The King James Conspiracy Read online

  The

  King James

  Conspiracy

  By Phillip DePoy

  The Fever Devilin Mysteries

  The Devil’s Hearth

  The Witch’s Grave

  A Minister’s Ghost

  A Widow’s Curse

  The Drifter’s Wheel

  The Flap Tucker Mysteries

  Easy

  Too Easy

  Easy as One-Two-Three

  Dancing Made Easy

  Dead Easy

  The

  King James

  Conspiracy

  PHILLIP DEPOY

  ST. MARTIN’S PRESS

  NEW YORK

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE KING JAMES CONSPIRACY. Copyright © 2009 by Phillip DePoy. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  Design by Phil Mazzone

  ISBN-13: 978-0-312-37713-7

  ISBN-10: 0-312-37713-4

  First Edition: May 2009

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The King James Conspiracy is dedicated to Father Coleman. I took confirmation classes from him when I was eleven years old. At that time, news of the Dead Sea Scrolls was becoming popular. I remember how excited Father Coleman was when he told me what they would mean. “Once they’re all translated, we can see what the Bible really says.” Nearly fifty years later, as I continue to wait for the complete translation and revelation of the Dead Sea Scrolls (as well as the Nag Hammadi library, known as the Gnostic Gospels, discovered in 1945 and still not fully available to the public), it seems appropriate that this book should belong to Father Coleman.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Keith Kahla for specific instruction and general help; Maria Carvainis for superior critique; Lee Nowell for first reading and constant support; and especially to the anonymous truck driver who pulled out in front of me on the expressway and nearly killed me. On his bumper was a sticker that said, “If it ain’t King James, it ain’t the Bible.” When I saw it I stopped wanting to explain the rules of safe driving and started wanting to tell him everything that was wrong with that sentence. Instead, I came home and started this book.

  The

  King James

  Conspiracy

  Contents

  1 Rome, 1605

  2 Cambridge, England

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44 Cambridge, That Night

  45 Westminster, That Night

  46 Cambridge, That Night

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  Some Historical Data

  1

  Rome, 1605

  “Blood!” The world’s most significant ring dented the tabletop; the fist bore it crashing into the wood again and again with each word. “We must have blood.”

  The secret room, smaller than a bedchamber, offered a faint echo of the final word. In the shadows along the cold stone wall, a small black beetle clattered softly to the corner.

  “But, Your Holiness,” Cardinal Venitelli sputtered, his sleeve trembling as he held up his hand ever so slightly, crimson skullcap twitching twice. “This book is in English. Who would pay attention to that?”

  “The book is circumstantial!” the Pope interrupted, bellowing. “If we are to win back that dirty little island, the time is now. We would never have attempted this with Elizabeth, but James has been handed the throne. He is a proud man, and now he has set his intellectual talents, such as they are, to work on this book. He is both overly assured and mentally distracted. The time is ripe.”

  “But—when you say blood . . .” Venitelli had no idea how to finish the sentence.

  Pope Clement’s red cape rose and fell with each labored breath. A white, translucent collar from the underdressing crested at the neck. Fire hissed in the hearth at the opposite end of the room.

  “Blood will stop the book. Stopping the book will unravel James’s plan for England. The plan unraveled builds a bridge from Rome to London. That bridge will bring England back to the Church. You must at least see God’s humor, if not His plan, in this.”

  The small stone room in which the two men sat was quite hidden. It was unknown to all but the Pope’s most intimate visitors. From the outside, the door was invisible, hidden by the stones in the long hallway. Inside, the room was bare of furniture save for a table and four chairs. Two large candles fixed to the tabletop illuminated the walls. The walls were draped floor to ceiling with thick tapestries, which did their best to absorb all sound. The images woven there were also red, stabbed with thorns: hunting scenes of startling violence. The characters seemed to move fitfully in the flickering light.

  The floor was nearly covered with a deep, intricately patterned carpet that had been stolen during the Crusades, it was said, from Saladin himself. Cardinal Venitelli always fancied he could smell Saladin’s encampment the moment he stepped on the rug. He had often struggled to explain the sensation to himself. The reason was just beyond his mind’s grasp. The room itself seemed accustomed to harsh words.

  “Yes,” the cardinal managed, “but the exact meaning—”

  “You need not concern yourself with exact meanings.” Pope Clement relished thinking of himself as an impatient man: it prompted quick action on the part of subordinates. “We have already set certain plans in motion. They involve, in part, the man who is housing these translators at Christ Church in Cambridge—a minister named Marbury, a Protestant. Alas, he is an intelligent man in a mire of idiots. But to the point: a scholar of the Cambridge group is this night to be—what word is best? Eliminated. When that happens, we shall introduce into their midst our avenging angel.”

  That phrase was a code well-known to the cardinal, but to assure himself he began to ask, “By which you mean to say—”

  “These tapestries are elegant, are they not?” Clement looked away.

  The cardinal understood: His Holiness must not say the name of his chief assassin—his avenging angel. In this way he could honestly say, in future conversations, that he had not called for him—not by name—and had certainly never spoken with him. That task was assigned to the cardinal, who did not relish it. His face grew ashen and his voice quavered.

  “I am to ask—ask the man in question to go to England, and kill—”

  “Certainly not! Hush!” Clement rolled his head around his shoulders. “Tell him only that he is to be assigned to the translators of the King James Bible. Emphasize the Bible. Then say to him these precise words: ‘The turning of the wheel by the tilling of the whe
at.’”

  Venitelli felt a fist tighten in his belly. How many times before had he conveyed such coded phrases to the man in question, subsequently leading to foul murder?

  “The turning of the wheel by the tilling of the wheat,” Venitelli repeated, nodding.

  The Pope smiled, but did not look at the cardinal. “We are using the man in question for his special talents—abilities which only he possesses. He has a telum secretus, if We may be permitted a dramatic flair.”

  “But our brother’s actual task—his assignment—”

  “The reason We assign these administrative tasks to you, my brother Cardinal Venitelli,” the Pope said soothingly, as if to a boy of seven, “is that you rarely grasp the import of any situation. You do, however, operate with discretion. You must understand that We will stop at nothing to reclaim England, bring her back to Mother Church. It is God’s plan. We have in mind a series of events, in fact, though they may take several years to unfold, which will achieve Us this goal.”

  “Yes,” Venitelli’s voice betrayed his absolute confusion.

  The Pope leaned forward, his face close to Venitelli’s, and he barely spoke above a whisper, but the sound of his voice was thunder.

  “This will be my legacy, do you understand? History will write me as the man who restored England to the True Church. And that begins with the destruction of this book—this folly to which James aspires.”

  The cardinal’s nostrils were momentarily assailed by a scent of camels; his ears heard faint Islamic prayers. Though he did not speak Arabic, he believed that the prayers were calling for the blood of infidels. He glared down at Saladin’s rug. Was it possible that a curse of the vanquished Islamic warriors lingered on the rug, infecting decisions made in this room? Perhaps that would account for the odd smells that attacked his senses, and the Pope’s disconcerting passion.

  “Are you attempting to think?” The Pope glared at Venitelli. “Are you giving second thought to Our words?”

  The cardinal stood immediately. “A thousand pardons, Your Holiness.” He reached for the papal ring. “God’s plan is glorious, and your name will live forever.”

  The Pope offered his hand, sighing—Venitelli kissed the ring.

  Cardinal Venitelli bowed, turned, and hastened toward the secret door. He peered once through a crack in the stones, cold and gray, his hand upon them, making certain no one was in the outer hall. When he saw no one, he pushed through, leaving his Pope behind.

  Once in the hallway Venitelli realized that his hands would not stop trembling, and that his hairline dripped with sweat. He fought to quell his worst fear: that the Pope had lost his mind.

  He slowed his pace only slightly, trying to decide which disturbed him more, the conversation he had just endured with his Pope, or the one he was about to have with the coldest man in Italy.

  2

  Cambridge, England

  Without warning, Deacon Francis Marbury’s slumber was shattered.

  “Help! Murder! Someone!”

  His eyes shot open. Moonlight, soft and clear, bathed his room. The April night was cold, the air still held a strong remembrance of winter, though winter itself had gone.

  “Someone help!” the call came again, louder.

  Marbury flew from his bedcovers, wrapped himself in a black, quilted cape, and thrust his head out the window of the tiny bedroom. One by one other windows all around him flickered from black to white; voices began to shout. Marbury stumbled back into the room, stopped to pull on his boots, then plunged into the hallway of the Deaconage, picking up his pace as he flew down the stairs.

  Out into the night, several others joined him; faces blurred in the darkness. The peace of the common yard, surrounded by silent stone buildings, was destroyed by men running toward the sound of the cries.

  As Marbury approached the Great Hall, from which direction the cries had come, he could see that one of the scholars, Edward Lively, stood barring the door. Lively was dressed in fine brocade, a soft silver that bent the moonlight his way. His hat was ermine, bold; new. He wore gloves of black leather whose cuffs were emblazoned with a scarlet letter L. His beard was as clean and soft as a rich man’s bed. Others surrounded the doorway as Marbury came to a halt before him.

  “What has happened?” Marbury, out of breath, touched Lively’s arm.

  “A body,” Lively managed, swallowing. “A dead body. In there.”

  Lively stood aside, opening the door to the hall, his voice echoing against lifeless walls. The rest of the men flooded past him, lighting candles; whispering furious questions. The hall was a cave, cold and quiet. The far corners were obscured by an obsidian darker than the midnight. The air seemed filled with slivers of ice. They pricked the fingers and stuck the cheeks.

  The men inched forward. Something terrible lay in a lump just ahead of them. After a moment one man cried out. Another began coughing, or vomiting.

  Marbury breathed heavily. “God in heaven.”

  A bloodied corpse lay on the cold stone floor near one of the scholars’ desks.

  Marbury fought to control his breathing, repeating over and over in his mind that what he saw was not really there, it was a phantom. But his mind knew better.

  Lively had apparently dropped a candle. It had come to rest against the leg of a desk and continued to burn on its side, casting a flickering light on the dead body slumped under the desk.

  A corpse alone would not have so terrified the scholars. Thanks to the plague, each man in his time had seen many a vacant body. It was the face that provoked an impulse to scream; the sight of it churned the stomach.

  That face had been cut perhaps a hundred times, long and deep lacerations gouged the flesh until no features were left, only raw muscle, peaks of bone, and dried blood the color of rotted plums.

  There was no way of knowing the identity of the man from that face.

  “Look!” Robert Spaulding cried, amazed. He was second-in-command of the translators, his position more secretarial than anything else. He seemed more fascinated than revolted by the scene that lay before him. His overcoat was plain, the color of a dead leaf, and cleaned so vigorously that it may have been in pain. He pointed to the intricate briarwood cross around the dead man’s neck.

  “That, I believe, is Harrison’s cross,” Marbury whispered.

  “And that is most certainly Harrison’s purple vest,” Spaulding confirmed, cold as stone.

  There was no doubt that the dead man was Harrison.

  Marbury steadied himself against Harrison’s desk, concentrating on his breathing. He watched in silence as the rest agreed with one another about the details of their conclusion.

  “How is it,” Marbury began slowly to Lively, “that you came across this horror at such a time of night?”

  “My enthusiasm drew me here,” Lively said quickly. “I was eager to work on my new pages—they hold an allure for me the magnitude of which you cannot imagine.”

  “Yes, but what I do not need to imagine,” Marbury pronounced carefully, “is the anger Harrison would have displayed had he known you were looking at his work. He is given to fits of rage. We all know it. Perhaps he was here, you argued; he attacked you.”

  Lively’s response was interrupted before it began.

  “We must alert the night watch immediately!” Spaulding demanded.

  “You are a man of letters, Dr. Spaulding, and would not know of such matters,” Marbury answered, barely hiding his derisive tone, “but our constabulary here in Cambridge are, to a man, quite useless. You must permit me to handle this affair in another manner.”

  “Outrageous!” Spaulding squeaked. “We must not allow this night to pass—”

  “I have already in mind a method for investigating this horror,” Marbury said, his tones calming, almost hypnotic.

  “But—” Lively began.

  Marbury turned at once to the assembled and raised his hand. “Your pardon, gentlemen—I suggest we take stock for a moment before we speak further
. Firstly, our Christian duty demands that we offer, each of us, a silent prayer on the part of our colleague Harrison.”

  Marbury watched as each living face registered its own brand of instant piety. Eyes closed, mouths moved; voices whispered.

  Marbury used the moment of silence to take another look at the dead body, trying to examine it more closely. The blood on the corpse had not dried, but was not running. There was an almost complete lack of stain on the floor, the desk, or the chair around the body. The vest showed several torn places. Two were soaked in blood, but that blood was viscous—not oozing, not dry. Could Harrison have been killed somewhere else and the body lugged into the hall?

  After a moment, Marbury forced himself to look again at the wreckage of the face. He prayed, then, that Harrison had been dead before it had been so mutilated. But as he finished his prayer, he noticed something else.

  “Now then.” Marbury’s voice broke the silence in the controlled tone of a man of business. “I beg you all to keep silent about this incident. Let us not discuss it with anyone outside these walls until we know what has happened. Your work is too sacred, too vital, to be distracted by this. Perhaps my words seem cold, but I believe they are in the best interest of your scholarship, and our King. After all, is this hall a place of learning, or a house of murder?”

  The most senior scholar of the group cleared his throat noisily. He was Dr. Lawrence Chaderton, a Hebrew scholar on friendly terms with many of England’s notable rabbis. He radiated the deep calm of a man completely confident of his place in this world—and in the next. His coat was plain and black, buttoned, reaching nearly to the floor. His head was uncovered, his white hair all stray lightning and sparks.

  “The man who did this to Harrison is not, by my definition, a human being.” Chaderton squinted. “We must proceed with impossible delicacy.”