The Grail Murders

you are warm and happy, even in a pile of shit, keep your mouth firmly shut!'
    Well, that was it. The Queen swept out of the chapel and I was placed under house arrest at my London home until I wrote the bishop a fulsome apology. I did so and was promptly fined a further hundred crowns for saying he was one of the nicest old ladies I had ever met.
    Ah, well, if you can't take a joke you shouldn't be a Christian!
    (I see my chaplain's shoulders shaking. He'd better not be laughing at me, I'd wring his neck if he bothered to wash it! Good, he has sobered up. He taps his quill on the edge of the manuscript and it's time to begin.)
    We must go back into the past. Think of it as a corridor with many rooms and each chamber thronged with murderers. I must go back to those golden days when I was in the service of Benjamin Daunbey, nephew to the great Cardinal Wolsey. We were both the Cardinal's special agents working for his good and that of the crown. The good of the crown! Fat, murderous, syphilitic Henry VIII, The Dark Prince, The Mouldwarp who drenched his kingdom in torrents of blood and sent the best and noblest of his court to the scaffold…
    I am ready. I have opened the leather casket with the year '1522' inscribed in faded gold letters. We have taken out the relics of that bygone, murderous age. They lie before me upon the desk. Some are tinged with purple where a wine cup spilt, others bear a deeper scarlet, the traces of some poor bastard's life blood. The ring given back to me is not important. My eyes are drawn to the scarlet threads, strips of tough silk, so light, so pathetic, yet in their time they concealed mysteries which stretch back to the time of Arthur.
    I half-close my eyes, summoning up the past. I can almost catch Benjamin's voice and, in my mind's eye, glimpse his dark sardonic face, gentle eyes and lanky, stooped figure which masked so many subtle skills. Ah, I was so different then. No great lord but a mere commoner, a jumped-up jackanapes rescued by Wolsey's nephew to plumb the dark treacheries of Henry's court.
    I look at a picture framed in gold which hangs on the wall on the other side of my room. A fair replica of me in my golden youth. Will Shakespeare once asked me to describe myself.
    ‘I was a hungry, lean-faced villain,' I replied. ‘A mountebank, a threadbare juggler, a hollow-eyed, sharp-looking wretch.'
    Will thanked me for it and, as always, used it in one of his plays. You'll find the same description in his Comedy of Errors, a subtle humorous piece which I sponsored with my gold.
    Ah, well, no more dalliance or asides. The curtains are drawn so let the bloody drama begin. I will exorcise the ghosts in my mind. Purge the demons from my soul and order them to go back to hell and tell the Lord Satan I sent them there. (Oh, by the way, you'll find this same phrase in one of Will Shakespeare's plays. He borrowed that as well!)

Chapter 1
    After we returned from France in the summer of 1521, my master Benjamin Daunbey was left untroubled by his uncle, the great Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. Old Tom had other things on his mind as we later discovered. You see, the fat Cardinal had one great nightmare: how to control the King. He used a magic ring, so they say, to call up demons, and hired the chief of witches, a harlot known as Mabel Brigge, to go on a Satanic fast in order to keep the King's mind firmly in his grasp.
    Old Wolsey was a fool. I told him so when he lay dying in Leicester Abbey, cursing all princes and Henry in particular.
    Now Henry VIII, that limb of Satan, had his brains firmly in his codpiece whilst his soul was a storm of emotions. He was a great Catholic yet he attacked the Mass. A learned scholar but he killed poor Tom More. A fervent friend until he tired of you. And, above all, a loving husband until someone more young and buxom caught his eye.
    You may have read how Henry wanted a male heir and rejected both his daughters. First, poor Mary. (That was her problem, you know. Mary was always looking for her father in other men, including me. And that shows you how desperate she was!) Secondly, of course, the great Elizabeth, Boleyn's daughter. And wasn't that funny? Satan must be laughing in hell. Old Henry searching for a boy whilst his poor, rejected daughter, Elizabeth, turns out to be the greatest monarch England has ever seen. Mind you, that's not the full truth. Elizabeth was his heir, ostensibly his daughter, only I know the truth… but that's a story for