The rain made the April air cold. Water ran in ripples down the path that led to the church with a crucifix hoisted above the door, Christ’s bleeding arms outstretched as thunder punctuated the voices of men digging with shovels. The despised Grimbald stood to their right, his candlebox giving them a palsied light as they worked. The rain had let up enough that the flame was in no danger.
She saw they had kicked over the headstone, dragging it away and throwing the dirt over it as they worked. She heard the shovel strike wood and the men growl with pleasure. They dropped ropes to a boy, who shimmied through the mud to the coffin and worked to secure the ropes around each end.
She crept closer to watch, careful to let the trees shield her in her shame. Blood had clotted on the underside of her dress, soaking through to the final outer layer of the skirt. The rain had dispensed with it well enough, but he would get no further remembrance of her body. She cursed her body, and the rain, for soiling the last thing on earth she had. The dress was blue silk, an illicit treasure she had found in an untended parcel outside a gentleman’s house. Silk was forbidden for her class to wear, so she found the courage to wear it only on her worst days. Some woman had a beautiful life; this dress was its proof. As she slid into a stranger’s dress, she willed that woman’s good fortune to befall her.
One man wore the robes of a statesman: golden damask and linen, with an ermine collar around his cloak that she could smell from where she was. The rain was unkind to the rich and poor alike, for it made the poor cold and the rich stink.
Another man wore scarlet robes of a thickly done fabric, with a gold chain looping at his neck and a cross swinging from his breast—a cardinal from the church. She recognized him, her knees going soft, sinking her into the buried memories. She remembered the last time she saw him as he proceeded down the London streets, boys carrying gilded silver crosses running ahead and children begging alms running behind. He would always stare straight ahead, oblivious to both cross and hunger. But she knew his secret.
He commanded the men at their work, simple men from nearby, probably Southwark, who had no qualms about raising a man if it meant they drank well later. One man jammed an iron into the casket, prying it open. The cardinal peered into it, shoulder to shoulder with the statesman. They looked at each other and conversed.
“Set a stake.”
The boy ran to fetch the stake as the diggers pierced the earth, rending a deep hole to set the stake in, filling it back with dirt and rocks, testing the stake to see if it would hold the body. Grimbald hauled chains to the foot of the stake and waited while the men lifted the man from the coffin. She watched in horror as a priest, dead and limp, rose in front of her from the dark pit where death’s seal had been broken. His priestly robes were rotted, hanging in loose shreds, some staining making the holy inscriptions unreadable. His eye sockets were sunken and black, and his mouth hung open stiffly, as if he had one last word to preach.
The statesman and cardinal motioned for them to stop, and approached.
“The knife,” the statesman said, his palm extended to the cardinal.
The cardinal hesitated, then produced a knife from his cloak and laid it across the open palm. “Sir Thomas,” he replied, looking as if the knife was as foul as the corpse.
He obviously had no appetite for this work. But Sir Thomas did. He licked his lips and breathed on the knife, rubbing it on his robes so it flashed like lightning before it struck.
“Ecclesia non novit sanguinem,” More said. He walked to the body, kneeling before it, stroking the face with the blade. “‘Now also is the axe laid unto the root of the trees: so that every tree which bringeth forth not good fruit, shall be hewn down, and cast into the fire.’”
He plunged the knife parallel to the body and up, slicing the holy robes off, tossing them into a pile behind him. He grabbed the hat that had identified the man as a priest of God and jerked it away with such force that the head turned almost backward.
The corpse’s open mouth faced her, as if his last words were for her. She narrowed her eyes and felt hate. She would not forgive a priest.
He took the knife and lifted the head closer. Cradling the head in one of his arms as if the man were a fallen friend, he dragged the knife across the rotting flesh of the skull, scraping clean hair and bits of skin. He dropped the head, and it made a sucking thud as it hit the wet earth. Next he lifted the dead man’s fingers, scraping the knife against each one.
“You have betrayed the anointing of your office, and it is removed.” Sir Thomas stood.
She bowed her head. God’s punishment had found this man only in death. She feared her own would be slow in coming too. She wanted it now.
“Come brothers, good men of God, and curse this heretic! Send him to hell that he may trouble us no more!”
The men came round and mumbled uncertain words, until More shouted above them: “Poena Damni. You are sentenced to the eternal night, where their worm does not die and the fire does not go out.”
All spit on the dead man, and the boy darted in to secure the body to the stake with the irons. They stacked bundles of wood and kindling against the base, building up until the wood touched the man’s breast.
“The rain has stopped that we may finish the work,” More said. “God be praised.”
Grimbald, the parish priest who had betrayed her, took the sinking candle from its box and set the wood on fire. It snapped from branch to branch, consuming the body with great speed, death having drained it of much fluid by this night.
No one spoke as they watched the body sag into the flames and disappear.
When the flames began to concentrate their efforts at the base of the stake, they knew the body was no more. More grabbed the iron and ran it into the fire, over and over, until it hit upon what he wanted. He withdrew it, the skull sticking to one end. He crushed it under his boot with a fierce strike, grinding it down, grunting as it resisted in places.
“Boy.”
The boy ran to him.
“Scrape the shards into a bucket and dump them into the river. Do not wait for morning. The rain may grow heavy again.”
“Sir Thomas?” the boy asked.
More beckoned him closer and knelt to hear him. “You have done well tonight, my friend.” He touched the boy’s cheek. “You will make your father proud.” He slipped the boy a thick silver groat as payment.
“But Sir Thomas,” the boy asked, “what was his crime?”
More smiled. “Throwing pearls to pigs.”
The boy ran off to complete his work. While the men moved to gather their supplies and disperse, the cardinal and More began discussing something quietly between them that she couldn’t hear from her hiding place. They were walking to their horses and mounting as a new slate of rain broke above them.
His words displaced her cold repulsion with another grief, a slow, sinking guilt. His words forced themselves down her throat so that she gagged, grasped her neck, and fell to her knees. Guilt swarmed in her roiling stomach as a thousand accusations worked their way into her blood. She retched as she forced herself to her knees and to stand.
She timed it just right, staggering onto the path in front of the men on horseback, who with a smart spur had forced the horses into a dead run to beat the returning rain. She wore her best gown for this moment. Bloodstained and broken, she lurched onto the path, lifting her arms to embrace the relief of her death, lifting her angry face to heaven as the horses bore down, their hooves lifting to strike the beautiful blow. She wanted to die here, where the bleeding Christ and His cardinal would both be witnesses, and see what their work had accomplished.
Swift arms encircled her, lowering her to the ground as the hooves thundered all around her head. He lay upon her, absorbing the strikes on his back, his tears washing hers away….
When she awoke she tasted her lips. They had the taste of another’s tears, and she could smell her son again.
I stopped him there. He was ready to turn the page.
“Wait!”
He raised his metallic eyes and looked at me.
“Whose arms? Did he die when the horses hit him? Why could she smell her son? Why did they burn a dead priest?”
He began to turn the page again. “I tell this story as I choose.”
“I’ll write it as I please! Haven’t you ever heard the law of Chekov’s Gun? ‘If you plant a gun in the first act, it better go off in the third.’ I’m telling you, readers will spend the rest of the story wondering who those arms were attached to, so you better tell them, or just leave that part out. I’m not going to write a sloppy book.”
“You’re going to write the truth,” he replied. “Do you like fish?”