once, and then to Brother Joseph; leaning upright, eyes frightened and wild, gripping the boy’s wrist. ‘I enjoyed it, Brother,’ he whispered. ‘God and the Saints preserve me, / enjoyed my work….’Joseph tried to calm him, but to no avail. A month passed before he rose and dressed himself. He had taken little food; he was thin now to the point of gauntness and his eyes were feverishly bright. He put himself to work on the litho presses; Master Albrecht chided, but he was ignored. John toiled all day, through the lunchtime break, through supper and the vesper bell. Night and the moon found him still working, inking the stone he could no longer see, swabbing, dropping the tympan, hauling the spokes of the wheel, lowering the bed, inking, dropping the tympan… Brother Joseph stayed with him a time, watching huddled in the shadows; then he too left, appalled by something he couldn’t understand.
It was early morning before John faltered in his penance. He stood slightly bowed, a dark shape outlined by a sheen of moonlight, listening, screwing his face as if trying to catch the echoes from some noise outside the range of human ears. Whimperings came from him; he staggered like a drunken man to the middle of the floor, dropped prone with arms outstretched. Over him a rooflight rattled in a sudden wind; he sat up, glared round straining for the sound, if it was a sound, he’d heard. It was then he suffered the first of the visions or hallucinations that were to haunt him for the rest of his days. Its onset was a quick thudding, like a drum rushing at night over a great tract of land. The room darkened, then glowed. John babbled, clawed at his face and tried to pray.
There had been a country girl at Dubris, a pretty wench whose crime, monstrous and unnatural, had been the receiving of an incubus. Her they released, finally; but before they let her go they clipped the fingers from one small paw, and gave them to her in a cloth. Brother John saw her again, clear in the moonlight. She passed across the room, mewing and dissatisfied; and after her traipsed the host of horrors, the cut legs and arms, the severed heads, the bodies broken on the wheel, pierced and burned by the hot iron chairs. A bawling came from them and a howling, a lowing like the noise of the ghosts of cows, a dead-bird chittering, a crying, a wanting… John’s face suffused; round him lights shone, the wheels of the presses seemed to spin like dark-spoked suns. He was assaulted by thunders and strange rattlings; his eyes rolled upward; disclosing the whites; he hammered at the floor with his fists, cried out and lay still.
In the morning the Brothers, not finding him in his cell, searched the workshops. Then the whole monastery, then its grounds. But it was useless; Brother John had gone.
His Eminence the Cardinal Archbishop of Londinium sighed heavily, rubbed his chin, yawned, and took a turn up and down the office from his desk to the windows that looked down on the grounds of the Episcopal Palace. He stood at the windows awhile, hands clasped behind him, chin sunk on his chest. The gardens were alive with colour now, with lilies and delphiniums and the newest McCredy roses; His Eminence was a gourmet in all things temporal. His eyes saw the display vaguely, and the fishponds beyond where aged carp rose to the tinkling of a handbell. Beyond the ponds again, beyond the herb gardens with their twisting paved walks, was the outer wall. Over it, gloomily, rose the slab side and lines of windows of the prison-like College of Signallers. Noises from Londinium’s maze of streets reached the study faintly; cries of hawkers, rumble and crash of waggon wheels, from somewhere the pealing of bells. The mind of His Eminence noted the sounds automatically; he pursed his lips, following his own tortuous and none too pleasant train of thought.
He returned slowly to his desk. On it, an open file disgorged a small flood of papers. He picked one up, frowning. Under the formal heading and more formal speech the rage of a pious and honest man was very plain.
My Lord,
May I crave the indulgence of Your Eminence to bring to your notice a matter of the most heinous and appalling nature; the torture, the agony, the foul indignities visited, in the name of the Christos, on the people of this my diocese. On the poor and the infirm, the aged and the simple of mind… on children and old men in their dotage, on mothers big with child… on parents by their daughters and sons, on husbands by their wives; I can, My Lord, hold peace no longer in the face of iniquity, of horror - His Eminence detected an error in the rush of Latin; his red fountain pen, irritably and automatically, made an erasure - horror such as has been perpetrated on us in this loyal, this ancient, and this blameless town. On the innocent and the foolish, on the helpless subjects of a Church and of a God professing love, and charity, and enlightenment… This madman, this desecrator of decency, and his so-called Spiritual Court…
The Cardinal flicked the pages to the signature and shook his head. Bishop Loudain of Dubris was a bold man but a foolish one; the letter alone, placed in the proper hands, would have secured for His Grace an interlude with those very gresillons of which he so ardently complained. The thing reeked of heresy…
The Cardinal lifted the document carefully with his fingertips and redeposited it in its file. He picked up another, terser and to the point, from the commander of the garrison stationed at Durnovaria.
…the renegade known to the people as Brother John continues to evade our forces. Riots stemming directly from the teaching of him and of his followers have lately broken out in Sherborne, Sturminster, Newton, Shaftesbury, Blandford, and Durnovaria itself. The people, attributing his escapes from our troops to miraculous intervention, become daily more difficult to control. I most earnestly request the release of a further troop of horse with a minimum of four hundred infantry and appropriate arms and stores, for the purpose of searching the region from Beaminster to Yeovil where it is currently believed the insurgents are quartered. Their strength is now estimated at between fifty and a hundred; they are well armed, and have an intimate knowledge’of the local terrain. Attempts to run them down employing normal methods of approach have repeatedly proved useless…
His Eminence dropped the letter impatiently. That and a dozen more like it had prompted his own formal document of excommunication. Sentence had been passed on Brother John six months ago; but it would seem the disavowal of the Church and the consequent damnation of his soul had had little effect. His followers had in fact been fired to greater excesses; a detachment of two dozen horse pulled down and massacred in broad daylight, their arms and equipment stolen; a Captain of the Roman Dragoons set on and beaten, sent cantering into Durnovaria with insulting messages pinned to his tunic; the Pope burned in effigy at Woodhenge and Badbury Rings. The Cardinal was only too uncomfortably aware of the dangers inherent in martyrdom; he would have preferred to ignore John altogether, let the whole wretched business die a natural death, but his hand was being forced.
He turned to the brief account of the rebel’s life and accomplishments, brought to Londinium at his request by an unusually subdued Adhelmian whose ears His Eminence would very much have liked to send back to Father Meredith on a plate for letting his confounded people get so far out of hand in the first place. The Adhelmians, admittedly through no fault of their own, were rapidly becoming the leitmotif of a new and disquieting popular movement. The resurging power of Anglicanism fed on such relics of ancient worship; for had not Saint Adhelm himself converted vast stretches of the country to the Faith centuries before the clergy flocking in at the heels of the conquering Normans restored Britain to the rule of Rome? The Anglican Communion had been a historic fact, however strenuously the Church tried to deny it, and the case for it could still be made out. Many years had elapsed too between Henry’s abolition of Papal rule and the excommunication of Elizabeth, years in which the English Church had presumably coexisted in a state of Grace. Greasy apologetics maybe, but dangerous ideas to let loose among a population lacking in general the fine points of theological instruction. The old cry of the Church, to submit and to adore, was no longer enough; the people were. being tempted once more to set up their own spiritual hierarchy, and John or some such figure was tailor-made to head it.
The renegade then had attended the last sitting of the Court of Spiritual Welfare; that, thought His Eminence as he reread facts already learned by heart, was clearly the beginning of the whole ridiculous affair. He shook his head. How explain? How quiet the rage of a man like Loudain with figures and facts, political argument? His Eminence shrugged tiredly. In the history of the world, there had been no power like the power of the second Rome. To hold half a planet in the cup of your hands; to juggle, to balance one against the next forces nearly beyond the mind of man to grasp…
The rage of nations was like the anger of the sea, not to be contained with straws. Anglicanism had torn the country once, the history of it was all there in the great books that lined the study walls. Then, England had glowed from her Cornish toe to her Pennine spine with the light of the auto-da-fe. Against that set a little pain, a little blood, soon gone and nearly as soon forgotten; that, and the mighty wisdom of the Church.
Once too often, mused the Cardinal; the goad, the threat of hellfire, applied instead of the lure of the Kingdom of Love… Father Hieronymous, mad as he undoubtedly was, had been useful in the past; but this time his
