Removing the gold cross and beads from about her neck, she asked Bull whether she might be allowed to give it to her maid and that he would be paid more than their value in gold. He shook his head and prized the crucifix from her fingers, placing it in his shoe for safekeeping. Then he took her ivory cross, too, and her rosary and handed them to Picket.
Unbidden, as if suddenly deciding she wanted no more delay to the proceedings, Mary gestured to her ladies and one of them bound her eyes with her kerchief, with a knot at her neck, a target for the axe. She stretched forward and rested her chin on her hands, over the edge of the block. Bull nodded to Picket, who stepped forward and pulled her hands away so that her arms stretched out in front of her, held gently in his.
She was speaking now, Latin once more, first a psalm and then, over and over, she commended her soul to God’s hands: “In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum.”
Bull raised the heavy, double-edged axe high above his head. It hovered there, at the top of its swing, for an eternity, then fell in a great arc into the back of her skull. The sound of sharp steel cracking bone, like the thud of the butcher’s cleaver, shattered the silence. Bull looked down through the slits in his mask at the gory mess below. Shit, he’d missed her neck. Quickly, he raised the axe again and brought it down once more. This time his aim was true and the blood spurted forth in a fountain.
He knelt down beside her to reach into the gore to pick up her severed head but saw that it still wasn’t severed. Gristly tendons still attached it to the body. With the edge of his axe he sawed through them, then clasped his blood-greasy left hand around her hair and held it up high for all to see.
“This is the head of Mary Stuart!” he bellowed. Only it wasn’t; it was her auburn wig. Her head, all gray and shaven, had rolled forward across the platform. Luckily, no one could see behind his mask, for now he closed his eyes in the closest thing Simon Bull ever came to embarrassment. At last he remembered his lines and took a deep breath. “God save the Queen,” he said with conviction.
It had been a bad day for Simon Bull and it got worse. As they were clearing up and stripping the body, the clothes were taken from him to be burned. He was deprived, too, of the crosses and beads he had taken from her. Walsingham would decide what would happen to them in due course. When Bull, feeling cheated, protested that the effects were his right to keep, someone muttered about “not having any relics left to make a martyr of that bloody woman.”
Finally, there was the dog, a little terrier, all spattered with gore, that scuttled out from the dead woman’s clothes as they were cut from her body to be taken outside and burned in the courtyard. Picket’s eyes lighted on it first and his masked face broke into a smile. “Hello,” he said, lifting it up.
“Put it down,” Bull said sullenly. “If we can’t keep a cross, they won’t let us keep a dog, will they?”
Reluctantly, Denis Picket put the dog down and it ran, whimpering, to the now naked corpse of its mistress. Picket eyed it with something akin to yearning. “You know that mastiff I was telling you about, Mr. Bull? I couldn’t kill it. Still got him at home and a fine creature he is. I call him Bully, after you-”
“Well, then, Denis, you should have called him Mr. Bull, shouldn’t you, lad?”
“You’re right, Mr. Bull, I’ll do that. From now on, I’ll call him Mr. Bull.”
Chapter 15
Bonfireslit the damp night sky. on every street corner and in every tavern, minstrels played merry tunes and people braved the rain to dance, drink, and rejoice. The murdering, adulterous witch of Scotland was dead. After nineteen long years, England was free of her malign presence. By midnight, the pitch black sky was howling, the flames of the bonfires fanned into a firestorm before finally dying down to sodden embers in the early hours when the revelers sank, drunk, into their beds.
Thomas Woode was shaking. While others sang and danced and drank, he sat alone at his table. And when the rest of London was snoring, he stayed awake. He had bitten the last of his nails to the quick and was now nicking pieces of the hard, stubby flesh at the end of each finger. In the gray rain of dawn, his white teeth glimmered in the light of three good beeswax candles, each burnt down to an inch. Their flames flickered and leapt briskly in the drafts that rushed up from the river and in through the gaps at the edge of the leaded lights in his private office in Dowgate. Rain slapped at the window in squally gusts.
This night past he had done without a fire; it would have been improper for him to have warmth when the butchered body of Mary Stuart lay cold in a box. He tore off his ruff and hurled it across the room. He picked up a quill, sliced the tip with his desk knife, and dipped it in the inkhorn. Hurriedly he wrote onto a scrap of parchment, then scratched the words out again. He needed to compose a business letter to Christophe Plantin in the Gulden Passer, the great Antwerp printers and bookworks where so much of his own wealth emanated. The words would not come. He was bone-tired; this was not a time for mundane business dealings.
He heard a scurry, a knock at the oak door. “Come in.”
It was the governess, Catherine Marvell. Woode was wealthy, a merchant of the class that now owned London, but he did not keep a big household. It simply wasn’t safe to do so; not with his secrets. Maidservants came in during the day to see to the housework and cooking, as did carpenters and masons for the construction, but at night it was just him, Catherine, the children, and their two guests, the Jesuit priests Cotton and Herrick, who wore the clothes of serving men in case anyone should call on the house. It was their presence that endangered his family.
Thomas Woode knew that everyone in the house was in mortal danger, and it troubled him. Harboring priests sent from abroad amounted to treason in the eyes of the law. London was full of spies and betrayers who could track the priests here at any time and inform the heavy-booted pursuivants of their whereabouts. But Thomas Woode was obligated to accommodate these men; it had been his wife Margaret’s dying wish that he bring up their children in the true faith. They needed instruction and they must hear the Mass regularly. Margaret also wished him to support the persecuted Church in whatever way he could. He had agreed to her requests because he loved her and because she was dying. How could he refuse her in such circumstances? Yet he regretted it every day. He would never have taken this path of his own accord. There were times, if truth be told, when he doubted his own belief in God.
There were practicalities to be observed. Yes, Cotton and Herrick could come and go as they pleased; when they went out they would wear the garb of tradesmen or gentlemen. When they were at home, they remained hidden by day. Only by night, when the household staff had gone home, did the priests venture out of the room they shared to eat and converse with the family, dressing as servants.
“Catherine, it is good to see you.”
“Master.”
“A sad day.”
“Yes, master.”
“We must take comfort in the certain knowledge that she is in a better place.”
Thomas Woode had never met Mary Stuart, yet he had revered her. Yes, his faith sometimes faltered, yet he was certain that if there were to be a religion, the Roman Church of Mary was the only possible way; he saw the Anglican church of Elizabeth and her ministers as a sacrilegious imposter, a false religion, a manifestation of power rather than spirituality. When he imagined Mary of Scots, he pictured her with the face of his late beloved wife. He smiled wanly at Catherine. “These are bad days. The people sing and dance, but the ports have all been closed down and the prisons shut to all but official visitors. Pursuivants march the streets, searching and questioning anyone they don’t like the look of. Even the ordinary people play their role, pelting stones at anyone they take to be foreign.”
Catherine’s dark hair hung in soft waves. The shrug of her shoulders was almost imperceptible. “Well then, let us stay strong.”
Woode found her a strange creature; the fire in her belly was most uncommon in a young woman. While he was mourning a queen others reviled and grieving for the future of this and every Catholic family in the land, Catherine spoke of strength. And he had to concede that she was strong. Her strength had helped bring new life back to this family since the dark days following Margaret’s death. The children had grown to love her.
“How is the boy?”
“Making mischief as ever,” Catherine answered. “The fever has subsided. It was nought but a winter
