By the Light of a Ratcatcher's Moon by Chris Page

Author:Chris Page
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: TUDOR, CATHOLICS, PRIEST-HUNTER, TOWER, TORTURER, SEX, BONDAGE, DEVIANT, ENFETTERED, RACKMASTER, BURNING, STAKE, HENRY VIII, REFORMATION, THE POPE
ISBN: 9781785388620
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2018
Published: 2018-04-25T00:00:00+00:00

17. A Small Cry in the Night

Gunner had never been much of a thinking man, never got ahead of himself or considered and weighed consequences overly. Orders and directions from others mixed in with the vacuity of the drifter, an instinct for survival and a certain inbuilt feral cunning had been his way of getting by. His father, the army under Josia Kenwith, followed by the itinerant wilderness years as a whore-tupping builder and, finally, the last nine years under the all-embracing preferment and command of the archbishop, had set this path. Thinking required intelligence and his had been acquired on the job as he went through these differing experiences, specifically by listening, obeying and watching. This had stood him in good stead in his present post: all these turbulent years at Cranmer’s side and he hadn’t put a foot out of place yet.

Until now.

Those hooded but admiring looks, the willing patronage in exchange for his services he had so eagerly sought from his royal and religious masters, had been often and generously conferred. Fire-bombing monasteries, pig-sticking sodomite usurer-monks, hunting down priests and their harbourers, using newly learned mind-games and, if necessary, pain to extract information - all these activities he had excelled in. He had developed a well-cocked ear for anti-reformist dissidence, a honed blade for treasonable injustice and the nose of a bloodhound for the hated Romish behaviour. He’d even learned some words of Latin from his master: he was the chief carnifex of the realm. Trusted and respected, a man of strict, rigid principles and endeavour who never shirked a task on behalf of his masters, a man of measured zeal and simple maxims - above all a man of loyalty and duty.

We hunt Catholic priests, we catch Catholic priests, and they burn at the stake.

He had been commended by the king, was valued by the archbishop, and was steadfastly followed by the small bunch of hardened skirmishers he had gathered around himself. It had all flowed seamlessly from day one. He had become a hard man with a solid reputation for getting the job done efficiently and correctly. A good man to have on your side in a fight, an impenetrable, enigmatic, unemotional type so thoroughly imbued with the cause that he’d caught and let burn his own, albeit estranged, sister. As he knew when he took the decision to let her burn, it was an action that augured well for his name as a hard man who wouldn’t let any personal emotion bar the way to getting the job done.

So what had happened to that trustworthy man? Why, having hauled himself up from the depths and dirt of the building trade and become one so valued, vaunted and quoted by his men and his masters, had he thrown it all away on the naked body of an incarcerated female prisoner? His first proper female prisoner at that! Put at risk everything he’d worked and aspired to, sacrificed

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