It seemed that the tale of blood was only begun.

Bedale, the Archdeacon of Cornwall, had gone that day to the Charterhouse; he had been seen driving there, and getting out at the door with a bundle of books under his arm, and he had passed in through the gate over which Prior Houghton’s arm had been hung on the previous evening.  It was expected that some more arrests would be made immediately.

“As for my Lord of Rochester,” said the monk, who seemed to revel in the business of bearing bad news, “and Master More, I make no doubt they will be cast.  They are utterly fixed in their opinions.  I hear that my lord is very sick, and I pray that God may take him to Himself.  He is made Cardinal in Rome, I hear; but his Grace has sworn that he shall have no head to wear the hat upon.”

Then he went off into talk upon the bishop, describing his sufferings in the Tower, for he was over eighty years old, and had scarcely sufficient clothes to cover him.

Now and again Chris looked across at his Superior.  The Prior sat there in his great chair, his head on his hand, silent and absorbed; it was only when Dom Odo stopped for a moment that he glanced up impatiently and nodded for him to go on.  It seemed as if he could not hear enough, and yet Chris saw him wince, and heard him breathe sharply as each new detail came out.

The monk told them, too, of Prior Houghton’s speech upon the cart.

“They asked him whether even then he would submit to the King’s laws, and he called God to witness that it was not for obstinacy or perversity that he refused, but that the King and the Parliament had decreed otherwise than our Holy Mother enjoins; and that for himself he would sooner suffer every kind of pain than deny a doctrine of the Church.  And when he had prayed from the thirtieth Psalm, he was turned off.”

The Prior stared almost vacantly at the monk who told his story with a kind of terrified gusto, and once or twice his lips moved to speak; but he was silent, and dropped his chin upon his hand again when the other had done.

* * * * *

Chris scarcely knew how the days passed away that followed his arrival in London.  He spent them for the most part within doors, writing for the Prior in the mornings, or keeping watch over the door as his Superior talked with prelates and churchmen within, for ecclesiastical London was as busy as a broken ant-hill, and men came and went continually—­scared, furtive monks, who looked this way and that, an abbot or two up for the House of Lords, priors and procurators on business.  There were continual communications going to and fro among the religious houses, for the prince of them, the contemplative Carthusian, had been struck at, and no one knew where the assault would end.