Princes of Ireland - Edward Rutherfurd [361]
There was quite a collection of relics in the carts. Some, like the fragments of the cross to be found all over Christendom, might not be genuine. An object belonging to one of the Irish saints, however, was quite likely to have been preserved down the centuries for pious veneration. Having got the statue on the fire, the two clerks were turning their attention to these. On the cart next to the pyre, amidst the reliquaries and jewelled boxes, lay a skull with a gold rim, a vessel of some kind. An English soldier had taken it from the home of an insolent apprentice with blazing green eyes. The soldier didn’t know exactly what it was, but his orders were to burn anything that stank of the pagan, idolatrous past, so he’d thrown it in with the rest of the swag. The gold could be worth something, anyway. The green-eyed apprentice protested vehemently that the skull was a family heirloom and had tried to fight him for it before the soldier had drawn his sword and the young fellow reluctantly let him past.
Cecily stared in horror. If anything was needed to prove the true nature of the heretic king and his servants, surely this was it. She felt a wave of fury at their impiety and of despair at the thought of such terrible loss. She gazed at the crowd. Wasn’t anyone going to do anything? She had long ago given up hope for most of the Dubliners, but it was hard to believe that no one was even saying a word.
Yet what was she doing herself?
Three years ago, she would, at the least, have shouted at the clerks and called them heretics. She’d gladly have let them arrest her. But since the failure of Silken Thomas’s revolt, and her husband’s return to his family in the tower, something had changed in Cecily Tidy. Perhaps it was that she was older, or her children were, or that she now had another on the way; perhaps it was that she did not want to upset her hardworking husband or that she simply could not face the stress of a quarrel with him anymore. Whatever the cause, though her religious convictions had not changed in the least, something had died in Cecily Tidy. Even faced with the destruction of all that was holy, she wasn’t going to make a scene. Not today.
Then she caught sight of Alderman Doyle. He was standing in the crowd with his son-in-law Richard Walsh, watching the proceedings with the greatest disgust. They might have had their differences in the past, but at least he was a figure of authority. And he could not approve of what was happening now. She went over.
“Oh Alderman Doyle,” she said. “This is a terrible sacrilege. Cannot anything be done?”
She hardly knew what she expected him to say; but then, to her great surprise, as he looked down at her, it seemed to Cecily that in his eyes she saw a look of shame.
“Come,” he said quietly, and taking her by the arm he led her towards the two clerks with Richard a few steps behind them. The gallowglasses looked as if they might intervene, but one of the clerks, recognising Doyle, said, “Good morning, Alderman,” and the soldiers fell back.
“What have you here?” Doyle asked.
“Relics,” one of the clerks said blandly. His colleague at that moment was chipping at a small gold reliquary encrusted with gems. “Some of them are tough to open,” he remarked as the other, having successfully prized the lid off, threw a lock of saintly hair into the fire where it instantly flared up.
“The casket?” Doyle enquired, pointing to the gold reliquary that had just been so rudely opened. “It’s gold for the king.” Even as he said so, Cecily observed that the fellow with the chisel had just detached one of the gems from the lid and calmly dropped it into a leather pouch that hung from his belt.
“The Church must be purified,” the clerk remarked to the alderman. And if Cecily was astonished by the coolness of his effrontery, she need not have been. For it was thus in parishes all over England, too. While the desire of many honest Protestants may have been to purify their religion and come into