By the Light of a Ratcatcher's Moon , livre ebook

Book one of the Priest-hunter series
By the Light of a Ratcatcher’s Moon
by Chris Page




By the Light of a Ratcatcher’s Moon
Published in 2018 by
AG Books
www .agbooks.co.uk
AG Books is an imprint of
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © 2018 Chris Page
The right of Chris Page to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any person who does so may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.




If you worship the Pope and Rome
and the Mass is your spiritual home,
Henry Tudor will be after your crown.
And Cranmer will make
you sizzle at the stake.
After Seb Gunner has hunted you down.



Prologue
Under the spiritual leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, Henry VIII is beginning to cut his infamous sway through each of his six wives. The former Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon has been replaced and Anne Boleyn will shortly be executed as the hard underbelly of the Protestant Reformation gathers momentum under the guidance of the Toms, Cromwell and Cranmer.
If the Reformation is to douse the fervent flames of embedded, well-supported shire Catholicism, dirty but legal brigandage in the form of the capture of papal priests and their recusant harbourers must take place. The religious fires of Rome must be forced to burn through the wooden pallets stacked around the heretics’ feet at West Smith Field, or else snuffed out by the sharpened axes and knotted rope nooses at Tyburn.
Many of these burnings will be treated as a public spectacle, macabre pageantry assisted by the offer of free ale and gin. As the heat melts the victims’ lower bodies and gargoyles their faces and their stomachs explode to drum rolls and the cheers of the drunken multitudes, the Tower’s cannons will fire. Some of the victims will first have been tortured there and will gladly embrace the end when it finally comes; others, including the Scottish widow of one English baron whose limbs have been torn from his frail body on the rack, will find other ways to avoid execution.
The man chosen to head up the priest-hunting is Seb Gunner, an ungodly type, a former soldier and an itinerant builder suited to the task in all respects. Except perhaps when his hand brushes the brazenly proffered nipple of an enfettered baroness...



Introduction: A Palace Garden, 1533
There was a man standing at the bottom of his high rickety ladder hallooing him and impatiently banging on the lower wooden rungs with a thick black book. By his dress and the black hat he wore, the man was a religious makeweight belonging to the palace Seb Gunner was working on, and the book was obviously a bible.
‘Fat lot of good banging one of those shitty things at me will do you,’ Gunner muttered to himself.
Seeing him peer over his shoulder, Black Hat shouted up at him that he was one of the chaplains to the great man who lived here, who wanted a word with him in the garden, and could the builder make all haste so as not to keep the great man waiting.
As Gunner climbed down the ladder the chaplain flapped his hand in the direction of the garden, said that the great man awaited him there on a seat, and reminded him that he was Primate of all the realm and that as such a common builder should keep a civil tongue in his head and address him as ‘my Lord’. Since Gunner didn’t know what a primate was he greeted the words with a shrug and set off towards the garden, thinking there must be some problem with how he was constructing the high flint-and-flat-brick walls of the arch and extension, and a bollocking or even dismissal was on the cards. Dismissal he most certainly didn’t want because he needed the money.
* * *
Before he met the Archbishop of Canterbury in the garden of Lambeth Palace, Seb Gunner’s life since childhood had been that of a jobbing builder - thanks to his father’s patient but strict hand with him from the age of nine to fourteen - and a common soldier. In his teens his thoughts had been that one or the other would surely see him through this life.
It was because of a young tearaway’s restlessness that he’d wanted to fight. At the age of fourteen he’d taken the king’s shilling and run away from home, intent on military service in the name of Harry Eight. They said he must be sixteen to fight, and being big for his age he’d owned up to that in order to get in. It was a necessary lie because he knew that younger boys were taken on as drummers or ammunition fetchers and carriers, and that he most definitely didn’t want. After a period of training he was sent to France to uphold the oath he’d sworn. They said ‘fight those Frenchies over there as hard as you can with your comrades’, so he’d fought them bravely and strongly and survived. In August 1513, as part of a force of 30,000 men, he’d fought against the duc de Longueville at Guingate in the Battle of the Spurs - so-called because the French army had put their spurs to their horses’ flanks in a frantic attempt to leave the field in the face of the charging English. It was the most thrilling experience Seb Gunner had ever had. He’d performed well that day, and bravely, and was noticed.
After he got back to England they said ‘you are a soldier, so drill and practise’, and he diligently spent hours at the archery butts and the straw-man stabbing grounds perfecting his aim and swordsmanship. But apart from a skirmish in Scotland, that was the start of a long period of inaction. He was a young man who had experienced the pulse of war, and once again he became restless for something else. So he left to go back to building walls in London. Soldiers only got paid and satisfied when they were fighting, and Seb Gunner needed some money and excitement in his life.
Which was how, that day in 1533, Gunner found himself standing before the seated archbishop in his dusty working clothes, unsure what he should say. The archbishop was a silver-haired, clean-shaven man of medium stature - forty-five years old, maybe? Then Gunner noticed his small, pale hands and blue eyes. He was smiled upon kindly by the black-hatted cleric, who gestured for him to sit on the bench, next to the fine silken folds of his robes. Gunner’s protestations that his clothes were too dirty to place alongside the mighty Primate were waved away in a gentle manner so he plonked his dusty arse next to God’s anointed right-hand man in England.
Gunner had no religion, nor did he want any. He’d been careful to hide this because the man was his customer, but now he blurted out the fact that he was a man without faith and, with the archbishop’s goodwill, would prefer to stay that way. He tried to say it respectfully and honestly for he reckoned the great man was about to try and do his duty and make a God-fearing Christian of him.
The archbishop smiled, and laid a hand on Gunner’s arm. ‘Walk with me for a short while, away from prying eyes and pointed ears.’
As they strolled side by side, the tall begrimed builder and the smaller, rotund archbishop in his ankle-length finery, the highest cleric in the land spoke quietly but assertively.
‘Master Gunner, I will be open and frank with you from the start. I want you to come and work directly for me as soon as you have finished the extension to my palace.’
Gunner whipped his head round towards the archbishop, a look of dismay on his face.
‘This may seem like heresy coming from the senior cleric in the land,’ the archbishop ploughed on, continuing to walk, ‘but having no faith will be a good thing for the duties I wish you to carry out for me on behalf of the king. And should any good and Protestant show of Christian faith be required, my friend, I will do enough praying and kneeling for both of us while you concentrate on the job in hand.’
He paused for a moment then, to let his words sink in.
‘Simply put, Master Gunner, the English landscape of religious observance is shifting and ripe for change. Under the laws of this realm popery is heresy and the days of the Catholic priests and their Mass-mongering and local dominance over simple, uneducated yeomen, their womenfolk and children, are coming to an end. Since the start of Henry Tudor’s Reformation we have detected an alarming trend: many of the great shire houses outwardly front as Protestants but underneath practise as Catholics. We wish to put an end to that. The Catholic snake must not be allowed to bite the reformist Protestant Church in its rump and inject its papal venom therein. We, my friend, are going to put a stop to these heretical agents of so-called Romish sacrificial grace from spreading their poison. We will quash their counter-reformation before it gains any further ground. They must be taught that the spouting of their liturgy is a treasonable act that is leading many of our laypeople in a spiritual direction that is unnatural, anathema to this great land.’
The archbishop stopped, and blinked rapidly, as if surprised by his rising vehemence.
Gunner was too stunned to say anything.
After taking a couple of deep breaths, the archbishop turned to his builder, placed a small hand on Gunner’s elbow and ushered him forward again.
‘Master Gunner