Christopher touched my arm. ‘That’s him, that’s your man.’
I gave the word to one of the searchers and we hid behind the netting sheds while Gifford was arrested. He was to be taken under military guard to London for interrogation. Our task accomplished, we left the soldiers to it and spent a final night in the Mermaid, with a fine mutton pie. I do remember what we talked about during that dinner, however.
It began with him saying, ‘Can you remember why Judas did it?’
He spoke as if we’d just been discussing Judas. But we hadn’t, not since Christopher’s mention of him at the time of the Lyford Grange affair. ‘Of course. For thirty pieces of silver.’
He shook his head. ‘You’re no better than the Papists, you don’t know your Bible. You should study more. Do you not recall what Mark says? He says that while Jesus and the disciples sat at meat at the house of Simon the leper a woman came and anointed Jesus with spikenard, a very precious ointment. And the disciples were indignant at the waste, pointing out that the ointment could have been sold and the money given to the poor. But Jesus rebuked them, saying, “For ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good; but me ye have not always.” Immediately after that Judas went to the Pharisees and offered up Jesus. He accepted the thirty pieces of silver they give him but clearly that’s not really why he did it. He did it because of Jesus’s self-aggrandisement, His intoxication with Himself and His mission, contrary to the message He had been preaching about relieving suffering and helping the poor. Contrary, too, to His insistence on poverty for His disciples, that they must give up all they have to follow Him. He had grown above Himself. He was becoming a Caesar.’
Blasphemy shocked me in those days. I urged him to quieten himself lest we both find ourselves at the stake. It was especially shocking that he smiled, as if it were all a joke. But he would not be quiet. ‘Then, of course, Judas betrayed him with a kiss, he was seized and as he was taken away a young man followed, wearing only a linen cloth. They seized him too but he escaped and ran away naked, leaving his linen cloth behind. Unlike our man today, who had no such enthusiastic followers and no chance to run away, thanks to us. What do you think these details mean, why does Mark give them?’ He drank his beer, keeping his eyes on mine.
‘I don’t know. Anyway, Judas hanged himself.’
‘Indeed he did. But only after returning the money. What does that tell us?’
‘That he felt guilty.’
‘For betraying his friend or for taking money for it?’
‘Both, surely.’
‘And what if he hadn’t felt guilty? What would he have done then?’
‘Kept the money and spent it.’
‘In which case he’d have deserved to hang, having betrayed Jesus for his own greed. But it wasn’t greed, was it? He returned the money. The reason he betrayed Jesus was surely Jesus’s own self-aggrandisement.’
‘You should be a preacher, Christopher. But you couldn’t preach that. You’d be burned for it.’
He smiled again. ‘You wouldn’t like anything I’d preach. No one would.’
I was troubled by that. I had inklings of what he was getting at, of course, but openly free-thinking, atheistical speculation was something I had never encountered. Heresies I knew about, and various perversions of the gospel truth, but this was different. It continued to trouble me and during our long ride back to London I spoke of it again. ‘You seem obsessed by Judas. Do you fear that in what you do for us you resemble him? Even though you agree that we rightly protect the true Godly religion and the security of the state? You don’t disagree with that?’
‘But that’s just how Judas would have thought, minus the security of the state. He must have thought he was acting to save the true Godly religion. He’d have said he joined the movement to help the poor, which is true to Old Testament teaching, and because he believed Jesus when He said that heaven was at hand. Instead of which He who proclaimed Himself the Son of God was now betraying the poor through His extravagance and self-glorification.’
‘But something must trouble you about Judas. You mention him often.’
We were approaching Sevenoaks and the chimneys of the great house of Knole had just come into view. ‘What troubles me is not that people might compare me with Judas,’ he said. ‘I doubt the comparison occurs to anyone but me and even I don’t find it close enough to worry about. Unless I’ve betrayed Jesus without knowing it?’ He shook his head and continued slowly. ‘No, what troubles me is something closer to home, something of myself.’
‘What?’
‘What’s that?’
We stopped. We had almost crested the wooded hill leading up to Sevenoaks when from the trees to our right came a sudden wailing, a girl’s voice begging and pleading. There was a track leading into the trees and Christopher, without waiting for me, prodded his horse along it. I followed and soon we rounded a bend to see a rough-looking fellow wearing a torn jerkin dragging a young girl by her hair. She stumbled behind him, bent low, fighting, struggling and screaming, clutching alternately at her hair and at passing bushes and branches. She had dirty bare feet and wore sackcloth that had seen better days. The only word I could make out from her screaming was ‘home’, which she kept repeating. Christopher halted his horse, handed the reins to me and leapt from it, making for the man. As he ran he hitched his knife from the back of his belt to the front.
Seeing us, the man stopped and turned, still holding the girl by her long brown hair. She had quietened but remained bent double because
