The Queen's Lady. Barbara Kyle

his aldermen. The Lieutenant bowed sadly and came down the steps. The guard lowered his pike to let him pass, then raised it to bar Honor again.

      Her vision had darkened. Every face faded except the face behind the Mayor. Every object blurred except the sapphire ring and the brilliant black eyes above it.

      He’s behind this. Evil surfacing again…like scum…blighting everything he touches.

      Fury overpowered her. Though the pike still barred her way, the guard had half turned to watch the Mayor. She lifted her foot and slammed it to the inside of his knee. His body buckled, his pike clattered to the ground.

      She bounded up the stairs toward Bastwick. Aldermen cringed in astonishment. Bastwick turned and saw her coming. He stared for a moment, incredulous. Then hatred flooded his eyes. He leaped up and pointed at her. “Guard!”

      She was three tiers from him—her fingers hooked to claw out those black eyes—before the guard was on her. Pain seared as he wrenched her arm and pinned her hand to the small of her back. Her eyes and Bastwick’s locked. As she writhed under the guard’s grip, Bastwick’s mouth twitched into a private smile of victory.

      Her arm was on fire, but the pangs finally shot reason back to her brain. Attacking him is madness. She sensed the guard’s reluctance to bring all his strength to bear on a gentlewoman, and so she groaned loudly, as if faint, and went limp. His grip shifted immediately into an effort to support her. Just then a roar went up from the crowd. Honor’s head snapped around. So did Bastwick’s. All eyes in the stands looked out. The crowd fell silent.

      The executioner had entered the pit. The dancing orange flame of his torch was the only movement in the square, and in the stillness Honor caught the Chancellor’s final words droning from between the condemned men. The awful phrase crashed over her: “…second charge, for which the sentence is irrevocable…”

      A steel band of terror tightened around her chest. No one convicted of a second charge of heresy could escape the fire. After a first conviction in the Church courts the accused could abjure, recant, and be released. But for anyone caught a second time there was no escape. That was the law.

      No one…not the Mayor…not even the King…no one can save him now…

      She turned and stumbled down the steps, Bastwick forgotten. The aldermen, settling for the spectacle, ignored her. The guard allowed her to go.

      Honor forced her way again to the rope. Ralph’s head rolled back and forth against the stake. His heaving chest, stripped bare in the struggle to tether him, glistened with grimy sweat. The anguish in his eyes ripped Honor’s heart like a fishhook.

      As the executioner stood by, the Bishop’s Chancellor read out from a scroll the condemned men’s heresies, beginning with the friar. “Divers and sundry times within the parish of St. Giles you have alleged that the sacrament of the altar is only bread, and not Christ’s true body…”

      “Stinking Lutheran!” a woman yelled.

      “…and you have alleged that no priest can absolve a man of sin; that tithes, mortuaries and oblations are not due to priests; that the pardons and blessings of bishops have no value…”

      When he had finished the list, he looked at the friar. The crowd murmured, knowing the question that was to come. Would Friar Heywood, in terror of hell at this ultimate moment, recant and die in the bosom of the Church? There was no chance of pardon; both men, as second offenders, must burn. But by recanting and gaining absolution, the Church offered salvation for their souls. And so the Chancellor asked, “Do you abjure your heresies and return to the Church?”

      Heywood smiled beatifically. “I trust I am not separate from the Church. I know that I am closer to God.”

      Amazement coursed through the crowd, most people condemning his wickedness, a few praising his steadfastness. No one seemed interested when the Chancellor crossed to the second man. On his way, he looked apprehensively at the bruised sky clamping down on the square. Rain clouds. He rattled through the second man’s crimes: “You have on sundry occasions shown yourself to be of an erroneous opinion concerning the blessed sacraments…”

      Honor strained at the rope to hear the charges, but she was too far away and the chattering people drowned out the Chancellor’s words. They were interested only in the famous friar, not this unknown man. She caught only the phrase “…selling illegal Bibles in the English tongue…” and when the Chancellor impatiently asked if he would recant his heresies, Ralph only shut his eyes tightly. Whether it was a gesture of refusal or only of agony, Honor could not tell. The Chancellor waited only a moment before quickly striding away.

      The pit was now clear except for the executioner standing between the two chained men. The air above the sand shimmered as if breathing back the absorbed heat of former fires. The crowd stilled. A dog barked in an alley. A far-off church bell clanged.

      The Mayor rose and lifted his arms. “Fiat justicia!”

      The executioner turned to the friar and thrust his torch into the faggots. Instantly, flames roared up. The executioner withdrew the torch, turned, and thrust it in below Ralph. The straw kindled, then flared. Ralph’s body went rigid. Only his eyes moved, darting over the flames that licked his legs and hands and then subsided like the playful swats of torture a cat inflicts on a maimed bird.

      There was now a wall of flame around the friar. All that could be seen was the top of his head. Clouds of gray smoke billowed over him. The hiss of the wood rose above the excited hiss of men and women who inched back from the blaze. Then, suddenly, it was over. His head slumped. The smoke had asphyxiated him.

      The Lieutenant stepped forward. In a gesture of mercy he raised a sledgehammer and drove in the nail that held the chain at the back of the stake. The chain rippled away. The friar’s body slid down the stake and melted into the fire.

      There was a moment of utter silence. Then a groan of disappointment that the drama was so swiftly concluded. Then, all eyes turned to the second man. The flames around him were not so greedy. At the sides they only skimped along the damp wood, though in front they were leaping up in three-foot orange tongues.

      Ralph was writhing under his chain. His abdomen pumped as if in spasm. But with his immense strength he was straining through the twine that bound his feet. It snapped. The two pieces sprang up like fighting snakes, then dropped into the flames. He lifted one freed leg and kicked wildly at the glowing wood. The chain gnawed his ribs, smearing skin away.

      Honor gagged. Beyond the flickering screen of fire she saw a slime of excrement darkening his leg. She caught glimpses of his foot…kicking, recoiling, kicking again…the skin of his sole charred black. People shouted and cheered, excited by his primal struggle. Honor wailed as if the fire was consuming her own flesh.

      Ralph’s eyeballs bulged, dehydrated. Tears spilled, bubbled on his cheeks, evaporated. The tatters of his shirt curled and smoked. Sparks lighted in the bush of his beard. It flared like dry pine needles. Honor shrieked. Ralph shook his head wildly until the beard only smoldered.

      The fire sputtered on endlessly, prolonging his agony. Not one merciful breath of wind rushed in to fan the flames. And Ralph’s own vast strength kept him conscious and fighting long past the time when most men would have fainted.

      Honor thought she would go mad. Like a wild animal, she sprang. As if infused with some of Ralph’s strength, she clawed her way between two guards and under the rope. She tore across the open pit. As she neared Ralph the fist of heat punched her, scalding her throat, forcing shut her eyes, gagging her with the sweetish stink of his burning flesh.

      She heard the rip of silk. A guard had snatched the back of her skirt. Without turning she bunched her fists and shot her elbows backwards into his ribs. His breath belched from him and he released her. Unbalanced, she toppled.

      She scrambled onto her hands and knees. Two guards were racing toward her. She was almost at the holocaust beneath Ralph. She sprawled across the final two feet of scorched sand. Her brain flared a warning, but her hands, with a will of their own, pawed at the glowing logs.

      She