The Dept. of Reformation
This was a pastiche I wrote in the style of Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, which is a brilliant book I read in one sitting and would recommend to anyone. This short story won the student fiction contest for Assignment Magazine in 2019, when I was studying for my MFA. It was originally published by Assignment Magazine under the title “Have Mercy.” You can read that version here.
What follows is the original version I wrote.
I remember going to the cathedral as a child. Salisbury stood tall. It reached the sky. I dipped my fingers in holy water. It was cold on my forehead and it dripped down the bridge of my nose. A priest spoke to me in Latin, and his voice echoed up the walls. He touched my head with a hand encrusted with jewels.
Martin Luther said, “Whatever your heart clings to and confides in, that is really your God.”
My father had two hounds for hunting and two children for breeding. Sometimes I dropped morsels from the table into the dogs’ waiting mouths. At night my father excused himself to go and pray before his altar and score his back with a cat-o-nine tails. I spied him once through a hole in the wall and cried in silence. The memory gave me nightmares for weeks.
The Tower of London is a damp place. The moist air is hard to breathe. In this beast’s belly I hear the screams of those who refuse to give names. Names of other reformers like me, names of parents, lovers, children, names of siblings.
My brother and I grew up running through tall, dark corridors. I didn’t know then we lived a castle. I didn’t know that it was possible to wear so much dirt that it caked on the skin like mud. I didn’t know what it felt like to try to sleep on an empty stomach. I didn’t know that we were rich, and others weren’t, that we had shoes and others didn’t. I don’t know if I’m imprisoned because I think the Church shouldn’t be rich, or if I’m imprisoned because the Church wants our riches.
Fact: Anne Askew was the first woman tortured on charges of heresy. They racked her. They being the King’s servants. They racked her before they burned her.
They say it’s not the flames that kill you, but the smoke.
I’ve counted five-hundred, thirty-nine stones in my cell. There are more, but I got tired of counting. I am educated. I can count past my fingers and my toes, though I used them to keep track of groups of ten stones, so I wouldn’t forget. Then I used them to keep track of one hundred stones. I lost track of how many days it took to count, how many days it’s been since they brought me here, but now there’s snow on the ground.
The river was flowing high the day they brought me. Three guards in their red, white, and yellow livery, spears shining in the sun. Traitor’s gate. Am I a traitor? When the King was married to Anne Boleyn, I wasn’t a traitor.
What Anne Boleyn said on the day she died: “I pray God save the king and send him long to reign over you, for a gentler nor a more merciful prince was there never: and to me he was ever a good, a gentle and sovereign lord.”
I was there the day she was killed. The executioner was from Calais. He used a sword instead of an axe and took her head off in one blow. They say the king celebrated Anne’s death, even though she said such pleasant things about him. They all said such pleasant things about him, even her supposed lovers, even her brother.
If the king elects to burn me, I will die at Smithfield. That’s where they burn people. Thomas More burned six reformers, before reform blazed faster than he could burn us. Then he died because he refused to acknowledge the king as the head of the Church of England.
What Thomas More said to the executioner before his head was lopped off: “Pick up thy spirits, man, and be not afraid to do thine office; my neck is very short, take heed therefore thou strike not awry for having thine honesty.”
I will tell my executioner that I forgive him. I forgive him and will speak highly of him to God when I reach Heaven, for I am no heretic and shall not be bound for Hell. I will tell him I don’t believe in Hell, so he shouldn’t fear it. Then he will make my death so fast and effortless that I think I should almost enjoy it. At least, I will enjoy it if I am tortured first. I don’t think death is as bad as torture.
I was engaged to marry once. I was fourteen. I went into the village with the ladies of my household and we looked at fabrics and jewels. The fiancé was thirty-seven years old. He had a pot-belly and no children. His first two wives died in childbirth.
We didn’t marry because he died.
What the physician said: “He might have been poisoned, but his body did not come in for examination in time to tell.”
There is no fire here in the Tower. Traitors don’t get fires.
I saw my father beat a servant once in the flickering light of his own fire in his own room. I was seven. He whipped her with his cat-o-nine, then threw her on the ground and followed. I couldn’t see what happened then, but I heard her screams. She prayed a lot, prayed to him, prayed to You, prayed to anyone who would help her.
Should I pray? Should I ask Henry to have mercy on me? I bet if I prayed, if I prayed like a Papist, making silly marks on my back to prove I could be like Christ in the privacy of my own room before my own altar, they would still call me a heretic. No amount of scars can make up for the books they found in my bedchamber. If I beg for mercy, they will still kill me. If I give them names…
Night comes again. The moon reflects on the snow, turning it silver. One of the guards told me I am lucky to have a window. Even here, it seems, there is a division between the formerly-rich and the forever-poor. The forever-poor don’t get windows. They don’t get regular meals. I suppose they must feed on rats; there are plenty of those here in the Tower. There are plenty of those in this part of the Tower, anyway.
What my father said: “King Henry VIII is the Nero of England.”
I don’t know much about poison except for that our father had a taster at home.
The Borgias ruled Rome because their father was the Pope. Pope Alexander Sextus. They were famous for poisoning people. The Pope’s daughter, Lucrezia Borgia, was rumored to be as deadly as she was poisonous in spirit. They say she kept powder in a ring and would open the ring over a man’s goblet if she wanted him to die. He would drink, and then he would die.
Is poison better than torture? Is torture better than being burned alive? I think I would take a few swings of an axe over being tied to a flaming pile of logs and hay.
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The prisoner huddles in a corner of her cell, rubbing her shoulders. She was racked that evening. She spoke no names.
Prayers to You, prayers to her brother, to her king, and to Martin Luther hang on her lips. Deliver me from this agony. My limbs are falling off. They tried to take my arms off, my legs off, when will they take my head off? Will they put my arms and legs and head around London as a warning? Thomas More’s daughter Margaret bought his head and turned it into a relic. Will my head rot on some pike over the River Thames? I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, I don’t want to burn, please don’t let me burn.
She doesn’t fall asleep. She stays awake, all night. The next day the guards come again. They carry her. She whimpers all the way down to the lower dungeons, where screams live. Nothing else survives down there, not even whispered names of fellow reformers, fathers, brothers, ministers. She doesn’t remember if she gave the brother’s name. All she remembers is the pain, day after day. She can’t track the days, can’t count them on her hands or feet.
She counts stones instead. One. Two. Three. Four. She never makes it past five before the pain comes into her brain and she whimpers or screams. Sometimes screams live where the formerly-rich live, under windows, in cells where food is delivered twice daily. Sometimes screams live there too. Sometimes they are louder than You.
She can’t hear You anymore, even though the brother told her time and again that You are everywhere and everything. That You would always hear her. She prays, whimpers, screams.
“I am here to inform you,” says one of the king’s men, “that on the morrow you will be put to death at half past nine. You will be tied to a cart and dragged to Smithfield, your place of execution, where you are to be burned—”
She cries out then. She wants to attack him, rip his puffy sleeves off of his shoulders, rip his shoulders off of his arms and his body. He keeps talking, and then he disappears. She isn’t sure if she knows You.
Maybe she doesn’t care about dying anymore because she can’t move her legs and she can’t move her arms.
Did Francis Dereham know the names of the other men who reportedly slept with Queen Katherine Howard escaped from his own lips? Did he know during his torture? How did they torture him? She can’t remember. She just knows he was tortured, and that he gave names.
If she gave her brother’s name, would he die? Would he be tortured until he gave names of pamphlet-writers, preachers, university men? Would he be burned? Would they house him in a cell with a window? Would they house him in this cell? Would he count the stones? Would he count as many stones as she had? Would they talk about how she gave up the brother’s name days after her death? Weeks, months, and years after she burned to nothing more than ash?
But no, she is a woman. She came from a rib. Adam came from the earth, from ashes. The brother would return to his base material. She could not become a rib again after they burn her. Would it hurt, to be ashes?
Deliver me. I don’t want to burn. I don’t want to be a pile of gray ashes on a gray day in a gray puddle on the ground at Smithfield.
She recalls the first time she set foot in Salisbury Cathedral. The sun glinting and squinting and sparkling from the priest’s rings when he put his hand on her head, heavy from the weight of those jewels, and said, “I bless you, child.” She wonders if he knew she would be burned as a heretic someday, if he knew she would perhaps betray the brother—her oldest friend. She wondered if the priest survived Anne Boleyn’s rule as Queen, though Anne didn’t want to execute people. She wanted to reform them. She wanted Henry to lead them into the light. The prisoner could think of the king by his Christian name now. He’d sentenced her to die, to burn, and before that he sanctioned her torture on the rack. They were close though they’d never met.
The prisoner never went to court to serve the Queen, whichever queen he had at the time, Katherine, Katherine, Katherine, Anne, Anne, or Jane. He only has one queen left, but he won’t kill her. Henry is getting older and no one else will marry him. He has lost too many wives. He will die with this Queen. Treason. It is treason, imagining his death, though the hooded figure comes for all in the end to slice out souls. The prisoner has heard the guards talk, talk about Henry’s infirmities. They say he can’t even stand on his own anymore because he’s grown so large. Maybe he will die tomorrow too, the prisoner thinks. Then they could travel to Heaven together and meet You as equals. But the prisoner knows Henry will not die at Smithfield. He will not die at Tyburn. He will die in his warm bed, with his leg leaking. She’d heard about that too, from the guards. One of them knew a man who used to clean His Majesty’s festering wound.
The prisoner hopes she will be allowed to speak last words, to the people gathered around her pyre, her spit, her burning heap of hay and logs. She hopes she will be allowed to speak last words to the king, and to her executioner. She will forgive the latter but not the former. Henry let the people of England open their eyes and then he demanded they shut them tight again. She will not forgive him, and if she goes to Heaven with him, she will protest his presence before You. Maybe then she will believe in Hell.
The guards send in a priest. The prisoner does not speak to the priest. She has words for the king, for her executioner, and for You. She has no words for priests, even if their hands aren’t covered in red and blue and green jewels. The guards carry her from her cell. The prisoner whimpers. The prisoner screams. Nine-thirty: the prisoner is tied to a stake. The prisoner is invited to speak. She opens her mouth and can only sob.
What Cardinal Wolsey said before he opened his own throat: “I see the matter against me how it is framed; but if I had served God as diligently as I have done the king, He would not have given me over in my grey hairs.”
Cardinal Wolsey was loyal to Henry but failed to get him his desired divorce from Katherine of Aragon. The prisoner knows she served You, and though she isn’t in her grey hairs, feels forsaken by You when the fires lick the blades of hay and bark of wood at her feet. Like the prisoner, they will soon be ash.
