Gloriana's Torch

by Patricia Finney

  ‘… and if you have any success at all in discovering this mysterious Miracle of Beauty, well, then I may also be the means of bringing it home.’

  Becket had the sense of walking across a bridge that had no beginning or end but was suspended on a silken spider’s web of feminine devices. The Queen looked at him quite as coldly as the falcons, as did Thomasina, Rebecca and the Negress.

  ‘Have I any choice?’ he asked bitterly.

  ‘Of course you do, Mr Becket,’ said the Queen with asperity. ‘I told you that if you do not feel able for this matter, then Mrs Anriques and Thomasina shall conduct it themselves.’

  ‘Thomasina as well?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘But … but I … but it’s dangerous. The Inquisition…’

  The Queen smiled at him kindly. ‘Mr Becket, the Inquisition make no distinction of man or woman in these things and so nor do I. Moreover, while I do not believe that women should have any place in high policy, which are reserved only to Princes, this is a most pious and proper thing for any wife to do, to search out and find whether her husband be dead or no.’

  ‘Mrs Anriques, I’m sorry, but surely … surely Simon is dead.’

  The veiled head tilted slightly. ‘He may be,’ said Rebecca coldly, ‘but I intend to be certain. And if he is not dead, then I intend to free him by whatever means there are.’

  ‘It will do him no good if his wife is hanged up and tortured next to him.’

  There was an intake of breath as if he had slapped her, as in a way he had. And intended it. He had never heard such madness.

  ‘Enough, Mr Becket,’ said the Queen. ‘I know you mean nothing but chivalry yet there is in fact only one thing for you to decide – whether you shall be party to this enterprise or no. In a way, this is a fishing expedition. I am setting a sprat to catch a mackerel, or perhaps a shark to catch Leviathan. And there may be no answer to the riddle of the miracle, or you may fail in finding it or—’

  ‘Or I may be caught and put to the question.’

  ‘Certainly you may, Mr Becket,’ said the Queen in a more gentle voice, ‘which is why we do not order this of you. I ask it, only ask.’

  I kept silence when they hanged me up in the Tower, my memory hid itself, she thinks me torture-proof. Oh Christ.

  ‘Why me?’ It was like a child’s complaint, he was embarrassed by it.

  ’Who else is there? And why not you, Mr Becket? You are a man of courage and integrity, of determination and quick thought.’

  I am not torture-proof, he thought, but didn’t say. No one is. Believe me.

  ‘I have many who wish to serve me, Mr Becket, but very few as seasoned and as apt to this task as you. None, I think. Will you do it?’

  She had said nothing of reward, which question hung in the air along with the chicken-coop choke nonetheless. But certainly, no man will put his head in the lion’s mouth for mere pay. There must be something else.

  He looked slowly at the small erect figure of Simon’s valiant little widow. ‘Must she come?’

  ‘It is her ship.’

  He sighed. ‘It will be hard enough to do without that I must protect my friend’s wife as well.’

  Mrs Anriques made an impatient ‘tchah!’ noise for no reason Becket could see.

  The Queen smiled and pounced. ‘But you will do it?’

  They waited for him, all watching him, while his thoughts scattered in all directions and he found himself wondering in a dishevelled fashion which Greek king it was got himself ripped apart by Maenads and if these women had looked like them.

  He shut his mouth, coughed bird-smell. His hands clasped themselves together and pressed until his fingers were white and he watched their antics as if they didn’t belong to him. He wanted to ask if they couldn’t find anyone else, and of course he knew they couldn’t. Could Munday do such a thing? Never. None other of Walsingham’s followers knew as much as he did or understood half of what he did.

  Simon would do as much for him, he knew that. And how could he let his friend’s wife go foolishly into such danger without a man to guide her? And insane though the plan was, it was the sort of insanity that did in fact sometimes work. He bowed to the Queen and the implacable Furies around her.

  ‘Yes, Your Majesty,’ he said with as much flourish as he could muster. ‘I will be part of this enterprise.’

  He got back to the inn late, his head still whirling and found no Philip waiting for him, only a couple of messages. One was from Pickering, which had been opened, no doubt by Philip who was also called Mr Becket. The other was from Philip himself.

  Brother

  I have sent a note to Mr Secretary Walsingham at Seething Lane and another to Dr Nunez, but as I have waited an hour and the tide is about to turn, I have gone down to the Pool to find the man.

  Your loving brother

  Philip

  Becket hired a horse and galloped like a madman to Seething Lane to demand what the devil had happened, to discover they had only just received the message sent by Philip because the innkeeper’s boy carrying it had got involved in a football match. He went down to the Pool of London with the Watch, Munday and a troop of men, to find that the Fortune of Lubeck had weighed anchor and warped out of the Pool on the ebb tide about an hour before he had ever seen the message.

  Philip was nowhere to be seen.

  Becket marched up and down the dock, questioning the anchor watch on the two ships either side of the Fortune. Yes, there had been a scuffle, but nobody had been very interested, this being the Pool of London. Oh it was over there, sir, the fight, behind the bales. Over quickly, yes. No, nobody dragged away.

  Sick with fear, Becket went to the bales, poked behind them, circled them, backed and nearly tripped on something hard and soft together.

  Munday came at the run when he heard Becket’s roar of anguish, to find him bent over the still shape of a man who had been stabbed in the eye.

  Edward Dormer

  Rheims, Early Spring 1588

  Pull back, up and up, out of the London docks, into the smoky sky, and step sideways and a little back across the map of time, so that we may examine another part of it, another thread in our tapestry.

  Here he is, young, rawboned, kneeling with his fellows in the little Chapel of the Jesuit English Seminary at Rheims in northern France, hearing Mass as he does every day. Nowadays we would call him a traitor, plain and simple. To himself, however, he is only a servant of a higher and nobler cause than a mere country or Queen. He is a true son of the one true Church and the greatest service he could give his country would be to help convert all the people back to Catholicism and so save them from Hell. He does believe that without the Catholic church, all of the English are doomed to Hell. There are no colours in his moral universe, only simple black and white.

  Edward Dormer is an ungrown seed, a young Englishman struggling with all his heart to be a priest but in fact, on this cold wintry morning with no signs yet of spring, he is sinfully far away from the Sacrament. He is dreaming of battle and blood and victory.

  * * *

  Pushed skimming over the waves by the oars, the longboats drove in towards the sandy English beach. Sunlight caught the frothing tips of the waves and made small rainbows in the spray. Behind them the cannon roared over the water at the cheeky little English ships, battering their hulls and murdering their men. Starved of ordnance by their penny-pinching Witch-Queen, the English had neither shot nor powder left to fight.

  The men in the longboats kept their heads low, some clutching rosaries and muttering Salve Marias and Pater Nosters over and over to themselves. Others drank from hipflasks. One or two were voiding their guts over the side. Musket fire sputtered from the beach and even some ridiculously old-fashioned arrows, which buried themselves in the wood of the boats.

  Edward Dormer carefully lit the fuse of a grenado with the slowmatch of his pistol, waited while the saltpetre sputtered into life, then stood and threw it overarm. It burst perfectly in t
he air, scattering nails and flints among the waiting English soldiers on the beach, scything ragged gaps in their ranks. In that second their boat grounded on sand.

  Dormer leaped over the side into the freezing water, staggered as the weight of his cuirass and morion helmet almost pulled him down, then gasping and lurching, ran through the red waves up onto the beach. Behind him his men followed with shouts of Jesu and Santa Maria, the holy patroness of the invasion. Dormer’s boots crunched in sand and shale. He dropped to one knee, fired his pistol and saw the red flower in the chest of a noble English lord. Bullets and arrows flung themselves harmlessly past him, maybe one or two of his men were down – but only the sinners, only the scoffers and drinkers, the men who were there for money and power. God spared the good soldiers, those who truly believed in the crusade, like him.

  And then Dormer led the charge onto his native soil, sword flashing in the sun, cutting down the miserable common bowmen, slicing open the heretics who were staring in horror at the realisation that yet again, England was being conquered.

  More troops came ashore as the longboats flung themselves in towards the sand. The tercio soldiers, the best troops in Europe, formed themselves into lines behind him and began setting up a terrible withering fire at the heretics, still shooting at them cowardly-fashion from the dunes. One fell, another fell, and the heretics ran again. They were withdrawing from the field, leaving Edward Dormer at the crest of the dunes, breathless, his morion shining the sun, blood on his sword. The beach-head had been taken for the King of Spain, for Holy Mother Church.

  Dropping devoutly to his knees where he was, Edward Dormer raised his voice clear and strong in a Te Deum, followed by the ringing bronze response of his men, who knelt likewise among the blood and bodies of their fallen …

  * * *

  ‘Vere dignum et … Snnnfff … justum est aequum et salutare … Snnnfff … nos tibi semper et ubique gratias agere … Snnnfffle harumph!’

  Edward Dormer was jerked back to the present by his belly rumbling and cramping under his breastbone. He realised with black depression that he had just daydreamed his way through the Canon of the Mass and had yet another sin to report to his confessor.

  He struggled to bring his mind back to God, to speak the Pater Noster properly, the words that the Saviour, and Captain of their Society, had given, in the very same words he had said, reverberating down through fifteen centuries freighted with holiness and power …

  The words jumbled and turned themselves to mockery. His boredom was extreme, a physical pain. The celebrant had a head cold and snorted constantly, the patten, ciborium and chalice glittered but the little church was icy, the black soutane Edward was wearing was third-hand and very threadbare, and the ominous smell of cabbage soup was already insinuating oily, quotidian fingers between the drifts of incense.

  Then a voice in his head, so loud Edward looked around to see who had spoken. You are not priestly material, my son.

  Nobody had said anything, the voice was inside Edward’s skull. Was he going mad? Had God spoken? Surely not, surely God would confirm the thing he had worked so hard for all his life. After all, he ought to be used to threadbare magnificence and cabbage soup by now, both had been staples of his family life before the Seminary. And he was the priest, the one destined to go abroad and be ordained, leaving their impoverished lands near Worcester in the capable hands of his practical older brother. He was the one whose life work it would be to pray for his elder brothers and sisters, forced by the evil Witch-Queen’s laws to pretend to her heretical mummery of a religion. It was what he had prepared for all his young life …

  You are bored, protested the voice. You hate it all. You want a woman. You want to fight someone. You hate using the discipline. You hate hairshirts. You would die for Me if you must, but not as a priest. Have mercy on yourself my son. Go home.

  Edward bowed his head, squeezed his eyes shut, shaking. He was going mad. What would people think? He pulled out his rosary, smooth ebony, a cross cut in the capital beads so he could tell them in his pocket. He pressed his steepled fingers against his lips to be sure he wasn’t speaking sotto voce.

  You will never make a priest and I do not want you to be one, said the voice in his head again. I want priests who rejoice in their priesthood, not miserable, dutiful slaves.

  Usually the feel of the beads slipping through his fingers, the monotony of the words Ave Maria, gratia plenum, Dominus tecum … repeated over and over calmed him, focused his rebellious mind, steadied his nerves.

  His heart thundered on oblivious. He couldn’t breathe. The air was too thick, laden with cabbage and frankincense, and the voice in his head would not let him be.

  Tell them you do not want to be a Jesuit priest. You have no vocation. If there is an opposite to vocation, this is it. I am calling you not to be a priest. Go home, my son. Your mother is sick and misses you more than she will admit, go home to her.

  Even though it was quite friendly, a firm, humorous, affectionate voice, as he sometimes imagined the voice of Jesus during Gospel readings, he was terrified. He gulped over and over again, sweating, his head spinning. He loosened his tight collar, tried to compose his mind.

  Louder and louder boomed the cannon fire of his heart, round and round went the contents of his skull, up and down went his chest until the Edward inside stepped away from the Edward in such bodily distress. He looked down on his own body with grave sympathy until the cramps started in his limbs and chest and blackness rolled up.

  His head was bleeding where he had cracked it on the ground. Around him knelt his fellow students, iron in their discipline, while the infirmerar was just hurrying from the back of the chapel, waving a couple of the sturdier men to help carry him out. A couple watched covertly from under eyelids, wondering if he was being favoured with a vision as some occasionally were, especially in the hungry season between Christmas and Easter when everyone’s joints ached and their gums bled.

  But as they carried him gently out, Edward knew he was a fake. He had no vision, only madness from his fear, only a panic-stricken collapse – because he was bored?

  Settled at last, sustained with rough aqua vitae, his head roughly bandaged, Edward doddered his way to the little chamber belonging to the head of the English Seminary at Rheims.

  Fr Persons smiled kindly at him, offered him a dish of sallet herbs to dip in oil. They tasted peppery and made his mouth flood so he could hardly speak.

  ‘What happened, my son?’

  Edward gulped down the sallet leaves. He could not keep his mind on things. Even now in front of the saintly leader of the English Jesuits he kept seeing the letters he wrote at the beginning of every exercise, every letter. AMDG, Ad Maiorem Dei Gloria – to the greater glory of God.

  ‘I felt ill … afraid. I was … I’m sorry, Father, my mind was not on the Blessed Sacrament.’

  ‘What was it on?’

  ‘Sinful self-indulgence,’ said Edward sadly, then saw the stern hardening of Fr Persons’ face. ‘Nothing like … nothing … er … fleshly.’

  ‘Good. You have been troubled by succubi in the past?’

  ‘Not recently, Father.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘This was … different. I was thinking of … of leading the assault on England, being first ashore to reconquer England for the True Faith.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Persons’ face crumpled with sad understanding. ‘I think many of us have such dreams. Nor do I think they are sinful, save they should not be indulged in during Mass.’

  ‘Yes, Father. But then there was this voice … like a voice. In my head – not outside, nobody spoke in the chapel. But the voice said I am not priestly material.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I tried to pray my rosary, but the voice went on about how … how I hate all this, how I … all I want is to fight … Like that, Father. So of course, I tried to pray harder and somehow the air became thick and I could not breathe and then I fell down.’ It sounded even more childish
, put like that. ‘That was all, sir.’

  ‘Hmm. Do you think it was a holy vision?’

  ‘No, sir, of course not. St Jerome teaches us to enquire of how we feel after such a visitation, since a true vision, from God or an angel, will make us feel better and a false vision from the devil will make us feel worse.’

  ‘Perhaps. Although our noble founder has more to say on the discernment of spirits, which is that if we are turned away from God’s true path for us, we shall find the touch of God painful. Did you feel it was unholy?’

  ‘Well, Father … Certainly I feel worse.’ Edward’s constantly rumbling stomach twisted, appalled. Oh no, more fasting, more praying, perhaps greater use of the discipline prescribed to help oust the demon. Oh God, no, please. I don’t think I am possessed by an evil spirit. Of course, an evil spirit would make him think that. Perhaps he should be exorcised.

  ‘If the choice were yours, Mr Dormer,’ said Fr Persons, ‘if your mother had not intended you for the Society of Jesus and you, as a dutiful son, obeyed, what would you do?’

  ‘I would go to the Duke of Parma and offer him my sword, my wits, my body, everything I have, so he can return England to the True Faith and I can go home.’

  The words had burst out of him, shaking with passion frustrated. Edward bent his head with embarrassment.

  ‘I cry you pardon, Father, I will try harder.’

  Fr Persons reached across the little desk where lay a piece of stale bread he had somehow forgotten long enough for it to have a trace of blue mould on it, and found a most stately piece of paper, deciphered in the spaces between the lines. He looked up at Dormer, who had to drag his hungry eyes away from the bread.

  ‘All your masters concur. They approve your dedication and determination to become a priest and your devotion to Our Lord and the sacraments, but they say they have only once found a man less suited to the calling of priest and he turned out to be a heretic English spy. Your swordsmanship is excellent, your understanding of gunnery excellent, your analysis of Joshua’s campaign of conquest in the Holy Land masterly. But in theology you struggle, you have mastered none of Loyola’s precepts and you are constantly bored and miserable.’ Edward bent his head at this devastating indictment of his faults, which he knew to be true, feeling the flush climbing his face and making his spots tingle. Fr Persons smiled at him. ‘Mr Dormer, we would have had this interview in any case, but it seems that Jesus Christ, our Saviour and Captain, is also in agreement.’