I shook my head. It was already clear what was going to happen. Poor Grove, I thought. He never had time to escape to Northampton. “I thought he’d called in someone else. Bate, wasn’t it?”

Lower flipped his fingers contemptuously. “Old Grandfather Bate? He won’t even leave his bed if he thinks Mars is in the ascendant, and his only treatment is leeching and burning herbs. It would take his entire training even to see poor old Grove was dead. No; Woodward is no fool. He wants the opinion of someone who knows what he’s talking about.”

“And your opinion is… ?”

“That’s the clever bit,” he said craftily. “I examined the body briefly and decided further investigation was required. Which I will do this evening, in the warden’s kitchen. I thought you would like to be there. Locke wants to come as well and if Woodward provides some wine, we should have a most instructive time.”

“It would be a great pleasure,” I said. “Although are you sure I would be allowed? Warden Woodward did not seem a very welcoming man, when we met.”

Lower waved his hand dismissively. “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “You did meet him in distressing circumstances.”

“He was offensive,” I said, “ in accusing me of giving countenance to slanderous tales.”

“Really? Which ones?”

“I don’t know. All I did was ask whether the poor man might have undertaken some physical activity. Woodward turned dark with anger and accused me of malice.”

Lower rubbed his chin, a faint smile of understanding on his face. “Well, well,” he said. “Maybe it was true, then.”

“What?”

“There was a little scandal,” this man Locke said, for he had finished his food now and was prepared to give his attention to other things. “Nothing too serious, but someone put it around that Grove was fornicating with his servant. Personally, I thought it unlikely, given the source of the story was Wood.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Locke shrugged, as though unwilling to continue. Lower, however, would have none of this decorum.

“The servant in question was Sarah Blundy.”

“I must say that Grove always struck me as an upright man, well able to resist the wiles of someone like her,” Locke said. “And, as I say the tale originated with that ridiculous man Wood, so naturally I discounted it.”

“Who is Wood?”

“Anthony Wood. Or Anthony à Wood, as he likes to style himself, as he has delusions of quality. Have you not met him? Don’t worry; you will. He will seek you out, and suck you dry. An antiquary of the most burrowing sort.”

“Not so,” said Lower. “I insist on justice. In that field he is a man of excellent abilities.”

“Maybe so. But he is a pernicious gossip, and a melancholic little bundle of envy; everybody is less deserving, and succeeds only through connection. I’m sure he believes Jesus only got his job through family influence.”

Lower cackled at the blasphemy, and I surreptitiously crossed myself.

“Now, Locke, you are upsetting our papist friend,” Lower said with a grin. “The point is that Wood lives a monastic life with his books and manuscripts and rather took up with the girl in some way. She worked for his mother as a servant, and poor Wood felt greatly deceived by her.”

Locke smiled. “Only Wood, you see, would have been at all surprised by such things,” he said. “But he did find the girl a position with Grove and then constructed these notions about them. As he is malicious, he started spreading this around the town, with the result that Grove was forced to dismiss the girl to guard his good name.”

Lower poked him in the arm. “Hush, my friend,” he said. “For here is the man himself. You know how sensitive he is to being talked about.”

“Oh, Lord,” said Locke. “I can’t take it. Not with food. I must apologize, Mr. Cole.”

“Cola.”

“Mr. Cola. I hope to see you later, perhaps. Good evening, gentlemen.”

He rose, bowed swiftly and headed for the door at an uncivil speed, bowing to an absurdly scruffy man shambling toward us.

“Mr. Wood, sir,” cried Lower civilly, “do sit down with us, and meet my friend Mr. Cola, of Venice.”

Wood was already about to do so in any case, without being asked, and squeezed in alongside me, so that the smell of his unwashed clothes became quite impossible to ignore.

“Good evening sir, good evening, Lower.”

I could see why Locke had been in such a hurry. Not only did the man smell, not only was he bereft of any elegance, even wearing his spectacles in public, as though he had forgotten he was no longer in a library, but his presence instantly cast a pall of gloom over what had previously been a jolly table.

“I understand you are an historian, sir,” I said, trying to make polite conversation once more.

“Yes.”

“That must be very interesting. Are you of the university?”

“No.”

Another long silence, broken eventually by Lower pushing back his chair and standing up. “I have to prepare,” he said, quite ignoring my panicked looks of entreaty that I should not be left alone with Mr. Wood. “If you would join me at Mr. Stahl’s in Turl Street in half an hour or so…”

And with a quiet twitch of amusement which indicated he knew full well the trick he was playing on me, Lower walked off, leaving me with only Mr. Wood for company. He, I noticed, did not order any food; rather he collected the plates of the others and scoured them for bits of fat and gristle, sucking the bones with a horrible noise. He must, I thought, be very poor indeed.

“I suppose they have told you snide stories about me,” he said, then waved his hand as I rushed to deny it. “You needn’t bother,” he went on. “I know what they say.”

“It doesn’t seem to concern you much,” I said cautiously.

“Of course it does. Does not every man wish to be held in high regard by his fellows?”

“I have heard many worse things said of others.”

Wood grunted, and attended to Lower’s plate; as the method of cooking had completely killed my appetite, I passed him my own, which was still laden with food.

“Kind of you,” he said. “Very kind.”

“You may consider Lower a false friend,” I said, “but I may say that he spoke very highly of your skills in the historical way. Which tempts me to ask what it is that you do.”

He grunted once more, and I was afraid that the nourishment might render him too talkative. “You are the Venetian physician I have heard of?” he said by way of reply.

“Venetian, but not a real physician,” I said.

“Papist?”

“Yes,” I said cautiously, but he did not appear about to launch into offensive denunciations.

“You think heretics should burn, then?”

“Pardon?” I said in some surprise at the gaucheness of his conversation.

“If someone is tempted out of the fold of the true church—your own or any other—do you think he should burn?”

“Not necessarily,” I said, trying to marshal an argument at short notice. It seemed best to try to keep him on generalities, rather than prying into my private affairs. I detest gossip of all sorts. “He may deserve to lose his life, if you follow the argument of Aquinas, who asked why the counterfeiters of coin should be killed, but not counterfeiters of faith. But that is rare now, I think, whatever you Protestants may hear.”

“I meant burn in hell.”

“Oh.”

“If I am baptized by a heretic priest, are the sins of Adam remitted?” he said thoughtfully. “If I am married by one, are my children bastards? Cyprian said the quality of the sacrament existed ex opere operantis, I think, so that a heretic baptism would be no baptism at all.”

“But Pope Stephen countered that, and said it existed ex opere operato, through the merit of the action, not the standing of the actor,” I said. “So you would be in no great danger if it was done on both sides by men of good intent.”

He sniffed and wiped his mouth.

“Why do you ask?”