Rizzio: A Novella

Yair joins the Watch and walks into town amidst the throng. He’s standing near Simon Preston as they leave the quadrangle and he, too, hears the squeezed little cry of ‘no!’, but it doesn’t haunt him. He’s already so mired in despair that nothing can penetrate his mood. Nothing touches him, not the cold or the chattering camaraderie of men returning home after a false alarm.

The men peel off, left and right. They are nibbled away by the city, swallowed by doorways and closes and lanes until they are very few. Those who are left decide to go for a drink together and talk over what happened tonight. They walk fast, looking for somewhere open. It’s late. Yair drops back until he’s at the very back of the group and then slides away, unnoticed.

He walks for a long time, stuck in a half-thought. He heads up to the Castle and then down to the houses below. He circles the foot of the Castle, walks the lower levels of the dark city, down through the lanes to the Grassmarket, the undercity, following his own feet. He doesn’t mean to go anywhere in particular, just walk until he’s exhausted, but he finds himself outside Father Adam Black’s front door.

Adam Black is notorious.

He’s everything Henry Yair isn’t. He’s a forty-year-old Dominican friar, well-off, cheerful, lascivious and much travelled. He’s been all over Europe, once all the way to the Holy Land. He is sympathetic to the transgressions of those who come to him for confession because Black is a sinner himself. He’s suspected of being a spy. It’s rumoured he reports to the Spanish, he reports to the French, he sends missives to the Vatican in cypher. His spy name is ‘John Noir’: that is what they call him in their letters by return. Ask John Noir if… Tell John Noir to seek… Must John Noir find… Everyone in Edinburgh knows these facts. Black is only tolerated because he’s not often in the city, and when he is it’s never for long. He was chaplain to Mary of Guise, the current Queen’s mother, and his official status is murky now.

Adam Black’s front door is small and pale blue with a large brass knocker brightly buffed. His house stands alone on a patch of land that backs onto Greyfriars cemetery. Yair thinks he has been brought here because he desperately needs to talk about matters of faith. He wants to know if his chest should hurt like this, if he has been mistaken in his conversion. He wants to ask why God is making men choose between religions like this when they can’t. They don’t know. They’re gambling their immortal souls. Yair can see both sides of the argument. He’s guessing now, but this feels like an answer of sorts, finding himself here at a priest’s house.

God shouldn’t ask men to answer these questions.

Yair looks at Adam Black’s door, wants to go in, but the house is in darkness. Still it is a sign, finding himself guided here. He tries the door. He has never done that before. In these porous moments, every tiny thing can take on significance and be read as a sign from God. The door yields. The bolt was not properly pulled. Henry Yair steps from the street into Father Adam Black’s parlour.

He wants to do the right thing, make the right choices. It’s a gamble. He saw Rizzio’s face cut through with a blade. Eyes like lips.

Then he’s standing by a bed, in a small room, a stifling room that smells of wax and old men’s clothes, and Yair finds himself smiling. He doesn’t have to decide. It’s been done for him.

He’s holding a knife he’s never seen before, holding it in his right hand which is covered in blood. It’s warm blood and it’s dripping onto the floor in a way he finds amazing. The blood of the Lamb. He is washed.

He doesn’t have to decide anything any more. It’s all been decided for him.

A woman is screaming words. It’s Father Black’s sister and housekeeper. She’s screaming words close to Yair and then far from Yair, and then men are here.

Men make him drop the knife and men hold his arms, and they light candles and see Father Adam Black in his scarlet soggy bed, and he has been stabbed over and over in his lovely holy face.