Free Final Sacrament (Clarenceux Trilogy) by James Forrester

ringing in the chill air above them. Occasionally he caught someone’s eye and nodded a brief greeting. Annie was feeling the cold and about to complain, so he held her hand a little tighter to remind her to be quiet. She would warm up soon enough in the church, with the heat of all the people.
    He looked up at the vicar’s room above the porch. So many vicars had come and gone, so many changes had taken place. One had even gone to the stake. Now there was no vicar: William Living had resigned the previous year to go to St. Mary Abchurch, and a series of chaplains held the services. The present one was a nervous man with short black hair called Mr. Bowring. His sermons were too enthusiastic for Clarenceux, too idealistic, copied from Mr. Bowring’s more able heroes.
    Clarenceux had first come here at the age of seventeen, before old King Henry’s dissolution, when the rector and right of patronage had been with the abbot of Westminster. It had then been one of the most beautiful religious buildings in the environs of the city, and he had marveled at it. The columns in the nave had carved stone vines twisting around them—a monument to a rich man called Vyner—and they had been painted, as if growing up to the roof. The walls too had been painted and the windows filled with rich glass. There had been six altars in the church, including a fine tall altar to St. Katherine in front of the rood screen. The printer Wynkyn de Worde was buried just in front of it. And each of those altars had had a painted screen behind it with sculptures of the highest quality, and an altar cloth around its front, and beautiful silver-gilt furniture. Above the high altar had been a great wood-and-silver cross. The whole nave had been a wonderful cave of color, light, and music. Chantry priests had sung through the day, until compline in the early evening; the organ had played during services. Now almost all of that had gone. The altars had been torn out, their sculptures smashed. The paintings had been covered in whitewash, the rood cross had been burned, the chantry priests all thrown out and the chantry hall sold off. The organ had been abandoned and was no longer used. No one dared sing anything but psalms these days. Tombs had been defaced, altar cloths turned into kitchen rags, and treasure melted down. Even the beautiful vine carvings on the columns had been purposefully damaged, the paint scraped away.
    He entered the church and sat on the plain bench pews in the nave. Around him, people found their places, and sat or knelt. He looked up: traces of sculpted beauty remained but most had gone. His daughters would never know the lyrical majesty of their parish church, which, like the vine, had once drawn the eye in many directions. They would only know the one altar, the stern dictatorial commandment to look east. To them, church attendance would not be a matter of community but duty—to take their place obediently behind the profusion of private pews of various types that now filled the nave, and to listen to the didactic and sanctimonious speechifying of an impostor priest. It was a sign of the times: people were no longer members of a community but individuals, cut off from each other, as if they were all choosing to stand alone in the eyes of God. It made him bitterly sad to reflect on so much destruction. It was not holy. Destroying beautiful things and fragmenting society could not be justified, and the smashing of the sculptures had been particularly vindictive.
    He knelt down, shut his eyes, and prayed for the mystical true faith to find another way to enter their lives, to allow a better understanding of God’s guidance. He prayed for the safety and security of his wife Awdrey and their daughters. He prayed for his closest friends, especially Julius Fawcett of Summerhill, Sir Richard Wenman of Caswell, John Hooker of Exeter, and especially for Rebecca Machyn. He prayed also for his servants, Thomas, Joan, and Nick, and the