The King James Men

by Samantha Grosser

  ‘I think we are all aware of the manner of their end,’ Andrewes said.

  ‘It is a quicker end than burning,’ Richard said. Martyrs’ deaths at the stake sometimes lasted hours, winds blowing the flames away and drawing out the agony. He remembered his conversation with Ben at the bonfire on All Hallows’ Eve, the same martyr’s spirit in his friend as the Papists who had died. His own faith seemed fragile in comparison – he was uncertain it would survive the threat of the fire.

  ‘They are traitors,’ Thomson said. ‘And they know the penalty for treason. I have no sympathy for them.’

  ‘They are misled,’ Andrewes replied. ‘And we should pray for them.’

  No one answered, the Dean’s compassion speaking to them all. Richard took a mouthful of wine. John Overall drained his cup and stood up. ‘I must be going.’

  Thomson leaned in towards Richard beside him. ‘Apparently the good doctor has more interesting company to go to. He is to be envied.’

  Almost forgetting himself, Richard nearly smiled. Overall’s departure prompted the others, and the small party began to break up. Richard rose from his seat with reluctance. He was comfortable at the Dean’s table, at ease with himself. Servants came forward with hats and cloaks and the scholars tipped out of the deanery and into the yard. There was still light in the sky, the season turning, and the branches of the trees in the grassy square promised buds of green, just starting to spill their colour. The evening was surprisingly warm and the men milled, saying their farewells, all of them strangely reluctant to be on their way and bring an end to the day. Richard found himself crossing Broad Sanctuary alongside Doctor Thomson.

  They came to the end of Thieving Lane. A left turn and a short walk would bring him to the Kemps’ and the end of the day. Turn right and he would head up into King Street, haunt of taverns and houses of ill repute. Places he had never visited.

  ‘Come take a drink with me, Doctor Clarke,’ Thomson invited. ‘It is early yet and the tavern is close by.’

  He considered a moment, curiosity piqued. ‘Why not?’ he said on an impulse.

  Thomson smiled with genuine pleasure and the two men sauntered along the rutted street, sun glinting off the puddles, unkempt half-timbered houses either side of them, shop signs creaking, the latticed windows crooked and broken. The air was thick with the odour of stale beer and meat, and the heavier stench of the runnels of human waste at their feet. They stepped carefully to avoid them.

  The tavern was the Boar’s Head, a low doorway leading down an uneven flight of stairs to a cellar where the spring warmth would never reach. At the bottom of the steps he shivered, gazing around, the tavern an unfamiliar world. Rough-hewn tables stood at haphazard angles to one another on a dirt floor strewn with straw. Men of all the lower classes occupied stools or benches, mugs of ale in their hands, the voices made louder by the drink and the lowness of the ceiling. Thomson led him through the crowd to a small table by the wall. A woman in a gown cut improbably low across her bosom approached them.

  ‘Hello, Doctor,’ she said to Thomson, with obvious familiarity. ‘Who’s your lovely friend?’

  ‘He is a gentleman and tonight we are here to drink your finest ale, not to consort with you and your friends.’

  She laughed, painted face splitting to reveal broken teeth. ‘Well, that’ll be a first, Doctor. But as you like.’ She winked at Richard, who looked away, embarrassed. When he looked back she had gone, returning a few moments later with a jug and mugs on a tray.

  ‘I’ll leave you to your ale,’ she said, taking the coins from Thomson and leaving quickly. There was no money to be made by staying.

  ‘You’re a regular here?’ Richard could not help but ask.

  ‘Do not judge me, Doctor Clarke.’ Thomson smiled.

  He said nothing and took a sip of the bitter ale.

  ‘You wonder why he puts up with me, don’t you?’ the older man said. ‘You wonder why Andrewes doesn’t just slap me down and put me in my place, poor sinner that I am.’

  ‘It has crossed my mind.’

  ‘It’s very simple, Doctor Clarke, you know. There is no big secret.’

  ‘So tell me. I’m intrigued.’

  ‘Firstly, I’m brilliant. My translations of Martial are second to none.’ The epigrams of the Roman poet, famous mostly for their obscenity. Richard had never read them, in Latin or translated. ‘Dean Andrewes knows that.’

  ‘Dear God! You think he’s read them?’

  Thomson laughed. ‘Who knows what the Dean gets up to every morning when he claims to be at prayer?’

  Richard was shocked. It had never occurred to him to question the Dean’s devotion – the man was almost a saint. He leaned forward. ‘Do not,’ he whispered, ‘accuse the Dean of sharing your filthy mind in my presence. I will not hear it.’

  Thomson lifted his hands in a conciliating gesture. ‘Perhaps he has, perhaps he hasn’t,’ he said. ‘But my craft as a linguist is not in doubt. It takes great skill to translate such poetry, to retain the meaning and the wit, to do justice to the original. Such skill is useful to him, and to the Company.’

  He took a long draught of his ale, placed the mug on the table and refilled it from the jug.

  ‘Secondly, I’m a man of the Church.’

  ‘We are all of us men of the Church.’

  Thomson inclined his large head to one side. ‘That is true. You are indeed a man of the Church. I don’t dispute it. You have a living in Kent. You preach at Canterbury.’ He paused. ‘But you also have Puritan sympathies. Puritan friends. Separatist friends even. Which I do not. Your loyalty is always going to be in doubt. Andrewes knows my beliefs: they are the same as his and he trusts me.’

  Richard took another mouthful of ale before he answered. ‘My loyalty to the Church,’ he said, ‘has never been in doubt. I am no Puritan, nor ever have been.’

  ‘You are lodging with the Kemps.’

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘Ben Kemp is a Separatist.’

  ‘It is many years since Ben Kemp went to prison. A man may surely change in so long a time.’

  Thomson shook his head. ‘I hope you’re not ambitious, Doctor Clarke, because your choice of friends has let you down.’

  He said nothing. He had known what would be thought of him if he stayed at Thieving Lane, knew the talk would damage him again. And though the men who mattered knew the truth, the slights still hurt his pride.

  ‘Andrewes will forgive almost anything, you know,’ Thomson said. ‘He is full of mercy for common sinners like me; he is too aware of his own frailties not to be. But your Separatist friends would see the order of the Church overturned or set themselves apart from it, and that is not so easy to forgive. The order of the Church is the order of society and without it we are lost.’ He took a mouthful of ale before going on. ‘And they are wrong in their thinking. They would deny man his God-given ability to reason, deny the presence of His grace in the sacraments. Where is the joy in their faith? Are we not capable of pleasure without offending God?’

  Richard sipped his ale. It was bitter and unpleasant but it gave him something to do.

  ‘I agree with you,’ he said. ‘I am no lover of Separatists.’

  ‘They need to be brought to heel and made to conform,’ Thomson said.

  ‘It is not so simple a matter,’ he replied. He knew. He had spent the best part of many years trying.

  ‘We should fine the Puritans for breaches. Same as the Papists.’ The older man put down his mug with a bang. Ale slopped across the table, unnoticed by Thomson. ‘And as for Separatists …’

  ‘What about Separatists?’ Richard said, though he knew well enough what was coming.

  ‘Separatists should be hanged.’ He let go of his ale and lifted his fingers to his throat in a cutting motion, in case Richard had failed to understand. ‘They are a threat to the realm, pure and simple, like a weed that unchecked would choke the life from the crop.’

  Richard nodded. An image flashed a
cross his mind, a memory of his dreams: Ben in chains up on the wall. It was easy to speak of Separatists in the abstract, to criticise their thinking, harder to condemn a friend to prison and to death.

  ‘They are few in number,’ he said.

  ‘But left unhindered their numbers will grow.’

  The ale had left a dirty taste in his mouth. He swallowed to get rid of it but the bitterness still lingered. He ran his fingers up and down the cup as he considered his answer, the cheap glaze rough against his skin. He had no defence for Ben’s position: whatever the rights and wrongs of their theology, Separatists were a threat to Church authority, raising doubts about the rightness of the order of the world. The hierarchy of the realm ended with the king. Bring the hierarchy into question and you were starting to talk treason. He knew all the arguments – they were branded on his heart. Ten years ago in the Fleet they had consumed all his conversation, hours upon hours of trying to reason Ben back into the fold.

  He looked across at Thomson, the veins across his cheeks and nose fine-threaded, purple, livid. Eyes that were clouded by the haze of drink still managed to track a whore across the room, interest lighting up. All the arguments he knew, but how was the man before him a godlier man than Ben? How should he have the right to judge?

  ‘Do you agree?’ Thomson turned his eyes from the whore back to Richard and leaned closer.

  Richard stopped breathing and moved back out of range of the other man’s breath, wondering if the evil taste from the ale in his mouth had made his own smell the same.

  Thomson pressed him. ‘Do you not agree that Separatists should be executed?’

  ‘In theory, perhaps.’

  ‘But not in practice? Of course not. You keep company with Separatists.’

  ‘Not so.’

  ‘Ben Kemp is a Separatist. The leopard does not change its spots.’

  ‘He was a Separatist once and he paid dearly for his folly.’

  ‘Three years in the Fleet, I’m told. In chains. Lost his wife, did he not?’

  ‘And his child.’

  ‘Punished by man and God, then. ’Twas no more than he deserved.’

  Richard felt hatred surge up from his gut – this self-satisfied sinner, handing out death and judgement to a man whose only crime was to want a more godly life. He was appalled, seeing the Church again through Ben’s eyes, its profanity and wickedness apparent in its spokesman getting drunk before him.

  Standing up, he knocked against the table in his haste and the half-full mug of ale tipped and spilled, a running blot of beer sliding towards him across the splintered tabletop. He moved away just in time to let the ale run off the edge and onto the floor, where it dropped onto the filthy straw.

  ‘I’ll see you next week,’ he said.

  Thomson lifted his mug in farewell and Richard could feel the shrewd drunken eyes on his back as he headed towards the door and the fresher evening breeze from the street. Outside he stood for a moment, breathing deep to calm himself, heart still racing from the confrontation, the foul taste still in his mouth. The hatred lingered even as his heartbeat slowed, his fists still clenched at Thomson’s complacent judgement on his friend. How dare he presume? How dare he claim to understand Ben’s heart? Such a man could not even begin to know the pain, the price that Ben had paid for his faith, the doubt his wife’s death had lit, the despair. He, Richard, had never thought to see Ben brought so low nor to lose his faith. And he had been the one to take the news. The memory of it still gave him pain – he dared not imagine the agony of Ben’s recollection. Richard shook his head, trying to dislodge the remembrance, but it lingered in his thoughts, stirred by Thomson’s casual judgement.

  He had gone to the Fleet with a weight of dread in his limbs, laden with the burden of his task. He had eaten nothing all day, guts churning with nerves, terrified of what was before him. Ahead, the great walls of the Fleet crowded out the dull spring light, and the pestilential river that ran alongside threatened to make him retch. But it was not only the prison itself that frightened him, a natural human dread of being witness to suffering, but fear of the man he would find within. It was beyond him to imagine what marks the weeks of imprisonment would have left on his friend, what cruelties he had suffered, and he was afraid of the telling of the awful news he carried, unsure how Ben would bear it. He braced himself for the worst, his steps growing slower, more reluctant, his whole body rebelling against the deed.

  At the prison gates a group of women were remonstrating with the gatekeeper. They parted and moved away when they saw him coming – an instinctive respect, he supposed, for his clerical garb. The gatekeeper watched him, waiting, as Richard drew out the precious letter, so hard to obtain, that would give him access to the gaol at last. He passed it carefully across, the coins held in his fingers underneath. The gatekeeper made a show of opening up the page and cast an illiterate eye across the words. But he understood the seal that was beneath them. He folded it back up, pocketed the coins, gave the letter back to Richard and gestured with his head towards the gate. Richard followed him, waiting while the man fumbled with the keys to let him through.

  Inside, the stench worsened, and the howls of men drifted in currents on the noisome air. Richard lifted an automatic hand to shield his nose and the gatekeeper laughed with a quick, sharp hacking sound.

  ‘You’ll soon get used to it. It gets worse inside.’

  He nodded, swallowing down the vomit that heaved in his gut: he would not give this man the pleasure of seeing such weakness. Another gaoler came to meet them with more keys in his hand, blackened teeth in a grimy face. ‘Who you here to see?’

  ‘Master Kemp.’

  ‘Oh yes. One of our Separatist friends, is it? If you don’t mind me saying so, sir, you don’t seem like the kind of man to be having any business with Separatists.’

  ‘Just take me to him.’ He wanted to get this over with, appalled.

  ‘All right.’ The man scowled. Then he shuffled off back the way he had come, Richard striding after him, fingers gripping tightly the bundle he had brought, the small, precious comforts he could offer to his friend. The atmosphere grew fouler as the gatekeeper had said, no movement of air along the corridors, the stone walls running with mould and damp. He shivered with the cold and thought, How can a man survive in such a low place?

  They reached a door where the gaoler stopped and laboriously sorted through his bunch of keys, checking them by touch, the light too dim to tell them apart by sight. It seemed to take an age before he found the one he needed, thrust it hard into the lock and opened the door. Richard brushed past him and went inside.

  Ben was standing by the small barred window, staring out, and he did not turn at the opening of the door. He was filthy, his once-white linen streaked with black, his hair matted and dishevelled. His hands hung at his sides and the chain that connected them fell across his thighs. Straw was scattered thinly across the floor of a room that was bare of furniture, and the stench of human excrement turned Richard’s gut again. He felt the heart go out of him, had to fight the urge to leave and flee before Ben turned. Then the door clanged shut behind him, the key scraping in the lock to cut off his escape, so he dug for his courage again and moved across the cell towards the window.

  ‘Ben?’

  The gaunt face turned towards him and twisted into the semblance of a smile. ‘Richard. I was expecting someone different. I … am glad it is you.’

  ‘Who did you expect?’

  ‘Bancroft. Or … others of his kind.’

  ‘You are … well?’

  ‘I am alive.’

  ‘Your father has promised handsome payments to the warden. You should have better food at least, perhaps better conditions …’ He cast his gaze around the sordid room, and thought he could not survive in such wretchedness, that such a life would drive him mad.

  ‘I’ve brought blankets and fresh clothes, some bread and honey from Cecily’s bees. And your Bible, of course, pen and ink.’

  ‘
I am grateful.’

  He lowered the bundle to the floor at his feet, the worst of his task still to come.

  ‘Ben …’ he began, and stopped, the words too hard to find, the cruelty of saying them in this foetid place too awful to bear.

  ‘What?’ Ben’s natural impatience surfaced, his irritation with fools. He turned his body fully to face his visitor, his weight still against the wall. Even in the dim light of the cell Richard could see the weals on his wrists where the manacles had cut into the skin, and the blood that stained the front of his shirt. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Ben,’ Richard began again. In the chill he felt the sweat against his skin, the dread of what he had to say. ‘I have grave news. Cecily …’

  He stopped. Pain coloured Ben’s face, and all the words he had rehearsed fell from his mind. ‘Her time came early,’ he managed to say. ‘It was the worry, the midwives said, and the fear.’ He lowered his voice. ‘She is with God now, and the boy too.’

  Ben closed his eyes and turned himself away from his friend. With his forehead pressed against the window bars, he gripped on to them tightly. He was silent, barely breathing, and Richard watched him with the same helpless uncertainty he had felt at the sounds of Cecily’s cries growing weaker through that long, awful night at Thieving Lane. A minute passed, maybe more. Footsteps shuffled past outside the door, keys rattling in a lock further down the passage. At last Ben turned his face from the bars: long streaks from his tears slashed through the dirt on his face.

  ‘I would rather you had been Bancroft after all,’ he whispered. ‘He could not have hurt me worse than this.’

  ‘I’m so sorry to be the bearer of such news.’

  ‘Don’t be. I am glad to have heard it from the lips of a friend.’

  Richard stepped forward and lifted a hand to Ben’s shoulder. It was all he could think of to offer comfort, and Ben let it rest for a moment before he turned again to the bars, looking out at the foul river below and a narrow glimpse of the early spring sky above it. Richard watched him, seeing the gaunt face in profile and the eyes staring out unseeing.