The Queen's Captive (23 page)

“Have you the means to sail immediately?” Richard asked, taking charge. “I can have my agent arrange passage for all of you on the next tide.”

“And we can give you money,” Honor added quickly, though she was so shaken by George’s arrest she could hardly keep her voice steady.

Roger said, “I thank you, sir. Madam. But we are well provided. Our father saw to that.” His mouth trembled. He hunched over and buried his face in his hands. A little boy on the stair burst into sobs. His older sister, white-faced, threw her arm around the child to comfort him.

It was too much for Timothy. He jumped up from the hearth, his face a map of guilt and pain. He bolted for the door. But Richard stood in his way and caught him by the arm. “Where are you going?”

“To tell them the truth. Let me go, sir!”

“Don’t be mad, boy. If you confess, they’ll kill you.”

Timothy tried to wrench free. “They’re going to kill
him!
”

Richard held him fast. “Your father knew what he was doing. Look around you. Look at your children. Your family needs you.”

The trail was sickeningly familiar to Honor. Richard was with her as they made their way to the one place she had hoped never to see again. Northward they walked in frozen silence, holding hands so tightly her fingers were almost numb. Westward they turned along crowded Newgate Street, all the way to the city wall pierced by the massive arch of the gate. Wagons lumbered through it, and people streamed, coming and going about their business. Newgate Prison rose in three stories above the arch, and felons peeked out in misery from its barred windows. A mad-eyed girl with an ear cut off. A wildly bearded man branded on the forehead.

Outside the city wall they turned north onto Pie Corner, where the road broadened into the wide expanse of Smithfield fair-ground. Cattle and sheep were sold here all year round, the farmers walking the livestock in from Essex, Suffolk, and Kent. Horse markets were held regularly, too, and every kind of mount was bought and sold, from priests’ mules, plow horses, and ladies’ palfreys, to finely bred Arab hunters and Barbary coursers. In August, Smithfield was home to Bartholomew Fair, when throngs tramped in from all over the country. Jugglers, balladeers, fire-eaters, and clowns milled with pickpockets, lovers, families, and whores. There were contests in wrestling and archery. Bakers hawked meat pies, gingerbread babies, and saffron buns. Country women sold asparagus, scallions, radishes, cherries, and ripe, fragrant plums.

But now, in the thin, cold November light, the merriment of August was only a memory. The empty cattle pens were a bog of soupy mud, the grass a blight of brown, and hoarfrost iced the Elms, the name given in grim jest by Londoners to the trio of gallows ever since, years ago, these gibbets had replaced a stand of elm trees. There was no scent of fruit pies and cinnamon buns to overcome the stench from the slaughterhouses and tanneries crammed, by law, outside the city walls, where the waste of entrails was slopped daily into the Fleet Ditch. Yet the place was almost as crowded as on any fair day, for Smithfield was also the city’s execution ground. People had come to see a burning.

The crowd, perhaps a hundred men and women and children, formed a wide semicircle around a roped-off square of sand that the night’s frost had turned to rutted muck. At the center of the square a wooden stake ten feet high was impaled in the ground. A narrow ledge was nailed to it two feet from the bottom, assuring that when the victim stood on it they could be seen by the whole crowd. There was no victim yet. At the foot of the stake lay faggots—bundles of sticks and twigs—and straw was heaped kneehigh on top of them. This was the pit. A lone guard stood sentry. A platform for dignitaries, with three tiers of wooden benches, rose at one side, deserted.

Amongst the waiting crowd, many had come for the sport, snatching an hour off work for the thrill of watching the primal drama of death, and they chattered and fidgeted in eager anticipation. A man yawned as he swung a little boy up onto his shoulders. A skinny woman suckled her baby and gossiped with a blowsy friend who was picking her teeth. Three youths wearing the blue smocks of apprentices had brought a small hogshead of beer that was perched on the broad shoulder of one, and they clinked brimming tankards to toast the event. But many more of the onlookers stood in the mute stillness of mourners. Honor knew by their long-suffering expressions, pinched with anger and dread, that they were secret Protestants.

“There,” Richard said, pointing.

She turned. Twenty or so people had broken away from the crowd and flocked alongside a procession on horseback, plodding up from Pie Corner to deliver the victim. The grim parade passed Honor and Richard close enough that they heard the people’s jeers.

“Stinking heretic!”

“Burn, you God-cursed Lutheran!”

Leading the procession were a dozen guards armed with spears and swords. They were followed by a member of the Queen’s council dressed in a fur-trimmed brown velvet robe. By law, one councilor was designated in rotation to attend each burning. Following him came four stolid officials representing the mayor. Then three black-garbed priests representing the bishop of London. At the rear, a mule dragged a wooden hurdle and on it, strapped down by lashings of leather, his wrists bound in front with twine, lay George Mitford. His face was as bleached as boiled linen, and his red-rimmed eyes stared out of sockets so dark they looked bruised. He was barefoot, in a filth-stained shirt and breeches, his hair matted with mud and sweat. Ragged children tagged after him, daring one another to toss handfuls of muck. One pitched a clump of dung that splatted his shoulder.

It sent such a shock through Honor she opened her mouth to cry out to George, but Richard jerked her hand in warning. “Don’t,” he said quietly, sternly. “Not even a word.”

She closed her eyes in agony, knowing he was right. The Queen’s new proclamation. Anyone showing sympathy for a victim being burned would be arrested and flogged.

“We’re here to bear witness,” Richard said. “That’s all.”

She nodded, knowing he was as horrified as she was about their friend’s fate. But they could do nothing to save him now.

The procession stopped and dismounted. The lone guard at the pit lowered a rear section of the rope barrier, raising a gleeful shout from the people who had come for the show. The whole crowd, gawkers and mourners alike, shuffled closer to the front barrier to watch, and Honor and Richard moved nearer, too, until they were separated from the pit by just two jostling rows of people. Being this close to the stake made Honor’s mouth go dry as dirt. For twenty years she had kept the memories chained in the cellar of her mind, but they sprang back now, snarling.
Stepping barefoot onto the stake’s ledge. The splinter gouging skin between her toes. The stench of moldy straw at her feet.

Six of the guards fanned out, taking up positions along the semicircle and facing the crowd. The city officials and two of the priests took their seats on the viewing platform while two guards stood sentry at its steps. The third priest, an austere man whose gold chain of office proclaimed him as Bishop Bonner’s chancellor, went into the pit and stood beside the wooden stake, where he waited with the impatient air of a man with a busy schedule. Ignoring the crowd, he shook out a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose.

A guard went to the mule-drawn hurdle and pulled his dagger and sliced the leather straps, freeing George. He tried to stand, but with hands still bound he could not get his balance and he stumbled and fell to his knees. Honor flinched at the sight…and the memories.
Twine scraping her wrists raw. Summer-hot sand of the pit scorching the soles of her feet.

The guard cut the twine binding George’s wrists, and he and another guard grabbed him under the armpits and dragged him facedown to the stake, his toes carving channels in the muck. The bishop’s chancellor stepped back to let the guards do their job. They prodded George to stand up on the ledge nailed to the stake. It raised him enough above the piled faggots and straw so that everyone could see him. They jammed his back against the stake, and another guard came carrying a chain that he wrapped around George’s waist so it pinned his arms to his sides, then hooked the chain to a nail at the back and passed it around him again at his hips. George watched the guard snug up the chain, like a grotesque parody of a man watching his tailor measure him for a new doublet.
The chain they wrapped around her chest…its links black with soot…

Another guard brought two head-sized sacks of gunpowder tied together with a short length of rope, and slung them around George’s neck so that they hung at his sides.

“Thank God,” Richard murmured. The gunpowder would speed up the burning.

But this measure of mercy in the brutal ritual brought a low hum of disappointment from several in the crowd. Gunpowder was not used at every burning, and they were not pleased that it was going to cut short their enjoyment today.

The bishop’s chancellor, this drill dully familiar to him, stepped up to George’s side. Raising his voice so the crowd could be both taught and warned, he intoned the charges to the victim. “At sundry times you have alleged that the sacrament of the altar is only bread, not the true body of Christ. You have alleged that no priest can absolve a man of sin. You have alleged that the blessings and pardons of bishops have no value…” While the chancellor droned these crimes of thought, George closed his eyes tightly, as though struggling to summon every shred of courage to endure. It was all Honor could do to not scream.

When the bishop’s chancellor was done he turned and walked away, blowing his nose again, and nodded his signal up to the platform of dignitaries. Although the Church condemned a heretic, it handed over the victim to the state to carry out the sentence, saving the Church from committing murder. At the chancellor’s cue, the mayor’s representative on the platform stood. He raised his arms above his head and declared,
“Fiat justitia.”
He sat, and the crowd hushed.

The ritual was done. The burning could begin.

A guard stepped forward with a flaming torch. Honor groped for Richard’s hand. She held her breath as fiercely as if by saving it she could save George’s life.

The guard plunged the torch into the piled faggots and straw. There was a
whomp
of the straw bursting into flame. Voices in the crowd sighed a loud “Ah!” of approval. Hearing it, Honor could not breathe. In sympathy, Richard’s hand almost crushed hers.

Flames leapt from the straw and licked George’s feet. His body stiffened. His red-rimmed eyes bulged white with terror. Smoke boiled up around him in the windless air. Honor’s parched lungs forced her to suck a breath, and the smell of the smoke sent an acid shock to her stomach that brought sickness boiling up her throat. She forced down the bile.
Please, let the gunpowder catch.

The flames died a little, the straw consumed. But the fire took hold in the faggots piled around the stake, and these flames, more determined, leapt up, making George’s breeches smoke. He kicked in an involuntary spasm, but he was above the fuel and there was nothing to kick but the scorched air. Honor saw the sole of his foot charred black like meat on a spit, and she gagged. His abdomen pumped under the searing hot chain. His head rolled against the stake, his eyes wild with pain. At his agonized moans Honor thought she would go mad. In the crowd, a few men and women were openly weeping.

Soon George’s breeches were smoking black shreds. Flames ate at his charred legs. His eyeballs bulged as he writhed against the chain. His shirt hem curled and smoked, then caught fire in an orange burst of flame. Sparks jumped to his hair, setting it smoking. He screamed. Someone in the crowd laughed. The flames leapt higher.

A slosh of liquid from the crowd hit one of the canvas gunpowder sacks, and then the other, wetting them. It was the apprentices flinging beer from their tankards, wanting to prolong the show. The sacks hissed steam, an almost comical sound that brought more laughter. The watching guards did not budge.

“No!” a man in the crowd shouted, hoarse with grief.

His cry unstopped the anguished fury of others like him. Two young men charged the pit, one banging Honor’s shoulder as he barreled past her. He jumped the rope. The next man trampled it. That set loose a half dozen others who stampeded after them.

Guards sprang into action, chasing them. The dignitaries on the platform jumped up, shouting, pointing.

But the enraged sympathizers, nine of them now, were racing toward George. A woman cried out to him, “Hold on, friend!” One of the on-rushers, a man huge like a wrestler, with long, fast strides reached the stake and pulled off his heavy gray cloak and hurled it at the burning faggots to smother the fire.

Hope flashed through Honor. Without thinking she bolted forward, driven by a pure, primal need, mad to join the rescuers. She was over the trampled rope and at the heels of the young man running ahead. George, writhing in his agony, loomed so near! She heard Richard shouting her name behind her. Then his voice was smothered in the shouting all around.

She was almost at the stake. Flames had quickly eaten through the man’s flung cloak and now raged up around George. Guards reached the sympathizers who had run forward first, and they set on them with fists and clubs. A man toppled at Honor’s side, blood gushing from his nose. A youth stumbled and fell, then instantly jumped to his feet and swung his fist at a guard. Another young man broke free from a guard and lunged at the bishop’s chancellor. His knuckles smashed the priest’s face. The priest collapsed and fell facedown in the muck.