clear tones of quiet ferocity such as I hope never to hear again from the mouth of a woman.

'More than my cousin. We were lovers.'

'What?'

'His father, my mother's brother, left to seek his fortune in London when he was a boy. My mother never forgave him for leaving the family, but when the man I was to marry died I went to London to claim kin, for all she tried to stop me. There was no work here.'

'And they took you in?'

'John Smeaton and his wife were good people. Good people. They welcomed me into their house and helped me to a position with a London apothecary. That was four years ago, Mark was already a court musician then. Thank God my aunt died from the sweating sickness, at least she was spared what happened.' Tears appeared in her eyes, but she wiped them away and raised her eyes to my face. Again there was something calculating in them, something I could not fathom.

'But you must know all this, Commissioner –' I have never heard such contempt put into a single word '– or why are you here?'

'I knew nothing for certain till half an hour ago. The sword led me to John Smeaton – no wonder you pleaded with me not to go to London that day by the fish pond – but for a while I could go no further. I was puzzled when the records said John Smeaton left no male relatives, and his estate went to an old woman – your mother?'

'Yes.'

'I have turned over the name of everyone in this house, wondering who could have had the skill and strength to behead a man, and in London I was no further forward. Then I thought, what if John Smeaton had another female relative? All this time I had assumed a man committed the crime, but then I saw there was no reason why a strong young woman could not have done it. And that led me to you,' I concluded sadly. 'The message I have just had confirmed that a young woman visited Mark Smeaton in his cell the night before he died, and the description is of you.' I looked at her and shook my head. 'It was a grievous sin for a woman to do such a thing.'

Again her voice was level, though dripping with bitterness. 'Was it? Was it worse than what he did?' I marvelled at her control, her steeliness.

'I know what was done to Mark Smeaton,' I said. 'Jerome told me some, the rest I learned in London.'

'Jerome? What has he to do with it?'

'Jerome was in the cell next to your cousin the night you visited him. When he came here he must have recognized you. Singleton as well; that was why he called him liar and perjurer. And, of course, when he swore to me he knew of no man here who could have done such a thing, it was a piece of his twisted mockery. He guessed it was you.'

'He said nothing to me.' She shook her head. 'He should have done, so few know what truly happened. The evil of what you people did.'

'I did not know the truth about Mark Smeaton, Alice, nor the queen, when I came here. You are right. It was a wicked, cruel thing.'

Hope appeared in her eyes. 'Then let me go, sir. All the time you have been here you have puzzled me, you are not a brute like Singleton and Cromwell's other men. I have only done justice. Please, let me go.'

I shook my head. 'I can't. What you did was still murder. I have to take you into custody.'

She looked at me pleadingly. 'Sir, if you knew it all. Please listen to me.'

I should have guessed she wanted to keep me there, but I did not interrupt. This was the explanation of Singleton's death I had been seeking for so long.

'Mark Smeaton came to visit his parents as often as he could. He had gone from Cardinal Wolsey's choir to Anne Boleyn's household, become her musician. Poor Mark, he was ashamed of his origins, but he still visited his parents. If his head was turned by the splendour of the court that was no wonder. It seduced him as you would have it seduce Mark Poer.'

'That will never happen. You must know that by now.'

'Mark took me to see the outside of the great palaces, Greenwich and Whitehall, but he would never let me in, even after we became lovers. He said we could only meet in secret. I was content. And then one day I came home from my work at the apothecary's to find Robin Singleton at my widowed uncle's home with a troop of soldiers, shouting at him, trying to make him say his son had spoken of lying with the queen. When I understood what had happened I ran at Singleton and struck him and the soldiers had to haul me off.' She frowned. 'That was when I first knew what anger lay within me. They cast me out, and I do not think John Smeaton told them of my relationship with Mark, or that I was his cousin, or they would have come after me too, to bully me into silence.

'My poor uncle died two days after Mark. I attended the trial, I could see how the jury looked afraid – there was never any doubt about the verdict. I tried to visit Mark in the Tower, but they would not let me see him until a gaoler took pity on me the night before he died. He lay in chains in that awful place, in the rags of his fine clothes.'

'I know. Jerome told me.'

'When Mark was arrested Singleton said if he confessed to sleeping with the queen he would be reprieved by the king's mercy. He told me that when he was first arrested he had a crazy notion that as he had done no wrong the law would protect him!' She gave a harsh laugh. 'England's law is a rack in a cellar! They racked him till his whole world was nothing but a scream. So he confessed, and they gave him two weeks' life as a cripple while he was tried, then they cut his head off. I saw it, I was in the crowd. I promised him my face would be the last thing he saw.' She shook her head. 'There was so much blood. A stream of it shooting through the air. Always there is so much blood.'

'Yes. There is.' I remembered Jerome saying Smeaton had confessed to lying with many women: Alice's picture of him was idealized, but I could not tell her that.

'And then Singleton appeared here,' I said.

'Can you imagine now how I felt that day when I came across the monastery courtyard and saw him arguing with the bursar's assistant? I had heard there was a commissioner come to visit the abbot, but I had not known it would be him –'

'And you decided to kill him?'

'I had dreamed of killing that evil man so many times. I simply knew it was what I must do. There had to be justice.'

'Often in this world there is not.'

Her face became cold and set. 'This time there was.'

'He hadn't recognized you?'

She laughed. 'No. He saw a servant girl carrying a sack, if he noticed me at all. I had been here over a year then, helping Brother Guy. The London apothecary had dismissed me because I was a relative of the Smeatons. I came back to my mother's. She had a lawyer's letter and went to London to fetch my uncle's poor possessions. And then she died – she had a seizure like my uncle – and Copynger evicted me. So I came here.'