'I have a task for you, one suited to your talents. The future of Reform may depend on it.'
He leaned forward and picked up a little casket, holding it up. Within, at the centre of an intricately carved silver column, lay a glass phial containing a red powder.
'This,' he said quietly, 'is the blood of St Pantaleon, skinned alive by pagans. From Devon. On his saint's day, it was said, the blood liquefied. Hundreds came every year to watch the miracle, crawling on their hands and knees and paying for the privilege. But look.' He turned the casket round. 'See that little hole in the back? There was another hole in the wall where this was set, and a monk with a pipette would push little drops of coloured water inside the phial. And lo — the holy blood, or rather burnt umber, liquefies.'
I leaned forward, tracing the hole with my finger. 'I have heard of such deceits.'
'That is what monasticism is. Deceit, idolatry, greed, and secret loyalty to the bishop of Rome.' He turned the relic over in his hands, tiny red flakes trickling down. 'The monasteries are a canker in the heart of the realm and I will have it ripped out.'
'A start has been made. The smaller houses are down.'
'That barely scratched the surface. But they brought in some money, enough to whet the king's appetite to take the large ones where the real wealth is. Two hundred of them, owning a sixth of the country's wealth.'
'Is it truly as much as that?'
He nodded. 'Oh yes. But after the rebellion last winter, with twenty thousand rebels camped on the Don demanding their monasteries back, I have to proceed carefully. The king won't have any more forced surrenders, and he's right. What I need, Matthew, are voluntary surrenders.'
'But surely they'd never—'
He smiled wryly. 'There's more than one way to kill a pig. Now listen carefully, this information is secret.' He leaned forward, speaking quietly and intently.
'When I had the monasteries inspected two years ago, I made sure everything that might damage them was carefully recorded.' He nodded at the drawers lining the walls. 'It's all in there; sodomy, fornication, treasonable preaching. Assets secretly sold away. And I have more and more informers in the monasteries too.' He smiled grimly. 'I could have had a dozen abbots executed at Tyburn, but I have bided my time, kept up the pressure, issued strict new injunctions they have to follow. I have them terrified of me.' He smiled again, then suddenly tossed the relic in the air, catching it and setting it down among his papers.
'I have persuaded the king to let me pick a dozen houses on which I can bring particular pressures to bear. In the last two weeks I have sent out picked men, to offer the abbots the alternatives of voluntary surrender, with pensions for all and fat ones for the abbots, or prosecution. Lewes, with its treasonable preaching; Titchfield, where the prior has sent some choice information about his brethren; Peterborough. Once I've pressed a few into voluntary surrender, the others will realize the game is up and go quietly. I've been following the negotiations closely and everything was going well. Until yesterday.' He picked up a letter from his desk. 'Have you ever heard of the monastery of Scarnsea?'
'No, my lord.'
'No reason you should have. It's a Benedictine house, in an old silted-up Channel port on the Kent-Sussex border. There's a history of vice there and according to the local Justice of the Peace, who is one of us, the abbot is selling land off cheap. I sent Robin Singleton down there last week to see what he could stir up.'
'I know Singleton,' I said. 'I've been against him in the courts. A forceful man.' I hesitated. 'Not the best lawyer, perhaps.'
'No, it was his forcefulness I wanted. There was little concrete evidence, and I wanted to see what he could browbeat out of them. I gave him a canon lawyer to assist him, an old Cambridge reformer called Lawrence Goodhaps.' He fished among his papers, and passed a letter across to me. 'This arrived from Goodhaps yesterday morning.'
The letter was scrawled in a crabbed hand, on a sheet of paper torn from a ledger.