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.
Kate was in her little room above the shop. “How did I get here?” she asked. But this was not real. Just another of the fever dreams. She would wake with Mad Maud screaming and Sal huddled in the corner of the prison chamber, drooling over her ragged doll.
“Endor found you. She knew where to look.” That was the captain’s voice, sounding far away. And it wasn’t Mad Maud leaning over her. It was Endor. Dear, dear Endor, holding a cup of steaming broth before her. It smelled of stewed chicken. The broth in her dreams had no smell, and she never tasted it.
She did not taste it now, but sank deep into the burning fever.
When she woke later, Endor was still there, but the hand on her forehead belonged to the captain.
“She’s cooler now,” he said. “Try the broth again.”
Kate felt his arm behind her lifting her up. She sipped the broth. It was savory but with the undertaste of Endor’s curative. She coughed, sputtering the liquid, and when she gained her breath again asked, “How long have I been here?”
“Two weeks,” the captain said.
Two weeks! “John! Did you find John?” She tried to sit up but sank back onto the strong arm that eased her onto the pillow. “Take me to him.”
The captain slipped his arm from behind her back and stood up, stooping beneath the slope of the eave. He did not look at her. Just took a deep breath, his gaze settling on an abandoned swallow’s nest outside the narrow window. He said nothing. He didn’t have to.
“He’s dead. John’s dead, isn’t he?”
“Kate, I—”
“They have killed him.”
He kneeled down beside her bed then and took her hand in his, but she snatched it away, as if not accepting his comfort would nullify the certainty. “Was it—” But she could not even frame the words.
“He died easily and with your name on his lips.” The words sounded rehearsed. He pleated the coverlet on her bed with his long fingers.
The abandoned nest beneath the eave was suddenly the saddest thing she had ever seen. “You are lying, Tom Lasser,” she said quietly. “I know my husband. He died with God’s name on his lips if anybody’s. He always loved his work more than he loved me.”
“Then he was a fool,” the captain said with such bitterness that she felt sad for him too.
“No. He was not a fool,” she said. “And he loved me. I know he did. He just belonged to God. I only borrowed him for a time.”
They sat in silence for a while.
Endor looked at her with wise, knowing eyes. She held the broth to her lips again. But Kate shook her head.
“Was there anything . . . left?” she asked.
He made a helpless gesture with his hands. “A few . . . ashes, some small pieces of bone. Sir Humphrey and I gathered what we could and buried them in the churchyard at St. Dunstan’s where Tyndale used to preach.”
Tyndale. The last time she had seen her husband, Tyndale had been with her as they waved to him from the harbor. If Tyndale had gone, he would have died and not John. Would he think of that when he heard? “Does Tyndale know?”
“I’m sure he does by now.”
Kate nodded, wondering why she had no tears. Her eyes were so dry they hurt.
“I think I want to sleep now,” she said, wanting only for them to leave her alone. It wasn’t a lie. She wanted to sleep forever.
FORTY-TWO
And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned and have not love, it profiteth me nothing.
—FROM ST. PAUL’S LETTER TO THE CORINTHIANS
Kate moved through the days and weeks that followed like a woman sleepwalking. She never cried for John. Nor did she go to St. Dunstan’s. John did not sleep there any more than his child slept beneath the stone cairn in the Antwerp garden. They were only ashes and dust. Their souls had returned to God. As would hers if she could will it so. But Endor nursed her faithfully, and her body grew stronger with each day.
The captain spent most of his time in Woolwich where his boat was being restored, though he came to see her often, bringing food and money, cautioning her not to reopen the shop lest she call attention to herself. Cromwell had ordered her release, but she shouldn’t give Thomas More further cause. He needn’t have worried; she had no desire to reopen the shop. On some days she wondered absently about her future, about what would become of her when the captain went away, but it was as though she were watching a character in one of the guild plays. The summer passed without incident—ironic now that she no longer cared. Let Thomas More come looking for her. What more could he do?
Master Tyndale wrote to her. His letter spoke of how John would live on in the great work he did. His words were kind and meant to give her comfort. They did not.
Sir Humphrey came one day to offer her his sympathy and ask if there was anything she needed. She had only to send him word, he said. He returned the Bible she had sold him—it seemed like a lifetime ago—saying he was sure she would want such a family treasure. She thanked him, and when he was gone she wrapped it up and returned it to its hiding place, thinking how the destiny of her family through so many generations, for good and ill, had been bound up with that holy book. But she felt no pride in it as she once had. She felt nothing—until one day she had another visitor.
At first she didn’t recognize the young woman who knocked at her door. “The shop is closed,” Kate said through the half-open door.
“I saw your light and your silhouette through the window and thought it might be you,” the woman said.
“I’m sorry. You must be mistaken—” Something about the woman’s demeanor, her sharp little chin, and the little blond girl holding her by the hand sparked her memory. That clear, blue-eyed gaze—“You are Winifred! And is this . . . little Madeline?”
The woman nodded, smiling. “Not a babe anymore.” Wrinkles formed around her eyes, and she carried herself with less verve than Kate remembered. There were shadows beneath her eyes and her face looked pale and pinched. The last few years had not been kind to her.
The child, who was the picture of health, looked up at K
ate with curiosity. “Are you the book woman who used to live here?”
The laugh felt strange in Kate’s throat. “Well, I used to be a book woman. But that was a long time ago.” She knelt down and grasped the child’s hand. “I see you’ve been busy in my absence, busy changing from a baby to a beautiful little girl.”
Madeline, her eyes wide with pleasure, looked up at her mother. “You were right, Maman”—she nodded as if hers were the last word on any subject—“she is nice.”
Kate invited them in and offered them Endor’s honeyed biscuits, noticing as the child reached for the sweet what a pretty dress she wore, though the meanness of the fabric belied the elegant stitching. “You are wearing a very pretty bonnet, Madeline,” Kate offered with the second biscuit.
Winifred’s eyes, a beautiful cornflower blue, a little lighter than her daughter’s, crinkled as her smile spread to her eyes. “There are some advantages for a poor child with a mother who is a seamstress,” she said.
But Kate noticed how worn-out she looked and how thin her arms were. “Your husband?” Kate asked. “Is he well?”
Winifred looked down at the little girl and said quietly, “My Frenchy was killed in the May Day riots two years ago.”
“Oh. I’m sorry,” Kate said, remembering that they’d heard about the massacre of the foreign workers even in Antwerp. “We have something in common,” she said, after a pause, “I too have lost my husband.”
After that, the woman and the child came frequently. Throughout the fall and winter Kate looked forward to their visits, urging Endor to keep a ready supply of the little honeyed biscuits and volunteering to watch the child on the days her mother had to travel some distance. On more than one such occasion, the captain showed up, and seemed to take a liking to the little girl. Kate watched their games and laughed at him, down on the floor in his fine breeches pretending to be a bucking horse whilst Madeline held on to his back, squealing in delight. One day he brought a cat, which Madeline promptly named Ruffles for the white patch of fur at its throat. “Like Captain’s,” the child said, pointing to the fluff of lace at his throat. The captain responded to Kate’s laughter by pantomiming a court dandy.
Kate had noticed he was dressing more elegantly than usual. She surmised that some of those same courtiers that he mocked were helping to finance the rebuilding of his ship with their games of chance. But what could she say, since those same gleanings helped to keep her and Endor in food and candles?
In winter daylight was precious, and since the guild had a strict rule against working by candlelight, Kate offered to watch Madeline every day so that her mother could work uninterrupted. The child was easy to mind, and the bookshop seemed less dreary when she was there. Endor enjoyed her almost as much as Kate. The two of them played with rag dolls, neither speaking a word. Watching their elaborate pantomimes provided Kate with hours of diversion from her grief. She could almost forget about her pain until one day she realized that she had been watching them all afternoon and had not thought of John. Not once. That was when the tears began to flow at last.
She was better after that. Not great. But better. Imagined scenes of John’s agony washed across her mind in wrenching waves, but more and more the pain lessened into an aching loss. She even mourned him in her sleep. But the times of forgetfulness grew more frequent, especially when the captain came, bringing delight to Madeline and special treats to all of them.
And soon she had an unease of another kind to distract her as she watched Winifred grow thinner with each new day. The woman scarcely ate anything at all—not even Endor’s yeasty bread.
“Are you well?” Kate asked one day after the little seamstress had a nasty spell of coughing. “Endor has a magic elixir for that.”
Winifred drank the aromatic tea and the cough subsided, but Kate thought she saw a speck of blood on the scrap of linen Winifred coughed into before tucking it quickly into her sleeve. Kate did not mention it. She did not want to alarm the child, who was playing with a wooden bumblebee Captain Tom had brought her. It was a clever contraption with brightly painted wings and wooden wheels that whirred when Madeline pulled on its string.
“I will be better in the spring,” Winifred said.
“Maybe, but I think you may be working too hard.”
Winifred sighed wearily. “It’s harder with Frenchy gone.” Then she looked up and smiled at her daughter who had paused in her play. “But we’re fine, aren’t we, Madeline?”
The little girl had been listening beneath the surface of her play. Kate could see it in the scowl between her blue eyes. Kate said as cheerfully as she could, “We’ll all feel better when old man sunshine comes back to London, won’t we, Madeline?”
Madeline nodded and jerked the bumblebee’s string. Its wings whirred and the wheels clattered on the wooden floor, but the child’s scowl remained.
By the middle of Advent, it was clear that Winifred was in steep decline. She took to her bed and was so weak she could hardly care for herself, let alone her daughter.
“Let Madeline stay with Endor and me until you recover,” Kate said, when after not seeing her friend for several days, she had gone looking for her. She lived in one room behind a tailor’s shop, a small room, ill lit for a seamstress, and littered with dress forms and bolts of silk that looked incongruous among the bare, impoverished furnishings. “Endor will come every day to see after you until you’re better, and I’ll bring Madeline to visit.”
She expected a protest, but Winifred looked at her with tears welling in her eyes. “That would be a great relief. Not to have her see me like this and to know that she is cared for,” she said before another paroxysm of coughing seized her.
After a week of Endor’s curative elixirs for catarrh, none of which seemed to make any difference in Winifred’s cough, the captain sent a doctor around to see her, but his report was not good. There was a strong possibility—even probability—that the woman might not recover. Kate could not deny the truth of it when she looked at Winifred, the mere shadow of the spirited young woman who had once run down and cuffed the ears of a pickpocket.
“I know it’s a lot to ask. I am already so much in your debt. I can never repay your kindness,” Winifred said after Madeline had been with Kate for a fortnight. “But it will only be a few more days. I’m feeling stronger every day.”
But Kate suspected from the bright pink of her friend’s usual pallid complexion that she was feverish. She would send Endor back with a tea of yarrow, chamomile, and angelica. “I love having Madeline,” she said. “She is a joy. Just concentrate on getting better.”
“There is one more thing . . .” Winifred lowered her voice so that Madeline, who had fallen asleep in her mother’s arms, would not hear her. “Just in case I . . . just in case anything should happen . . . there is a noblewoman by name of Countess Clare that I sew for. She lives in a large house near Bishopsgate, the first lane past Crosby Hall.” She looked down at the sleeping child, and stroked her hair gently, obviously trying to collect herself to go on. “When I first began to cough up the blood, I was frightened—my sister did that before she . . . before she . . .”
Kate nodded her understanding, so she would not have to say it.
Winifred continued in a whisper, still stroking the child’s pale hair. “The countess agreed to let Madeline go into service as a kitchen maid should anything happen to me. If she could just stay with you and Endor until she gets used to . . . the idea and you could sort of look after her . . . in the beginning. She might be lonely and . . .”
“I will look after her, Winifred. Don’t you worry.”
Winfired reached out with her other hand, the one not caressing her child, and gripped Kate’s. Her skin was alarmingly hot. “You have been so kind to me,” she said. “If I could beg one more favor . . . My Frenchy is buried in St. Dunstan’s churchyard. I know the priest there. He has agreed . . . all you have to do is ask.”
For a moment Kate did not trust herself to speak. St. Dunstan
’s. We buried his ashes in St. Dunstan’s churchyard. She tried to swallow her emotions along with the lump in her throat, and prayed the child would not waken. “Of course, it will be done as you wish. But that’s just the fever talking. You’re going to get better. I’m going to get you something to help bring down your fever. If Madeline wakes up, tell her I’m coming right back.”
Winifred closed her eyes and nodded.
Kate returned in less than twenty minutes. The tea was still steaming. The child was still sleeping in her mother’s arms. Winifred slept too. But it was a sleep from which she never woke. She died two days later.
“You must be weary of always coming to my aid,” Kate said. It was a gray winter morning and she and Captain Tom stood alone beside Winifred’s grave.
The curate of St. Dunstan’s had finished reading the psalm and left. Kate could not bear to watch the grave digger heave the dirt on Winifred’s frail body. Cold numbed her and loneliness crept up from the grave at her feet. Her legs might have buckled except for the support of the captain’s arm behind her back, a support for which she was very glad. She was glad, too, that she’d left Madeline with Endor. The last thing the child would remember about her mother would not be this horrid scene but the comfort of Winifred’s beating heart as she fell asleep against her mother’s breast.
“I am very grateful, Captain. I do not know how I would have gotten through these weeks and months without you. But I know it cannot go on forever,” she said. “This is the last time I will summon you from your friends, I promise. I fear I have become a burden.”
The Heretic’s Wife Page 46
