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monasteries are down?’
     
    ‘Yes. Because Reform will finally be safe. And because then Lord Cromwell will have enough money to make the realm secure from invasion and do much for the people. He has great plans.’
     
    ‘By the time the Augmentations men have had their cut, will there be enough left even to buy those churls downstairs new cloaks?’
     
    ‘There will, Mark.’ I spoke earnestly. ‘The large monasteries have untold wealth. And what do they give to the poor, despite their duty of charity? I used to see the destitute crowding round the gates on dole days at Lichfield, children in rags pushing and kicking for the few farthings handed through the bars in the gate. I felt ashamed going into school on those days. Such a school as it was. Well, now there’ll be proper schools in every parish, paid for by the king’s Exchequer.’
     
    He said nothing, only raised his eyebrows quizzically.
     
    ‘God’s death, Mark,’ I snapped, suddenly irritated by his scepticism. ‘Take your feet away from that chimney. They stink worse than that sheep.’
     
    He clambered into bed and lay looking up at the thatched vault of the roof. ‘I pray you are right, sir. But Augmentations has made me doubt men’s charity.’
     
    ‘There is godly leaven in the unregenerate lump. It works its way, slowly. And Lord Cromwell is part of it, for all his hardness. Have faith,’ I added gently. Yet even as I spoke I remembered Lord Cromwell’s grim pleasure as he talked of burning a priest with his own images, saw him again shaking the casket containing the child’s skull.
     
    ‘Faith will move mountains?’ Mark said after a moment.
     
    ‘God’s nails,’ I snapped, ‘in my day it was the young who were idealistic and the old cynical. I’m too tired to argue further. Goodnight. ’ I began to undress; hesitantly, for I do not like people to see my disability. But Mark, sensitively, turned his back as we took off our clothes and donned our nightshifts. Wearily, I climbed into my sagging bed and pinched out the candle.
     
    I said my prayers. But for a long time I lay awake in the darkness, listening to Mark’s even breathing and the renewed scrabblings of the rats in the thatch as they crept back to the centre of the room, near the chimney where it was warmest.
     
     
    I HAD MADE light of it, as I always did, but the looks the villagers gave my hump, and the abbey-lubber’s remark, had sent a familiar stab of pain through me. It had settled miserably in my guts, crushing my earlier enthusiasm. All my life I had tried to shrug off such insults, though when I was younger I often felt like raging and screaming. I had seen enough cripples whose minds had been made as twisted as their bodies by the weight of insult and mockery they suffered; glowering at the world from beneath knitted brows and turning to swear foul abuse at the children who called after them in the streets. It was better to try and ignore it, get on with such life as God allowed.
     
    I remembered one occasion, though, when that had been impossible. It was a moment that had defined my life. I was fifteen, a pupil at the cathedral school in Lichfield. As a senior scholar it was my duty to attend and sometimes serve at Sunday Mass. That seemed a wonderful thing after a long week at my books, struggling with the Greek and Latin poorly taught by Brother Andrew, a fat cathedral monk with a fondness for the bottle.
     
    The cathedral would be brightly lit, candles flickering before the altar, the statues and the gloriously painted rood screen. I preferred those days when I did not serve the priest but sat with the congregation. Beyond the screen the priest would intone Mass in the Latin I was coming to understand, his words echoing as the congregation made their responses.
     
    Now that the old Mass is long gone it is hard to convey the sense of mystery it communicated: the incense, the rising Latin cadences, then the ringing of the censing bell as the bread