THE SHADOW OF THE PYRE
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
1555
The boy’s terror thrashed and squealed in his chest like a piglet anticipating the knife.
But soundlessly. That was the worst of it. His terror had no voice. Nor did it have eyes, for the dark that was pressed against his eyeballs was something he had never known; mayhap his parents had always kept a rush light by his bed. But it had a nose, and the scent of the hay in the loft, the store of peahorn, was the smell of his fear. And it had hands; hands that scrabbled wildly about them, knocking over his cup and bowl, barking knuckles on the shearing bench, touching a threshing stick still claggy with the stockholm tar used to seal cuts on the sheep’s feet. Until he stopped, and withdrew into himself for fear of touching what might lie in that world of darkness just beyond his skin.
And it had ears. There were flutterings and scratchings from the rafters. That may be the screech owl coming in through the hole in the thatch to hunt for mice, or the earliest of the swallows collecting mud for its nest. It may even be bats swooping for moths as they did on mild nights, although there was no squealing sound like a soul in torment, as the bat was wont to make.
But it may be Robin Goodfellow or some fairy bent upon that mischief that is cloaked by darkness and is discovered at daybreak in upturned churns and broken vessels, if no food or drink is left for their provision. No matter that Alice Martlew and those others who, unlike his parents, believed in the little folk, went in fear only of their knocking over pails or stealing milk, or that he was eight years old, and could not now be taken to the fairy kingdom, and a weak and sickly changeling put in his stead. It was fairy form and not the moonlike face of the owl he imagined when he heard the beatings of wings.
Or, worse than all, it may be spirits. Old Tom knew such as haunted his barn; a choleric fellow dressed in white who would pluck him by the sleeve, crave his pardon, and beg that someone called Joshua who no-one knew, arrange masses for his soul undergoing the torments of purgatory. There were other such as were talked of coming back to avenge some foul deed. His father and mother would have been angry if they knew he harboured such conceits, since they had no belief in Purgatory, and told him that fairies and such like were devices whereby the Papists (those outside his own family) deceived the people.
So he sat, back propped against a stack of cornsacks, while the night’s chill seeped into his young bones, and he did not know whether the chattering of his teeth was for very fear or simple cold. He made of himself stone, a tensed thing that durst not stir for fear of what may lie a finger’s length from his face.
But this was not the beginning of his fear. Where does a life begin? Not when you are born, but when your memories are born. It seemed to him thereafter, howsoever earlier memories may surface unbidden, like bubbles on a stream above a pike, that his earliest memory was of the coming of the sheriff’s officer and his men at arms three weeks before. It was as if his terror had gotten a hold of his muling, insensate self, and slapped it into life.
They had come to the farm and searched the house, turning out the chest and emptying the cupboard, and taken his father and mother away to gaol in Radthorpe. The leader of these men, with a close-shaven face and taut hips that made his stiff long legs move like compasses measuring out their property, asked them in a lispy voice, to confirm who they were, then withdrew a paper from his scrip and read to them, saying he had come in pursuance of the Queen’s writ, to weed out heresy as required by the law of man and of God. He was to take them to Beccles that they may be given in charge to be examined by His Grace the Bishop of Norwich’s Chancellor. The boy did not understand the words, but he understood the anger of the men, who shouted much and used strange words like ‘heretic’ and ‘sacramentary.’
His father and mother offered no resistance. His father straightened a back that was often bent with pain, and followed at the rough promptings of the men, shoved from one to the other. His mother, treated more gently with the respect due to her sex, gazed at him with tear-stained eyes and bade him go stay with Mistress Goodwin for the nonce, and he would soon be able to come to them. But he refused to go, dragged at her skirts, felt a last caress of her hand on his cheek, and then commenced beating at the hose and slop breeches of the man leading her.
“It is God’s will, my son,” his father said. “Do as your mother asks. All will be well.”
And he was left lying in the dust as the three men with cruel strides led his hobbled elders up the path to the high road where stood a horse and cart.
The boy’s name was John Elliot. He would say in later years that, if naught else, they left him the name his parents gave him. That was untrue. They left him also with the locks of hair his father and mother had severed from one another using the knife of a sympathetic guard, and their matching silver rings. His father’s English psalter had likewise been left for him with Mistress Field, but they had discovered it and thrown it on the fire. The hair was kept in his mother’s jewel casket, a poor thing of pewter, decorated about the lid with sea shells. His father’s hair was matted and twisted, coarse as a nag’s tail, his mother’s, fair as a moonlit stream, finer and more delicate. The ends of both were frayed, and bore, it seemed, even beyond those marks of rough hewing, those of pain and anguish.
His chest heaved with sobs like a cart horse’s withers as it strained to the pull of the wain. The raw flesh of his throat burned, tasting of copper and salt. But he no longer screamed. His screams had died with the light. The light from that lanthorn that had dazzled his sleep-sotted eyes as Master Goodwin dragged him from his bed and bade him get dressed, batting away his questions with a husky
“Never you mind lad.”
Then he was marched downstairs. He stared at Mistress Goodwin, ghostly in her shift with shawl wrapped round her shoulders, watching from the stair’s foot. And when the light sheared across her face he could see there were tears.
“Get the vittles!” her husband snapped.
And with the opening of the door and the sight of that lady’s tears his fears came rushing upon him like a river in spate, and he tried to pull free. But Master Goodwin had his hand clamped over his forearm. He wrestled and clawed at his captor’s hand, his fear increasing when he saw he was bound for the barn. Mistress Goodwin shuffled after.
The barn door was hauled open.
“You must bide there. ‘Tis only for the one night.”
Goodwin dragged him inside and his wife handed him a cup of march beer and some frumenty in a wooden bowl. But not so much as a rush light for his companion. And as the light receded and the door was drawn to, Mistress Goodwin’s cheeks were glistening with tears that were like the tracks of snails on a damp autumn morning.
At first he beat upon the door, screamed, lay his eye to the crack, but once the house door was closed on the swinging lanthorn, there was only dark. He could feel the blood drawn from his knuckles by the frayed wood, and lay down upon the cornsacks, sobbing and sucking at the coppery life stream.
The dark itself had never made him tremble - it was the shadows that prowled within it. When his father's voice had risen and fallen over scripture by candlelight, those black hobbled forms and nodding heads, growing and shrinking with each flicker of flame, ballooned over their wall as if listening to every word. He could not but believe those shadows were monsters that haunted this world and none but he could see.
His father tried to allay his fears by explaining that they were nothing more than the places the light could not reach. But that was still more terrifying. The light was good, the light was God’s word. If there were shadows, then there must be places where God’s word could not reach; places where there was no light, holes in the world into which anyone, particularly a boy, might fall and never come out again. And mayhap he was now in such a hole, beyond reach of his parent’s love, of all light, and all sense.
His terror kept him awake for a long time, and when sleep eventually overcame him, stilling the throbbing in his chest, it was a fitful thing, of more labour than wakefulness. Time and again he was started awake by a tickling of tiny feet across his hands or felt through his kersey stockings. It was no more than rats or mice, but each time his heart leapt and his mind saw unbidden the tiny legs and green-clothed feet of Robin Goodfellow going about his mischievous business. The call of the screech owl, the barking of a fox, conjured for his mind some spirit in animal form searching for abandoned souls to augment its store.
When he awoke for the umpteenth time a pale light was filtering through the crack in the barn door, almost at floor level. He could see nothing of the barn’s interior save for a small patch of earth, the upturned bowl and spilt grains. The darkness that hung from the rafters still weighed him down. But it was a joy to see the light. He lay down and put his face on the beaten earth and felt the light play on his cheek.
After a while he rose, took up the threshing stick and commenced banging on the door, holding the stick by its handle so that the hinged part slapped against the wood. In the intervals between strikes he called for the Goodwins, but there was no reply save for the clucking of hens and the herd calling to one another in the misty dawn. At length he heard the sound of pattens in the yard, the chickens stabbing the strewn earth for feed. And he called out
“Mistress Goodwin! Wherefore am I pent in this place! I have done naught wrong.”
No answer was given him. He recommenced beating with the threshing stick and shouting, hardly words at all, just shouting for the loudness of it, until his voice grew hoarse, his breath scalding his tender throat.
When the sun was up, he could hear the mare being saddled and called out again. But no answer. He heard Master Goodwin’s voice, hailing someone on the high road, the approach of a horse’s footsteps, and the rustle of voices in close conversation.
He could make out only his parent’s names and the odd word of what they said besides: ‘close pent’; ‘goodly crowd’; ‘Radthorpe market place’; and the word ‘pyre,’ which he understood not. He peered through the hole and saw two pairs of hobnailed boots.
He grew used to their low speech. The stranger asked
“Where be the child?”
There was no answer, or none he could see.
Then Master Goodwin:
“We be keeping him here. You can’t let the child see that. We’ll release him anon, when all’s done.”
The boots disappeared. A few minutes later he heard Mistress Goodwin’s clogs crossing the yard. He felt a great relief and anticipated a release. But she stopped at the door, put down a beaker of ale and a trencher with bread on it, then squeezed them gingerly through the hole at the foot of the door.
“Mistress Goodwin! What have I done that you should keep me here?”
Her voice, sad and low
“You must bide here child. Just for a short while. Your parents would want you to be good.”
He tried to grab her hand as it pierced the door, but she withdrew it and scuttled back across the yard.
He ate the bread and drank half the ale. Then he determined to make his own escape. The wood by the gap in the door was rotting and the floor sandy. He may be able to dig his way out.
The sunlight was creeping across the floor and up the walls. He looked carefully about him and then went exploring, turning up the cornsacks. The sticks were no good for digging. But then he came upon a mattock lying by a pile of peahorn.
He returned to the hole. As he needed to relieve himself he wet the ground with his urine to make it easier to dig, and started sawing with the mattock. When the earth dried out he poured the remainder of the ale on the patch of earth and dug again. His shoulders ached, and he was breathless by the time he had dug what he judged a sufficient hole. He attacked the door, stabbing at the rotted wood with the adze head, and using his hands to pull away the strands like handfuls of coarse hair.
Looking through the hole he could see scatterings of straw that told him Mistress Goodwin had not yet swept the yard. He would have to be quick, for she might come out with her besom at any moment.
He lowered himself to the ground, put his feet by the hole, pointing his toes outwards, and started to wiggle forwards, pushing against the door. Both legs went through with rent hose, but at hip level he had to twist and hammer against the wood with his fists. At first he was quiet lest Mistress Goodwin be still about, but when he was secured at the hips, his desperate thrusts were such that the whole door shook as he assayed to wriggle through.
His hips broke through, his torso following smoothly thereafter. And, face upright, his nose braving the splintered wood that stabbed him on the temple, his head came free. And he was in the open, in the early morning sunlight, listening for sounds from the farm. There was nothing.
What did he intend? He did not know what they meant to do to his parents. If he had thought in tangible terms of their fate, it would have been only that they might be put in the stocks.
But he did not know their offence. And if any had been so kind or so cruel as to attempt to explain to him he would not have understood. For him to read the Bible in English was as natural as breathing. This was what his parents had done, in the mornings his father reciting to them, testament in hand but speaking largely from memory, his favourite psalms or the parables of the sower or prodigal. And in the evening his father’s sallow face draped with his long locks bent over the tallow candle while his mother, who had no letters, sat with her hands clasped in her lap, eyes dreamy in the firelight, sometime smiling, sometime reaching out with a gentle hand to touch her husband’s sleeve at those passages that moved her.
It was only on those nights when Master Goodwin or Goodwife Margaret called upon them, and sat listening while his father read from the Bible in their native tongue, that John had cause to wonder. Then he noticed his mother did not reach out to his father, but sat, hands clenched that much tighter in her lap. And so sat those others. It was the only time he ever saw Master Goodwin not sucking his teeth. And his father would start of a sudden at the sound of passing feet or hooves from the high road, his eyes flickering towards the chest under the casement. John had always imagined he must be fearful for their valuables lest a gang of make-shifts descend upon them. But why then did he look toward the chest and not the cupboard? The chest contained only his mother’s dowry apparel. It was not until later that he realised his father must have been anticipating a concealment of the testament.
And those others could start at nothing more than a lowing from the field or the barking of a fox.
And once when someone fresh from the alehouse had, sotted, mistook their farm for his own, and come stumbling through their yard, his brand visible through the horn pane, cursing above the chickens clamour, they had all four of them leapt up, and his father had thrust the testament into his jerkin. Their breathing was heavy until the drunk swayed muttering off along the high road.
Then one evening, as the orange sun was doused in the soggy fields, a wild-eyed, grass and burr coated fellow with soil in the seams of his face appeared at the door. He, affrighted, hid in the pantry until curiosity got the better of him. The testament was brought from a coffer, and this he saw as a pledge of mutual trust, and came forth.
When the stranger saw him, his eyes lit up, and he raised his hands as if in benediction, crying all the while in a keening voice
“Oh, the little one, the little one.”
He shrank back, but his mother pulled him into the room, and introduced him to the stranger who they called by a name as strange as his person: George-trudge-over-the-world.
Later he heard the sheriff’s men were offering a twenty pounds reward for the capture of this man, and it seemed incredible that he who was dressed in rags should be worth so unheard of a sum. Later his father told him, in a voice of sadness, that this George had gone to his wedding. Why any respectable woman would want to marry such a vagrant, he could not imagine. When he looked blankly up, his father said
“His wedding with the Lord, little man.”
He ran across the yard and into the high road. There was no call of alarm in his wake. Turning right he took the way toward Radthorpe. This was a mean bridleway, that joined with the east coast road to Yarmouth some three miles hence. The path he traversed had been all but impassable for months on account of winter rains. But for the last week they had had bright sunny weather, the earth rime-dusted, and this had dried the clay out.
At first his way led through a country of copses and broad champion, and from Sandon Hill
THE SHADOW OF THE PYRE
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
The boy’s terror thrashed and squealed in his chest like a piglet anticipating the knife.
But soundlessly. That was the worst of it. His terror had no voice. Nor did it have eyes, for the dark that was pressed against his eyeballs was something he had never known; mayhap his parents had always kept a rush light by his bed. But it had a nose, and the scent of the hay in the loft, the store of peahorn, was the smell of his fear. And it had hands; hands that scrabbled wildly about them, knocking over his cup and bowl, barking knuckles on the shearing bench, touching a threshing stick still claggy with the stockholm tar used to seal cuts on the sheep’s feet. Until he stopped, and withdrew into himself for fear of touching what might lie in that world of darkness just beyond his skin.
And it had ears. There were flutterings and scratchings from the rafters. That may be the screech owl coming in through the hole in the thatch to hunt for mice, or the earliest of the swallows collecting mud for its nest. It may even be the bats swooping for moths as they did on mild nights, although there was no squealing sound like a soul in torment, as the bat was wont to make.
But it may be Robin Goodfellow or some fairy bent upon that mischief that is cloaked by darkness and is discovered at daybreak in upturned churns and broken vessels, if no food or drink is left for their provision. No matter that Alice Martlew and those others who, unlike his parents, believed in the little folk, went in fear only of their knocking over pails or stealing milk, or that he was eight years old, and could not now be taken to the fairy kingdom, and a weak and sickly changeling put in his stead. It was fairy form and not the moonlike face of the owl he imagined when he heard the beatings of wings.
Or, worse than all, it may be spirits. Old Tom knew such as haunted his barn; a choleric fellow dressed in white who would pluck him by the sleeve, crave his pardon, and beg that someone called Joshua who no-one knew, arrange masses for his soul undergoing the torments of purgatory. There were other such as were talked of coming back to avenge some foul deed. His father and mother would have been angry if they knew he harboured such conceits, since they had no belief in Purgatory, and told him that fairies and such like were devices whereby the Papists (those outside his own family) deceived the people.
So he sat, back propped against a stack of cornsacks, while the night’s chill seeped into his young bones, and he did not know whether the chattering of his teeth was for very fear or simple cold. He made of himself stone, a tensed thing that durst not stir for fear of what may lie a finger’s length from his face.
But this was not the beginning of his fear. Where does a life begin? Not when you are born, but when your memories are born. It seemed to him thereafter, howsoever earlier memories may surface unbidden, like bubbles on a stream above a pike, that his earliest memory was of the coming of the sheriff’s officer and his men at arms three weeks before. It was as if his terror had gotten a hold of his muling, insensate self, and slapped it into life.
They had come to the farm and searched the house, turning out the chest and emptying the cupboard, and taken his father and mother away to gaol in Radthorpe. The leader of these men, with a close-shaven face and taut hips that made his stiff long legs move like compasses measuring out their property, asked them in a lispy voice, to confirm who they were, then withdrew a paper from his scrip and read to them, saying he had come in pursuance of the Queen’s writ, to weed out heresy as required by the law of man and of God. He was to take them to Beccles that they may be given in charge to be examined by His Grace the Bishop of Norwich’s Chancellor. The boy did not understand the words, but he understood the anger of the men, who shouted much and used strange words like ‘heretic’ and ‘sacramentary.’
His father and mother offered no resistance. His father straightened a back that was often bent with pain, and followed at the rough promptings of the men, shoved from one to the other. His mother, treated more gently with the respect due to her sex, gazed at him with tear-stained eyes and bade him go stay with Mistress Goodwin for the nonce, and he would soon be able to come to them. But he refused to go, dragged at her skirts, felt a last caress of her hand on his cheek, and then commenced beating at the hose and slop breeches of the man leading her.
“It is God’s will, my son,” his father said. “Do as your mother asks. All will be well, depend upon it.”
And he was left lying in the dust as the three men with cruel strides led his hobbled elders up the path to the high road where stood a horse and cart.
The boy’s name was John Elliot. He would say in later years that, if naught else, they left him the name his parents gave him. That was untrue. They left him also with the locks of hair his father and mother had severed from one another using the knife of a sympathetic guard, and their matching silver rings. His father’s English psalter had likewise been left for him with Mistress Field, but they had discovered it and thrown it on the fire. The hair was kept in his mother’s jewel casket, a poor thing of pewter, decorated about the lid with sea shells. His father’s hair was matted and twisted, coarse as a nag’s tail, his mother’s, fair as a moonlit stream, finer and more delicate. The ends of both were frayed, and bore, it seemed, even beyond those marks of rough hewing, those of pain and anguish.
His chest heaved with sobs like a cart horse’s withers as it strained to the pull of the wain. His throat was raw. But he no longer screamed. His screams had died with the light. The light from that lanthorn that had dazzled his sleep-sotted eyes as Master Goodwin dragged him from his bed and bade him get dressed, batting away his questions with a husky
“Never you mind lad.”
Then he was marched downstairs. He stared at Mistress Goodwin, ghostly in her shift with shawl wrapped round her shoulders, watching from the stair’s foot. And when the light sheared across her face he could see there were tears.
“Get the vittles!” her husband snapped.
And with the opening of the door and the sight of that lady’s tears his fears came rushing upon him like a river in spate, and he tried to pull free. But Master Goodwin had his hand clamped over his forearm. He wrestled and clawed at his captor’s hand, his anxiety increasing the more when he saw he was bound for the barn. Mistress Goodwin shuffled after.
The barn door was hauled open.
“You must bide there. ‘Tis only for the one night.”
Goodwin dragged him inside and his wife handed him a cup of march beer and some frumenty in a wooden bowl. But not so much as a rush light for his companion. And as the light receded and the door was drawn to, Mistress Goodwin’s cheeks were glistening with tears that were like the tracks of snails on a damp autumn morning.
At first he beat upon the door, screamed, lay his eye to the crack, but once the house door was closed on the swinging lanthorn, there was only dark. He could feel the blood drawn from his knuckles by the frayed wood, and lay down upon the cornsacks, sobbing and sucking at the coppery life stream.
He had never been afraid of the dark. What he had been afraid of were shadows. As they had gathered about the candle when his father read from the testament, those black hobbled monstrous forms ballooned over their wall as if listening to every word. He could not but believe those shadows were monsters that haunted this world and none but he could see.
His father tried to allay his fears by explaining that they were nothing more than the places the light could not reach. But that was still more terrifying. The light was good, the light was God’s word. If there were shadows, then there must be places where God’s word could not reach; places where there was no light, holes in the world into which anyone, particularly a boy, might fall and never come out again. And mayhap he was now in such a hole, beyond reach of his parent’s love, of all light, and all sense.
His terror kept him awake for a long time, and when sleep eventually overcame him, stilling the throbbing in his chest, it was a fitful thing, of more labour than wakefulness. Time and again he was started awake by a tickling of tiny feet across his hands or felt through his kersey stockings. It was no more than rats or mice, but each time his heart leapt and his mind saw unbidden the tiny legs and green-clothed feet of Robin Goodfellow going about his mischievous business. The call of the screech owl, the barking of a fox, conjured for his mind some spirit in animal form searching for abandoned souls to augment its store.
When he awoke for the umpteenth time a pale light was filtering through the crack in the barn door, almost at floor level. He could see nothing of the barn’s interior save for a small patch of earth, the upturned bowl and spilt grains. The darkness that hung from the rafters still weighed him down. But it was a joy to see the light. He lay down and put his face on the beaten earth and felt the light play on his cheek.
After a while he rose, took up the threshing stick and commenced banging on the door, holding the stick by its handle so that...
