Chapter Text
This is about fundamental understandings of where a man sits in this world and what it is that occupies the space around him. This is about things unseen and unknowable. This entire case, really, rests on whether it is fair for a man to believe in God, the immortality of the soul, Divinely ordained free will while not believing the preternatural—ghosts and phantoms, faie and hobgoblins, curses and spellcraft.
This is about, well, Christ’s blood, it’s about taking Harsnet’s obsession with possession and thinking: God help us, was he right? Not about Cantrell, no, Cantrell was mad—but what is happening before Shardlake right now. Could Harsnet be right? Shardlake doesn’t know.
What he does know is that there is a woman screaming in a garbled tongue. A husband, broken-hearted. A daughter, desperate.
What he does know is that it is never good for people to delve too deep into the wells of desperation and grief. They stir silt into water that ought to be left clear.
What he does know is that some of the worst acts he has ever witnessed are committed out of love. Love and faith. And God above does Shardlake know all about that.
But here, back up. Start again.
Sometimes, Shardlake worries he has as much faith in his heart as a field has good harvest after drought. Which, in terms of size and weight, means he worries he can fit the amount of faith he has onto the head of a pin.
Heretical joke hidden in there somewhere, isn’t there? Angels, heads of pins, substantiation of one type or another, how many kinds of communion are necessary for the salvation of the soul, here he stands but he can absolutely do more.
‘Communion?’ Barak shrugs. ‘One, both, and neither, depending who you ask.’ They’re speaking quietly, they must be. Purges continue—Shardlake wishes they would make a list and hammer it the door of Lincoln Inn: Herein contains a compilation of those now taken, tortured, burnt. Spy well if your friends’ be named. If so, watch your back.
Bonner will do as Bonner does. Bonner—bon air—good for what? Nothing but hot air. Air chaud, there the joke falls apart.
It comes and goes, Shardlake’s pinpricks of conscious about doubt. He tells Guy, ‘It’s one thing to doubt dogma or theological conclusions or strictures—does it really matter if I wholly agree with Aquinas or Augustine or Luther or Cranmer? But it’s another thing to doubt altogether.’
‘How long have you doubted?’
‘A few years, many years—decades, minutes, only the last ten seconds—I don’t know. How can I quantify something that might have always been festering in my soul?’
Guy pours him more wine. It’s a nice, big-mouthed red that grounds. All spice, leather, and the meat of the earth. His friend says, ‘These things are understood by God. It may be a cold comfort, but God does know what a difficult task he has set before us when he placed us in these bodies and on this earth.’
‘An architect knows the foundations of his house?’
‘And knows what it can weather,’ Guy replies. ‘You will weather this. Your house has good bones.’
At night, Shardlake dreams of a well—dead dogs, cats, horses, friends clutter it up until it overflows. A spring bursting with filth and from the heavens comes a deluge. Torrential. The rain is often on fire. Giles drowned body reaches up a muddied hand to cup Shardlake’s face to say, Why did you kill me, friend? I confided in you. You who were with me through many trials. Cromwell’s head on a pike speaks to him: I, too, had faith. Sometimes a man is punished for trusting too much.
After such dreams, Shardlake wakes tangled in sheets. He goes to his garden in bedclothes and a robe to sit under a tree. He cries, sometimes. Or gets near enough to shedding tears he is tired so of being hunted and hounded and dogged by this fearful uncertainty in what should be certain.
The mornings after these nights always brings Barak asking: ‘What ails you?’
And it always has Shardlake answering: ‘I miss Chancery, that is all.’
And Barak will always start with a mocking: ‘He’s been dead these past four years. Genesis will think you do not care for him. Anyway, he was just a horse.’ Then he will understand that it is Shardlake’s shorthand for: ‘What isn’t there for me to miss? Write me a list, Barak, of what has been lost over the past forty-something years of my life and it will take you some time, I’m sure.’
Self-pity bordering on melancholy. Beat it out with work and prayer.
Ora et labora &c.
Only, perhaps not so papist as what ora et labora implies.
This year, though, he makes it to Church on Easter which is something. It chews Barak up, though, the sermon and the preacher going on, droning as he does, about the guilt and sin and evils of the Pharisees. Shardlake walks beside him as they make their way homeward wanting to say something about the preacher ignoring the other gospels. There are four, only one lambasts Jews as hard as an Englishman after a few pints on Good Friday.
But it won’t do any good, he thinks. So instead he tugs gently on Barak’s sleeve, ‘Let us go for a walk.’
‘We are walking.’
‘You know what I mean.’
Barak hunches his shoulders, making an ugly face of annoyance—though, it isn’t at Shardlake. Or Shardlake doesn’t think it is meant for him. It seems as though it is meant for the world at large. Barak would cast that unfortunate glower at God Himself if he could.
Granted, Barak would also call God an arsehole, a right bastard, and give Him a rude gesture if he thought he could get away with it.
They pass through Cup field and Purse field of Lincoln’s Inn, Barak taking Shardlake’s arm to steer them north. Up to Grey’s Inn and past to fields. They’ll not make small talk with Shardlake’s brothers in the law. More importantly, they’ll not walk paths Roger walked before he died.
And here Easter is meant to be the most joyful, glorious date in the Christian calendar. Shardlake supposes it is natural that he and Barak would be so contrarian in their views on the matter, if for different reasons.
Once they’re onto a path that cuts through a few fields, they slow their pace. Meander. Barak kicks a few stones before them. Shardlake has half a mind to ask about Tamasin but Barak’s been snappish—this Spring is a miserable year(ish) anniversary for many miserable things. Barak remains bruised, still, his pride and heart deep purpling blue. Not yet fading to softer browns and yellows.
Shardlake tells himself that he is an honourable man and wants Barak and Tamasin to figure it out. He says so to anyone who asks. But there’s that horrid, secret part of him that is soot-covered, ugly, a bit nasty—and that part is perhaps a little happy about the situation.
If the marriage was repaired, Barak would leave.
Shardlake very much does not want Barak to leave.
What foulness inside of him—if his soul were to be reflected in a mirror, it would be a stained one. A little warped, glass not quite fitting the frame as it ought.
Barak glances over with wilderness filled eyes which remind Shardlake of the land he grew up on. The bit of forest local labourers would discreetly poach in to help liven the winter pot.
‘They say wrestling is good,’ Barak remarks.
‘You’ve lost me, I’m afraid.’
‘Faith. Sometimes you have to tangle with it. Demand some things of it. Be angry at God for a while. Pin it down, rough it up.’
Shardlake reaches a hand out to run over shrubs lining one side of their path. Leaves and branches smart against his palm. At length he replies, ‘That’s rather insightful, Barak.’
‘I am capable of it, you know.’
‘I never thought otherwise.’
A flash of the cheekiest smile in London and all her environs. Barak adds: ‘Granted, that advice came from my father who had it from his father.’
‘Then your grandfather was a wise man.’
‘Nah,’ Barak scuffs at the dirt with his toe. ‘He just liked a brawl. Said it was part of the family tradition.’
Shardlake smiles, even laughs a little, and Barak smacks his arm in a jovial manner: There’s what he was after from the old man. A laugh. Which prompts Shardlake to scoff: Old man? Excuse him, he is only four-and-forty.
‘Aye,’ Barak grins. ‘And you’re ever complaining to me about the woes of aging.’
The sky unveils itself from the low-hanging clouds of the morning, letting sweet spring sun of the early afternoon to light down upon them. Shardlake takes Barak’s arm and begins to steer them back towards his house. He says that Joan will have made them something swell for dinner, but there’s some work that needs to be done before hand. All his court cases, they are a never-ending flood.
‘As it goes in the book of Amos.’ Shardlake quotes: ‘Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.’
Enter Autumn. Arriving with season change are those vegetal smells of earthiness and decay. Leaflitter, detritus, cool morning air.
Shardlake attends the burning of an alleged Anabaptist. He hadn’t known there were any left here in London. Since they had such ill luck in the low countries and London had never been warm to them. He would have thought no, no, there'll be done of them hereabouts. But he was wrong. Watching, Shardlake thinks about free will and the importance of the age of majority and personal choice when it comes to faith as his face and hair are dusted with the greasy ash of a former person.
It begins to rain, steam from the pyre billows heavenward carrying, in Shardlake’s mind, the soul of the woman whose remains will be scraped up by friends to be buried somewhere secret and sacred.
As he leaves the crowd, a woman jostles his shoulder. She has bright eyes, cornflower-blue, and wears a faded, red dress. She holds a package wrapped in brown paper beneath her arm. Something of good size—a painting, perhaps.
She looks at him and seems to know him though Shardlake could not say he recognizes her face, oval-shaped and snub-nosed as it is.
Then, she is gone. Swallowed by the din of London.
That night, Shardlake naturally dreams of Yarrington burning in his church. Roger’s ghost sits on the edge of his bed reciting property law to him, but he speaks through the gash in his neck rather than through his mouth. Cantrell impaled on a bedpost laughing at him. Shardlake wakes in a sweat, Barak leaning over him and shaking his arm: ‘I could hear you. It’s just a dream.’
He grabs Barak’s hand, half-thinking it belongs to his dead friend, and wants to press it to his lips in Thanksgiving: Oh you’re alive, oh all of that never happened, oh I’ve been mad-dreaming, oh I get to hear your voice once again, I get to dine with you and Dorothy, I get to mock Bealknap with you, I get to see you smile, we get to be friends on this earth, we still have time—
But it is Barak’s hand and oh he wants to press it to his lips, too, but for reasons beyond friendship and of a more sinful nature. So, he squeezes it instead, ‘Thank you,’ lets it go.
At the door, before returning to his room, Barak says, ‘If it’s any consolation, I still see that boy’s body at the bottom of the well. Only, it gets muddled and so I’ll wake thinking I’ve lost my teeth.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Shardlake whispers.
‘Not your fault, is it? You’re not one of the many arseholes we've run up against. You're not the one who did terrible things.'
No, Shardlake thinks, but he’s the arsehole who keeps Barak as his right hand, meaning he brings the younger man along to see things no one can ever unsee. He is the arsehole who is selfish and wishes to wrap Barak up in a blanket and keep him to himself. He is the arsehole who cannot say no to cases, even when he ought to.
Barak, of course, would likely reply: Bullocks. I chose to be here, didn’t I? Christ’s bones you love to be sorry for yourself, sometimes. Old man.
Unsaid, but certainly known: Every day they wake up and choose each other.
Anyway. This peaceful way of life, such as it is, could never last. They receive fits and bursts of calm waters between tempests. Clouds on the horizon, though, are dark as coal.
