A new scene had begun Lust had made a pact of fellowship with Inclination To Evil. Some distance away my friend Roger Elliard, to whose house I was invited to a dinner afterwards, held his wife’s hand. He was perhaps the crookedest lawyer I had ever come across it still smarted that eighteen months before I had been forced to abandon a case against him through the ruthless machinations of his patron, Richard Rich. Those eyes were never still, would never meet yours, and as he saw me looking at him his gaze slid away. Across from me I saw my old enemy Stephen Bealknap, his greedy pale blue eyes studying his fellow lawyers. Treasurer Rowland, a thin-faced, acerbic old man, was eyeing the actors as though wondering whether it might have been better hiring a troupe with less expensive costumes even if this play required no elaborate scenery.

I cast my eyes over the shadowed faces of the audience. As the actor playing Virtue, resplendent in pale robes and a long, white, false beard, lectured Dissimulation on his deceitful ways - appropriately, perhaps, to an audience of lawyers - my attention wandered. The play that year was a new Interlude, The Trial of Treasure, a heavy-handed moral fable with the gorgeously robed actors portraying the vices and virtues of mankind. The performance of a play at Lincoln’s Inn, traditionally held in March, had been cancelled earlier in the month because of heavy snow late in the month now, it was still unseasonably cold, the breath of actors and audience visible, wafting up like smoke to the high roofbeams. After an hour standing watching, my back was starting to ache, and I envied the few elderly and infirm members who had brought stools.

Most members of Lincoln’s Inn were present, the barristers in their robes and their wives in their best costumes. The high chandeliers in the Great Hall of Lincoln’s Inn were ablaze with candles, for it was late afternoon when the play began.

Revelation by cj sansom