* * *
The Abbey bell tolled the hour. Richard sat back from the desk in the library and stretched out his arms against the stiffness in them, joints cracking loudly. He closed his eyes and rotated his head, searching to ease the soreness in his neck. It made no difference. His mind was tired and his fingers were cold. Opening his eyes, he got up and went to stand by the fire, holding his palms towards its heat. It was burning well, the logs piled high – someone must have come in to tend it while he was working but he had no recollection of it. His thoughts had been elsewhere, absorbed in the greatest commandment, striving to pull the perfect meaning from the Hebrew into English.
He rubbed his hands together gently, warmth returning. It would be dark outside, night coming early on these cold winter days. He should return to Thieving Lane for his supper, and tackle the passage again tomorrow when his mind was fresh, but for some reason he could not let it go. The Hebrew turned again through his thoughts.
Sh’ma Yisra’el, Adonai Eloheinu Adonai echad.
Such a short phrase, so deceptively simple, yet the crux of Christianity contained within it.
Warmer now, he left the fireside and went back to the desk, running his fingers over the pages spread out before him. Older translations, other men who had striven with the same words, and failed to find perfection in their answer. He recalled his attempt to sing the words to Alice, and the fear of failing to render their beauty. The same fear gripped him now, that whatever words he used in English would fall short of God’s meaning, the holy message lost in vain translation.
He read the line in the Geneva, the finest of the translations that had gone before, and spoke the words aloud.
‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is Lord only.’
His voice was hoarse from disuse the last several hours. He cleared his throat and read it again. The Bishops’ Bible had it the same; Coverdale had one word different.
‘… the Lorde our God is one Lorde only.’
Neither version seemed quite right to him; neither captured the subtle transcendence of the word echad. It was only one word, and the word meant ‘one,’ but the command was so crucial to what it means to have faith that to render it anything but perfectly could change the very nature of belief. How should he convey the nuances within it?
One God: containing the Trinity – father, son and holy ghost, comprising the One.
One God: to be worshipped above all others;
One God: the only God, creator of all things.
He read the line again in the Hebrew, then cast his eye once more across the translations that had gone before, before turning again to his own efforts to make it perfect.
‘The Lord our God is one God.
‘The Lord our God is the Lord alone.’
He murmured each possibility in turn, slowly, his fingers tracing the words he had written across the page as the sounds passed his lips.
‘The Lord is our God, the Lord is one.
‘The Lord our God is one Lord.’
His fingers came to rest on the last of the lines. He whispered it again.
‘The Lord our God is one Lord.’
And again. The words shimmered in his mind, left an echo in his heart. His soul filled, lifting him beyond the chilly gloom of the library, and met with an answering love.
There is only one God and to love Him without reservation is the greatest commandment, the greatest truth. The divine love depends on total self-surrender to this truth, and love for our brothers is founded on this first and primal love. For the Jews it must have been a startling revelation – surrounded by other gods, their god was the first to deny the existence of others, to demand total belief in Him alone, total devotion to the one Lord. And now it formed the very core of all faith – Christ as Lord in unity with God, moved by the Holy Spirit. The Trinity forming one Lord. One Lord from whom all things stem.
Richard knelt, joyous and elated, losing himself in the perfection of the Lord, surrendering his heart and soul and mind to Christ, filling himself with the love of God, his own unworthy soul redeemed by Christ’s love. He knelt for a long time, unaware of the growing cold of the library or the stiffness in his knees, and when finally his soul formed again within him and he was himself once more, he knew he had found perfection.
Silently, still with joy, he got to his feet, packed up the books and the pages, and headed out of the library towards the waiting supper at Thieving Lane.
In the cloister he saw Thomson too late to avoid him. His muscles tightened, preparing for defence. The older man smiled as though they were old friends, and Richard had no choice but to stop and greet him. A group of chattering boys from the Abbey school parted like a wave around them and hurried on. He watched the small retreating backs and shivered in the draughty passage. The library had been warm in comparison.
‘Did you go?’ Thomson enquired, still smiling. ‘Did you see them suffer?’
For an instant he was bewildered. His thoughts were still in the world of Deuteronomy, the perfect words of the Sh’ma still sounding in his mind.
‘The Papists,’ Thomson clarified impatiently. ‘Did you not go to see them die?’
He remembered. The Papists and their ill-fated gunpowder treason, their failed attempt to blow up king and parliament. He had not wanted to go: he had no desire to witness another man’s innards on display when he was not yet dead, nor to see the scaffold slippery with the blood of men still breathing. But persuaded by the suggestion of Bancroft he had done his duty, against his will, to stand with the baying crowd in the Old Palace Yard at Westminster, forcing himself to watch this reminder of the fate that awaited traitors. The violence had sickened him, and the brutal lusts of the crowd had left him horrified. They had not come to see justice served, uninterested in the political need for the deaths of these men or the errors in their faith that required such correction. They were a crowd like the mobs that gather to watch a brawl in the street, drawn by animal instinct and inflamed by a base and carnal passion. He had felt himself to be trapped in the midst of something infinitely wicked, the cries of sinners all around him, corrupted and filled with hate, as though Satan himself were amongst them. Was this how Christ had died, he had wondered, amongst such hatred and lust, ears ringing with the shouts of depravity and evil? No wonder He had thought He was forsaken: it must have seemed as though He were already in Hell. But the men on the scaffold had each died true to their cause, no last-minute recantations, their belief undimmed despite the hellish trial before them. Such strength of faith that could drive a man to martyrdom.
It had seemed to last an age until the last screams faded through the chill morning air, and the obscene, sweet stench of blood and burning guts drifted over the still-baying crowd. When he lifted his head at last to survey the scene in front of him, he saw the body parts of men strewn across the scaffold boards, and other men stooping to pick up the pieces. Sickened again, he turned his face away.
As he was borne away from the scene by the tide of the mob, only half-aware of the chatter all around him and the sweat of lust still across their faces, he had remembered another execution: the death of Henry Barrow years before on the gallows at Tyburn. Barrow, who had helped to inspire Ben’s beliefs; Barrow, who had hated the Church as Ben did. Ben had not long been in prison when Barrow died, his ordeal just beginning as the older man’s came to its grisly end. His death had been a martyrdom too, less famous than the gunpowder plotters’, a smaller audience, but it was martyrdom nonetheless – the giving of his life for his faith. He too had died unrepentant, certain of the rightness of his path.
And Ben was prepared to die the same way, his conviction no less than Barrow’s, no less than that of the men who had just been butchered for their loyalty to the pope. If he stayed in England, would he die a martyr too? On a different scaffold from the Papists perhaps, a less brutal death, but death nonetheless: a rope round his neck would end a life just as easily. Ask Barrow. And for what? Had Ben not paid enough already? Had he
not suffered for his faith?
God knew that Ben had given more than most, and He was offering him a different path, a way to safety. How many times had Thomas Kemp asked his son to go? Was it God’s hand working through him, trying to lead his servant from the wilderness to safety? To Richard it seemed so. Ben could make a good living as a merchant in Aleppo or in Holland. A living in safety. In Holland he could worship how he liked and be in no danger. So why did he still refuse to go? Was it guilt that made him obstinate? Or pure bloody-mindedness?
He must make Ben see it was God’s will that he should go. He would talk to him again, he resolved, and make him understand, urge him away from England’s shores. He must save Ben Kemp from himself.
Now, in the cloister, Thomson was almost rubbing his hands with relish. ‘Did you not think it a fine spectacle?’ he said.
Richard drew his mind back from thoughts of Ben to the man before him and said nothing.
‘I thought you were a farmer’s son.’ Thomson clapped him on the back. ‘A little blood shouldn’t bother you.’
He drew his lips back in a poor pretence at a smile. ‘It’s hardly the same, now is it?’ He made to walk on and Thomson fell into step beside him, returning the way he had just come. Richard huddled into his cloak and wished the other man would go on his own way and leave him alone. But Thomson was watching him with shrewd narrowed eyes that disappeared into the fleshy face.
‘You don’t have secret sympathies for Papists as well as Puritans, do you?’
Richard’s muscles clenched against the insult, the casual insinuation of his sympathy for traitors.
‘No recusant aunts and uncles in that godforsaken place you come from?’ Thomson was enjoying himself. ‘No priest holes in the farmhouse walls?’
They reached the door and stepped out into the wind. Broad Sanctuary was busy with crowds, voices humming and raised with excitement. It was not hard to guess the topic of their conversation. Another bonfire had been lit in celebration, flames leaping wildly as they were buffeted by the wind.
‘Hardly,’ Richard answered. ‘My forebears had pages of Tyndale under the floors. No secret Papists there.’
Thomson inclined his head as if considering whether or not to believe him. Richard met the look with open hostility: he had given up any semblance of civility. The older man let out a laugh and clapped him again on the shoulder. ‘I’m having a joke with you, Doctor Clarke. There’s no need to take it all so seriously.’
He tensed under the weight of the other man’s hand and turned his face away. His breath was ragged and hard, all the injustice he had suffered on Ben’s behalf embodied in this careless baiting. He jerked his shoulder from Thomson’s grip.
‘How is it a joke to say such things?’
Thomson registered the shift in his tone. ‘I meant no offence,’ he said. But then, unable to resist, ‘But if you will keep company with men like Ben Kemp …’ He shrugged as if to say Richard had made himself fair game.
‘Good day,’ Richard said. Then he turned and strode away through the throng of people, huddled down inside his cloak and thinking of nothing.
Chapter 17
Spring 1606
How long wilt thou forget mee (O LORD) for euer? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me? How long shall I take counsel in my soule, hauing sorrow in my heart dayly? how long shall mine enemie be exalted ouer me? Consider and heare me, O LORD my God: lighten mine eyes, lest I sleep the sleepe of death. Least mine enemie say, I haue preuailed against him: and those that trouble mee, reioyce, when I am moued.
(Psalms 13:1–4)
* * *
Spring blew in finally late in April with gusts of wind that whipped the petals from the trees so that the air still seemed wintry and filled with snow. In the yard at Scrooby Manor the farm dogs barked at nothing and within the house the wind whipped in the chimneys and rattled the windowpanes.
‘… After John was committed to prison, Jesus came into Galilee, … pre … preaching the Gospel of the kingdom of God.’
The child Love looked up at Ben from the passage triumphantly, then glanced once more to the window where she could see the leaves being swept from the trees by the gusts. He followed her gaze. Such a serious, studious child, yet even her spirits were called away from her books by a windy day.
The children had been skittish at their studies all morning, utterly unable to focus on the passage of Scripture Ben had set them to learn. With infinite patience he had called back their attention again and again from their fidgeting, their eyes drawn to the window and the lure of the wind beyond.
‘Go,’ he ordered in the end. ‘Go outside and run around for half an hour. Perhaps then we can study.’
They needed no second telling. The bench almost tipped as they raced from the room and out of the house, into the yard beyond. He watched them go with a smile, then tidied the books into a pile on the table before he stood up and lifted them across to the shelf in the corner. He could hear the children calling to one another, their voices fading and flowing on the wind. They sounded happy and free: as yet they knew nothing of chains and bars, of cold, dank cells where a man could die for lack of light or air. Dreams of prison still haunted him, fear waking him at night: the pain of despair was not so easily forgotten. He could take himself back there in an instant, memories shivering through him, vivid and close. Lifting his gaze, he looked towards the East, towards Holland, where there existed the possibility of a freedom they would never have in England.
A memory of Amsterdam filled him, the tang of the city the last time he was there, when he took Barrow’s writings and risked everything, the sharp salt air and a language only half-understood, the creak and slap of boats at their mooring and the promise of Greta’s fish stew. God had offered him a different path that day but he had turned away from it, following instead the sin of his desire for Cecily, and the weakness of his flesh.
The crossing to Holland had been rough and frightening, but the risk of it as always had enthralled him. He could understand why men chose to spend their lives at sea – the primaeval struggle with the storm, the sense of God’s power of creation, his own humble place in the face of it. But he was unafraid of drowning, dying into Christ to be born again with God. He had stood on deck, gripping on for dear life as the vessel plunged and bucked beneath his feet, wind and spray in his face, and he was awed by its magnificence, God’s hand holding the balance of forces. Feeling humbled, he had touched his fingers to the precious packet of writings in his shirt, safe and warm against his skin in its wrapping of leather.
The stone quay in the harbour at Amsterdam felt too still and solid beneath him as he stepped ashore, making him giddy until his legs remembered the ground was not supposed to move after all, and he could stride with ease to the house of his friends. They greeted him with warmth, conversing in a mixture of English, Dutch and Latin, the children grown taller and more serious in his months away, and shy of him now he was no longer so familiar. But the shyness soon passed and the little one with the cheeky smile stood by him with her hand on his leg as she had used to do.
‘How is London these days?’ Pieter asked him. ‘We heard that Henry Barrow is still imprisoned.’
‘It’s more than four years now. He still writes.’
‘Which is why you are here, I assume?’
‘And we thought you’d come just to visit.’ Pieter’s English wife, Anne, chided him playfully. ‘We thought you’d come to see our Greta.’
Greta, Pieter’s daughter by an earlier wife, kept her head tactfully averted, focusing on the pot she was stirring at the hearth. But the line of her neck was still familiar, the blond hair tucked up under the plain white cap, wisps breaking free to curl against the young pale skin. Like Cecily’s, he reflected, heat rippling through him at the thought of her, but he knew the scent of Greta better: his lips had touched that skin. He turned his eyes away from her, prayed for God’s forgiveness.
He should have stayed and married her, he thought,
and become part of this family with its warmth and laughter, a different world from his own: a father he was incapable of pleasing and his fretful mother. Here there was joy to be found and freedom to worship; he wondered what impulse had sent him back to live in England.
Greta brought the pot to the table and ladled out soup for them all.
‘It’s lovely to see you again, Ben,’ she said, and it was hard to say if there was a reproach in the words or if the pleasure was genuine.
‘After we eat,’ Pieter said, ‘we’ll go and see Miller.’
Greta took her seat across from Ben, head lowered away from him.
‘Please, Benjamin, say a good English grace for us.’
They bowed their heads as Ben prayed.
‘And thank you, Lord,’ Greta added, when he had finished, ‘for keeping Ben safe and bringing him back to us.’
Ben kept his eyes on his soup and said nothing. He remembered why he had left.
They had walked quickly through the streets of Amsterdam in the cool damp of the spring, slipping slightly on the wet cobblestones. The familiar stink of the city pervaded the air, a different stench from London, more reminiscent of the freedom of the sea. The streets were well known to him and though Pieter often walked in front as though to lead the way, Ben could have found the place alone. He had spent many hours with the printer when he lived here, helping with the transport of books and tracts to England. But in spite of Holland’s freedoms there was still need to be wary: the English Church’s spies were not confined to England.
Miller greeted them as old friends. Born an Englishman, he had lived in Holland more than thirty years, an exile from Bloody Queen Mary’s religious zeal. But he had made his home in Amsterdam and stayed, taken a Dutch wife, and now he made a living printing literature he would have hanged for in England.
The King James Men Page 21