The Heretic’s Wife (68 page)

The sight of the soup sickened her. A green skin was already forming on top of it. She pushed it away so she did not have to look at it. Time might be when she was glad to see even that. But not yet.

The guard glanced at her, then at the bowl. “I’ll leave it, ’case you change your mind.” The ring of keys jingled in his hand, the door slightly ajar.

He is too big. You’ll not even make the yard.

“Frith? Popular name,” he said. “We had another Frith. He didn’t stay long.”

Kate’s heart missed a beat and then another. “You said ‘had’?”

“He left this morning.”

Her breath was trapped inside her chest. “Was his name John? A young man? Not yet turned thirty?”

“Hard to tell under all that beard. Don’t remember his first name. Strange one.” He circled his forefinger beside his temple, a gesture of derision. “Talked to himself. Gibberish mostly.”

“He is not strange. He is brilliant. He is a gentle wonderful man whose only crime is providing people with books they can read in their own language.”

“A relative of yours?”

If John was here when she was brought in, why had she not sensed his nearness? “He is my husband,” she said.

He looked at her sharply, as if she suddenly interested him.

“Do you know where they took him?” she asked.

His expression softened, and he looked away.

Please, God, let that not be pity in his eyes.
“Tell me where they took him. I have to know!”

“Smithfield. They took him to Smithfield,” he said soberly.

His words rang in her head like the bells of St. Mary le Bow, the floor beneath her undulating with each word.
Smith field! Smith field! Smith field!
The walls swayed to the rhythm of the words in her head. The world was disintegrating around her, all the hope stringing away thread by thread, leaving her mind a tangled mass of raveled wool.

Somewhere a woman was screaming.

This was no ordinary Friday for Sir Thomas: 4 July 1533. A day of celebration. A day of atonement. The only day more worthy of celebration would be the day the flames consumed William Tyndale, stopping his vile pen forever. He hoped it would be soon. He hoped, too, that he would be alive to see it. Cuthbert had warned him that Cromwell was investigating the Holy Maid of Kent for treason. Thomas had met with Elizabeth Barton on more than one occasion, which fact Cromwell was sure to uncover. Parliament had turned against the Church. Even the bishops had lost their courage—cowards all. It was only a matter of time. He was already preparing his family for the inevitable, even staging a mock rehearsal of his arrest one night as they sat at dinner. It had been instructive to watch their reaction.

But he would not think of that today, he thought, as carrying his flagellum, he entered his private chapel. The sun would be at its zenith now. They would be lighting the fire. He closed his eyes and inhaled as if he could draw into his lungs the smoke from the burning wood and hair and flesh. He lifted his little knotted whip and felt the first sting of pain across his shoulders. Then again. And again, until a shudder of ecstasy passed through his body.

John Frith felt strangely calm as the soldiers led him and the young apprentice Andrew Hewet, who was to die with him, to the single stake just outside the London Wall. The sun, as if unable to look full upon such an abomination, hid its hot July face behind a smoky haze in a pale sky. John whispered to his companion the words Tyndale had written in his last letter. “If the pain be above your strength, remember, Andrew, ‘whatsoever ye shall ask in My Name, I will give you.’ Pray to the Father in that Name, and He shall ease our pain.”

John had clung to those words these last days as a drowning man clings to a piece of driftwood in an empty sea, praying that his courage would not fail, that his demeanor would give strength and comfort to the other man. The apprentice nodded tight-lipped and closed his eyes as they led him first up the rickety wooden platform and bound him to the stake, his back to the bulk of the crowd.

When it was John’s turn, they tied him back to back with Andrew, facing the crowd. As John’s bound hands encountered his companion’s, he felt the trembling in Andrew’s hands. John grasped two of his fingers with two of his own. “Blessed are you when men shall revile you and persecute you for My sake,” John whispered. The trembling did not stop.

As they secured his neck and waist to the pole, John looked out at the crowd. Except for the rector who was in charge of the burning, no familiar face looked up at him. That was a good thing. This final loneliness he could not share. If he should be forced to witness the horror on Kate’s face, that horror would enter into his own heart, and he could not then endure what he must. He thought of her safe and far away, as though the woman bent over her needlework in the English House in Antwerp was someone he’d loved in another lifetime. Tyndale had promised to look after her. And when Tyndale followed close behind him, Captain Lasser would be there for her.

The rector gave the nod and the two soldiers, one on either side of the stake, stuck their lit torches to the outer brush. The crowd murmured as a
single chorus, with one brave voice calling out above the others, “Let them go. They have done nothing wrong.”

“Have no more pity for them than you would for dogs,” the rector admonished the crowd.

A wind came from out of nowhere and ruffled John’s beard, blowing a lock of hair across his face and whipping his loose robe. He was glad he’d inserted the two shillings that were to have been his passage home into the hem of the plain linen garment. It would stay weighted until the brush caught the hem. By the time his robe burned away, the flames would cover his nakedness.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” he shouted as loudly as he could. He would go to his death with the English Scriptures on his lips.

The faces in the crowd looked up at him with wide eyes: some curious, some fearful, some stunned, not wanting to be there but unable to leave. Some gloated. He could see it in the way they licked their lips. Some held tears. Others looked away. He pitied them all, and prayed for grace to forgive the rector and Bishop Stokesley and Thomas More. He could not go to God with hatred in his heart.

“Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.” Even he was surprised that his voice could ring so clearly with no hint of the trembling he felt inside.

The wood had been stacked high in a pyramid shape and the platform smeared with pitch. He grasped Andrew’s hand more tightly as the flames leaped up among the dry tinder with a popping and a shower of sparks.

“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy,” Andrew’s voice behind John shouted. The flames caught their garments.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God,” John answered. “Blessed are they—” But the heat and smoke stole his breath away and he could answer no more.

He felt Andrew’s hand go limp in his and was glad.

“Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” a voice in the crowd shouted.

But John did not hear.

The Steelyard was not much out of his way, the guard thought as he finished his shift and left for home. The woman had said the captain would pay. But
even if he didn’t, her circumstances had stirred something akin to pity in a heart as callused as his hands. Her keening and hysterical weeping had landed her in the women’s ward with the other madwomen who had to be chained. But by the time the matron came, she had let herself be led away like a lamb. He had seen other women who went into the madwomen’s ward with that same fixed stare. They only came out in a dirty winding sheet.

When he reached the Steelyard, he scanned the docks for a ship named the
Siren’s Song,
but he saw none with that name. Shrugging, he turned back toward home, wondering idly about the burned-out hulk of a ship bobbing like a dead duck in the harbor. Seemed there was enough bad luck to go around these days.

As Tom Lasser read the note Kate left, dread like an anchor weight descended on him. She would be making the rounds of the prisons looking for her husband as she had once looked for her brother. But this time she had not come back. He tried to console himself with the thought that perhaps she had found John and simply refused to leave, maybe even talked some guard into letting her stay with her husband. He would begin by checking the prisons. But he got no farther than Fleet Prison.

No, there was nobody by the name of John Frith there, and no inquiries had been made by a woman or anybody else on his watch. It had been a slow day. Everybody had gone to the execution of those two heretics in Smith-field.

Oh God, he thought. Let her not be there. Let her not have found him only in time to watch him burn.

He smelled the smoke before he got to the city gate, his stomach lurching at the sickening stench of it. The crowd parted as he pushed his way toward the fire, calling out Kate’s name. Nobody answered.

By the time he reached the great pyramid of fire, the flames were leaping so high and the heat and stench so fierce that one by one the crowd drifted away. Nothing remained of John Frith that he could recognize. The two charred bodies tied to the stake looked like nothing human. At least Kate was not here to see this, he thought, as turning aside he heaved the contents of his stomach into the ash-strewn dirt. A shower of sparks ate through the cloth of his doublet. Later he would find the small blisters, but he felt nothing but dread as he turned away from the fire to resume his search.

What would he tell Kate when he found her? If he found her.