Tombland

I stopped to speak to him. ‘You do well to ensure the excrement is well buried. I have seen what the consequences can be in an army camp unless care is taken.’

He looked at me curiously. ‘Yew been a soldier, sir?’

‘No, but I was at the military camp at Portsmouth four years ago, when the French invasion threatened. The bloody flux came, and killed many.’

He nodded agreement. ‘And at Boulogne, where I fought. This place is well sited for a camp, but in this heat and with no water nearer than the Wensum it is truly a breeding ground for the flux: pits are being built everywhere to dispose of ordure and rubbish. There is getting to be a problem with lice as well; the men’s beards and hair are to be trimmed.’

We started to move away from the pit, but then I stopped, for I recognized one of the diggers. My attention had been drawn because I had seen him turn his face from me. ‘Is that Peter Bone?’

The brother of Edith Boleyn’s dead maidservant looked back at me. His hair and beard were longer and unkempt, his keen brown eyes standing out in a face which, pale and drawn when I had last seen him, was now fuller, and tanned. ‘Lawyer Shardlake,’ he said, with the slight hostility I remembered from before, and laughed. ‘And your friends. Where are your fine robes now? Why are you in the camp?’

‘I am assisting Captain Kett with legal matters.’

Bone stepped out of the pit. ‘Under duress, I’ll be bound.’ He spoke with a new confidence and with what a few weeks ago would have been called insolence to one of my class. But as Kett had said, the days of doffing caps to gentlemen, and speaking quickly and carefully, were over.

Barak asked, ‘What are you doing here, come to that? When last we saw you, you were living in your own house in Norwich.’

Bone rounded on Barak angrily. ‘Barely getting by on the poor rents I charged, spinning wool like a woman for pennies. So I came up here, to help right the wrongs done to the Commonwealth.’

I looked back at him. I understood his anger, but why had he turned his face away when he saw me? I remembered, back in Norwich, how I felt he was keeping something back. The other men had stopped digging and were looking at us, perhaps hoping for an argument. The man in charge said, ‘Back to work, lads. Perhaps you should move on, sir?’

‘No need to “sir” his like now,’ Bone said, but he bent to his spade. We walked on. Nicholas shook his head. ‘A strange thing, to see what the common people really think of us,’ he said.

‘There’s more to it than that,’ I said quietly. ‘He’s covering something up, I feel it. It’s not the only thing I learned today. I hadn’t realized Chawry led the party which attacked Witherington’s people so savagely.’

‘How did you find that out?’ Nicholas asked.

‘At the trials at the Oak of Reformation. He has at the very least a connection to Richard Southwell’s gang of ruffians.’ I sighed. ‘The case indeed follows us to the camp.’

* * *

ON OUR WAY BACK we paused to watch where some men were digging out a rabbit warren – there were several in the heath. Some held dogs by their collars, while others dug down into the ground. A few rabbits ran out, and the man with dogs released them; they caught the animals instantly. Then a man came forward, carrying a large pouch carefully. ‘I got this from the stores,’ he said. ‘Gunpowder!’

‘By gor, be careful,’ one of his fellows called out.

‘They told me what to do.’

The man bent down and carefully let the black powder run out. Fortunately, there was not much. He took a wick, placed one end at the edge of the gunpowder and the other some feet away. Everybody stepped well back. There were a couple of tense minutes until he got a flint to light, then the flame sputtered to the gunpowder and there was a loud explosion, throwing up earth and grass. Dozens of rabbits instantly fled through the holes in the warrens, to be caught by the dogs or speared by the men. A great pile of them was set by the edge of the warren and the men, in pleasure at the result and in relief that they had not been blown sky-high, ran onto the warren. They shook hands and clapped the shoulder of the man whose idea it had been.

Then the portion of the warren where they stood, already honeycombed with burrows under the light soil and now shaken by the impact of the gunpowder and the weight of men, collapsed under their feet. Fortunately, the pit they had created, though broad, was shallow. The men emerged and stood up, dirty but cheerful, laughing; nobody was hurt. Barak clapped them, and we turned and walked on. At the time we thought the episode a mere diversion; much later, we were to learn differently.

* * *