The Heretic’s Wife

by Brenda Rickman Vantrease

  “Yesterday there was a woman in the first cell. What happened to her?” she asked.

  “We change them out regular. To give everybody a chance.”

  Her heart skipped a little beat. “Do you mean to say that everybody gets a turn, then? How often do you change them?”

  “Nay. I don’t mean to say ‘everybody gets a turn,’ ” he mocked. “Just the ones that pay for the privilege.”

  “But the woman—surely she was too poor to pay and she showed no interest in begging at the window. She would hardly take the coin I gave her.”

  “The prisoner in the cell next paid for her. Tom Lasser, I recollect. I tried to tell him ’t were a waste.”

  The black-haired thief? Kate wondered. He hardly seemed the kind to give charity . . . more the kind to steal it. Still, he was in the next cell. “What happened to him? Is he still here? May I see him? I think he knew . . .”

  “Nay, mistress. He beint here. Some fancy-dressed lord bailed him out, like always.”

  “Bailed him out?” she asked. “But . . . how . . . ?”

  “Paid surety for him.”

  “Do you know the man’s name who bailed him out?”

  “I can’t remember his name. Big hulk of a man in satin knee breeches and furred doublet.”

  That was it then, she thought, feeling suddenly very tired. The late March wind whipped at her skirt, tightening it against her body and blowing back the hood of her mantle. The sentry leered. Kate pulled her mantle in and her hood back up on her head. She stepped back, widening the space between them. Why hadn’t the scoundrel Tom whatever his name was told her John would have to pay to get to the window? She would have given him the money. It was probably all a lie anyway. He probably didn’t even know her brother. She turned to leave, but a voice in her head held her back.

  Raves in his sleep about a woman named Mary. And there was more. Something behind these forbidding walls pulled at her. She fancied she could feel John’s despair weighing on her own heart. Or perhaps it was just the weight of so much communal misery seeping through the walls. Whichever, she turned back for one last try.

  “I have reason to believe that my brother is here. If you would just let me in to take a look.”

  He coughed and loosed a string of spittle over his shoulder. “This stinking place is a hotbed of disease. No fit place for the likes of ye.” His brow furrowed and his eyes bulged with this pronouncement. “Like I done told ye afore. There beint nobody here by the name of John Goll.”

  “Gough. John Gough,” Kate said quietly. “It would be spelled gh on a list, but it is pronounced like an f,” doubting that he could read, but hoping her own measured tone would settle his temper. “I know he’s here. The man in the cell next to the woman described him to me. You said his name was Tom something. This same Tom said my brother is here. He is a tall, blond man. His features are somewhat like mine. Except he has blond hair where mine is dark. Same high forehead.” She threw back the hood and swept back her hair with her hands so the watchman could see her features clearly.

  He peered at her intently for what seemed like an eternity. “May be.” He nodded. “Just may be. I do recollect—a quiet sort. His back all bruised and bleeding when they brought him in. Spent a week in the infirmary. Didn’t have much to say for hisself. Not even after he healed up. Tom told me to put him on the list—’course he didn’t pay enough to get him on the list, so I didn’t.”

  Kate dug in the little leather purse tied at her waist just inside her cloak. She handed him a shilling with a question in her eyes. He looked at it and raised an eyebrow. She dug out two more.

  The watchman slid the coins into his pocket so swiftly she hardly saw his hand move. “Come back tomorrow,” he said. “Be here early. I can’t vouch for the whole day.”

  At first Kate wasn’t sure.

  She’d gotten up before dawn, restless, pacing as she waited for day to break. Finally, she’d put on her cloak and gone out into the darkness of the silent street, carrying a tallow-dip lantern. A light dawn mist settled rather than fell, fogging the streets so that her smoky lantern looked like a ghost-light bobbing along—had any soul been abroad at that hour to notice.

  The prison was eerily quiet as she approached at first light, no street traffic except a lone ragpicker with his cart creaking down the lane on his way to a more lucrative street. Even the pigeons roosting on the rooftop still had their heads tucked beneath their wings. All the cells looked empty. Then suddenly, as though the walls had ears enough to hear her light footsteps, one or two prisoners began banging their shallow tin bowls against the window grills. She approached the second window gingerly and looked in, careful not to get too close lest one of the prisoners poke a skinny arm through and seize her.

  She held up her lantern and peered into the cell’s dim interior. A man sat on a pile of rags on the floor, his back resting against the wall, his head slumped forward between his knees. Greasy strands of pale hair half covered his face. But she wasn’t sure. The damp fog had penetrated the cell though the open window. The shoulders, the head, so slumped in defeat, that was not John’s proud posture at all.

  “John?” she said, pressing her face against the cold iron of the bars. She might as well have been talking to a statue. “John, it’s me. It’s Kate.”

  The man raised his head. A face as pale as the dead ashes in the cell’s cold firebox peered at her from the deep gloom. It was John’s face—and not John’s face. He was so gaunt and haggard she had to fight back tears. “Come to the window,” she coaxed, trying not to startle him.

  He shielded his eyes with his hand against the light, peering at her for a long moment as a man would look at an apparition.

  “Kate?” he said softly, not moving.

  “Yes, John. It’s me. Kate. Come to the window so we can talk.”

  He stood up slowly and took a couple of steps forward, then hesitated as if uncertain what to do next.

  “Come on, John. Come to the window so we can talk,” she repeated softly.

  “Kate?” he whispered. Then took another step. “My God, it really is you.”

  It was raspier, more tentative, but it was John’s voice. Her cheeks were wet with tears. She brushed them hastily away. She did not want him to see her cry. He moved to the window and stuck his hands through the bars to seize her cloak as though he feared she might run away. “Thank God, Kate. I thought I’d never see you—see any of you—Mary and . . . ?” His voice broke. “Are they—”

  She put the lantern on the window ledge where it rested precariously and reached through the bars to touch his face. “Mary’s fine, John. Don’t you worry, we’re all fine. Pipkin too. He asks about you constantly. We just tell him his da’s on a trip and will return soon. Mary’s going to be delirious with happiness to hear we’ve found you.”

  The flame in the lamp was sputtering, its wick smoking. Forever after, Kate was to associate the smell of a dying wick with this moment, but now she scarcely noticed. The creeping dawn provided enough light for her to see his face.

  Her fingers caressed an angry scab that had formed across his forehead . . . time enough later to ask about that. She ran her fingers down the line of his jaw. It was like touching her own face. “You are so thin. Don’t they feed you?” she asked, trying to keep the rasp from her voice. He was too near the edge to see her break down.

  “Maggoty porridge twice a day. It comes from the almshouses for those who have no money to pay for food.”

  “Will they let me bring you food?”

  “I probably wouldn’t get it. If you give them money, I’ll be fed better, but give the money directly to the deputy warden.”

  She unclasped his hand from her cloak. “Let me go, so I can see to it straightaway. Can I bring you clothes?”

  Even the ragpicker would have scorned the filthy remains of a shirt and trousers he was wearing.

  “There’s slim chance I’ll get them unless you give them to me directly. If you bribe the turnkey, th
ey’ll let you visit me.” His voice was stronger now, as though he were drawing some strength from her. “If you hurry, I might even still be here.” He paused. “But Kate, don’t bring my wife and boy. I don’t want them to see me like this.”

  “I understand,” Kate said. “When you’ve cleaned up a bit.” A milk cart rolled by on Farringdon Street. Kate used the clip-clop of the dray horse that pulled it to cover her sniffing. “But I can’t put Mary off very long, John. It wouldn’t be right to make her wait after what she’s been through.”

  He nodded. “Not long. Just one more day. To give me a chance to prepare. I don’t want to frighten them. And if there’s enough money—a straw mattress. But only if there’s enough money.”

  The tears welled in the back of her eyes threatened to spill. “There’s enough money, John. You’ll have your mattress.”

  “They didn’t close the shop then? I’ve been so worried about how the three of you would live. We spent so much on the inventory that we had to burn.”

  “They haven’t been back since they arrested you. Mary has been tending the shop while I looked for you.” Thank God, she thought, that the topic had turned to more mundane business matters. Maybe she could control her emotions now. “We sell enough to keep going, but there’s much we need to talk about, John. We need some new way to distribute the books when we get new inventory. Do you think—”

  His face turned hard, the blue vein standing out in protest, the scabbed welt crossing it in the shape of a cruciform. “New inventory? If you mean of the Lutheran sort, there can be no new inventory.”

  “But how can—”

  “Gough’s Book and Print Shop will no longer sell contraband books, Kate. Promise me.” His hands started to shake violently.

  “John, be calm. We are safe and we are careful. Don’t worry. All will be well.” How foolish of her to talk about such unimportant matters. “Let me go home and get some money—and tell Mary I’ve found you. You’ll have a good meal and get some fresh clothes. Time enough to talk about the future later. Our first job is to get you out. At least they didn’t lock you up in the Lollard Prison or execute you. That means you are just in here for a little while, right? There may be some fine we can pay. What is the charge?”

  “There is no official charge.”

  “But surely . . . the law . . . surely they cannot keep you without due process.”

  He laughed bitterly, more a grunt than a laugh. “Thomas More and Cardinal Wolsey are the law of England now. They can do as they please.”

  “But—”

  He dropped his gaze as he interrupted her. “I abjured, Kate.”

  “You confessed to heresy and recanted?” she said, not wanting to think about what they must have done to him.

  “I confessed to nothing. But it’s the same thing. I denied that I had any knowledge of the English Bibles or any sympathies with Luther, and promised that I would not print his or Tyndale’s or any other Lutheran works.” He looked up at her then, and she could read the shame in his eyes. “It’s not just about me,” he said.

  It was a plea for understanding. And Kate wanted to understand. Who was she to judge him? Yet she felt a strange sense of loss, as though he’d somehow brought dishonor to their father’s memory, as though his denial had been the act of a coward. Then she thought of Mary and the baby. John was right. It wasn’t just about him.

  “You did what you thought was best,” she said.

  “It’s what we all have to do. There can be no turning back. Do you understand, Kate?” He squeezed her hand hard. “It’ll be the fire next time.”

  She could not argue with him. Not after all he’d been through. “I understand, John.” She reached up and touched the long horizontal scab running along his forehead, the forehead that was so much like her own. Her own flesh shuddered with the pain of it. “No contraband books will ever again be sold at Gough’s Book and Print Shop,” she said. “I promise. Now, let me go, so I can get you some food.”

  By mid-May, John Gough’s circumstances had improved. Kate had not only found money for a mattress, but she had scraped together enough—by selling everything they had that was portable—to get him released to the Liberty of the Fleet. It cost her dearly: the rent on one room in an old dilapidated mansion plus eight pence a day plus another twelve pence for a keeper who supposedly kept watch but never did. It wasn’t necessary. She had put up the deed to their shop as surety that John would remain within the environs of the Liberty. It was what the old gaoler had meant by bail.

  Once or twice in her comings and goings, she thought she glimpsed Tom Lasser going into one of the many taverns and stew houses that had grown up like mushrooms in the environs of the Liberty. But no, this man was well dressed and much too jolly to be in gaol. Yet on one occasion, he had turned his dark-eyed, mocking gaze toward her and she had thought she saw a flash of recognition. She had looked hastily away and blushed at the sound of his familiar laughter.

  Though John’s movements were restricted to the taverns and houses within the Liberty, he had a small but decently appointed room where he enjoyed what basic comforts Kate could afford. Every day Mary and the boy came to visit him, bringing him fresh food and clean linen. Sometimes Mary even stayed with him there. But without the print shop running and because of the prohibition against dealing in Lutheran materials, Kate faced a daily challenge to keep him in Liberty quarters. The rent was high—even for the ramshackle old great houses gone to seed. Mostly only wealthy merchants and nobility, who had had the ill fortune to fall into the Crown’s disfavor, could afford it. More than one nobleman had found himself incarcerated in the Fleet after a visit to the Star Chamber.

  John slowly gained his strength back but not his old spirit. Though he had always been a quiet sort, introspective and thoughtful, there was about him now a pensive melancholy. Oddly, she noticed it most in the presence of his wife and child. Like now. Mary, as she always did when she visited John, babbled on about nothing, as if her cheerfulness could somehow bring her husband back. John just sat beside her on the cot and stared out the door, which was open to the spring sunshine. The little boy sat on a blanket that Mary spread on the floor and played with the woodcut blocks that Kate had brought, thinking to spur her brother’s interest. If she could spark him back to life, they might set up a makeshift press in one corner of the room—at least print some broadsheets they could sell.

  John sat idly watching—without seeing—as the little boy banged the print blocks together like cymbals, squealing with delight at the dull thudding noise they made. Kate thought to take them away from him, lest such constant banging chip the woodcut. Such blocks, especially the finely detailed ones—and these two were finely detailed enough to pique any printer’s interest—were expensive and these were the last ones John had ordered. He’d never even had a chance to use them. Kate stuck out her hand to take them away from the child and then withdrew it.

  What did it matter? John had just stared listlessly when she showed them to him.

  “See, John,” she had said, “look at this one. It’s an excellent piece of workmanship. You can see the wheat grains in the sheaf. And this one—each rosemary sprig. See—this one would make a fine frontispiece for an almanac and this one could illustrate a garden calendar. We could set up a simple press, and if you could print up a few broadsheets we could bind them and sell them in the shop. Or perhaps even sell them in the market, singly. A farthing for a sheet.”

  John had run his thumb along the finely carved wheat sheaf, then pushed them aside.

  “There’s not enough room here for a press,” he said.

  Kate bit back her observation that they’d better find room if he was going to continue to enjoy his quarters in the Liberty. Mary was pleading with her with eyes that seemed to say Give him time, Kate. Don’t bedevil him about this.

  But Kate didn’t know how much time they had. They’d nothing left to sell except the presses and punches. Then without the tools of the trade how would he e
ver make a living for his family?

  By the time summer came, Kate was desperate. They’d sold all their remaining stock, and there were no funds to buy more. John continued to languish in the Liberty and had fallen into such a depression that he no longer even seemed aware of their struggle to keep him there. It was still early in the day, plenty of light streaming through the windows, when she decided to set up the press herself in the back of the print shop. How hard could it be? She’d watched John do it often enough, even helped him set the forms once or twice when the work was backed up.

  The trick was to start with something simple. She cast around for something short and chose one page from a book of poetry, one of the three or four volumes of inventory they had left. She picked out four lines of a love poem to a woman named Margaret by John Skelton—four short lines. Margaret was a common enough name, and surely any love-smitten swain with a yen for a woman named Margaret could vouchsafe a farthing for a pretty page to impress his love.

  Then she sat down at the type case and went to work, picking out the letters, arranging lines of text on a handheld composing stick, and wedging the composed text into a metal frame along with a random border of twining ivy. She stood back and admired her finished work, a perfect mirror image of the pretty little poem. That wasn’t so hard.

  The next part would be trickier, but she remembered John instructing her journeyman suitor, and if that lazy, fickle, no-account ne’er-do-well could do it, surely she could. It might take a couple of practice runs, and it looked to be a messy job that she did not relish. John never splattered a drop, but maybe she should put on the printer’s apron.

  She picked up the composed form and carried it over to the hulking wooden press in the corner. “Here, feed on this dainty little morsel, you big, wooden monster,” she said, as with some difficulty and much heavy breathing she wedged the form onto the press bed. The next step she knew was to ink it with the big leather-padded daubs from a large jar of ink sitting at the base of the press. But how much ink? She stirred the ink, which had glopped during John’s absence. How much turpentine to add? She poured in a bit, stirred, poured a bit more, then began to mop the leather pad. A few drops splashed, then a few more, then a glob. She should have folded the paper over the form before she’d started with the ink—next time she would know—she thought as she wiped her forehead with the crook of one arm and struggled to clamp the sheet of damp paper into the holder; it always looked so easy when John did it. She slid the entire apparatus under the plate—the “platen” John called it—and shutting her eyes lowered the plate to press it against the inked form.