James Forrester - Final Sacrament

He looked to his right. Here, overlooking the street, was the main window. Beside it stood his elm table, with a single silver candlestick. He ran his fingers along the oval rim of the tabletop. As a boy he had played with carved wooden soldiers on its surface, and had rolled glass beads over the ridges formed by the grain of the wood. He had learned to read sitting at it, and regularly he and his brother Thomas had eaten off it, when their parents had entertained guests at their main table. Along with his father’s old sword, it was one of the few family possessions that had survived the destruction of his house by Walsingham’s men. At ten years of age he had been beaten by his father for carving his name on it and had had to file away the offending letters. The file marks were still there, patinated now. One day their story would be lost. Most tables were rectangular, and a very few were round. His table was oval. It was unusual, well-made, solid, and dependable-all the things he approved of. There was nothing frivolous about it. It was more than a little like him.

He heard the running of his daughters’ feet down the staircase at the back of the hall and turned as Annie ran toward him. Her shoulder-length brown hair bounced as she ran, then hung down, framing the handsomeness of her face. She was in her eighth year now, and showing every sign of a sharp, contrary intelligence, like her father. Her younger sister, Mildred, who followed her as fast as her short legs would allow, had just passed her fourth birthday. She was tiny, very pretty, and very outgoing. Both girls were wearing plain woolen cream dresses and soft leather shoes. Mildred had the finest fair hair, like her mother, and was clutching a straw doll wearing a similar dress to her own. Joan followed them, folding her arms as she watched from the doorway at the end of the hall. Clarenceux noticed Awdrey behind her.

Annie rushed out her message in a torrent, looking up at her father with great blue eyes full of excitement. “We were upstairs playing with Mildred’s doll Elizabeth and she said that she loved her doll Elizabeth more than anyone else in the world except for Mam, and Mam heard us talking and said, ‘What about your father? Don’t you love him just as much?’ And Mildred said she did love her dad, and so Mam said we should tell you we love you when you come downstairs because she said you would like to know that we do.”

“I love you,” said Mildred, looking up at her father.

Clarenceux smiled and knelt down to hold both girls. He stroked Mildred’s cheek. “That’s good to hear. And I’m glad you love your mother more than your doll.”

“I love you more than my Elizabeth as well,” Mildred said happily. Annie, in high spirits, echoed her little sister. “I love you more than…capon.”

“More than green cheese!” exclaimed Mildred.

“Enough,” Clarenceux said. “I feel much loved…”

“More than warm milk,” shouted Annie.

“Enough,” he repeated, getting back to his feet.

“More than God!” said Mildred.

Clarenceux shook his head. “Mildred, no. No. You must not say such things. You cannot love me more than God.”

“But I do.”

Annie looked at him disapprovingly. “But she is telling the truth, and you say we should always tell the truth.”

Clarenceux saw the disappointment in Mildred’s eyes and the crossness in her sister’s. Mildred was uncertain, waiting anxiously for a kind word from him. He knelt down again and put an arm around her, hugging her. He put an arm around Annie too, and spoke to both of them. “You must love God most of all. For we pray that God looks kindly on us, do we not?”

Mildred nodded, her blond locks bobbing as she did so, her eyes moist.

Clarenceux wiped away a tear running down the little girl’s cheek and kissed her. He stood again and patted Annie on her head. Then he looked at Awdrey. “I am going out.”

“Where?”

He said nothing.

“William, it is very early to be going to swordsmanship. Too early.”

Still he said nothing. He walked toward the door through to the main staircase.

“Tell me you are not going to watch Sir John,” she said, coming after him. “Promise me you will not go!”

Clarenceux paused in the doorway. “I am not going to let them hang him with no one but jeering crowds there to see him. He was a good priest to both my mother and my brother. He stood by them while they were dying. He gave them the last rites. I want him at least to know there are people who will always appreciate the good he has done in this world before he goes to the next.”

Awdrey put one arm around his shoulders and the other hand she placed on his chest. “William, it is too dangerous. Those people across the street, do you not think they will see you? They will know where you are going. Walsingham is probably waiting at this very moment for you to step outside-to arrest you for trying to protect a man he has condemned as a traitor.”

He looked at her and saw the fear in her blue eyes. He gently moved a loose strand of golden hair away from her face. “Awdrey, Sir John is my friend in God. I will not let him go to his death without someone beside him. No more than I would you.”

He removed her hand from his chest, kissed it, and stepped out onto the staircase. He descended fast, determined not to look back. At the bottom he picked up his long black cloak from the peg nearest to the door and nodded to his old manservant, Thomas, who had heard his master’s footsteps but was too late to reach the front door. Thomas was left standing, watching, as Clarenceux strode out of the house, leaving the door open behind him.

Thomas closed it. A child’s cry made him look up. In the hall, he found Awdrey crouched on the floor holding Mildred, who was crying. She had dropped her doll and Clarenceux had inadvertently stepped on it as he had left. Annie was standing there too, uncertain what to do.

“He’s allowing it to take him over,” Awdrey said, looking at Thomas. “I don’t know what to say to him. He is living every moment as if he’s fighting, scared. He cannot hold a conversation without bringing it back to that accursed document. I wish he would just destroy it and be done with it.”

Thomas tactfully waited until an opportune moment came. “He says that he has destroyed it, Mistress Harley.”

Awdrey cradled Mildred all the more. “You don’t believe that, Thomas, do you? That document is like a bad conscience, eating away at him, making him do things that are dangerous.”

“Mistress Harley, would it be reassuring if I followed Mr. Clarenceux? We know where he is going.”

“Yes, Thomas. Yes, it would. Please. Go with God.”

Mary Vardine was forty-three years of age and near death. The wounds from the whip on her bare back stung terribly; the gashes were as deep as the thickness of a finger and they would probably never heal. She lay in the dim corner of the jail, starving and frozen on the cold earth floor. Pieces of muddy straw had stuck to the congealed blood on her back She had nothing covering her but the remains of her torn smock. The stench of urine around her was rank, and she had fouled herself. In the last four days she had had nothing to eat but only three slices of stale bread.

She coughed and tried to spit, but there was no phlegm. She closed her eyes and opened them again; all she could see was a gray haze of moving shapes. She heard the clink of a key and the creak of the cage door opening. Two of the shapes approached, and she heard the voices of two younger women prisoners trying to attract the attention of the jailers. One of them was a kindly young tailor’s wife who had made sure that Mary had been given a piece of bread one day. If Mary had had the energy, she might have hoped that the warden would choose to lie with her. But in truth she was too tired even to hope anymore. They were all in this hole because they had been accused of felonies; in all likelihood they would be sentenced to be killed on the next visit of the assize judges. For the younger women, there remained the one hope that they could become pregnant before that day, so they could plead their bellies. It was not so much to prostitute themselves that the women called to the guards-it was to find a man who was ready to show pity to them. There was no other transaction except the sexual act, unless the barbarities perpetrated on some of the women by the more vicious jailers counted as a form of payment, by the women.