I went to the Tower straightaway, though it was late, for I wanted to talk to Prynne alone. The porter at the Bulwark Gate looked at me strangely but was not disposed to engage me in conversation. Miserable low dog of a fellow. Speaking of loathsome creatures, I bumped into Wade on his way home for the day.
‘Harry Lytle! Truly as I live!’ he exclaimed, wrinkling his nose and grinning. ‘What’s news in the world? Your custom is out, so we hear? Labouring for the King himself, so we are told? This is something like!’
‘Aye, something like. Would you do me a favour, Wade?’
‘What favour?’
‘Ask Prynne that I would see him over at John’s Chapel.’
‘Tell him yourself, I’m going home,’ Wade retorted, looking most offended. ‘Why would you meet him in John’s Chapel anyway? It’s a right old mess, no one’s yet been fain to touch it. No one goes near it.’
‘I need to speak to him alone, Wade. Give him the message else I promise you he will be vexed.’
Wade scowled at me, keen to be away, but his fear of Prynne prevented him from declining my request. Swearing and stamping his feet, he turned on his heel and headed back whence he had come. I hurried past the low portcullis of the Bloody Tower before climbing the slope beneath the cold shadow of the forbidding White Tower. I touched my forelock to a yeoman, a man I recognised. Stinking of wine, his eyes rolling, he was wearing only the top half of his uniform and walked unsteadily. I gave him wide berth. A group of five soldiers stood at the bottom of the wooden steps that led up to the Tower entrance, chatting, bored. I walked past without stopping. The White Tower stood the height of twenty men; its walls were thirteen feet thick. Commissioned in the eleventh century by William the Conqueror, it was built to serve both as palace and fortress. Nowadays it was used to store rifles, ammunition, and lots and lots of gunpowder.
At the top of the staircase I turned right, and climbed the spiral staircase to the first floor. The chapel was located at the top of the staircase before the entrance to the rest of the floor. The frozen winter sky shone chilling white through the arched windows over the nave, framing a simple wooden cross in silhouette. I walked across the stone flagstones, cleared of seating. To either side, in aisles behind sturdy stone arcades, were newly fitted wooden shelves, all of them packed tight with scrolls. Most were property rights for parishes towards the northern city walls. Dust hung in the air like fine white gauze. I waited there in one of the aisles, out of sight of any that might pass idly by.
Prynne was famous for having lost his ears — bit by bit. The flappy top bits were cropped thirty years ago before I was even born, after he published Histriomastix, a long, boring tirade against every form of entertainment that man had invented. In it he called women actors ‘notorious whores’, an insult said to be directed at the Queen. The King fined him, pilloried him at Westminster and cut the tops off his ears. Don’t know why he bothered. No one would have read the book if he’d just let it be. He was a frightening, furious man whose acquaintance I had avoided whenever possible when he had been my better and superior. Now I was free of him, yet here I was again.
‘Lytle?’ A familiar voice snapped, not much later.
‘Mr Prynne.’ I emerged out of my hiding place.
‘Thee would speak to me, Mr Lytle, before Keeling’s soldiers come to take you to Tyburn.’ His long face stared at me mournfully through the gloom. Walking towards me he ran a long crooked forefinger over the wooden shelves, eyeing the scrolls with steely resolve. I couldn’t help but stare at the long curls that covered his temples on their way down to his chin. Three years after Histriomastix he got into trouble again, this time for publishing ‘News from Ipswich’. I haven’t read that either — caring little what happens in Ipswich — but it is said to be another long, weary collection of your usual Puritan rantings, not stuff I’d think twice about if I was King. Charles, though, cut off the hard gristly bits of his ears and branded him on the face with a burning iron ‘S L’ — seditious libeller. Not what I would call setting a good example when it comes to toleration and goodwill unto others. But then what would I know? Prynne twitched his nose.
‘Sir, I need your counsel.’
Prynne snorted, though I could tell that he was flattered. ‘What counsel would thee seek of me, Lytle?’
Prynne had been in Parliament many years ago. He was kicked out for opposing the army, both their intention to execute Charles I, and their advocacy of religious toleration. A Puritan, he had been utterly opposed to Charles I’s policies, but he was no regicide. Now he was no royal confidant, nor was he a politician or schemer about Court — just an eccentric, old outcast. I felt I could trust him, yet I was wary. In him I saw something of John Parsons.
‘I think that the Lord Chief Justice may be involved.’
‘Of course he is involved. He is Lord Chief Justice, and put Joyce to death.’
‘Yes, which is strange in itself, methinks, that he should take such an active interest when the evidence against Joyce was so questionable. Since then I have found out that his daughter may have taken her own life ten years ago when she was with child. Perhaps it was William Ormonde’s child.’
‘William Ormonde’s child?’ Prynne’s old face turned a deep crimson. Standing silent, his thin body shook with wrath, eyes fixed on mine. ‘Who says so?’
‘The surgeon that found Jane Keeling’s body says that she was with child when she took her own life. When you consider the nature of Anne Giles’s death — an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth — and Keeling’s own behaviour in this matter — then it is easy to come to that conclusion. I think Shrewsbury heard the rumours too, though I am not supposed to mention his name, and I think he has laboured to have me discover it.’
Prynne stared at me, his lips twisted into a gnarled scar. His eyes were a watery light blue, pinhole black pupils aimed at me. Clenching his fists, he breathed noisily through his nostrils. ‘Then now you know it all.’
I picked up a scroll and blew the dust off it. So many secrets. ‘I am not so sure. The trail was laid so carefully. There is one thing that troubles me.’
‘Speak!’
‘While at Epsom, both Mary Ormonde and William Ormonde himself let it be known that Ormonde and Keeling were once great friends.’
‘It’s well known. That is no great mystery.’
I looked into Prynne’s poisonous face. ‘Aye, but they were both Baptists.’
Prynne’s body stilled. ‘They told you this?’
I nodded. ‘Mary Ormonde did so with great deliberation, William Ormonde seemed to speak it more casually. But why should either of them tell us, strangers, that the two of them were once dissenters? Even if it is known widely, and I know not whether it is the case, why make particular mention of it to the strangers?’
‘Why indeed?’ Prynne put a hand to his chin, his brow lowered as he paced the floor in puzzled thought. ‘Why indeed?’ He found an old stool buried beneath a pile of parchment and sat on it, sending the records flying through the air. ‘Give me time to think.’ With his head in his hands and his elbows on his knees, all I could see was the back of his old head.
It was silent in the chapel. The bright white light that shone through the long narrow windows turned to grey, and shadows crept out from the ends of the aisles. I sat down on the floor, my back against a shelf and waited. I would wait all night if necessary.
Prynne sat straight then pointed at me. ‘Ye said that Ormonde was not father of the girl’s child?’
‘No,’ he could point at me all he liked. ‘I said that I was not sure that he was.’
‘Then why did Keeling kill Anne Ormonde, if it were not so?’
‘Perhaps he didn’t.’
‘Oh no. He killed the girl, that much is clear.’
‘How do you know?’