Read Sacred Treason for Free Online Page B

blackness of Ludgate itself. The gate was shut fast, but Clarenceux was reassured: he was cold and wet but he knew where he was. He turned and followed the line of houses built along the wall to the north, along the line of the Old Bailey.
    He came to a corner. The tall shadow on his right was Newgate. Muffled shouts came from within a building nearby; a fight must have broken out in the prison. He sighed, despondent. At this rate it would take him all night to reach Machyn’s house.
    Ahead was the gate of the old priory of St. Bartholomew the Great. Once it had been a beautiful church. He cursed the old king—as he always did when he came here—for Henry the Eighth had ordered the destruction of the nave and all the abbey buildings. Twenty years had now passed; what was left was a paltry wreck. That was the thing that enraged him about Protestants. They might speak from conviction, and they might seek God’s will just as fervently as those of the old religion—but then they recklessly destroyed things of divine beauty. That could not be done with God’s blessing. They spoke for themselves, not with God in their hearts.
    He wiped his face and leaned against a wall. Ahead there was an intense dark shadow—St. Giles’s Church; it would not be much further to the elm. He could see the outline of the city’s north wall and Cripplegate ahead. He made his way toward it until he felt the cold stone of the gate tower beneath his hand. He stepped carefully forward, slipping in the mud and pressing himself against the wall. He sensed the elm, which grew from the side of the bank, and then felt its bark. He moved between it and the wall. Here was the door, still unlocked. It creaked open, and he went through.
    He was now in a dark, sheltered yard, somewhere just inside the north wall of the city, as blind as he had been when he first stepped out of his house. He reached up and felt the wet shingles of a low roof. It must be a stable of some sort, or the blacksmith’s forge. What’s the smith’s name? Lowe. Not that he is likely to appear now, not in this weather.
    Clarenceux’s knee struck stone. He bent down and felt a large water-filled cistern. Water for the forge. He moved around it; not far away was another door. He found the latch and opened it tentatively. He closed the door behind him and started to walk down the right-hand side of the street.
    Holding the unlit lantern in his left hand, he ran his right over the walls and shop fronts, doors and stone pillars. He bumped into barrels, mounting blocks, carts, cases, and piles of wood. His ankle clipped a crate lying in the darkness in the street. At one point he slipped and fell in the mud, landing on his hands and knees in the wet slime, fumbling around in the dark for his lantern and hat.
    Why am I doing this? Machyn’s problems are his own.
    No. He needs my help. And despite his age, he managed this journey in the dark. So I can too.
    A dog started barking nearby. Trembling, he reached out and felt the stone of a pillar. It was the church gate of St. Mary Aldermanbury.
    O blessed savior Jesus, help me.
    He leaned against the church wall, gasping. He felt pain in his hand and realized he was grinding his palm into the stone of the church wall. What was happening to him? Fear. To go on would be to leave the comfort of the church and enter a deeper, malevolent darkness: a darkness in which he would be as fully visible to the Devil as if it were daylight, and all the iniquities of the city at night would be invisible to him.

8
    Lying in the darkness, Rebecca Machyn wiped the tears from her face. She turned in the narrow bed. What have we done to deserve this?
    She remembered Henry’s words, and his kisses. And his tears. And the emptiness of the words he had spoken—how his reassurances had sounded false and shallow, and yet how deeply distressed he had been.
    She had done as he had said. Mistress Barker had been very