Will

by Christopher Rush

  The old woman’s throat quavered in the firelight.

  ‘I’ll tell you,’ she said. ‘It was a deed. It was a deed –’

  A deed without a name?

  Too terrible to hear. So shocking a whole parish would be infected with fear. The hammering on the door at four in the morning, following the night’s debate, the stripping and searching for the devil’s mark, for the supernumerary nipples, cunningly camouflaged as warts and moles and callouses and scars. Or hidden with diabolical invisibility in ears and armpits, nostrils and hair. Under the eyelids, the tongue, the fingernails, and feet. Even far into the fundament and the secret clefts, as deep as the probes of pricker and inquisitor might breathlessly search. Investigation by question and needle and a fine excuse for peering into the pudenda – they had to be certain in their examination.

  ‘So certain?’

  That’s why every hair had to be shaved clean from the body and the head left bald as a turnip, prior to the interrogation under torture. Think of it as method, procedure, system, due and necessary process of law: extraction of cuticles; application of thumbscrew and boot, with consequent dislocation and pulverisation of bones; application of rack, with teasing of joints, stretching of skin and sinew and consequent crippling.

  ‘Christ Almighty.’

  Ignore the nipples crisped and torn off with white-hot pincers. Ignore the tender tongue, sensitive as a snail, quivering in the vice, while the long needles go savagely to work, wedded in lust to a quest for truth that can have only one answer. Ignore the hammer-blows descending on the legs with excruciating and insistent zeal. Ignore the split skin and the burst bowels when the rackman goes too far. Ignore the fingers dangling like crushed radishes, the tangled red roots that were toes and the mangled meat that was legs. Ignore the screams. Especially ignore the screams.

  ‘Will, enough! I’m a lawyer. Do you think I need you to tell me what I already know only too well?’

  But don’t miss one syllable of what comes out of that sobbing mouth by way of confession. Because every word that you hear justifies the torture. The confession is essential for the salvation of the soul. And after all this, with not even an eyebrow left on her white egg head, what kind of thing do you suppose it was that they finally dragged on a hurdle to the stake that had been prepared for her?

  ‘I’ve told you – you can spare me the details.’

  A witch, of course. Not a woman, that’s for sure, otherwise how could you look in your glass, knowing what you’d just done to another human being? No, it was easier to point to the thing with jellied legs and shaved noodle, the thing that couldn’t even hold itself upright as it was chained to the stake – and to say that it was a witch and not a woman that was being smeared with pitch from the barrel beneath the broken feet. The bible said it clearly. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. You had God’s own backing for it. And the biblical injunction was to be carried out with the utmost barbarity. Cite scripture and you can get away with anything.

  ‘Even murder.’

  The stake was piled high with faggots – the crowd seethed round it like the sea, hissing its hatred, its derision, spitting into that wild white face. A mob hungry to feed on the terror in the eyes. Anxious not to miss out on a single note of the screaming that would start up after the officials thrust their torches into the bundles, and the raging white-haired ministers of religion yelled at the unrepentant wretch: that the agonies in which she would presently expire were a mere foretaste of the red eternity that awaited her. Unless of course she elected to confess and save her soul. Confess, you whore! You fucking witch! Confess! Confess!

  ‘Jesu.’

  Oh yes, it was safer to libel it as a witch, that broken thing on the barrel, turning slowly to a shrieking blue blister behind the shooting curtains of sparks. Never a simple illiterate country girl who’d made extracts from herbs and flowers for eye-brighteners, breath-sweeteners, and reddening of the lips. Not surely some gossiping old grandmother with a squint in her eye and with nothing left in her life but to confide in the cat and tell lies to the spiders on the wall. That’s the cunning of the creatures, to play the innocents. Country wenches? Country’s the word, all right. Country cunts! No, burn the fuckers, burn the bitches to the bare bone – and damn their souls to hell!

  ‘Hell on earth. It stayed with you, what your old gran described.’

  On my imaginary forces worked. All the everyday horrors faded by comparison into thin air. The roaring thoroughfares of those carcasses, mad with maggots; the dead cats in the ditches, stuck to the frozen drift of leaves, frost-furred and open-eyed, stiff and snarling at the moon; the moon itself, that scowling cindered old skull in the sky, yellow with death. Even my shithouse terrors: the Old Men that lurked in the privies, long-lost forgotten gong-scourers with arms long enough to reach up through the shithole and drag me down deep into the black stench of their bowel-world, alive with excrement and flies – even all this was nothing to the terrors told round winter fires. From old remembering mouths. Into fresh ears too horrified to hear but unable to close the doors.

  ‘Doors that never close, eh?’

  Never. So the Bloody Mary burnings were endlessly rekindled in the heads of the old ones, they just couldn’t let them die out, could they? And the slow old syllables were blown from their lips, lazily, like stray sparks, to land on me and set me suddenly on fire, to make me grip the sides of the stool till my knuckles were white to the bone. I couldn’t stir. My feet were packed hard with faggots. Waiting for the flames. They fanned them with their failing breath, those pitiless old chroniclers of winter, till the blaze was roaring about my ears and I couldn’t rise from the chair because of the chain round my middle. Soon it would be holding a blackened skeleton to a smoking stake. The charred memory of a person, collapsing into a black bundle of bones, to be blown to the winds. All I could do was to sit on, held in the shackles of the familiar sentences, waiting for the winter burnings to begin again.

  ‘Childhood entertainment? Childhood abuse, more like. What was the worst story?’

  Latimer and Ridley. One of the old ones up at Asbies, or maybe it was Snitterfield, told me how he’d walked all the way to Oxford to watch them burn, being a good Catholic subject, as we were on both sides, and loyal to both Marys on their thrones, down in London and up in heaven. Yes, he said, he wanted to see those bastards burn well – infamous spawn of Luther that they were, fine fuel for perdition and the fires that never die. He wanted to hear them howl in the flames, so that he would have some idea of their torments in hell.

  And once I’d heard that story, I was part of it, and it of me. I re-enacted it a thousand thousand times, walking down to Oxford. I remembered the old man’s voice:

  ‘I arrived at the scene just in time to see the executioner pulling off their stockings and it struck me like a thunderbolt. I thought, Hold it right there, sir, don’t you see it? These execrable heretics – they wear stockings! Like me, like you. The stockings will burn anyway, mere cobwebs in the greatness of the flame. Why bother to remove them? Will this ridiculous procedure somehow obliterate their spiritual error? Execute them the more effectively? And their trusses, shirts and shoes, such necessary items even for a brace of nefarious apostates and traitors – surely these homely weeds, innocent enough in themselves after all, could be permitted to remain? In any case they’ll scarcely protect them from the unbelievable pain to follow, won’t keep it from them for more than a moment. And if heresy is such a plague, wouldn’t it be better if every last scrap of their clothing were to be burnt and perish along with them?

  ‘Yet there they were, two old men standing barefoot in their shrouds, waiting to be burned. It was the middle of October, the first chill in the air, and I couldn’t help noticing how Master Ridley’s toes curled a little when he felt the first coldness of the ground beneath his now shoeless stockingless feet that would be the first parts of him to feel the fire. So his toes twitched blindly. For some reason it made me think of my fields up here, w
hat with the first frosts coming on, and how I’d soon be bringing my beasts inside. Fuck me, you wouldn’t even treat an animal the way these poor old buggers were now to be served. That’s when it hit me that it was real and not just some theological game. These two old gentlemen, one of them shivering a bit, really were going to be burned alive. I’d been shouting along with the mindless mob, chucking in my Catholic groatsworth, but from that moment on I never uttered another word. The executioner stepped forward with his torch alight, ready to thrust it into the faggots, and at that point the crowd fell silent too, holding its breath.

  ‘I watched amazed as Latimer stretched out his arm and laved his face in the first flame as if he were washing, and it was a relief to see how easily he expired, his open mouth filled with fire, quickly choking off the brief screams, so I began to think how efficiently after all the blaze ate away the enemies of the true religion. But it had a short life, that thought. Because Master Ridley’s experience of the flames turned out to be very different – and here’s how it happened.

  ‘For a start some of the wood they were using was completely unseasoned, as any fool could see, unless that was deliberate. And it was no farmer who’d made up that fire, that was obvious, because the stupid bastards had heaped up the faggots much too close to the poor old bugger’s face and chest. Fucking well-wishers, thinking to speed things up by piling on the fuel, when all they succeeded in doing was stopping the flames from really taking off. So that for what seemed like hours his lower parts went on burning till they were thoroughly consumed, and him screaming out to the people closest to the fire to stir up the sticks if they could, for pity’s sake, and let the fire come to him above his middle, so that he could even begin to die. But what with the buzzing sparks and the hissing smoke, the crackling of green wood and the hellish din going on round about him – fiddlers and jugglers and drunkards, acrobats and balladeers – they got the wrong message altogether from the poor man’s screams and they packed the wood all the tighter, over-stoking and slowing down the whole fucking business.

  ‘It was awful – beyond anything imaginable. The flames just went on gnawing at his legs and roasting his lower portions with no effect whatever on the vital parts, so that he started leaping up and down in the blaze with a ghastly alacrity for an old man. Till the time came when he could leap no more because his legs were quite gone. How cruelly they’d botched the fire, those Oxford oafs who stood that day in front of Balliol, preaching at the man whose torments they’d so intensified and prolonged. Fucking inhuman bunglers! I wanted to tell them what should be done but I couldn’t find my tongue in all that crowd and anyway I was nowhere near the front. I just stood there, gorgonised by what I saw.’

  ‘I know, I know. What kind of fucking men were they?’

  O! you are men of stones. Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so that heaven’s vault should crack.

  ‘Meanwhile Ridley must have felt the bottom of the stake crumbling away to nothing and he was terrified he’d fall out of the fire only half burnt because he wailed out to the officers to pin him with their pikes to what was left of the stake. But they did fuck-all, the bastards.

  “I can’t burn!” he kept shrieking. “I can’t burn! I can’t burn!”

  ‘At last somebody with half a brain in his head reached up with a pole and pulled the faggots away from the man’s chest and a sudden tongue of flame shot upwards and a little to one side, and Ridley leaned himself as far to that side as he could stretch and into the flame, as though he were a starving man reaching after food. Not long after that a finger of flame touched the little cask of gunpowder that somebody – his brother-in-law, I think – had hung round his neck, and when that exploded in his face he stopped screaming and moved no more.

  ‘It was just in time because less than a minute later the stake burnt right through and the upper half of Ridley fell out of the flames right down dead at Latimer’s feet. Everybody could see that there was nothing there but charred black bone that separated itself from the upper half as soon as it fell. So a man had been burnt in half for his religion, who’d lit a candle in England that would never be put out, so Latimer had said. Latimer who’d laved himself in flame as though he were a lover taking a bath. Well, Ridley’s candle still burns in this old head, I can tell you, though as to his religion I can say nothing. What I do say is that his killers were so God-inspired they couldn’t even light a fucking fire. Another thing, when I walked back up here again it took me two days and I never spoke a single word to man or beast all the way.’

  ‘God in heaven! How do you remember all that and stay sane?’

  It was only a story. But I lived it, all right. And I reached out from where I was sitting and shielded my face from the fire for a moment. Reached out with my right hand to feel just a hundredth of the heat that had raged through Ridley’s lower bones for uncountable agonies of time. Till he was roasted, marrow and all. Half a chestnut, blackened in the fire.

  The very next year it was the turn of Cranmer who’d helped Henry in his big break with Rome but was forced to change his tune under Mary and recant. Cranmer too reached out with his right hand, only he plunged it right into the fire. As he stood among the faggots he held out the hand that had signed the recantation (before he’d regained his courage and recanted his recantation) and he kept the hand there in the flames till it was blistered and black, the hand that had signed and sinned, punishing it before the rest of his body, making it suffer first for its weakness and its fear. Then the queen’s fire went on to punish all the other parts of Cranmer for his stubbornness in refusing to accept her Catholic credo. And as the torment took hold, that old familiar screaming started up again. Because no matter how right you are, or think you are, your rightness is in your mind, and it’s not your mind they burn, it’s your feet and legs and belly and bowels, and your heart and lungs and lips. And every last hair on your head. Till you’re a charred and twisted cinder, a smoking ruin. It’s your body that feels the pain of the fire, not your mind. Just keep your mind shuttered, that’s all. The martyrs built themselves big wide windows in their souls and let the whole world see in. Honourable – and ill-advised. The martyrs have no voice in my plays. They did plenty screaming already. But silence – man, that’s pure gold. Silence keeps a man alive. Keep your own counsel and you’ll lie quiet in the earth one day and never know the flames.

  3

  ‘And get rid of those,’ muttered Mistress Mine, bustling in and pointing to the chest in the corner. ‘Are you needing stoked up, Master Francis? Apart from the wine, that is.’

  Disapproval stood easily on her furrowed brow. Always did.

  ‘Early in the day, I’ll admit,’ said Francis in his sweetest pudding voice, ‘and all the more reason to take advantage of your kind offer. Wine and work do give an edge to appetite.’

  ‘It’s only the cold shoulder from yesterday, but maybe it will fire you up. What have you achieved?’

  He spread his fat fingers.

  ‘Well – Will’s been reminiscing a bit.’

  On came the frown, double helping of displeasure. And up came the beef, brought in by little Alison, nice little tits.

  ‘Mustard?’ Anne could always make an invitation sound like a reproach.

  ‘Beef without mustard –’

  Is like war without fire. The Henry Five plan of attack, to see old England through. Not a hunter’s breakfast exactly but better than powdered beef, or horse food.

  Anne ushered bewitching tits out of the room and out of my imagining, pointing again to the chest.

  ‘Leave them to whoever you like but don’t leave them here! I don’t want them clogging up our life.’

  Our life. Interesting expression. What life was that then? We never had a life together, not to speak of. Our life. After I’m gone is what she meant. How easily she dismissed me.

  And out she went.

  Francis fell on the meat like a maniac and filled up my glass in his good nature. I’ll never eat meat again.
Only after he’d gulped down a single forkful that would have stood my Sunday lunch did he burp, sit back a bit, and ask, ‘What’s in the chest?’

  More than she thinks. My supply, stashed away. For a minute there I thought we were in trouble.

  I finished my glass, bent my elbow, and made more drinking motions, indicating the chest with a wink.

  Down at the bottom.

  ‘What’s on top?’

  The Arden hangings, that’s all.

  ‘What, painted cloths – in that wee box?’

  In there.

  ‘They’ll be crushed to hell.’

  Francis gobbled another gargantuan gobbet of beef, Harry Five dressing, washed it down with the best I’d got, and clumped over to the old oak chest to ferret for more.

  Out came Dives and Lazarus.

  ‘As I said, crushed to hell. What’s she want rid of them for?’

  You’ll see. Spread it out a moment.

  ‘Pretty crude, isn’t it?’

  Dives was the rich bastard. Not unlike you, Francis.

  ‘Do me a favour, Will. I may have a paunch but he’s got a pie-shop!’

  Dives sits sumptuously in a waterfall of purple, and with a purple glass raised to his purple lips. The table groans before him, a longship of delicacies overloaded to sinking – whole beasts gone to the spit. His dogs crouch at his knee, snapping at the scraps as they fall.

  ‘Crumbs? They’re fucking tennis balls! What this man wasted would have fed a colony of lepers.’

  And he didn’t give a fart for the leprous beggar lying at his gates.

  ‘So this was your introduction to art, Will.’

  That was Lazarus.

  ‘Hardly Holbein, is it?’

  All the better for it. Cloths and woodcuts and Coventry capers – they did the business for a young boy. Close to comic, don’t you think? That thin line dividing tragedy and travesty, laughter and horror.

  ‘Made an impression on you.’

  Still does. I always noticed how nobody pays any attention to him, he’s just too ugly for words. Even the flunkeys avert their cold faces from the hailstorm of boils that have landed on him, striking him from head to foot as he lies there, flung in the gutter. Only the dogs come and lick his sores.