Sarum (137 page)
Authors: Edward Rutherfurd
“He had not strength. We’ll not speak of him again.” Then, without a word, she walked away from them and the two men knew that they, too, were included in her quiet contempt.
Almost harder to bear at this time was the attitude of his own wife. For when little Celia heard of the burnings and asked what they were for, it was Katherine who, with her sweet, trusting face, told her: “Your father will explain.”
Then, when he found he could not, she assured the little girl: “It’s to save their souls from worse hellfire, is it not, Edward?” And he was forced to agree. How strange he found it, knowing his wife’s gentle nature, to realise that this was truly what she believed.
In Edward Shockley’s memory, the month of March 1556 was a time of blood.
The first execution was of the irascible Lord Stourton, who had thrown such curses at Pembroke’s gates. For ordering his servants to kill a Wiltshire man named Hartgill, he was hanged with a silken rope in Salisbury market place. The servants were hanged with plain hemp. The crowd found it an amusing affair.
Not so the second execution.
Bishop Capon had been active. Though the persecutions were most active in the Protestant strongholds of London and the eastern counties, the bishop did not intend to allow his own diocese to fail in its duty to the queen. It was not long before he was in luck.
Three obstinate men in the parish of Keevil – a tailor, a freemason and a farmworker – who all knew Tyndale’s English Bible well and could quote parts of it by heart, were foolish enough to tell their priest that purgatory was a sham.
“They called it Pope’s Pinfold,” Peter Mason told Edward excitedly. This was a term implying that purgatory was a source of cash for the Holy Father, since as long as Catholics believed in it they would buy indulgences. It was an impertinence that clearly needed more investigation.
Capon questioned them at once. Their answers to his question left no further room for doubt. In his presence they called the pope an Antichrist; they denied Transubstantiation and called the mass idolatry, and one, questioned about the wooden statues of the Holy Family and the saints, boldly replied:
“They’re good, I should think, to roast a shoulder of mutton on.”
“’Tis they who will roast,” Peter Mason judged. “They say Bishop Capon’s determined to burn them.”
He was indeed.
A few days later, soon after news came that Cranmer himself had been burned, in the field outside Fisherton, the three Wiltshiremen, undressed to their shirts, were brought forth. They were allowed, all three, to kneel and pray together, and then one, John Maundrel, was offered the queen’s pardon if he would repent: whereat he cried out loudly: “Not for all Salisbury.” John Spencer the freemason declared: “The most joyful day I ever saw.” Then they were burned.
William Coberley, the tailor, burned slowly; after a long time, however, the fire drew his left arm from him. Then, it was recorded:
he softly knocked on his breast with his right hand, the blood and matter rising out of his mouth.
Edward Shockley had gone alone to witness the grim business. Katherine had preferred to pray for the three men at home.
Yet as he watched, he found that his eyes kept returning to one sight which struck him with surprise.
It was not the three victims that Edward Shockley gazed at with wonder on that spring day. It was Peter Mason.
For he was standing beside his wife, his mouth half open, staring straight in front of him, with a strange look of excitement on his simple face, as though he had just received some secret vision. As the minutes passed, and the three unfortunates before them were consumed, Shockley looked from the rising smoke back to Peter several times, and on each occasion, it seemed to him, the cutler was separated from the crowd around him in his curious ecstasy.
He wondered what it meant.
Captain Jack Wilson was a good-looking forty and he had been sailing thirty years.
Conventionally handsome, no. He had lost three teeth, though only one of the gaps could be seen. His long, black matted hair was streaked with grey. But in his careless way, he was magnetically good-looking; and when at the inn he lay back in his chair and stretched his long, strong form, there was a sense of cat-like power about him that told women that the years meant nothing to him.
Even at a distance, he was unmistakable. Other sailors in the port of Bristol would be seen coming from their ships with the slow rolling gait of sailing men; but Jack Wilson, no matter how long he had been at sea, still came on shore with the same loping walk. Some men, though with no ill feeling, called him the wolf.
“He’s a good friend to any man unless it’s the captain of a ship at sea with a cargo he wants,” a sailor told Nellie. “Then he’s a wolf all right.”
Many privateers like this were half way to being pirates, though they usually took care only to attack the ships of countries with whom England was on bad terms.
“And with women?” she asked.
The fellow laughed. “A wolf again.”
Nellie Godfrey decided to marry Captain Jack Wilson the day she first saw him.
She had done well in Bristol: better than she had dared to hope. Thanks to her savings, and Shockley’s present, she had been able to make her way in the busy port with care, scouting for some time before finding a protector. When she did, he was perfect: a rich widowed merchant who had, for the time being, no need for a wife, but a sufficient need for a mistress to set her up comfortably in lodgings.
He was a bluff, burly middle-aged man with a red face and a deep purse. She gave him comfort and, keeping a thoughtful eye on the swollen red veins in his face, excitement. The merchant was generous too, as long as she never asked for anything; if she suggested a present, though, he shut up like a clam. It did not take long to learn his ways.
She had made a few friends, all women. Apart from this, she kept herself to herself and saved her money.
“It’s a start,” she considered. “I’ve had luck.”
She had – but not enough, a small voice told her, to send word to her brother. She could tell him she was safe, of course; she could tell him a merchant was keeping her. But at this thought she only shrugged. She wanted more than that: for it was hardly progress.
“One day,” she told herself, “I’ll send him word I’m married.”
There was no question, of course, of the merchant marrying her. A rich burgher of the city would never do that. And indeed, she had no wish to marry him.
“Three nights a week with the merchant is well enough,” she admitted cheerfully; “but to spend my days with him as well . . .”
And yet. She had never entered his own house, where his children lived, but she could see it – for he had proudly described it for her often enough. Yes, she could see it very clearly: its solid oak table, the gleaming pewter and silver in the hall and in the kitchen, the handsome, embroidered counterpanes upon the beds. Perhaps I could even bear the merchant for a house, she thought. And for long hours she would lie, alone in her room, dreaming of that other house she would one day call her own: she could see its broad fires, its sparkling cleanliness; she could smell the great saddles of mutton, the roasts, the spiced dishes and baskets of fruit she would heap proudly upon the table, and see the faces of her children . . . Her children, the merchant’s mistress thought of them each day: the vision was her secret comfort; it was almost an obsession.
But there was the rub. What kind of man would marry her? And what kind of man, come to that, could she put up with patiently herself? “Any good man,” she would murmur sometimes; then laugh at herself. No, not any man.
Captain Wilson had been taken to sea, despite his mother’s protests, by his father when he was ten. His father had told the owner of the ship that the boy would make himself useful or be thrown overboard. He had made himself useful.
His grandfather had come from Sarum, he knew. He had been the first to go to sea, and had become, in the fullness of time, master of a small ship. He could remember old Will Wilson very well – a small but sturdy man, equal to any crisis.
“Found my first ship in London,” he always used to say. “God sent me a sign in the thunderstorm – a bolt of fire, right through a field. Lucky I followed it.”
His family used to laugh in secret at his tale, obviously invented. But then they, too, knew nothing of Roman roads either.
Captain Jack Wilson was already a successful man when Nellie saw him at the inn.
He had never married, though he had numerous children in London, Bristol and Southampton. He gave their mothers handsome presents of money when they were born, then never troubled about them. The life of the port was easy going. He had a child in Spain that he did not even know about.
“And that,” she thought as she watched him at the inn, “is my man.”
He was staying there a week, then going on business to London, she discovered. She must act fast.
Within the hour she was talking to him. She made no advances at all; but she learned his business and surprised him by how much she understood of the trading affairs of the port. The merchant had been useful to her there.
She soon discovered that he was planning to sail his little ship to the Baltic. There was a newly formed Muscovy company, he started to explain.
“I know,” she cut in, and gave him not only details of the company but an accurate account of the recent attempt by Willoughby and Chancellor to find a route through to the fabled Cathay by the North East Passage. This, too, she had learned from the merchant.
He looked at her with interest.
“Do you trade south, to the Barbary coast” she asked.
Yes, he told her, he had been to the Mediterranean, but the Barbary pirates were a match even for him.
“I don’t mind a fight,” he said easily, “but not if there’s no profit.”
After a time she left him, and she noted, as she surreptitiously glanced back, that his eyes followed her with interest.
The next day she repeated the process. And the next. When he tried to find out more about her circumstances and invited her to sup at the table with him, she politely refused.
The fourth day, she did not go to the inn until the evening. When she did, she slipped past the main room unseen, and with a small bribe to one of the serving girls, she had herself let into his chamber. Most of those staying at the inn shared rooms, sleeping on boards or mattresses. But Captain Jack Wilson was a fellow of means. He had his own room with – for it was the best in the inn – a stout oak bed. She undressed, got in, and waited.
It was towards midnight that Captain Jack Wilson made his way easily up the stairs. He had been sorry not to see the handsome woman that day. He had a girl with him.
They entered the chamber together.
And as they both stared at her in surprise she announced coolly:
“You won’t be needing her tonight.”
She had burned her boats. For the merchant had been expecting to see her that night. But she was confident she could succeed; and on the third night with Wilson, she put it to him squarely:
“Time you had a wife. You won’t find better than me.” She looked him straight in the eye. “And I’m descended from the nobility.”
Wilson gazed at her. He thought of his roving life, his forty years, the many women he had known. Were they so important to him, any of them? This woman, who had calmly walked into his bed and thrown a rival out, this woman had a fire, an inner strength and determination he had not met before.
“By God,” he suddenly thought, “I’ve money enough of my own; I could do worse.”
Two months later Nellie Godfrey got her house. It was at Christchurch.
But why, Shockley wondered, why had Peter Mason performed this act of madness?
Each time he thought of it, he remembered the day only a few months before, when he had seen the cutler staring so strangely into the middle distance at the execution of the three heretics.
Was it then that he had decided to do it? Was it before even that, some day when he heard Abigail’s scornful words for the men who, like himself, had not the courage to speak out? It was impossible to know: for one thing was certain – Peter Mason was not saying.
The cutler had chosen his time well. Shockley was there.
He would never forget how that morning, at the moment of the elevation of the Host, the quiet form of Peter Mason had suddenly walked into the aisle and approached the altar table. For a second no one noticed him: then they assumed that he must have some private purpose – an unexprcted call of nature perhaps – for moving from his place. He reached the front and then turned to face them. The priest and his assistants glanced back at him, irritated. Then, looking rather drawn and pale, Peter Mason said something. His voice was so soft, no one heard. He gazed at them, clearly expecting something to happen. Again he opened his mouth and Shockley strained to hear. This time there was a little gasp from the front rows.
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