Great Britain -- History -- Henry VIII, 1509-1547 -- Fiction
He had begun, like a cat in a new house, to make himself slowly at home
in the hostel, and to set up that relation between outward objects and
his own self that is so necessary to interior souls not yet living in
detachment. He arranged his little room next the Prior’s to be as much
as possible like his cell, got rid of one or two pieces of furniture
that distracted him, set his bed in another corner, and hung up his
beads in the same position that they used to occupy at Lewes. Each
morning he served the Prior’s mass in the tiny chapel attached to the
house, and did his best both then and at his meditation to draw in the
torn fibres of his spirit. At moments of worship the supernatural world
began to appear again, like points of living rock emerging through sand,
detached and half stifled by external details, but real and abiding.
Little by little his serenity came back, and the old atmosphere
reasserted itself. After all, God was here as there; grace, penance, the
guardianship of the angels and the sacrament of the altar was the same
at Southwark as at Lewes. These things remained; while all else was
accidental--the different height of his room, the unfamiliar angles in
the passages, the new noises of London, the street cries, the clash of
music, the disordered routine of daily life.
Half-way through June, after a long morning’s conversation with a
stranger, the Prior sent for him.
He was standing by the tall carved fire-place with his back to the door,
his head and one hand leaning against the stone, and he turned round
despondently as Chris came in. Chris could see he was deadly pale and
that his lips twitched with nervousness.
“Brother,” he said, “I have a perilous matter to go through, and you
must come with me.”
Chris felt his heart begin to labour with heavy sick beats.
“I am to see my Lord of Rochester. A friend hath obtained the order. We
are to go at five o’clock. See that you be ready. We shall take boat at
the stairs.”
Chris waited, with his eyes deferentially cast down.
“He is to be tried again on Thursday,” went on the Prior, “and my
friends wish me to see him, God knows--”
He stopped abruptly, made a sign with his hand, and as Chris left the
room he saw that he was leaning once more against the stone-work, and
that his head was buried in his arms.
Three more Carthusians had been condemned in the previous week, but the
Bishop’s trial, though his name was in the first indictment, was
postponed a few days.
He too, like Sir Thomas More, had been over a year in the Tower; he had
been deprived of his see by an Act of Parliament, his palace had been
broken into and spoiled, and he himself, it was reported, was being
treated with the greatest rigour in the Tower.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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