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with wealth.

    According to some, the answer to these abuses was ‘reform’, a simple word with very dangerous connotations. Now a lot of Ned’s acquaintances at the Inns of Court had talked about these new ideas coming out of the German lands. Names like Luther and Zwingli, while not mentioned aloud, were commonly whispered. The medium of this reform movement was not gossiping clusters of clerks or wild haired men preaching at market places. No, it was something much more difficult to track down, that could be passed innocently from hand to hand and affect hundreds in its passage. It was a book.

    Dangerous, subversive, damned heretical and corrosive of the soul! That was how Bishop Stokesley of London termed the flood of forbidden heretical books. Ned had to admit the Bishop could be right. Heretical books had changed his life though not just from their perusal. It was another stranger route that had snagged him.

    No less an authority than Sir Thomas More claimed that the flood of ‘fetid filth spewing from the arse of Luther’ was dropped through open windows as baited traps for the innocent and unwary. The truth was somewhat different. It was smuggled into the country and snapped up by avid readers, ready to hand over a few shillings. And one of the main suppliers of this heretical trade was Mistress Meg Black, apprentice apothecary, the recent ruiner of his Christmas Revels, and current reluctant partner in the minding of young Walter Dellingham.

    Ned still wasn’t sure how to describe their, what…friendship?…Acquaintance?… familiarity?…connection via his companionship with her brother Rob? Or perhaps it was the shared travails and threats of the Cardinals Angels ? Maybe even a touch of gratitude for ministering to his injuries, even if one time it was with a white hot poker, though his better angel prodded him to reluctantly admit the wound had healed well. However his daemon had slyly suggested another reason. Since the College of Barber-Surgeons had essentially forbidden women, Meg Black would take her practice in surgeoning where she found it.

    However neither gratitude nor connivance explained why Ned found his cods stirring alarmingly as Meg Black swayed past in a laced bodice and kirtle. She was fair enough at some five foot in height and he had to admit he liked the way her blue grey eyes sparkled with mischief. Or the tilt of her pert nose when she was amused and the manner in which she brushed her chestnut hair off her ears with a distracted flick while she puzzled through a problem. This allure though had its draw backs. In all of London he’d never met such a forward lass. Instead of the modest, respectful silence becoming to a young girl, as was proclaimed from the pulpit, Meg Black followed her own wilful customs and was never one to shy away from dispute or argument.

    Actually the more he thought about it, the more Cromwell’s request of his involvement in this task of sheepish–reformer shepherding seemed somewhat strange. Why him? Surely Cromwell had several more qualified retainers, all hot for reform, with the status to show an impressionable country lad around the best reformist sites of the city. The short missive signed by his ‘good lord’ was as brief and cryptic as he was coming to expect. It charged him to ward and protect Walter Dellingham from the many perils that manifest in this city of London, and that was all. No further instructions, admonishments or recommendations. Considering the usual hedging and prevarication of his Uncle Richard, this instruction was briefer than a bishop’s penance. Ned gave Meg Black a covert glance. She seemed pleased with a faintly satisfied smile on her face, the one she usually had after successfully finishing a complicated remedy. His daemon noted that for a hot bible–smuggling reformist, Meg seemed extraordinarily pleased to be here. Odd that. Another suspicious thought bubbled up. She couldn’t have volunteered him, could she? His