Revelation

'No. Not yet. But they will.'

I left the stable. Outside, I bit my lip. What if he ran away? But he would not, not with the prospect of another place. He knew something, and it would be easier to find out what it was once he had got over his initial shock.

'Master Shardlake!' Harsnet called again impatiently from the open doorway.

'Yes, I am coming!' Suffer the little children, I thought bitterly.

I JOINED HARSNET, who had gone down the street and stood looking at the church with Barak.

'How did the killer know about Yarington's whore?' He sighed. 'I'll have the girl and that servant questioned hard, but I don't think they know anything. What about the boy?'

'He told no one about Abigail. I said I'd come and see him again tomorrow, when he's calmer. He will be without a place now. I told him I'd try and find him one.'

He looked at me curiously. 'Where?'

'I don't know yet.'

'I hope you can. Or if he lives he'll grow to be another beggar starving in the streets and threatening the peace.' He shook his head. 'I would they could be cared for, and brought to God.' His anger seemed to have passed.

'My friend Roger was starting up a subscription among the lawyers for a poor men's hospital.'

'Good,' he said. 'That is needed. Preachers too. The beggars are utterly devoid of the fear of God. I've seen that in my work.'

'They are outcasts.'

'So were our Lord and his disciples. But they had faith.'

'They thought a better world was about to come.'

'It will,' he said quietly. He smiled at me. 'I am sorry for my anger earlier. You will still come to dinner tomorrow?'

'Of course.'

'I wonder if Yarington had any family. I will find out from the servants.' He turned as the guards appeared in the doorway. Abigail and Toby slumped between them, looking terrified. 'I must go with them.' Harsnet bowed quickly, and walked away.

'I don't envy them,' Barak said as the two were led away.

Chapter Twenty-five

BARAK AND I walked back to Chancery Lane. I was bone-tired, the stitches in my arm tweaking and pulling.

'We should have a few hours' sleep when we get back,' Barak said. In the moonlight he too looked exhausted. 'There's Adam Kite's case tomorrow, then Smithfield with Harsnet, then the dean.' He groaned at the thought of it all.

We walked on in silence for a while. Then Barak said, 'That poor arsehole Yarington a lecher, eh?' He sounded almost back to his usual mocking self, perhaps glad to be dealing with ordinary human weakness again after the horror at the church.

'Yes. And the killer knew that somehow.'

'How?'

'I don't know. If we can find out, we may have him.'

'What will he do next?'

'It's impossible to say. As Hertford said, the fifth prophecy is vague.'

'What do you think those people are hiding — Lockley and the dean? They're hiding something.'

'Yes, they are. We must find out tomorrow.'

'Do you think they were part of some nest of sodomites? The monasteries were full of those filthy creatures.'

'I don't know. Lockley certainly didn't strike me as being inclined that way.'

'You can't always tell.'

'You sound as fierce against sin as Harsnet.'

He grinned. 'Only sins I don't feel drawn to myself,' he said with a flash of his old humour. ''Tis always easy to condemn those.'

We arrived back at Chancery Lane. 'I must go and see that boy Timothy first thing,' I said wearily. Behind a window I saw a lamp raised. Harsnet's man Orr, on watch.

'What if he makes a run for it in the night?'

'He won't run. I told you, he needs a new place.'

'And how are you going to conjure that out of thin air for him?'

'I have an idea. I will not let him down. Now come, I am too tired to talk more. We need a few hours' sleep, or we shall be seeing double tomorrow.'

WHEN WE REACHED home I asked Barak to have me wakened no later than first light, and wearily mounted the stairs to bed. Exhausted as I was, I could not sleep. Lying in bed in the darkness I kept turning Yarington's terrible death over in my mind, trying to fit it into the pattern of the others. At length I got up, threw my coat over my nightshirt and lit a new beeswax candle. The yellow glow spreading from my table over the room was somehow comforting.

I sat at the table, thinking. I was sure the killer had been there when we got Adam down from London Wall. Yarington had been there too. Was that when the killer had decided that Yarington would be his next victim? No, that spectacle had been planned a long time, and Yarington's fornication with that poor girl had been known to the killer. But how, when the cleric had kept it so secret? It had not been a matter of common knowledge like Roger's and Dr Gurney's turning away from radical reform, or poor Tupholme's noisy affair with Welsh Elizabeth.