Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [449]
“I think,” Moody answered him gravely, “that there are other ways to save a man’s soul than through the fire. You should help him.”
He considered the idea for several hours. If he went to see Peter, might not people suspect complicity? What if Peter let fall a careless word? And again, if he urged Peter to recant, Abigail might be furious and even denounce him. On the other hand, what would young Moody think if he refused such a Christian act? Could that be seen as suspicious? He turned it all over in his mind for several hours.
He liked Peter Mason. Perhaps he was too fearful. If they were going to arrest him, they would have done so already. Finally, he went to see the prisoner that evening, at a time when he was alone. He only meant to stay a few minutes.
The room at Fisherton gaol in which he was being kept contained only two other prisoners, a man and a woman. It was furnished with two small benches and a wooden table. He and Peter Mason sat opposite each other. There were no priests about.
They had not seen each other for a week, but he saw no great physical change in the prisoner except that he was a little thinner. His manner, however, was altered completely. Instead of the cheerful, eager, simple-minded fellow he had known, he found a stranger, mild-mannered, but withdrawn – as if he had already entered some other private world that gave him a comfort he would not share. He was almost serene.
The two men conversed in low tones for half an hour.
“Many of us, your friends, wish you would not take this matter to the bitter end,” Edward told him. But Peter only smiled gently.
“A man may outwardly conform yet keep his heart pure, praying in secret,” he also suggested hopefully. But it was as if Peter had not heard.
Suddenly, however, he began to talk of his little workshop, of things that he had made, of Nellie Godfrey who used to come past his door before she was driven away. “I wonder what is become of her now,” he murmured. And sensing that these thoughts of happier times were a comfort to him, Edward encouraged him and added his own memories. He forgot the time.
They were still talking of these things when Abigail arrived with Robert. He looked at her nervously, but she seemed to take little interest in him beyond acknowledging him calmly.
She was pale – paler than ever. The rings under her eyes were so deep and black that they seemed to have been branded permanently onto her face. She was very quiet, as though her sense of duty had taken her into a region of the mind that lay beyond mere sadness.
Though he knew it would be wiser to depart, some instinct – perhaps just curiosity – kept him still in the room.
As the three of them spoke in low tones, Abigail and Robert giving quiet words of comfort – she with placid composure, he with occasional nods of his head and short, nervous gestures – while Peter sat on the bench and listened with his head bowed, it seemed to Edward that there was something agitated about him, yet he could not say what.
After a time, he looked up, his eyes a little softer, more uncertain, nearer to the simple Peter that Shockley had known before.
“Tomorrow, they mean to burn me,” he said.
Robert Mason shifted his feet awkwardly. Abigail looked at him steadily.
“’Tis God’s work thou didst,” she said quietly, as if this was enough.
“It was right to speak?” There it was: the almost puppy-like face of the friend that he knew so well, looking hopefully to his wife for approval.
“God’s work is hard,” she replied.
Then Peter, with a dignity Edward had not seen before, stood up and gravely turned to his cousin Robert.
“I commend my wife to your care,” he said gravely; and Robert bowed his head.
Edward could bear it no more.
“Yet will you not recant?” he cried, breaking into their solemn meeting unashamedly. “They will accept a recantation even now. Believe in your heart what you will, until better times come, Peter Mason, but conform in body only, not in spirit.”
Why such anguish in his voice, when there should