The Heretic’s Wife Read Online Free PDF Page B

message to his wife, or to her, unless he was dead—or in prison. Each day they waited, thinking he would be home today or tomorrow. Today and tomorrow and more tomorrows came and went, and no John.
    Her sister-in-law came to the shop every morning. When the door opened sharply at nine bells, Kate didn’t even have to look up.
    “Tell me he’s not dead, Kate. Last night I dreamed I saw his body in a winding sheet. Tell me John is all right,” she said, her large brown eyes overflowing while the two-year-old squirmed in her arms.
    “He’s not dead, Mary. I would know if he were dead,” she said, reaching for the boy who held his arms out to be taken. “That’s just your own fevered brain conjuring demons from your fear.”
    What she did not say was that at this very minute he could be undergoing the most grievous kind of torture or languishing in the Lollard prison, ahorror she had first heard whispered about as a child. The Lollards had been persecuted for two hundred years, since John Wycliffe first called the Roman Church to account for its abuses and dared to call for the Scriptures to be translated from Latin into English so that every man could discern the truth for himself. Her family had been engaged in that struggle for liberty for almost as long.
    She buried her head in the boy’s blond curls, feeling its softness as she brushed the bone of the skull underneath with her lips. So hard, and yet so fragile. The baby smell of him reminded her of the baby Madeline.
    “If they had killed him, we would have heard about it,” Kate said to reassure herself as much as Mary. “Why else do it, if not to noise it abroad to strike fear in the hearts of their enemies?”
    “They say that Wolsey doesn’t like the killing. That he gives them a chance to abjure . . . but I’m not sure that John would—”
    “John would abjure for you, Mary. And for his son,” she said flatly, remembering the resolute look on his face as he had burned the books. “He would for you.”
    “And you do not approve.”
    “I don’t know what I would do in his place. But I know what our father did. He died in the Lollard prison because he stood fast for his beliefs. He would not deny that a man should have the right to read the Gospel in his own language, and he would not proclaim allegiance to a Church that taught false doctrines.”
    “And is that what you would have your brother do? Your father wasn’t the only one to suffer. What about you and John? What about your mother? She didn’t die of weak lungs. She died of grief. Whenever you speak of your father you have that same look of . . . worship on your face that John has.”
    At the word
face,
the boy put his hand on Kate’s cheek and repeated the word as though they were playing the game they often played: nose, hand, face, ears. Her heart clutched with affection at the touch of his hand on her face.
    Her sister-in-law persisted. “Would you do it, Kate? Would you recant?”
    “I said I don’t know what I would do, Mary,” she said, feeling resentful that her sister-in-law was pressing her. “It would be as though our father died for nothing. And those before him. Our family has always been involved with reform. You know that. We grew up on stories of martyrdom and heroism. We inherited those stories along with that big old family Bible.” Shelooked down at Pipkin squirming in her arms. “But I do not have as much to lose as John.”
    Kate liked to think she knew what she would do, but who could ever know? Many brave men had broken under torture. How could a woman hope to endure?
    “Air,” said the child, pulling on Kate’s hair.
    “Here, take your little wiggle worm back,” she said as she disentangled his hands from her hair, then reached for her cloak on the peg by the door and struggled into it. “I’ll be back in time for you to go home before dark. If anybody asks for a Lutheran text, just say—well, you know what to say.”
    “I’ll say we no longer