A Dead Man in Deptford by Anthony Burgess

and his hammering father,
would weep. Weep when? That he did not know. He could hear
weeping on the wind.

    - Brown Peter, his father said, as they sat about the table,
is well looked after. He knew not his old stable at first but then
he knew it and whinnied. You have been a good boy with him.
A man and his horse are one in the big world of affairs. Here I
do not need to ride. I am nailed to my soles and heels.
    - I shall walk to Dover, Kit said. Twenty miles, it will
be good for me.
    - I shall give you new soles tomorrow.
    - Kitticat, Meg said, the Reverend Kitticat, mender of
men’s souls.
    - It will be a year or so. I must become a Master of
Arts, you know that. And till then a Walsingham man.
    - Walsingham? Anne said. That was a holy town, and
the Milky Way in the sky showed the way to it.
    Kit explained who Walsingham was. They listened, all except
poor Dorothy, who fed a sop vainly to her wooden doll. Kit
looked in pity and anger at her idiocy. He said:
    - It is sometimes hard to give praise to God. Dorothy is
always the same, we thought it was a prolonged childishness,
but she is almost a woman and she wets the floor still and says
nothing.
    - She says a word or so, his mother said. She has learned
some words since you left. She knows the names of her sisters
but she uses them turn and turn about. Sky she knows, and sun,
also rain.
    - And, his father said as he cored a pippin, she knows
that God is in the sky. But she thinks that God is the sun.
    - So did we, so did the Emperor Constantine, Kit said out
of his learning. Sunday is the Sabbath. The theological question
is whether she has a soul to be saved. If yes, then she shall burn
for the heresy of saying God is the sun. If no, she’s dissolved into
elements when she dies, like any beast of the field.

    - This is terrible, Meg said. Is this what they teach you
at Cambridge?
    - Oh, we’re taught a lot about the soul and who is saved
and who damned. It seems everyone is damned who does not
belong to the English Church, and there are times I grow sick
of it.
    - Sick of your studies? his father said. Studies are for
raising you, this you know.
    - That and that only perhaps. In themselves nothing. They
are a bunch of keys for opening doors. Feet are for walking but
they need shoes. That is a useful art, the making and mending
of shoes. I am being apprenticed to the useless.
    All about that table save poor Dorothy looked at him in
disquiet. His mother at length said:
    - And yet they employ you on high business, young as
you are.
    - The high business of searching for enemies of the realm.
So they can be apprehended and brought home and hanged. It
is the hanging and drawing and quartering that is important. A
bloody show meant for a warning to the people, but the people
take it as diversion. Well, I mean to give them diversion, but
the blood will be pig’s blood.
    They did not understand him. Poor Dorothy had been long
in the situation they seemed only to have arrived at, but she
tried to tear the head of her doll and cried what sounded like
Gog.
    - There, you hear, her mother said. Clever girl, she crooned
at her. Say God. Say sky.
    - Koy.
    - She has said her prayers, Kit said in weariness. I will
say mine and sleep. The sun is down and I will join the crows
and starlings, black-suited choristers that crark. I have not had
much sleep of late. Where do I sleep?
    When a son must ask this in his own home, then perhaps
he is past thinking of it as his home.
    He walked, as he said he would, to Dover. His shoes were
freshly soled; he carried on his back the flat leathern sack which held two newly washed shirts and three pairs of hose. A good
mother. Oh, they were all good, the kind embracing round to
which he must be the tangent. He walked the round earth that
looked tangential. Kind clouds were propelled above him by a
kind wind. The summer weather held. He walked over fields
and along paths, seeing sheep and shepherds.