Sacrilege
Perfect for fans of C.J. Sansom and The Name of the Rose, the third historical thriller featuring Giordano Bruno, heretic, philosopher and spy.London, 1584. Giordano Bruno travels to Canterbury for love. But finds only murder …Giordano Bruno is being followed by the woman he once loved – Sophia Underhill, accused of murder and on the run. With the leave of the Queen’s spymaster, he sets out to clear Sophia’s name. But when more brutal killings occur a far deadlier plot emerges.A city rife with treachery. A relic steeped in blood.His hunt for the real killer leads to the shadows of the Cathedral – England’s holiest shrine – and the heart of a sinister and powerful conspiracy …Heretic, maverick, charmer: Giordano Bruno is always on his guard. Never more so than when working for Queen Elizabeth and her spymaster – for this man of letters is now an agent of intrigue and danger …
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2012
Copyright © Stephanie Merritt 2012
Cover photographs © Angelo Hornack/Alamy [seal]; Shutterstock [blood]
Stephanie Merritt asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Excerpt from Giordano Bruno novel four © Stephanie Merritt 2012
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authorâs imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © April 2012 ISBN: 9780007317790
Version: 2017-05-10
Table of Contents
I knew that I was being followed long before I saw or heard my pursuer. I felt it by some instinct that by now had been sharpened by experience; a shifting of the air, a presence whose movements invisibly shadowed my own. Someone was watching me and had been for several days: from the mouths of alleyways, from behind pillars or walls, amid the crowds of people, carts and animals that thronged the narrow streets of London or out among the river traffic. At times I even sensed eyes on me in the privacy of my room at Salisbury Court, though that was surely impossible and could only have been the tricks of imagination.
It was the twenty-third day of July, 1584, and I was hurrying to deliver my new book to my printer before he left London for the rest of the summer. A merchant ship from Portugal had recently docked at Tilbury, at the mouth of the River Thames. Plague was raging in Lisbon and the crew had been forcibly quarantined; despite these measures, rumours that the infection had begun to claim English victims were spreading through the city quicker than the disease itself ever could. Outbreaks of plague were common enough during London summers, I had been told, and any Londoner with the means to move to healthier air was packing as fast as they could. At the French embassy, where I lived as the Ambassadorâs house-guest, whispers of the black plague had sent the household into such a frenzy of imagined symptoms that the Ambassador had dispatched his private secretary to enquire about country houses in the neighbourhood of the Palace of Nonsuch, Queen Elizabeth of Englandâs summer residence.
Fear of the plague had only added to tensions at the embassy in the past few days. Our peace had been shattered the previous week by the arrival of the news from the Netherlands that William the Silent, Prince of Orange, had been assassinated, shot in the chest on the staircase of his own house in Delft by a man he knew and trusted. I imagined that in all the embassies of the Catholic and Protestant powers throughout the greatest cities of Europe, men and women would be standing much as we did when the messenger arrived, speechless in the face of an act whose repercussions would shake the world as we knew it. The shock and fear occasioned by the deed were still palpable in the streets of London; not that the English people gave two figs for William himself, but it was well known that the Catholic King Philip II of Spain had offered a reward of twenty-five thousand crowns for his murder. And if one Protestant ruler could be knocked down as easily as a skittle, there was no doubt that Queen Elizabeth of England would be next on Philipâs list. The sense of foreboding was all the greater at Salisbury Court because Williamâs assassin had been a Frenchman.
John Charlewood, my printer, had his lodgings at the Half-Eagle and Key in the street known as Barbican, just to the north of the city wall. He also had a press nearby at the Charterhouse, the old Carthusian monastery which had been converted into a grand private residence, but I refused to visit his business premises; the Charterhouse was now owned by Thomas Howard, half-brother to the young Earl of Arundel. I had made enemies of the Howards â the most powerful Catholic family among the English nobility â the previous autumn and preferred to avoid the possibility of running into any one of them. This amused Charlewood, but he never asked questions; he was sufficiently eccentric himself to tolerate the apparent caprices of others, or else shrewd enough to realise that, in these days of tangled loyalties, it is often safer not to know another manâs business.
