The Dying of the Fire

By G.H. Rehling

‘The Dying of the Fire’ is a gripping page-turner, full of twists, which immerses the reader in mid-sixteenth century Canterbury, south-east England, as its citizens tread a perilous path through the battlefields of faith and sickness.

November 1558. Queen Mary is dying and England is fast approaching a historic and fateful turning-point. Can catholic England survive? Does it deserve to? In Canterbury, John Hewett, an illiterate carpenter, is burdened with a dangerous message from a disturbingly heretical voice claiming to be God. Meanwhile, Archdeacon Harpsfield has arrived in the city, determined to reassert the authority of the church. His young secretary, Francis Coppyn, returns to Canterbury with a mission to uncover the long-buried truth, prevent a second rupture with Rome and continental Europe, and to restore the fortunes of the city.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Conrad Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781839784156

Book preview

1

Canterbury

All Souls’ Day

Wednesday November 2, 1558

The voice of God was as sweet and clear as that of a beautiful child, as sonorous as the matins bell.

John Hewett, a carpenter and joiner, heard it soon after dawn, as he threaded the narrow passage between St Andrew’s church and the bawdy-house that backed onto the shambles. A dove started with a clatter from the roof of the church and, involuntarily glancing up, he saw its silhouette ascend into the pearly sky. And then he heard the voice and, at the same time, seemed to hear the door of the church close behind him, as though, even in this rank place, in walking into the rising sun he approached the altar.

‘Wait, John Hewett,’ it proclaimed, ‘for I would speak with thee.’

The voice came from above and Hewett, whose mouth had dropped open in astonishment, searched in vain for its source; but even the dove had disappeared from view.

‘Who… who is it that speaks to me thus?’ he demanded tentatively, unconsciously refining his rough speech into something resembling the liturgical English that he remembered from the reign of young King Edward. Still his eyes searched walls and eaves and sky, but there was nothing to see.

‘I am that I am,’ replied the voice after the briefest of pauses.

I am that I am? The carpenter had heard those words before, and he worked away at his memory until a recognisable shape emerged. In church, he thought, a reading from the Bible.

‘Where are you?’ he enquired politely of the voice, still peering, blinking, around himself. ‘I cannot see you.’

‘Know this, John Hewett – it is a lie.’

‘What… what is a lie?’

‘You ask where I am, John Hewett. Look where you will and I am there, but seek me not in flour and water baked. That is the lie.’

He shivered at the repetition of his name and then, after he had turned the second part of the answer over and over in his mind for some moments, examining it from every angle, he arrived at its meaning and felt his bowels turn to liquid fire. The Voice had fallen silent now, but Hewett was unable to move and remained standing in that narrow passage, his toolbox at his feet, until Peter Relf the tiler, cursing loudly, barged him from behind.

‘This here bottle needs no fucking stopper, John, so move your skinny arse.’

John jumped and gaped around like a startled hare, so wild-eyed that the ebullient tiler took a backward step.

‘Father Prescott!’ cried John, as the infallible person of his parish priest came suddenly to mind. And, squeezing past Relf, he ran away down the High Street, followed by the bewildered gaze of the tiler.

Observing that the carpenter had forgotten his toolbox, Relf took it in charge, thinking that he would pass by Hewett’s lodging at the end of the day to return it. Then, perhaps, he would discover the reason for his acquaintance’s unhinged behaviour. And, while he was there, he might as well try to bed John’s comely landlady into the bargain. He felt his cock stir at the thought and, smiling secretly behind his bristling beard, he passed on through the alley.

John Hewett ran as far as the junction with Lamb Lane, ignoring those among his fellow early-birds who would have liked to stop and exchange greetings, and slowed to a more cautious brisk walk as he turned the corner, heading for Stour Street. Here, where no one troubled to spread gravel or level the surface, the hot summer had dried last winter’s mud into deep ruts and towering ridges which had, more than once, sent him sprawling as he returned home after a night’s drinking at the Fleur-de-Lis.

He had departed the low cottage where he lodged with the widow Sacket – one of a tumbledown row in the shadow of the castle, far beyond the Greyfriars’ gate and the Poor Priests’ Hospital – not half an hour earlier, and now he hurried past, looking neither left nor right, intent only on taking shelter under the consecrated wing of the vicar of St Mildred’s.

Alison Sacket, who was peering through a crack in the still-closed shutter, waiting to see if she could catch the old woman next door in the act of flinging her slops onto the path before Alison’s door, was instead startled to see John scuttle past – his familiar scrawny frame and the hunched shoulders upon which his knobbly head bobbed as he walked, lending him the appearance of a wading bird – and rushed to the door to call after him.

‘John! Wait! Wait there for me!’

He stopped dead, as though he had walked into an invisible wall. For an instant, disoriented by the verbal coincidence, he thought the voice had followed him here, and he almost voided his bowels in terror. Then he realised that this voice was that of Alison, Mistress Sacket, and he was able to breathe again.

She caught him up, puffing from the few steps she had run, and snatched at his arm, bringing him round to face her. She was even smaller than him, but plump and round-faced, with pleasingly full breasts that always threatened to overboil the top of her linsey-woolsey petticoat.

‘Where are you going, John? Have you no work today?’

She knew very well that he had a job that day – fixing and re-erecting the rood screen in the church of St Mary Magdalene in Burgate Street by order of the archdeacon during his visitation in September – but she was so astonished by this unprecedented act of desertion that she feared he had been dismissed.

‘En’t you at work today?’ she repeated.

Now that she was close enough to see him clearly – she was, truth be told, a little short-sighted from all her years at the loom – she saw a startling change. Her John, as she secretly regarded him, was a mild and incurious sort of man, not given to wild enthusiasms, groundless dreads or flights of imagination. Steady was the word – engraved in the deep lines of his lean face, and emblematised by his great, strong buttress of a nose. But now he seemed shaken, his mouth gaping, his normally placid grey eyes darting hither and thither, never settling to meet hers.

‘What is it, John? What’s happened? Have you been beaten, robbed… soldiers?’ Looking him over, she could find no external sign of injury, but something was missing.

‘Where’s your toolbox, John? Have they taken your tools? Oh, how will you…?’

Mention of his tools brought John back to earth. He glanced down at his hands as though surprised to find them empty and then, at last, looked Mistress Sacket in the eye.

‘I must have left them there’, he mumbled. ‘Peter Relf was there… I can’t go back.’ He was finding it hard to express himself clearly, still much affected by his experience beside St Andrew’s.

‘What are you saying, John? What’s that bastard done now? The man has the devil himself inside him, en’t I always said so?’

John bore no great love for the tiler, whom he thought a rude and unreliable fellow, but he felt obliged to defend him on this occasion.

‘No, not Peter. I was passing by St Andrew’s and… something happened. I was spoke to. It was… it was… most wonderful and... terrible. A dove flew up and vanished in the light and then He spoke… to me… using my own name. Then Peter came and wasn’t looking out in that dark passage, all head down like a lumbering ox, and bumped into me, all cursing and making cracks, and He said no more. I was so afraid…’

‘Of Peter Relf? Pah! He’s all piss and wind is Peter, like his father before him.’

‘Not of Peter. Of being spoke to, being… chosen. And what He said.’ At this, he recalled his mission, his urgent need to consult the parish priest. ‘Alison, I must find Father Prescott and tell him what happened. He’ll know what I must do.’

Increasingly alarmed, Alison gripped his sleeve still tighter to detain him. ‘You’ll tell no one what you’ve got to tell till you’ve told me, John Hewett,’ she insisted. Then, alerted by the sound of shuffling feet, she cast a glance behind her and continued, ‘And now old nose’oles has come out, her ears all flapping, we’ll go indoors and you’ll tell me there.’

The ancient neighbour, whose hearing was sharp enough when she wanted it to be, advanced upon Alison, pointing a twisted finger and crying, ‘If you have business that won’t bear hearing, it don’t bear doing neither, Alison Sacket. So!’

‘So shut your hole or crawl back inside it.’

Aware that this riposte made little sense, Alison hauled John into the dark interior of the cottage, sat him down on his stool at the table which he had made for her, and put a mazer of beer in his unresisting hands. ‘Now then,’ she said, standing over him. ‘Tell me.’

*

At the beginning of each day of a sitting of the Commissary Court or Heresy Commission, Archdeacon Dr Nicholas Harpsfield shared in the celebration of a mass in the Chapel of Our Lady in the north transept of the Cathedral. On this day mass was sung in a low monotone by a young priest whose name the Archdeacon could not recall and, however much he tried to remind himself that the man was no matter, the ceremony all, this lapse of memory and manners teased and tormented him like a troublesome flea.

Behind him, Robert Collins, the commissary general, and John Warren, canon of the eighth prebend and rector of Great Chart, reflexively joined in the vocal and gestural responses prescribed. Then each of the three churchmen went forward in order of seniority to kneel at the feet of the younger man and partake of the body and blood of the Saviour and finally kiss the small gold cross that he held out to them.

Despite his youth, the priest presiding, vested in black in honour of the day, All Souls, conducted the shortened service with unhurried confidence; enunciating clearly, moving fluidly between the altar and the credence table, and displaying the vessels containing the Holy Sacrament with steady hands. Behind him, the morning sun shone through the window, scattering bright jewels of coloured light on the floor around his feet as he carried out his holy office.

Archdeacon Harpsfield gazed contentedly around the little chapel, which he had recently caused to be renovated. The deep mystery of the mass – the quotidian miracle of transubstantiation – never ceased to move him, but any defect in place, apparatus or procedure scalded his soul, as though Christ were being nailed to the cross again. Here, in the Chapel of Our Lady, everything had been made perfect, a setting fit for a pearl of so great a price.

The Archdeacon was constrained to suppress a pulse of pride at his part in its creation: the perfection of vestments and vessels, the delicacy with which details in the stonework had been picked out in blue and gold, and, above him, the glorious illusion of a seemingly infinite firmament; a panoply of stars endlessly circling God’s world.

Most of all, he loved the Pietà, new-coloured on his instructions, beside the altar rail. Poor, pale Christ, just taken from the cross, was supported by the two Marys with the ineffectual assistance of Joseph of Arimathea, while John the best beloved looked on as though, the Cardinal had remarked on seeing the work for the first time, he were about to take notes.

The whole piece had been carved by some unknown genius out of pear wood, the underlying flesh tones of which lent the figures an eerily lifelike quality, and Dr Harpsfield was always much affected by the mother’s obvious anguish as she held her dead child – truly man, truly God – and by the deep lines of suffering upon His face. His own mother had died while he was yet an infant, and he had no memory of ever resting his head in her lap as his Saviour’s head lay in his mother’s lap in the deposition scene.

‘Do you see, Robert,’ he said, pinching emergent tears from his eyes with a thumb and index finger, as the young priest departed, ‘how the recent changes work to the greater glory of God? The altar cloths and precious vessels, the restoration of the chapel, this most excellent carving? This is what I desire for every poor ploughman in the diocese – that he, too, can better know the glory of the Lord through that of His Church.’

The commissary-general broke off his earnest conversation with Father John Warren to attend to the archdeacon.

‘I know, Archdeacon. And each year you exhaust yourself and your unfortunate mount in the cause of that poor ploughman, counting every candlestick in Kent.’

He paused, perhaps waiting to see if the archdeacon would laugh at this sally, before returning to the matter that he had been discussing with Father Warren.

‘I thought we might re-examine the five that remain alive in the castle keep before at last surrendering them to the pyre. They have passed some time in the cellars of the civil power now, and time, that can coax a river from its course, might yet have changed the way opinion flows in them – that face eternal fire.’

‘The commission is quorate without me, and certain matters remained unresolved at the archdiaconal court in September, so you will excuse me today,’ the archdeacon declared. ‘I have summoned men to appear before me.’

‘Your secretary has not, I think, yet arrived?’

Canon Collins was reluctant to free the archdeacon, who had ridden to Canterbury with unprecedented speed to urge more haste in putting these wretched heretics to the fire, from the obligation to face the condemned himself.

‘He has not.’

Dr Harpsfield seemed suddenly anxious about the prospect of recommencing archdiaconal proceedings – the verification of letters of ordination, the chiding of laggards and stayaways, the checking of church inventories and schedules of works – with no secretary to make a full and correct record, and sweat appeared on his brow.

‘Where can young Coppyn be?’

Collins saw that the archdeacon was exasperated at having the archbishop’s young protégé foisted upon him in place of the reliable Fairhall.

‘Detained by some business of His Eminence, no doubt,’ Collins reassured him, noting with guilty satisfaction the spasm of irritation that passed across the face of the archdeacon. ‘He will be here but, in the meantime, we should seize the opportunity to allow these misguided souls the solace of your counsel. Perhaps you may succeed where all of us have failed. And Mr Roper himself will attend today – ’

‘Very well, have them brought to us in the Chapter House. Remind me – who have we?’

‘Two meek fellows and a railing rogue; a widow who maintains her obstinate dissent out of obedience to her son; and a poor green girl who would be Joan of Arc.’

Father Collins signalled to Father Warren, who was rather deaf, that it was time to repair to breakfast and informed him, ‘The Archdeacon has been kind enough to agree to join us,’ at which the old priest dipped his head and smiled self-deprecatingly. The others could not tell if he had heard.

‘Still, I wish I knew where young Coppyn has got to,’ said Harpsfield, beads of sweat standing out on his brow like blisters. ‘I am accustomed to punctuality in my secretary.’

*

Francis Coppyn was, at that moment, approaching Harbledown, the last village before Canterbury.

The Archbishop, His Eminence Cardinal Reginald Pole, had indeed detained him in order to brief him more fully on his ‘little errand’ in Canterbury, and he had been further delayed and obliged to spend the night at a Faversham inn, when his horse had thrown a shoe. Still dismayed by the additional night’s delay on the journey, he urged the little brown cob that he had selected from the Lambeth Palace stables into the final incline to the village.

He could see the smoke rising in the still air from the first cottage when two figures emerged from the forest onto the road ahead of him. Instinctively, he checked the knife in his belt – his good Toledo sword was inaccessible, wrapped in the bundle behind him – and pressed the sturdy little horse to greater urgency.

‘Hey!’ cried one of the men as he bustled past them, and Francis prepared to defend himself as a filthy hand reached up to grasp the bridle.

*

‘No, John,’ said Mistress Sacket forcefully, ‘you can’t go to Father Prescott with this fool’s tale. They’ll burn you for sure. Besides, this must be a jape, the work of some prankster who would make mischief for you.’

‘No, no one was there, Alison. I looked hard, all up and down and all around, and I was all alone, I told you.’

John’s brow was furrowed more deeply than ever and his head bobbed back and forth with agitation. He had not touched his drink and his legs would not keep still, so that the beer kept spilling over his canvas breeches, making it look as though he had pissed himself. Alison, seeing his distress, spoke to him more soothingly, as though to a frightened child.

‘Come, John, come – someone was there, but hidden, surely. And didn’t Peter Relf arrive as you stood there? You didn’t see him come and he’d stoop to any kind of trick.’

The distasteful memory of Relf dipping his prick – surprisingly and repulsively long and spindly for such a stocky fellow, like a length of tarred and knotted rope – into a momentarily distracted watchman’s ale in the taproom at The Bull came to mind but, she had to admit, this jape – if it was a jape – was of quite another order.

‘Peter came after He… it had spoke, and round the corner of the church, from St Margaret’s way. The voice was from above, there was a dove and then…’

Alison spoke decisively, as she remembered her mother speaking to her as a child when she had been teased and tripped over by the boys who played at the corner, and would not venture past them again.

‘You’ll drink up your beer, John, and then we’ll go to that place together, and you’ll show me, and we shall see what we shall see. Now then.’

John gazed up at her helplessly and saw her standing over him, hands on hips, set, and knew it was decided. He raised the mazer to his lips with unsteady hands and drank. Her beer was good.

‘And no more talk of going to the priest with this,’ she said.

*

In the cellar of the castle, not a hundred yards from Mistress Sacket’s cottage, the two poor wretches due to hang that day on Wincheap Green – it being a market day – had already been taken, leaving the prisoners of conscience to wait to be manacled and let out into the courtyard, where they might be able to beg a few morsels of food from passers-by.

John Corneford, a Wrotham papermaker and the self-appointed leader of the group, was already standing at the grille through which a paltry ration of early morning light and clean air might be enjoyed, considering Mistress Knight’s suggestion that they might say a prayer for the souls of their recently departed companions.

‘You’ll find, good mother, that those unholy thieves did sneer and spit on us and on our faith. They’ve chosen their path, and it isn’t that of salvation. Our prayers would be wasted.’

‘No prayer is wasted,’ mumbled Christopher Browne, rallying to the support of his co-conventicler from Maidstone. Beside him his brother, Richard, still awaiting definitive examination by the commissary court, nodded in agreement.

‘Did not Our Lord admit one of the thieves to paradise?’ asked Mistress Knight uncertainly. The bundle of rags at her side stirred and stretched and, recollecting where it was, began to wail. ‘There, Alice, dear,’ said the old woman, absent-mindedly stroking and patting the girl as a rich woman pets her lapdog. ‘There, there, my little one; there, there, there.’

Corneford ignored this and snapped up his scriptural triumph.

‘The penitent thief,’ he said. ‘These thieves were far from penitent.’

He was a balding, stocky man of middling years, who had been a habitual tavern brawler in his rebellious youth. Now, having delivered what he evidently considered a knockout blow, he turned back to the grille and watched hungrily as a pair of pigeons, pecking at the hard ground of the courtyard in a futile search for seed, came close. By pressing his face to the rusting iron he could almost remove himself from the prison stench of unwashed bodies and excrement, but his movement startled the pigeons into flight and they only resumed their meticulous scavenging when they were some yards beyond his reach.

From the darkest corner of the cellar came a long, rattling cough, signifying the awakening of John Herst, the stonemason from Ashford. For a man who had spent a long working life with stone, Herst found it remarkably uncongenial to lie surrounded by it. Of all of them, he had starved and sickened most rapidly, and seemed as likely as not to die before the bonfire could claim him. Corneford felt a sudden rush of irritation and took a step towards the corner where the old man lay.

‘For God’s sake stop that racket, will you?’

‘Please do not swear so, John,’ cried Mistress Knight in horror. ‘It en’t fitting in a Christian man.’

‘Christ’s wounds, woman!’

Corneford turned on her in rage and despair but, at that moment, the heavy door above them was flung open and the gaoler, his voice mockingly solicitous, called them.

‘Out you come – all who live – one at a time. We’ve got some pretty bracelets for you here; come, don’t be shy now. They’ve summoned you to the cathedral, I don’t know why – perhaps they want to hear you preach, eh?’

He continued to chuckle at this amusing proposition as they emerged, one by one, to accept their manacles and be led away by the constable, John Corneford half-carrying the ailing stonemason.

*

Fear leapt like a lurcher unchained in Francis’ breast and he released his grip on the reins to reach for his knife, but a stronger hand caught his arm and arrested the movement. Desperately, he looked down into the eyes of the bandit – blue eyes that sparkled in a soot-blackened face – and a forlorn hope started in him.

‘Simon? Simon Goldfinch – after all these years, still here then?’

He was not quite certain, for mien and manner change much in the years between fourteen and twenty-five; but the second figure, hanging back and shuffling his feet as always, was surely unmistakeable, the black hair still sticking up from his blackened head in stiff, uncontrollable tufts: Moses ‘Hedgehog’ Cocke.

‘Sure, it is us. Who did you think we were – Hob of the Blean? Moses nudged me and pointed down the road and I knew it was you, straight. You still ride all arse in air – can’t mistake it, like no one else I’ve ever seen – for all this finery.’

Simon cast an appreciative eye over his old friend’s apparel, expertly weighing it to the ounce without touching again for fear of dirtying it.

‘Broadcloth in Spanish wool, and best cambric – and such colours too. You have risen far in this world, our Francis, and I am glad to see it.’

In the background, Moses Cocke grunted his agreement, scratching his backside the while.

Francis dismounted and, careless of his clothes, embraced the companions of his boyhood in delight and no small measure of relief.

‘But why are the two of you so black?’ he cried, ‘Surely you have not taken up my father’s old pursuit, the charcoal burning? Why?’

They should be working the family farm – the last of the apples, the manuring of the crop fields – he thought. Why work the forest, the resort of the landless, when they had such a fine, fat farm? It made no sense.

‘It’s a long old story,’ said Simon. ‘Things aren’t what they were, and that’s straight.’

Simon and Moses exchanged glances pregnant with shared knowledge and experience that excluded Francis, and, his earlier fear quite forgotten, he experienced a pang of jealousy.

‘I’ve been away too long,’ he said. ‘And it’s been far too long since we passed time together. Shall we dine tonight, we three alone, and gather up the threads of missing years? Where is good in Canterbury now?’

‘Good? Canterbury? You have been gone too long, my friend,’ replied Goldfinch with a bitter grin. ‘Besides, Cocky and I…’ His grimy hands spread in a gesture of helplessness and futility, and his gaze fixed on the ground between their feet.

‘Come, I mean to pay the reckoning,’ Francis hastened to reassure him, ‘for the pleasure of old friends’ company. Where shall we meet?’

‘Market day?’ Moses Cocke spoke at last, all but hopping up and down on the spot, a thin drivel of drool escaping his lips. ‘Steak pie at The Bull on market day! And pease pudd’n.’ The cloud of dust kicked up by his shuffling feet began to settle as he stood and contemplated this happy prospect.

With a flush of shame, Francis realised that his childhood friends were half-starved, but discretion forbade acknowledgement of the fact.

‘The Bull at the bullstake? So The Bull it is.’

*

When Alison led John back out onto the street, they found Widow Redwood still occupying the narrow strip of footway between their two low doors – if the remains of the old woman’s door, rotten and gap-toothed, could properly be regarded as a door at all.

John had often offered to make it good, using off-cuts from one of his paid jobs elsewhere, but their neighbour, ever ready to infer some ulterior motive – perhaps John wanted to fix her door so that he could come at her in the night while she slept – had repeatedly spurned his well-meant advances. Now she wasted little time in glowering at the two of them, her attention being fixed on something further up the street behind them.

A ragged procession was stumbling towards them in the wake of the imperiously pot-bellied form of the parish constable, Ffuller Barlinge. The old woman looked on fervently, strings of spittle catching on her whiskery chin as she jeered at the prisoners. She reserved her most potent venom for the two women among them, calling them drabs and cocktraps, whores who liked to take it up the arse from their ministers. As they drew level with her – the younger woman clinging to the arm of the elder – she hawked loudly and spat in their faces.

The constable proceeded, oblivious to all but his own importance, but Alison gasped and recoiled from the old woman, who, swooping on an opportunity to take offence, turned on her.

‘You got no cause to look down your nose at me – what’s shared her bed and board with three men since your husband took ill and died! Not that that river shrimp,’ she continued, pointing at John with a crooked and shaking finger, ‘could do fuck all for a woman under the covers. Ha!’

For once, Alison was lost for words. She turned her back on the crone and saw that John was watching the sorry procession with tears in his eyes. He was, in fact, quite overcome with pity and with fear.

After their months in captivity the prisoners barely resembled human beings; rather, mere images of people assembled from twigs and tatters and filth. Or worse, that which remains of a person when a coffin is broken open years after burial. As he watched these reanimated corpses staggering blindly after the contented constable, their eyes nestled deep within bony sockets as though to conserve the feeble embers of a fire that once had blazed there, he shivered. Someone just walked over your grave, his mother would have said.

*

Father Warren’s infirmity so slowed the progress of the Archdeacon and his companions through the cloisters that they were soon overtaken on the way to the refectory by the choir, in supposedly pious procession from practice for that evening’s Vespers.

For all that they dreaded him – and he was, to be sure, of a choleric disposition – the choirboys competed to mimic most outlandishly the stomping gait of their master, Thomas Bull (how well named he is, thought Canon Collins, not for the first time), as he sailed ahead of them, gown streaming like a ship’s standard, towards breakfast. The boys, thought Collins, looked cherubic in their cassocks – black for the day, like the young priest’s – and he felt his heart warm to their innocent playfulness.

Most of them, he knew well, were beneficiaries of cathedral scholarships which would, in time, afford them opportunities to rise in the world, perhaps in holy orders, far above the lowly stations of their families. He knew that the bright promise of Francis Coppyn, the archdeacon’s temporary and still absent secretary, had been recognised and nurtured here, under the milder regime of the old choirmaster.

He felt the swell of gratitude and, before he pinched it out, pride, within him for the godly work of this place and its people in forming such fine young men. Let these boys play for now: their time would come.

After the boys, came the lay clerks, whose office was to lay down the bass notes, and, finally, the possessor of the sweetest voice in all England, Henry Nethersole.

At the age of twenty-five, the castrato was beginning to run to fat but he still moved with languid grace. Of all in that procession he was the only member who truly processed. As he walked, his head turned slowly from side to side as though he were acknowledging the acclaim of crowds or, thought Collins, in fear of a sudden attack. He saw that something in the exaggeratedly unhurried deportment of the younger man irritated the Archdeacon, who prized prompt exactitude in all things. As he passed, Nethersole’s dark eyes met the archdeacon’s and briefly held them. A nod, a raised eyebrow, and he moved on, his languorous gaze scanning side to side.

Harpsfield frowned and murmured to Collins, ‘Is that kohl around his eyes?’

*

Alison and John had to mind where they trod in the passage beside St Andrew’s, for drunken patrons of the neighbouring bawdy house often squatted there in the darkness to void their bowels. They immediately ascertained that John’s toolbox was not there and, for the first time, John felt the extent of his possible loss, his carelessness.

‘It was my father’s before me,’ he said. ‘He made it himself. The tools too – the hammers, the saw, the chisels… all his. They’re all I have of him. They’re all I have.’

Alison, seeing that he was close to tears, touched his hand, causing a woman who was at that moment attempting to squeeze past them with a basket of eggs to snort and suggest, ‘You want to take a room there, next door, you two, you do.’

‘Mind your own!’ snapped Alison to the woman’s bustling back, tightening her grip on John’s hand.

‘We’ll find your tools, John Hewitt,’ she said, pretending more certainty than she felt. ‘We’ll go and look for Peter Relf, for he must surely have them in safe keeping.’

She bit her lip as she said this, knowing that no one would describe the intemperate tiler as having ‘a safe pair of hands’. A pair of hands, yes – she had fought them off on more than one occasion – but far from safe, so she swiftly changed the subject.

‘This is such a stinking alley, John. Do you really think God or an angel would choose this place to show himself?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said miserably. ‘I only know what I heard, and I don’t know how I heard it. God is everywhere, isn’t he? Even in the meanest places?’

‘Where did it come from, this voice?’

‘I told you. There was a dove and then the voice, up there. Oh!’ he said as Alison peered upwards, screwing up her eyes to search the sheer wall of the church and the shuttered frontage of the bawdy house for some clue to the likely origin of the voice.

But John had been distracted by something floating down, it seemed, from the blue heavens into that dark and fetid alley to settle on his narrow shoulder. A single feather; a flawless white feather; a dove’s feather. And he knew it was true.

2

The stableboy at the Chequers of Hope was an amiable young ruffian who accepted Coppyn’s paltry tip with a good cheer that led Francis to wonder if he had overpaid. He had become accustomed to the mercenary ways of London, where they said one could not sniff a ferryman’s fart for a halfpenny; and the set fare of a penny to cross the river would be accepted with an ill enough grace unless it was accompanied by its twin.

He left his mount in the care of the inn with a twinge of regret that took him by surprise, and even found himself reassuring the sturdy little horse that they would soon be reunited. The ragged lad seemed to understand, and stood by patiently while this ceremony of separation was concluded.

As he made his way along Mercery Lane to the cathedral gate, Francis wondered at the sparseness of the crowd browsing the stalls selling trinkets and trifles. The scurrilous cries of the pedlars, as near the knuckle as in any London market but in the distinctive voice of deepest Kent, were just as he remembered them, but the good wives of Canterbury, who in his remembrance gave as good as they got, seemed pinched and colourless, listlessly picking through the pumice stones, buttons and offcuts of cloth in silence.

‘Come on, Missus,’ called one scrawny little fellow, whose voice seemed to have been made for a much bigger man. ‘Are you buying them pegs or just wondering what they remind you of? Six for a penny – I’ll throw in a seventh if you comes over here and has a rub of me pumice. You too, my love,’ he cried to another, who was hurrying past with a bewildered looking wretch in tow. ‘Fact is, I’d make it the round dozen for a taste of them sweet apples.’

Francis realised that the pedlar must already be drunk, or still drunk from last night, to call so recklessly to a woman in the company of another man – even though he and the woman’s companion would not have made two sticks of kindling between them – but she hesitated only momentarily, perhaps suppressing a smart reply, before rushing onwards. Francis stood and let them pass, admiring the woman’s plump and sprightly little body, the admirable swell of her breasts beneath the petticoat. The pedlar might be drunk but he wasn’t blind.

The incident gave rise to a pleasing reverie which occupied him until he was roused, almost at the cathedral gate, by the sound of his own name over the clamour of the traders and distressed poultry in the market square.

‘Coppyn!’

The Archdeacon himself, his lean, stern face allowing itself to relax into a thin smile of greeting, stood within the arch of the cathedral gate (Francis and his childhood companions had known it as ‘King Arthur’s Gate’ as a result of an almost wilful mishearing; the gate actually being dedicated to the ill-fated Prince Arthur, the elder brother of the old king).

‘I am glad to see you at last, my boy. I had feared some mishap had befallen you.’

‘I am sorry to have caused you any concern, sir. His Eminence had need of me and then my mount lost a shoe… I am not a strong rider,’ he finished lamely.

‘No matter, you are here now.’

Francis noted that Dr Harpsfield betrayed no curiosity on the matter of the Cardinal’s sudden decision to recall Fairhall, his usual secretary, and send Francis in his place. Either he knows, thought Francis, or he knows that he is not to know.

‘I shall require your assistance in the Chapter House,’ continued the Archdeacon with a sigh. ‘The extirpation of this plague of heresy is yet incomplete and we must strive again to save the souls of the self-condemned.’

The words had barely left his lips when both men started at a new uproar at the far end of the market square, beyond the market cross. A bull had been tethered tightly to the stake and now the dogs were at it. Before the rabble spilled from the inn that bore the poor beast’s name to enjoy the sport, Francis had a clear view of the scene; the great orbs of the bull’s eyes rolling in terror and in rage, the thick pats of dung spattering the stony ground,