Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [445]
Capon questioned them at once. Their answers to his question left no further room for doubt. In his presence they called the pope an Antichrist; they denied Transubstantiation and called the mass idolatry, and one, questioned about the wooden statues of the Holy Family and the saints, boldly replied:
“They’re good, I should think, to roast a shoulder of mutton on.”
“’Tis they who will roast,” Peter Mason judged. “They say Bishop Capon’s determined to burn them.”
He was indeed.
A few days later, soon after news came that Cranmer himself had been burned, in the field outside Fisherton, the three Wiltshiremen, undressed to their shirts, were brought forth. They were allowed, all three, to kneel and pray together, and then one, John Maundrel, was offered the queen’s pardon if he would repent: whereat he cried out loudly: “Not for all Salisbury.” John Spencer the freemason declared: “The most joyful day I ever saw.” Then they were burned.
William Coberley, the tailor, burned slowly; after a long time, however, the fire drew his left arm from him. Then, it was recorded:
he softly knocked on his breast with his right hand, the blood and matter rising out of his mouth.
Edward Shockley had gone alone to witness the grim business. Katherine had preferred to pray for the three men at home.
Yet as he watched, he found that his eyes kept returning to one sight which struck him with surprise.
It was not the three victims that Edward Shockley gazed at with wonder on that spring day. It was Peter Mason.
For he was standing beside his wife, his mouth half open, staring straight in front of him, with a strange look of excitement on his simple face, as though he had just received some secret vision. As the minutes passed, and the three unfortunates before them were consumed, Shockley looked from the rising smoke back to Peter several times, and on each occasion, it seemed to him, the cutler was separated from the crowd around him in his curious ecstasy.
He wondered what it meant.
Captain Jack Wilson was a good-looking forty and he had been sailing thirty years.
Conventionally handsome, no. He had lost three teeth, though only one of the gaps could be seen. His long, black matted hair was streaked with grey. But in his careless way, he was magnetically good-looking; and when at the inn he lay back in his chair and stretched his long, strong form, there was a sense of cat-like power about him that told women that the years meant nothing to him.
Even at a distance, he was unmistakable. Other sailors in the port of Bristol would be seen coming from their ships with the slow rolling gait of sailing men; but Jack Wilson, no matter how long he had been at sea, still came on shore with the same loping walk. Some men, though with no ill feeling, called him the wolf.
“He’s a good friend to any man unless it’s the captain of a ship at sea with a cargo he wants,” a sailor told Nellie. “Then he’s a wolf all right.”
Many privateers like this were half way to being pirates, though they usually took care only to attack the ships of countries with whom England was on bad terms.
“And with women?” she asked.
The fellow laughed. “A wolf again.”
Nellie Godfrey decided to marry Captain Jack Wilson the day she first saw him.
She had done well in Bristol: better than she had dared to hope. Thanks to her savings, and Shockley’s present, she had been able to make her way in the busy port with care, scouting for some time before finding a protector. When she did, he was perfect: a rich widowed merchant who had, for the time being, no need for a wife, but a sufficient need for a mistress to set her up comfortably in lodgings.
He was a bluff, burly middle-aged man with a red face and a deep purse. She gave him comfort and, keeping a thoughtful eye on the swollen red veins in his face, excitement. The merchant was generous too, as long as she never asked for anything; if she suggested a present, though, he shut up like