I have a visitor, John Feckenham, whose idolatry is proclaimed by his long cream-colored woolen robe, tied at the waist with a leather thong, and a white hood that he pushes back from his square flushed face. A Benedictine monk, come to visit me, poor fool.
He catches his breath from the climb up the stairs to my rooms. “Steep,” he manages, gasping, and then ducks his head in a bow. “Lady Dudley, I’ve come to talk with you, if you’ll have me.” He has a strong accent, like a butcher or a dairyman, nothing like the refined accent of my Cambridge-educated tutors. It makes me smile, as if the cowman was preaching.
“I have no need of guidance from a blind man in darkness,” I say quietly.
“I have weighty news for you.” Indeed, he looks quite bowed down with whatever he has to tell me. I think of my father, on his way to me now, at the head of his army, and I know a clutch of fear in my tender belly. I hope that nothing has gone wrong. But surely, if something had gone wrong, they would not send a strange heretical priest to tell me? A fat heretical priest with a round face and an uncouth accent? It is to insult me.
“Who has told you to give me this news?” I ask. “Who burdened you, a heavy man, with such weighty news?”
He sighs again, as if he is sad as well as blown. “I’m not here to chop logic with you,” he says. “The council commanded me to give you the news and the queen herself has ordered me to free you from the superstition in which you have grown up.”
“To free me from the superstition in which I have grown up?” I repeat coldly.
“Yes.”
“How long do you have?” I force a laugh.
“Not long,” he says very quietly. “They have confirmed your sentence of death. I am so sorry. You are to be beheaded tomorrow. We don’t have long at all, Lady Dudley.”
I feel as if I am struck dead by the very words. I can’t breathe; my belly, always quivering with flux, goes suddenly still. I dare say that my heart ceases to beat. “What? What did you say?”
“I am truly sorry, my child,” he says gently.
I look into his broad flushed face. “What?”
“You and your husband, Guildford Dudley, are to be executed. Tomorrow.”
I see that he has tears in his eyes. The tears, and his awkwardness, his flushed face, his stertorous breathing, convince me more than his words.
“When did you say? When?”
“Tomorrow,” he says quietly. “May I talk with you about your immortal soul?”
“Oh, it’s too late for that,” I say. I cannot think straight; there is a noise in my ears and I realize it is the rapid thudding of my heart. “Oh, there’s not enough time to attend to so many things. I did not think . . . I did not think . . .” In truth, I did not think that the queen my cousin would turn vulture; but I see that her false religion has driven her mad, as it does so many.
“I could ask them to give me more time to wrestle with your soul,” he says hopefully. “If I could tell them that we were talking. If I could assure them that you might repent.”
“Yes,” I say. “All right.” Even a day may give my father time to get to me. I must stay alive so that he can rescue me. Every day he comes closer, I know it. He will not fail me; I must not fail him. Even now he may be fighting a battle south of the river. I must be here when he crosses the bridge.