“Your Grace is in accordance, then?”
Prince Harry nodded. “Only for the gathering of evidence. Under the greatest secrecy.”
Arundel rubbed his hands together impatiently as though he relished the idea of beginning immediately. “It shall be done, Your Grace. As I told you, Commissioner Flemmynge is in the process of studying all of Wycliffe’s written documents and outlining the heresies therein. We will post these heresies, so that none can say they were not informed of the law. In the meantime, we have chosen where to begin. Brother Gabriel will gather evidence by inserting himself as confessor to an abbey within proximity of the household of a known heretic who sits in Parliament. He will begin gathering evidence there, and when he has a sufficient preponderance, we will bring formal charges.”
Gathering evidence! So. He had not been summoned for theological consultation. Stupid fool, to feel flattered by the archbishop’s attention! Pride always goeth before a fall. His was the Judas role. He was to be a spy. He had been right to wish himself well away. He felt as though he’d just been punched in the stomach.
“Does Brother Gabriel have your permission to proceed immediately?” Arundel asked.
Arundel had not even asked him, not given him the opportunity to refuse.
“Brother Gabriel has our permission to begin. But only to gather evidence.”
Arundel smiled.
“May I ask who the lord is?” Prince Harry asked.
“An acquaintance of yours, Your Grace. By name of Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham,” the archbishop said, unfurling a rolled parchment.
Now it was the prince’s turn to receive the fist in the stomach. Gabriel saw the blood drain from his face. He’d not known it was his old comrade of battlefield and tavern haunts. How cleverly Arundel had worked his prey!
“There must be some mistake. The Sir John I know cares not a fig for religion. He is a scoffer, yes. But he’s harmless.” Prince Harry’s alarm showed in the working of his mouth. He chewed on his lip.
“Harmless no more, Your Grace. He has become a Lollard. And he takes no pains to hide it,” Flemmynge added, handing the prince a quill. There was a gloating in his tone that Gabriel despised. “Sir John Oldcastle has found religion,” he said and snickered. “From what I hear, he could use some. Trouble is, ’tis the wrong religion. And now he’s going to burn.”
The prince put down the pen and scowled at him.
“In hell, I mean. If he does not repent, of course.”
The archbishop scowled at his lackey for the second time that day, then shoved the order in front of Prince Harry.
The prince picked up the quill, laid it down, picked it up again, fiddled with it.
“Your Grace, the soul of England—”
Prince Harry signed it with a flourish, blotting the parchment in his anger. He exchanged glances with none but Beaufort, who made no attempt to hide the sympathy in his eyes as he reluctantly nodded encouragement.
From outside the chamber, thunder grumbled. Gabriel felt the threat of it settle in his soul. With the slash of a pen, the prince had turned a nobleman into a fugitive and a preacher into a spy.
FOUR
I will take you as my people, and I will be your God.
—FROM PSALM 52,
RECITED IN THE PASSOVER SEDER
Anna was just outside the walls of Judenstadt when she heard the taunts. She decided to ignore them. Who had appointed her guardian of hurt souls anyway? That was the job of saints and angels, and she was neither.
All Anna wanted was to deliver her book to the rabbi at the Staronová synagóga and get back to prepare for tonight’s meeting. Her grandfather had insisted she take the decorated megillah to the rabbi as soon as it was finished, and he’d finished it last night.
“Ddeek, it’s the story of Esther! The rabbi will not need it until the next Festival of Purim. You said so yourself. You still have months to finish it.”
He had rubbed tired eyes. “What does a little jasmine flower like you know about the urgency that drives an old man? You have plenty of time.”
Plenty of time? Try telling that to Martin, she thought.
The taunting grew louder. “Ring around the rosey—silly little Jew boy, silly little Jew boy.”
A childish game. Just children in a circle, chanting.
It was hot—even the flag hanging above the walls of Judenstadt could find no breath of air to lift its Star of David bravely on the breeze. The boys would tire soon enough of their games and go home to their mothers to find cool drinks. She glanced away. With her free hand she wiped sweat beads from her hairline, then unbound the kerchief from her hair. It tumbled in a heavy cascade of curls down her back. She wiped her face with the kerchief, inhaling its sour smell—she had washed both hair and kerchief only two days ago. If she hurried maybe she could get back in time to wash it again.
“Ring around the rosey. Plague maker, plague maker.”
Of course she knew what Ddeek would do if he were here. But she had not his virtue. And there was supper to get yet. Everything had to be just right. Martin was determined to ask for her hand tonight. She rebound her hair in the kerchief. A whisper of a breeze cooled her neck.
“Pocket full of posey. Christ killer, Christ killer.” This was accompanied by the sound of a clod of earth breaking against some firmer substance. The child in the center of the circle started to cry. Thin little whimpers.
Oh, Holy Jesu!
How could any Christian woman—how could any woman—not respond to that? Sighing, Anna laid down her package and rushed into the huddle of boys. Their shrill voices rose to shrieks as she jerked one of them, the ringleader, by the arm and pulled him out of the circle.
“Shame on you, Petr. I know your father. Go on home this minute, or I’ll tell him what mischief you have been up to.”
She wanted to shake him until his teeth rattled in his hateful little skull, but she dropped his arms and turned to the rest of them. “All of you. Go on home. Before I give you the back of my hand.” She shooed them with her hands as though she were shooing chickens. “Leave this child alone. He’s done nothing to you.”
The miscreants scattered.
“Jew lover,” one of them called to her over his shoulder as he flung another clod of dirt. This one landed at her feet, spattering her hem with dust.
“Won’t do you any good to tell my father,” Petr yelled. “He’s not a Jew lover, like you.”
But they kept on running.
“Now you.”
The child cowered, as though he were rooted in the sunbaked soil.
“I know you too. You’re Jakob, the rabbi’s boy.”
Speechless, he stared back at her out of wide, dark eyes rimmed with tears, his black hair plastered to his forehead beneath the silly little conical hat, the cornutuspileus, that marked him as a Jew. Marked him as a target for the taunts and jibes of others. Every time she entered the cramped misery of the Jewish quarter, it was always the same. Part of her wanted to raise her fist to heaven and scream at a God who let his chosen people be treated in such a way. Part of her wanted to fall on her knees and thank that God because she was not one of those “chosen” ones.
“You know better than to play outside the walls of Judenstadt,” she scolded.
He couldn’t be more than six years old. A huge teardrop slid down the boy’s cheek, making a track along his dusty face. She gathered him into her arms and hugged him against her, wiping his face with her apron.
“Stop that now,” she said, her voice softer. “You are not really hurt, Jakob. Come. I’ll take you back to the synagogue. I’m on my way to see your father. I have something very special to show him.” She picked up the book and unwrapped it. “See.”
The boy smiled when he saw the bright menorah spread across the carpet page. Anna turned the page. He reached out his hand to touch the human figures with heads of animals that decorated the margin: Hamin with a weasel’s head; Mordecai, the head of an ox for his steadfastness; and
Esther, the body of a beautiful woman bearing the head of a lioness, to display her courage. Thou shall have no graven image before me. But her grandfather had rendered the figures so skillfully that there could be no doubt, even for a child, of the characters in this story.
“The queen is beautiful.” The boy pointed to the lion’s head.
“Yes, she is. My grandfather painted her. But he is old, and sometimes he doesn’t see too well. See this funny little ochre mark? It’s where he got outside the line. Here, you carry the book for me. If I had to guess, I would guess that you have an old grandfather too. While we go, tell me, do you have a grandfather?”
“Ano.” The boy nodded his head, forgetting all about his fright and humiliation, and babbled on about his grandfather. As they entered the Judenstadt gate, Anna listened with only half an ear.
She was wondering what she would do if her grandfather refused Martin.
Finn explored his face gingerly with his hand and then inspected the tip end of his finger. Still bleeding. He pressed hard against the spot. It needed to stop before Anna returned. She would be angry with him for trying to do it himself. And her anger could be a sight to behold. But a man had his dignity to consider. Even an old man with trembling fingers. He touched another spot on his chin. Apparently, he’d let the razor slip more than once. When she came home, she’d find him looking like a pockmarked fool.
Getting old was hell, but the worst part was what it did to his work. The palsied fingers. The bleary eyes. The megillah would probably be his last book. He knew how his granddaughter labored over his manuscripts when she thought he was asleep. More than once, he’d seen her hunched in a corner by the fire, her woolen shawl wrapped around her thin nightdress, her blue eyes straining against the meager light of a nearly spent candle to clean up the ragged edges and to color in the missed spots.
He would have liked to paint her in that light. He should have. Before he had grown so old. Now, all he could do was watch her from the shadows, regretting and yet not regretting—for there was some private pride in the savoring of such beauty reserved for him alone, even while his artist’s heart wished to share that picture framed in his artist’s eye with the world. She’d got the wide almond shape of her eyes from her mother, but not the blue color. She’d not got that chaos of red curls from her mother either. Those had come from Kathryn’s side. As had the stubborn set of her chin. But the wide mouth and noble brow, those had been gifts from his daughter, Rose.
From outside, in the busy square, he heard shouting, curses, but paid scant attention. The peace was often marred by the noise of traffic and commerce. They lived in a small house diagonally across from the Staroměstská radnice, the Town Hall, at the corner of the Old Town Square. Their little town house had one common room that served for cooking, eating, working, and entertaining downstairs and two small bedchambers and a garderobe upstairs. It was clean—thanks to Anna—and comfortable and decently appointed with two chairs, a table, a wooden settle with feather pillows, good pewter, a silver salt cellar, and even a well-placed tapestry on the wall facing his workbench and table. Two beds made of ropes strung on wooden frames supported fine feather mattresses, and two chests with real drawers furnished the small bedrooms at the top of the narrow winding stairway just off the entrance. And from all the windows, upstairs and down, windows with real glass, Finn could see the great astronomical clock with its two faces and golden hand.
When he and his young granddaughter had first come to Prague from Ghent he had located them halfway between the Jewish quarter and the university, planning to support them by illuminating manuscripts for both communities. It had been a good plan.
He opened the door to let in a fresh breeze. No breeze. Only noise poured in. Wasn’t this Sunday? Yes, he was sure it was Sunday. He’d wanted to go to mass at Týn Church to take the Holy Eucharist, but there had been the manuscript to finish. The square was usually quiet on Sundays after the Hussite mass had finished and the celebrants gone home.
Finn stepped outside to find the source of the commotion. Across the square, a small knot of noisy onlookers gathered in front of Týn Church, and they did not sound like worshippers. But whatever it was, it was none of his concern. He’d long ago decided which side he was on. He was too old and tired to worry about churches and their politics. Lately he had a new worry, pains in his chest and sometimes trouble getting his breath after he climbed the stairs to his bed. And his conscience pricked like a burr in his breeches, robbing him of sleep and paining him almost as much as his worn-out old knees. He worried about Anna.
It was time to give his granddaughter up—past time. He knew that. She should long ago have been building her own nest, not tidying his. And Finn knew Martin had more on his mind than flirtation. He could see it in the way his stare followed Anna’s every move. As she sharpened the quills they used for transcribing or bent to ladle the broth from the kettle hanging on the fire, Martin’s gaze never left her, and there was more than a young man’s lust-filled yearning there. Finn could see that too in the way he rushed to help her lift a log onto the fire or relieve her from a tray of drinking tankards as she served the other students.
There had been others before Martin. Equally worthy. There had been that student from Oxford, a proper Englishman. Finn would have liked to see his granddaughter with an English husband, but when he went home he would have taken his new wife with him. And Finn knew he could never return there.
He could not dig that close to the root of all his pain.
Then there had been the burgher who lived in a fine house in Mala Strana, the Little Quarter just below Hradcany in the shadow of the great castle. Why had he not nudged Anna long ago in that direction? By now she should be sweeping her own hearth, scolding a brood of children, tending her husband’s prosperous business. He had told himself she had too good a mind to waste on women’s drudgery.
He knew in his heart he had not encouraged her to marry because to give her up would kill him. Anna was the incarnation of all the women he had loved and lost. And now it was time to lose her too. But at least this one would not be taken from him. He would give her up of his own free will.
The shouts and commotion from the cathedral steps rose to a crescendo. Time was when he would have gone across to investigate to see what it was that drew such an uncommon crowd, what it was that disturbed the Sabbath peace. But today he stepped back inside and shut the heavy oaken door, sealing in the quiet, bloated air of the common room.
He was suddenly very tired. And it hurt him to breathe deeply. He’d just take a little rest before Anna returned.
FIVE
[An indulgence is] the remission of the temporal penalty due to forgiven sin, in virtue of the merits of
Christ and the saints.
—OXFORD DICTIONARY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH
Brother Gabriel surveyed the hunched tenements languishing along Bankside Street. After the conference at Lambeth Palace was ended, he had not meant to return this way, back through Southwark and Bankside. And yet memory drew him to it. Memory or his dissatisfaction at the way the conference had gone. He needed a reminder of where he’d come from, what he’d been before Brother Francis saved him.
He had thought his future settled. Father, Brother: those callings he embraced. When he’d received the commission to sell the papal indulgences, he’d been less enthusiastic, especially when it seemed this service to his church preempted the other two. Now his archbishop had decreed he was to add spy to his calling. But whence came that calling? Yet to question that would be to question the very institution that had brought him the means of salvation. It was still the only means as far as he could tell.
He left his reverie of self-doubt—for that must surely be its name; he could never doubt his church—to consider his surroundings from astride the horse that same church provided. It was as though this place, these smells, these sounds of cursing and bear-baiting and bargaining, echoed some half-forgotten dream rather than his own childhood memori
es. He’d been six years old when Brother Francis rescued him from the cesspit that was Southwark.
Was it still there? The brothel? Where his mother, little more than a girl herself, had plied her trade? A whore’s apprentice at twelve, whore at fourteen, mother at sixteen. He’d proved a stubborn fetus that would not turn loose even with the scraping of a knotted rope. “Marked by God,” Brother Francis had said, “a child protected in the womb to do His work.”
Yet he hung on to the thinnest thread of belief that she had loved him. The brothel that kept her was more generous than some, giving her a halfday every month for herself. Every month she had made the five-mile trek to the priory to visit him. Every month she had brought him sweets and together they had played at toss the ball in the abbey gardens. And every month at leaving time, she had crushed him to her, his face pressed between the cleavage in her breasts, suffocating him with her musky sweat and woman smells, overlaid with stale perfume, attar of roses, provided by the house, the cost deducted from her wages.
“My pretty blond cherub,” she’d called him. “My sweet Gabriel.” Every month. For two years. The last time—he had not known it would be the last, how different might have been his demeanor if he had—her eyes had glittered with wetness, her arms resting on her high round belly. He’d known what that meant. And he’d been ashamed for her. Ashamed for himself. And when she’d tried to hug him good-bye, he’d pulled away, refusing to look at her.
She had not come again.
Now, as he looked down the street, he tried to pick out the house he remembered.
There. The one with the rotting gable—no, it was too narrow. The one leaning into the street? No, it had no wide window. He remembered a wide window seat where he’d been allowed to play as a child. But only in the daytime. At night, he’d had to sleep in a small closet. From that tight, dark place, he sometimes heard his mother moan or cry out, and he’d been afraid for her. Afraid for himself. But she had told him never to leave the closet until she opened the door. He never did.
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