Free The Heretic’s Wife by Brenda Rickman Vantrease Page A

in the print shop,” she said wryly. “But we still have to buy food.”
    She regretted almost instantly the remark about the cradle, but at least it brought some fleeting expression to his face. Pain was after all better than feeling nothing, wasn’t it?
    He did not look at his wife or at her when he answered, just stared at the floor in that habit he’d acquired in prison. “Mary’s father has offered to let us come and live with them in Gloucestershire.”
    He did not even say
until the trouble passes,
or
for the time being
. His voice was weighed down with resignation. Kate felt a sudden surge of fear, as though she were watching some fast-flowing stream carry him away from her, and he wasn’t even struggling. “You mean close our father’s shop?” she whispered in disbelief. “Permanently? Move to Gloucestershire and . . . do what?”
    Mary, who had been bouncing her restless son on her knees, set him on the floor and put her arm across her husband’s shoulders in a protective fashion.“It will only be for a little while, Kate. Gloucestershire is really pretty country. And there’s not all the fighting over religion there. Not a bishop within a hundred miles. It smells better than London too. Lots of fresh air for Pipkin. You are to come with us. My parents have plenty of room. They bade me tell you to come. John is going to help my father. His back’s been poorly.”
    Before Kate could stop herself, she blurted out, “John? Herding sheep!” The look of pleading in Mary’s face made her instantly regret the words. “I suppose the fresh air will be good for him,” she added lamely.
    “Good. It’s settled then.” Mary gave them her bravest smile. “You’re coming with us?”
    Kate shook her head, unable to quite believe what she’d just heard. “That is very dear of your parents, Mary. But I think I’ll stay right here for a while and watch the shop. I have a bit of money still and one or two things left I can sell. I can at least make it through the summer. Who knows what may happen by then?”
    “But you will come for a visit? Tell her she must come for a visit, John.”
    John raised his head and looked at her. The deadness in his eyes frightened her. “You must come for a visit,” he said.

    It turned out that the only thing Kate had left to sell was the Wycliffe Bible that had been passed down to her from her great-grandmother Rebecca. She had never known her grandmother Becky, but even as a child she’d loved the big Bible, loved the way the words with their funny spellings crawled across the crowded pages, loved the little pictures in the margins. It was not like the books the printing presses turned out. This one was all written out by hand, supposedly by some long-ago relative, an illuminator who lived in Bohemia over a hundred years ago.
    On the July morning that John and Mary and little Pipkin, who held on to her and could only be pried away with the promise of a lamb, departed, Kate took the Bible out from its special hiding place beneath a loose stone in the hearth. Who would buy such a thing? she thought as she removed the linen wrappings and rubbed her hand over its tooled leather binding. Few could afford it. Who would dare take the risk of owning it in such perilous times?
    She opened it carefully, remembering how her father used to show it to her with such pride before he was arrested, how her mother could no longerbear to see it after he died. It opened to a brightly illustrated picture of the baby Moses floating down a blue Nile River in his little basket. Everything was in miniature—his perfect baby’s face, each rib of the basket so perfectly executed she could almost feel the texture of the reed—and all within the intricate capital that swirled and swooped in brilliant reds and blues and a tracing of gold down the margin of the page. The face of Miriam, his sister, peered into the basket at the child. That long-ago artist had captured in her expression the love