Paul Doherty - Candle Flame

The Carnifex and his assistants became busy leaping about like imps from Hell. Sparwell, his body one open wound, was unstrapped from the hurdle and dragged to the soaring execution stake driven into a steep hummock of piled earth. Athelstan followed and started with surprise as Cranston strode out of the crowd, his chain of office clear to see, the miraculous wineskin in one hand and a pewter cup in the other. He winked at Athelstan as he planted himself firmly in front of the executioners.

‘A drink?’ Cranston filled the deep bowled cup. One of the bishop’s party rushed forward to object but Cranston bellowed he didn’t give a piece of dried snot what he thought. The coroner was supported by the sheriff’s men, who hadn’t forgotten Cranston’s promise of a free blackjack of ale. Sir John filled the cup to the brim and virtually forced it down Sparwell’s throat. The prisoner drank greedily, coughing and spluttering. Cranston stepped back and the spectacle continued. The executioners had already slipped the barrel over the pole. They now seized Sparwell, bound hand and foot, and lowered him into the barrel. A herald of the bishop’s court read out the billa mortis – the bill of death. How Sparwell ‘was a sinner, obdurate and recalcitrant, steeped in his hellish ways and so deserving of death by the secular arm’. Athelstan had followed Sparwell to the execution stake, but had to step back as the Carnifex and his assistants heaped the brushwood and stacked the bundles of faggots. Athelstan studied these. Cranston was correct. A great deal of the wood was green to the point of suppleness.

‘ Homo lupus homini – man is truly a wolf to man,’ Athelstan whispered to himself. He stared over the crowd, now pressing in against the cordon of soldiery: a mass of faces, a babble of voices. Some cursed and yelled; others chanted songs of mourning or hymns for the departed. Athelstan glimpsed members of his parish clustered around Mauger the bell clerk. What caught his attention, however, was Paston’s daughter Martha standing close to the ever-faithful Foulkes. Both young people were markedly different from the crowd on either side. They stood so quietly, staring at the grisly ritual as if memorizing every detail.

‘Let it begin!’ the herald shouted. Athelstan blinked and stared around. The hurdle, sledges and great dray horse were being pulled away. The execution pyre was ready. Oil-drenched branches were fired from a bowl of glowing coals. The air grew thick with the stench of grey-black smoke. The flames on the fire-fed torches leapt up, almost exuding the horror they were about to inflict on this freezing February afternoon under a lowering winter sky. Athelstan glanced at the stake. Sparwell had fallen very silent. In fact, he just lolled against the barrel as if deeply asleep.

‘Fire the wood!’ the herald shouted. The executioners raced forward, torches held out, thrusting them into the kindling. Smoke and flame erupted, though the fire seemed to find the faggots stacked closer to the condemned man more difficult to burn. The smoke plumed up and billowed out, almost hiding that pathetic, lolling figure. The crowd strained to watch. The smoke grew thicker, forcing the sheriff’s men and the executioners further back, leaving the execution ground to that great, fearsome cloud lit by darting flames, which seemed to just thrust itself up from the earth. The crowd had now fallen silent as if straining to listen to the cries and shrieks of the condemned man. There was nothing.

‘He’s gone,’ Cranston whispered, coming up beside Athelstan. ‘When I left you, Brother, I visited an apothecary and bought the strongest juice of the poppy.’

‘The wine?’ Athelstan asked.

‘Oh yes, Brother. It was in the wine or rather the cup. Sparwell was already exhausted. Such a potion would have put him into a sleep very close to death.’

‘Sleep is the brother of death,’ Athelstan retorted. He forced a smile. ‘Or so a Greek poet wrote. Sir John, I cannot stay here.’ Athelstan raised his hand and blessed the air in the direction of the execution pyre. The smell of smoke was now tinged with something else: a foul odour like fat being left to burn. The flames had reached Sparwell! Athelstan took off his stole and walked away. One of the bishop’s men tried to catch him by the sleeve but Athelstan ignored it and, pushing through the crowd, walked quickly towards The Candle-Flame.

‘Brother Athelstan?’ He turned. Master Tuddenham, face as white as a ghost, strode towards him. The man was deeply agitated, all a tremble.

‘What is it?’ Athelstan walked back to meet him. Tuddenham stopped, crossed himself and went down on one knee.

‘Bless me, Father,’ he intoned, ‘for I have sinned.’

‘I bless you indeed,’ Athelstan declared, ‘even though I am very surprised. Get to your feet, man. What is the matter?’

Tuddenham glanced over his shoulder at that great pillar of smoke rising against the sky. The reek was now truly offensive, and the crowd, disgusted at the stench, was already breaking up. ‘That was my first burning of a heretic, Brother, and, by God’s good favour, it will be my last. You see,’ Tuddenham tweaked the sleeve of the friar’s robe, indicating that they walk on, ‘I am a canon lawyer, a notary. For me, heresy is a blot on the soul of the Church.’ He blessed himself again. ‘Today I found out different. I was shocked by what you did but,’ he stopped to stare straight at Athelstan, ‘I admired it. Sparwell was pathetic. A poor tailor who had certain ideas and could not give them up. Stupid but …’

‘If stupidity was a burning offence?’ Athelstan retorted. ‘We’d all be living torches, yes, my friend?’ Athelstan stared at this confused cleric. A good man, the friar reflected, who had just realized that heresy was not just a matter of belief but the arbiter of a very gruesome death.

‘I never realized what it would entail.’ Tuddenham shrugged. ‘The Bocardo, the sheriff’s men, Blanchard, who really should decorate a gibbet, the crowd baying for poor Sparwell’s blood …’ Tuddenham’s voice faltered, tears in his eyes. ‘Sir John?’ he asked.

‘The Lord High Coroner gave Sparwell wine laced with a strong potion which dulled the prisoner, a true act of compassion. I assure you, Master Tuddenham, for doing less a mercy many a soul will surely enter Heaven. But tell me,’ Athelstan indicated they walk on. ‘Sparwell was denounced?’

‘No.’ Tuddenham’s voice was harsh. ‘That is the other reason I have approached you, Brother. Sparwell was not denounced, he was betrayed. There is a traitor in his conventicle, as the Lollards call it.’

‘Who?’

‘We don’t know but, Brother Athelstan, it makes me fearful. Sparwell’s execution might be the first of many such horrors.’

‘Did Sparwell know of this traitor?’

‘Of course not. It was kept hidden lest, somehow, Sparwell communicated to other members of his conventicle. He was simply informed that he had been denounced.’ Tuddenham pulled a face. ‘Of course, he then convicted himself out of his own mouth. In the end we had no need for witnesses or proof.’

‘And the traitor?’

‘We know very little. He recently appeared in the shriving chair at St Mary-le-Bow. He was protected by the mercy screen. Let me hasten to add he made no confession, just gave Sparwell’s name, his trade and where he lived, then added that there would be more.’

‘Any indication of his identity?’ Athelstan glanced over Tuddenham’s shoulder; the smoke was thinning, the crowd clearing. He gestured for Tuddenham to follow him away from the throng now intent on slaking their thirst in the Dark Parlour. They walked over to a small enclosure shrouded by bushes.

‘We know nothing,’ Tuddenham replied. ‘The priest reported the spy had a coarse voice, how he’d caught the odour of the farmyard. Whoever he was, his information proved correct.’