The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [211]
‘Perhaps’, Thomas heard him murmur to their mother, ‘Cromwell may relent. But I do not think so.’
The second occasion was more difficult. With time passing, although she tried to keep calm, his mother had become more and more distracted. As the day of the execution approached she seemed to think that her appeal to Alice Lisle was sure to bring relief. ‘I can’t understand why it’s taking so long,’ she would suddenly break out plaintively. ‘The reprieve must come.’ She’d frown. ‘It must do.’ She also for some reason would return in her mind, again and again, to the fact that the sheriff’s men had turned her out of her house for two days. ‘To think they could do such a thing,’ she would exclaim.
They knew their second visit would be their last because the execution was to be the following day. They went there in the afternoon and entered the prison.
But for some reason there was a delay. They had to wait a while in an outer chamber, where they found themselves in the company of the senior gaoler who passed the time by thoughtfully eating a pie and picking his teeth. He had a dirty grizzled beard, which he had not trimmed because, nowadays, there was no one to make him. They tried not to look at him.
But he looked at them. They interested him. He did not like royalists, especially cavalier gentry, which these Penruddocks were. If the father of these children was about to have his head cut off, so much the better. He observed their aristocratic clothes – lace and satin for the girls; why, the younger boy had little rosettes on his shoes – and wondered idly how they would look after he and his men had had a chance to spoil them. He could see the clothes in tatters, the boys with a black eye or two and the mother …
The mother was jabbering on about something now. She’d hoped for a reprieve. That was a joke. No one was going to reprieve Penruddock, even he knew that. But he listened curiously all the same. She’d hoped Judge Lisle would speak to Cromwell. He’d heard of Lisle. Never seen him, though. Close to Cromwell he’d heard. The woman had written to his wife. A useless hope, obviously, but the wives of condemned men sometimes got like that.
‘Lisle, did you say,’ he suddenly interjected with a smile, to throw her off guard. ‘Judge Lisle?’
‘Yes, good man.’ She turned to him eagerly. ‘Has anything been heard from him, do you know?’
He paused. He intended to savour this. ‘The warrant for your husband’s death is made out by Lisle. In his own hand. He was with Cromwell when he signed it.’
The effect was delicious. He watched her face fall into abject confusion. She seemed to collapse and wither before his eyes. He had never seen anything equal to it. The fact that he hadn’t the least idea whether Judge Lisle was even within a hundred miles of Cromwell or the warrant made it even better. ‘’Tis well known,’ he added for artistic effect.
‘But I wrote again to his wife,’ poor Mrs Penruddock wailed.
‘They say it’s she’, he went on blandly, ‘who especially urged the poor Colonel’s death.’ The suggestion that he pitied her cursed husband made the thing sound more plausible. The woman almost fainted. The eldest boy looked ready for murder. And he was just trying to think whether there was anything else he could invent to taunt these unhappy people when a signal from one of the guards told him that the prisoner was ready.
‘Time to see the Colonel, now,’ he announced. And so the Penruddocks