London - Edward Rutherfurd [319]
They had been there several minutes before Peter broke the news. “I have taken the oath.”
Rowland had not known. He had seen no one except a guard with some food in the last two days. Yet, shocked though he was, after seeming to droop for a moment or two, his reaction was rather unexpected. Gazing earnestly at Peter he said gently: “Was it so terrible for you, too?”
“Do you wish to do the same?” Thomas asked him. “I do not think it can save you, but,” glancing at Peter, “with Peter here having done so too, it might soften the king’s mood. I could try.”
Though he paused for thought, Rowland did not do so for long. “No,” he said at last. “I could not take it then; I cannot now.”
Peter drew out from under his cassock a little flask of wine and then, with a smile, three little beakers. A little shakily he poured out wine, fumbling slightly with one of the beakers. Managing to control his shaking hand well enough he passed them to Rowland and Thomas.
“In my state of health,” he said gently, “I am not sure that we shall meet again on earth, Rowland. So let us drink together one last time.” He looked carefully at Rowland, then. “Remember in your hour of agony,” he said softly, “you who are more to me than even a brother, it was you, not I, who truly earned a martyr’s crown.”
They drank, and waited a while, saying nothing more. Then Peter and Thomas Meredith rose up, and did what they had come to do.
Darkness had fallen by the time Dan and Thomas departed with the monk. It was not only sickness but the emotion of this final parting that had suddenly overcome him, for now, unable even to walk properly, he was practically a dead weight between them as they made their way back, very slowly, towards the gate. Seeing Thomas, the guards not only opened the gate but helped them get the monk up into the cart. Once this was done, assuring Thomas that he could manage, Dan drove slowly away to return to the Charterhouse, while the courtier turned round.
“A sad night,” he remarked to the yeoman warder in charge of the gate, who nodded his head in quiet agreement. “I shall return and sit with poor Bull a little longer,” Thomas told him. “He looks almost as ill as the monk.” And he walked slowly and thoughtfully back.
All was still in the Tower that night. Prisoners, custodians, even the ravens were asleep. The grey stone walls and turrets loomed blankly out of the shadows, apparently sightless in the starlight – except for a single faint glow, from the window of one cell, dimly lit by a candle, where two men still remained, keeping watch together. When once the guard looked in, he saw that Thomas was sitting gloomily on the bench while the lawyer, kneeling by the window, was softly murmuring his prayers.
Thomas did not interrupt, though the prayers were long. As he waited, he went over his conversation with his brother three days before. How brave and yet how uncertain the priest had been, in what agony of spirit. “I am denying the Church two martyrs,” he had confessed, “if we do this thing. Perhaps,” he had sadly remarked, “I shall lose my soul.”
Yet surely, Thomas thought, Rowland had offered himself for martyrdom: wasn’t that the same? As for Peter, what name did one give the sacrifice, he wondered, of a man prepared to lay down not only his life, but even his immortal soul for his friend?
But now the figure by the window rose from his knees and, with a nod to Thomas, lay on the bed. It was the moment Thomas had dreaded, the thing he had said he could not do.
“You must,” the figure on the bed said softly. “We have to be sure.”
Taking a blanket, therefore, Thomas went across to the bed, put the blanket over the other’s face, and began to press down.
All his life he accounted it a proof of God’s mercy that another hand, at that moment, intervened.
There was no doubt what was happening when the courtier summoned the guard. A few minutes later, two sleepy yeomen warders joined them to witness the scene.
The lawyer on the bed was having a massive apoplexy. He