#st george the martyr

[lovingsylvia]

"My fingers are so full of amazing news to type that I hardly know where to begin. First of all, you better stop what you are doing and be very quiet and sit down with a tall glass of cool lager and be read to keep a huge and miraculous secret: your sister, as of 1:30 p.m. June 16th in London at the 250 year old church of St. George the Martyr is now a married woman! Mrs. Sylvia Hughes, Mrs. Ted Hughes, Mrs. Edward James Hughes, Mrs. E. J. Hughes (wife of the internationally known poet and genius): take your pick. It is really true."

--from The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1: 1940-1956, a letter to her brother Warren Plath, written on Monday, 18 June 1956

…

Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes first met on 25 February 1956 at party in Cambridge, England. They married only four months later on 16 June 1956 at St George the Martyr, Holborn, London in honor of Bloomsday with Plath‘s mother Aurelia being the only wedding guest. They have been married for six years and four months until Plath died by suicide on 11 February 1963.

Even though they have been separated for four months since October 1962, they never got a divorce. Maybe today would have been their 68th anniversary, if they were alive and stayed together. However, despite Ted Hughes later claiming that they were about to reconcile, they were, more likely, heading for a divorce.

...

Picture: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes photographed in front of Hughes parents' home The Beacon in Heptonstall, near Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire in September 1956.

Photo source: sothebys.com

[beloved-of-john]

Happy Saint George's Day!

Today we celebrate the feast of Saint George, which is significant for many reasons, not least because he is the patron saint of my country. Happy birthday England? 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

However, it's important when we turn to him as an inspiration and patron, that we aspire to the values he really represents. St. George has often been co-opted as a military figure, but it's worth remembering that he was put to death by the Roman army for criticising the cruelty of the emperor and for refusing to give up his faith and beliefs. He gave all his money to the poor before being sent to be tortured.

Even the legend of St. George and the dragon was not about seeing violence in itself as virtuous, but rather about fighting to save a town suffering drought and a woman facing violence, fighting for the health and freedom of others.

Saint George was indeed a soldier, but he was a soldier of Christ. Let us honour him for his devotion to the way of Christ and pray for a little of that great courage in our own lives.

A prayer for Saint George (taken from bookofheaven.dom)

St. George, Heroic Catholic soldier and defender of your Faith, you dared to criticize a tyrannical Emperor and were subjected to horrible torture.

You could have occupied a high military position but you preferred to die for your Lord.

Obtain for us the great grace of heroic Christian courage that should mark soldiers of Christ.

Amen.

[kecobe]

The Beheading of Saint George Cornelis Schut I (Flemish; 1597–1655) 1643 Oil on canvas Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp (KMSKA), Antwerp, Belgium

[mybeautifulchristianjourney]

Today in Christian History

Today is Friday, June 2nd, the 153rd day of 2023. There are 212 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History:

304: Syrian Bishop St. Erasmus (also known as St. Elmo) is disemboweled in Formia, Italy, during the savage persecution of Diocletian.

1070: Hereward the Wake (ie: the wary) and his followers, a resistance movement against William the Conqueror, attack and loot Peterborough Abbey, supposedly to keep its wealth from passing under Norman control because a Norman abbot had been appointed.

1811: Baptism of Abdool Musseeh (Sheikh Salih) who had been an ardent Muslim but had begun to seek Christ after seeing his Muslim military supervisor assassinate another Muslim while vowing friendship. Shortly afterward, Husseeh heard the missionary Henry Martyn speak and was drawn by his words. Then while binding copies of Martyn’s Hindustani translation of the New Testament, he had read the contents and become convinced of the truth of Christianity. He will become a strong witness among Muslims and open a Christian school, becoming a catechist for new Christians and eventually an ordained Lutheran pastor. At one point he will have to flee to escape assassination by Muslims angry at his defection from their religion; but by the time of his death he will be respected wherever he goes.

1895: Death of Christian educator Zeng Laishun in Tianjin. He had served the church both in China and the United States, as well as serving in business and administrative posts in China.

1901: Death in Formosa (Taiwan) of Canadian Presbyterian missionary George Leslie Mackay from throat cancer. He had been the first foreign missionary commissioned by Canada’s Presbyterian church. On Taiwan his close identification with the Taiwanese had prompted him to take the unusual step of marrying a Chinese woman. Over a century later, he would be the subject of an opera.

[theclaracrowell]

Saint George and the Dragon, Hans von Kulmbach, 1510.

Legend tells that a fierce dragon was causing panic at the city of Silene, Libya, at the time George arrived there. In order to prevent the dragon from devouring the people, they would give it two sheep each day; eventually, the sheep were no longer enough, and so the people were forced to sacrifice humans instead. An election would be performed. One time the king's daughter was chosen. George saved the princess by slaying the dragon with a lance called Ascalon. The king was so grateful that he offered him treasures as a reward for saving his daughter's life, but George refused it and, instead, gave these to the poor. The people of the city were so amazed that they were all converted and baptized.

[alexsmithson]

An Assiduous Day For Sunny London Town!

The buzz that swept around sunny London Town resulted from the assiduous and energetic atmosphere surrounding the city! #shotoniphone #photography #london

[grecoromanyaoi]

rome 2024 masterpost ❤️🇮🇹(+i couldve sworn there was a colloseum emoji but whatevs). we mostly saw stuff we learned abt - we took the medieval european + byzantine art course together, n i took one abt greek n roman art as well. ill try to keep it 1 reblog per day. day 1 was mostly The Worst Flight In History so. day 2, churchravaganza - santa maria maggiore / santa pudenziana / the mausoleum of santa costanza / santa maria in trastevere (w gio ❤️) / temple of portunus

under readmore bc i go on extremely long tangents but hey. blorbo from my degree!

santa maria maggiore (432) - the arc depicts events from jesus's life, like the annunciation. in the top center u can see the empty throne to which he is supposed to return, on which there is a bejewled throne. u can also see depictions of jerusalem and bethlehem (which r named), under each there r 6 sheep, representing the 12 disciples. the walls are decorated w mosaics of events from abraham and joshua's life. the pic i took (n learned abt) is the angels visiting abraham and sarah.

santa pudenziana (5th century) - the apse mosaic depicts jesus preaching to his disciples, and is visually very dependent and based on pagan depictions of a symposium. behind petrus and paulus are the martyred sisters pudentiana and praxedes, who some say are supposed to represent the dual origins of the early christian communities - the christian community of jewish origin, and the one of pagan origin. st pudentiana is apparently the patron saint of the phillipines, and the church is associated w filipinos.

the mausoleum of santa costanza (325-350) - dedicated by constantine to his daughter, constantina. constantina in italian - costanza (yes i was thinking abt george the entire time). the mosaics were made before the decision on the "standard" depiction of jesus in the same building, one as light haired and young and one as older and dark haired (christos twinkos and christos dilfos, as we call them in academia)

[koscheys-skull]

Deities, Figures, And Spirits of Rebellion, Revolutions, and Resistance.

While Tensions are High and emotions flood the body and mind, I like to think back to time and how history has birthed incredible and magnificent people throughout its unforgiving march forwards. And I think of those figures and people or those gods and stories, and I remind myself of their presence and how they shook the time and the eras that they occupied. I’m in love with them. And I admire them. Whether they are trickster Spirits that stand against Authority and embrace strength against adversity or fighting against authority and resisting the status quo, I often admire and think of them. I think of them fondly and I nod to them through Space and Time, and by thinking of them, I carry them in my heart. And I am motivated by their Light and the Inspiration that they have brought across the ages. I know that they are *there*. Eons apart from me or in spaces and spirit that I cannot grasp anywhere but within my very spirit. They are there. And I am holding them in my spirit and heart and they are holding me. And I move with their spirit and their awareness. And I nod to them. And they, to me. I wanted to provide a large list of Figures, Saints, Gods or other individuals and Beings commonly venerated, worked with or worshiped as icons of resistance and overcoming trying times. History is steeped in trials and circumstances where the oppressed and hunted have overcome great adversity or stood against the tides that seek to bring harm unto them. Here, I will list figures that you can draw upon or look to in your hours of need. If you seek a Revolutionary, you may find one Here. (feel welcome to add some as this crosses your path!)

Some Saints:

St. Michael the Archangel – Known as the chief warrior angel, St. Michael is often invoked for protection and strength in battles and against evil.

St. Joan of Arc – The French saint who led her country in battles against English forces during the Hundred Years' War. She’s celebrated for her courage and conviction against overwhelming odds.

St. Jude Thaddeus – Known as the patron saint of lost causes, people turn to him in desperate situations for help in overcoming challenges that seem impossible.

St. Sebastian – Often depicted as a martyr who survived multiple executions, he became a symbol of strength, resilience, and steadfastness in the face of persecution.

St. George – Known for slaying a dragon, St. George is a symbol of overcoming evil and oppression. Often associated with courage in adversity.

Deities:

Sekhmet (Egyptian Mythology) – The lion-headed goddess of war and healing, Sekhmet is revered for her fierce power and for defending the oppressed.

Morrigan (Celtic Mythology) – The Celtic goddess of battle and sovereignty, Morrigan embodies both the power to protect and to incite change. She is often seen as a guardian of the land, appearing before battles to inspire or instill fear in the enemy.

Kali (Hinduism) – Goddess of destruction and rebirth, Kali represents the destruction of evil and is often invoked for overcoming difficult circumstances and for protection against oppressive forces.

Oya (Yoruba/Orisha Tradition) – Goddess of winds, storms, and transformation, Oya is a fierce warrior who stands up against oppression and is often turned to for protection and resilience. Ogun (Yoruba/Orisha Tradition) – The god of iron, war, and labor, Ogun is a force for justice and is often invoked in situations requiring resilience and the strength to overcome oppression. He’s seen as a revolutionary spirit for those seeking to break free from their constraints. Eshu (Yoruba/Orisha Tradition) – Known as the divine messenger and trickster, Eshu brings both disruption and opportunity. As a god of crossroads, he’s associated with challenging authority and initiating change, reminding followers that revolution often begins with unexpected choices. Yemaya (Yoruba/Orisha Tradition) – The mother of all life and goddess of the sea, Yemaya is often associated with resilience, protection, and the healing of generational trauma. As a nurturing and revolutionary spirit, she is frequently invoked for personal and collective strength. Queen Nanny of the Maroons (Jamaican Folklore) – A legendary figure and spirit in Afro-Caribbean culture, Queen Nanny was a leader of the Maroons who resisted British colonial forces. She’s honored as a warrior and symbol of independence and strength.

Huitzilopochtli (Aztec Mythology) – The god of war and the sun, Huitzilopochtli led the Aztecs through harsh conditions to establish their empire. He symbolizes endurance, perseverance, and overcoming obstacles.

Inanna/Ishtar (Mesopotamian Mythology) – Goddess of love, war, and justice, she descends into the underworld and returns, representing survival through dark times and resistance against forces of oppression.

Manjushri (मञ्जुश्री) (Buddhist Bodhisattva) - Manjushri is venerated across the Buddhist world as an embodiment of wisdom, with devotees seeking his guidance to develop the courage and insight necessary to face personal and societal challenges. Manjushri holds a flaming sword that symbolizes the cutting of ignorance and illusion, a powerful symbol of spiritual revolution and awakening. He represents the transformative power of wisdom and the courage to overcome ignorance, delusion, and societal conventions, which align with themes of inner revolution.

Susanoo (建速須佐之男命) (Japanese Shinto) – The god of storms and the sea, Susanoo is known for his rebellious nature against the heavenly order, and he’s often venerated for his unyielding spirit. He’s remembered for protecting people by slaying a great serpent, representing courage and the ability to challenge authority.

Amaterasu (天照大御神 / 天照大神) (Japanese Shinto) – Though primarily known as the goddess of the sun and order, Amaterasu withdrew from the world when her brother acted destructively, only returning when lured back by others. Her story reflects the themes of resilience and the power to restore light and hope.

Guan Yu (关羽) (Chinese) – A legendary general deified as a god of war and protection, Guan Yu is known for his loyalty, bravery, and sense of justice. He’s widely worshipped as a guardian figure who defends the oppressed and inspires people to uphold righteousness and loyalty.

Nezha (哪吒) (Chinese) – A child warrior deity known for his rebellious spirit, Nezha is celebrated for resisting oppression, particularly against tyrannical figures in the heavens. He represents youth, resilience, and defiance against unjust authority, often empowering those who feel marginalized or oppressed.

Xiwangmu (西王母) (Chinese) – Also known as the Queen Mother of the West, Xiwangmu is a powerful goddess associated with healing, protection, and transformation. While not a revolutionary in the typical sense, she embodies resilience, independence, and the power of women in a traditionally male-dominated pantheon.

Zhong Kui (钟馗) (Chinese) – Known as the demon slayer, Zhong Kui is a spirit of justice who fights against evil spirits and brings protection to those who feel haunted by oppression. He is venerated as a deity who can help people overcome fears and defeat obstacles that seem insurmountable.

The Eight Immortals (八仙) (Chinese) – A group of legendary Taoist figures, each with unique powers, who often challenged the social order. Figures like Lü Dongbin and Zhang Guolao used their abilities to help people and protect them from corrupt rulers and evil forces, embodying the spirit of defiance against oppressive systems.

Sun Wukong (孙悟空) (Chinese) - The central figure in the 16th century novel “Journey to the West (西游记) but also a figure in Mythology, Sun Wukong stands against authority and inspires both resistance and strength as well as dynamic growth. 

Demons:

Lord Lucifer - The Adversary and Illuminator. Lucifer is a longstanding figure of bearing the light in the darkness and fighting against overwhelming oppression and control of powers that deem themselves tyrants. Lucifer fights and battles against forces that subjugate the oppressed. 

Lord Asmodeus – Known in demonology as a figure representing strength, ambition, and power, Asmodeus is sometimes invoked for resilience, drive, and confidence to overcome personal and external challenges.

King Belial – Often associated with independence and personal power, Belial is sometimes venerated for helping people stand strong in their own beliefs and against unjust authorities.

Mother Lilith – A figure of independence and resistance, Lilith is revered in some traditions as a symbol of feminine power and autonomy, especially in standing against oppression and patriarchal structures.

Lord Buer – Demon of healing and knowledge, called upon for mental strength and overcoming illness or hardship through wisdom and resilience. Promotes mental health and healing as well as encourages growth through overcoming your mental blockages.

Lord Leviathan - The Lord of Shadow Working. Lord Leviathan helps you navigate the deep and dark waters of your mind where you may feel overwhelmed and drowning. Lord Leviathan can bring you clear waters and help support you when the tides feel like they may pull you down. 

Secular Saints & Venerated Figures, Other Folkloric figures and Revolutionaries:

Harriet Tubman – Though not formally canonized, Harriet Tubman is often seen as a symbol of liberation and resilience, escaping slavery and leading others to freedom.

Malcolm X – An icon of strength, self-determination, and resistance, especially in the context of racial oppression. His life inspires resilience and the fight for justice.

Hypatia of Alexandria – Known for her wisdom and intellectual resilience, Hypatia became a symbol of strength and survival in a time when powerful figures often sought to silence knowledge.

Nelson Mandela – Revered globally for his resilience and role in overcoming apartheid, Mandela is a secular saint for many, representing strength and the spirit of resistance.

Frida Kahlo – Known for her resilience through physical and emotional pain, Kahlo’s life and work are often venerated as symbols of strength, personal power, and survival against all odds. Cuauhtémoc (Aztec/Mexica Tradition) – The last Aztec emperor who resisted the Spanish conquistadors. He is remembered as a hero who fought courageously to protect his people, embodying resilience and the spirit of resistance in Mexican culture.

Emiliano Zapata (Mexican Folk Hero) – Though not a deity, Zapata’s revolutionary spirit against oppressive forces has made him almost a legendary figure in Mexican folklore. He’s revered as a folk saint and a symbol of the fight for social justice and indigenous rights.

Hua Mulan (Chinese Folklore) – Celebrated for her bravery and willingness to challenge gender norms, Mulan fought in her father’s place in the army. Her story is a symbol of courage, resilience, and overcoming social constraints.

Kumari (Nepalese Tradition) – Known as the living goddess of Nepal, the Kumari is believed to embody divine power and protection for the people. She serves as a symbol of resilience and cultural endurance in the face of modernization and outside influence.

Zumbi dos Palmares (Afro-Brazilian Tradition) – A leader of a community of escaped slaves (Quilombo dos Palmares) in Brazil, Zumbi is honored as a hero and symbol of freedom, resistance, and African heritage in Brazil.

Yue Fei (岳飞) – A historical general from the Song Dynasty who became a symbol of loyalty, patriotism, and resistance against foreign invaders. Despite betrayal and wrongful execution, Yue Fei is venerated as a hero who embodies loyalty to one’s people and the fight against oppression.

Li Shimin (Emperor Taizong of Tang, 唐太宗 李世民) – Known for his role in overthrowing the corrupt Sui Dynasty, Li Shimin played a crucial role in establishing the Tang Dynasty. He is respected as a revolutionary leader who brought stability and cultural prosperity to China.

Chen Sheng and Wu Guang (陈胜, 吴广) – These two commoners led one of the first rebellions against the Qin Dynasty’s harsh rule, sparking what would eventually become a larger revolt. They are remembered as symbols of the common people’s resistance against an oppressive regime.

The White Lotus Goddess (白莲教) – Associated with the White Lotus Society, this goddess represents spiritual resistance against corruption and oppression. The White Lotus sect played a significant role in several uprisings throughout Chinese history, including revolts against the Mongol Yuan Dynasty.

Chi You (蚩尤) – A figure from ancient mythology, Chi You was a tribal leader who fought against the Yellow Emperor. He is often depicted as a warlike figure who stood against established order. Though he was ultimately defeated, he became a symbol of rebellion and bravery in later cultural narratives.

Lü Zu (吕祖) – One of the Eight Immortals, Lü Dongbin (or Lü Zu) was known for challenging both heaven and earth, and he often sided with the poor and downtrodden. He encouraged people to resist worldly corruption, especially among the rich and powerful, inspiring resilience and self-cultivation.

Madame Zheng Yi Sao (郑一嫂) – Often called the Pirate Queen, she was one of the most powerful pirate leaders in history and led a massive fleet that defied the Chinese imperial government. Madame Zheng embodies resistance against oppressive authorities and is celebrated for her intelligence and revolutionary spirit.

[see-arcane]

Blood of My Blood: Never Loved

One more Blood of My Blood cinderblock for you @ibrithir-was-here and @animate-mush. Put on your most dramatic breakup song playlist.

Summary: Castle Dracula is abandoned. By son, by subjects, by its Master. The latter finds himself dwelling in the dirt and dark as he waits to strike the English shore once again. Thinking on traitors and thieves. And on his dear friend, who makes him bleed still into the grave earth.

Warnings for: Violence, coercion with and without hypnotism, and domestic abuse.

He woke with a draining ache behind his eyes. A worse one in his chest.

The surprise had gone out of this nights ago. Anger rushed over the sensation like a balm. More, he rushed toward anger. Spurred it, stretched it, wrapped it around himself like a gossamer membrane. It would thicken as the night wore on and his mind roamed its new gamut of bile and rage, snapping at itself until the sky overhead should have roiled in time with his internal tempest. But no. Only favorable winds here. Not that such winds were wholly necessary now. He and his grave earth rode a ship without sails. How fast the mortal mites and their innovations worked in this age.

Jonathan had spoken of traveling by one. An idle comment in their talks of England. One of many. The travel, the choice of estate, the precautions needed to counter the possibility of a second attempt to thwart the setting down of roots. Always in that measured way. Always with the mien of one laying out itinerary rather than laying the foundations of an invasion. Always looking his Master in the eye. Always with that sad grey shade in his pallor, the face of a man who hates his work and knows the alternative is worse.

Poor villain against his will. Poor martyr. Poor Jonathan.

Thunder grumbled high overhead. He heard voices through his box, warm bodies exclaiming and jumping. One of them was close. There was a spiced whiff of cigar smoke. A cheap odor.

Not like the ones you gave him. He dropped so many vices after the boy was born. Smoke and drink vanished from his lips overnight. Just in case they might have tainted him somehow. Spoiled the blood. You told him it was nonsense. Even she did. But he would not have it. Not until this year. He used his allowance for one single box of cigars; cheap, like the ones he’d had back in his shriveled nothing-life in Exeter. You caught him at it in January. Within the month he found the little box gone, replaced by a pack of Romeo y Julietas. One, maybe two a month since then. And what did he say when you asked him why? Why return to the habit now?

“Almost time,” he’d said. That’s all. “Almost time.”

He had pressed Jonathan on it. Oh, gently, gently. Barely a nudge of the mesmer; because he’d thought he already knew.

Jonathan had looked at him through the coiling smoke with those dead starlit eyes. The same glowing shade of the ghost-light on St. George’s Eve. And he had simply raised his hand to his chest, rubbing the place over his heart as if there were still a crucifix to wear there. Worry and sorrow had rolled off him like cologne.

“I may as well, Sir. I think I am saying good-bye to it this year. In whatever way.”

And oh! Oh, what an idiot child he had been in that instant! Later that night he had laughed aloud at himself. He had actually felt a pang of fear. Had even strained his ears to be sure of his friend’s heartbeat. It had drummed steadily enough, he thought. Mostly. Steady, but thin. Always thin, for the tide of his blood was necessarily fickle by his exsanguinations, but…

But you did not know for certain if there was some threshold near to being crossed. You’d never had a case like Jonathan Harker before you. Not even to experiment with. Why bother? You never thought in terms of keeping a single body as your reservoir when you were content to either starve or glut yourself at random. No one like Jonathan existed to you until he offered himself up as the living meal to you and two other hungry mouths for twenty years. And, childish thought, you’d wondered if he could do thirty. Longer. However long the charade could last before the inevitable came and you bled yourself back into him, feeding him from your heart’s blood to end the game of humanity and lock him in your thrall. And then, finally, you would get to see him drink. Master’s orders, my friend. Gorge yourself.

But that presupposed there would be no issue come the time of turning.

That this state, the ghoulish and gauntly haunting form that existed on the line between life and death, was not itself a spoiling factor in the process. Would the rules change if he died as this creature? Would he rise at all? If he did, would he be a Vampire or something else? Something still beholden to his Master only because he was chained by love and not the unshakable tether of being sired into undeath?

He did not know.

Having acknowledged that he did not know, he had almost ripped the cigar from his friend’s mouth so that he might force the man to drink from his veins that second.

Jonathan had seemed to read this in him. He tapped his ash into the tray with something very nearly like a smile.

“No, Sir. Not now. There is every chance I could be wrong. Perhaps it’s age alone whispering to me. Many men start to dwell on these things once they reach the 40-year mark. So I was always led to assume. For myself, I remain shocked that I have lived this long in the first place. I only feel as if there is now a clock ticking somewhere in all this. That it will end before the year is out because…”

He had paused to puff and shrug.

“…because it must end. Either because this state is finally preparing to collapse or because, with three adults to feed, I have begun to deplete too much to sustain the meals and myself.”

It was true. The boy was now a boy only in feeling. Somehow the calendars had piled up and the child was now a young man. Careful with his Papa—and no, even now he did not envy the boy learning his Lesson from his mother the night his adolescent hunger had slipped too far and left the man as pallid as his hair—but still taking more than he ever had in his boyhood. He and his mother had agreed in silence to feed a little less, alternating on their meals each feeding. Even he had stopped short of a full draught more than once. And it was not enough.

Still, Jonathan had been unperturbed. His Master had thought little of that calm. Time had not broken so much as smoothed him. An unfinished stone sanded and shined by a waterfall’s endless pressure until what had been his nightmare was reduced to mundanity. Ah, he woke to the New Year feeling that death was imminent? Hmm. A shame. May as well enjoy a smoke first.

Months passed since that scene. Though his blood did not change, his mien did. Each turn of the calendar’s pages brought some unknown weight down heavier and heavier on him. Distraction drew his attention away, his ghost-light eyes blazed like warning flares in the dark sockets, he lost himself for minutes or hours at a time at the desk, and once, in the far end of March, his Master had caught him weeping silently while eating. A tear would roll every few bites. Savoring and saying farewell at once.

Whether this unknown mortal clock really was ticking or not, his friend believed in it. Felt it was real enough to say his good-byes to human sensation. Such a fuss, his Master had thought. Tried to think.

You did try. Truly, painfully, you tried to make yourself laugh. Jeer. Hold to certainty and joy at the approaching finality. Humanity shed to give your friend his stalled eternity. Still, you caught yourself worrying. Wondering. What if something went wrong? What if something was wrong already? What if, ha, he was making plans to short you at the last? What if he had made plans with some conspirator in the towns to pierce his heart and take his head? What if the turning somehow did not take at all? What if, what if, what if?

What if indeed. You fretted so much over those months, old devil. You worried about every little thing that might go wrong before you made your move. Before you ended the game and took your prize and burned the nuisance of mortality on the pyre it deserved two decades ago. 

The prize you never thought was waiting at the end of someone else’s long game.

He made a noise into the soil. A coughing bark of a laugh. Out in the cargo hold, the smoker stirred.

“Hello? You down here, Mikhail?” He leaked himself out of the box. Fog to flesh. The smoker squinted in the half-gloom, coming closer. “Hello?”

“Hello,” he echoed. The smoker swung around to face him. There was not much to face, as he stood still in shadow. He watched the man’s brow furrow. Trying to squint his way toward recognition.

“Who are you? One of Arnold’s new boys?”

“No,” he answered, stepping into the glow of the man’s lighter. The squint turned to a gawking mask of horror bordering on disgust.

“Jesus,” came out in a gasp that reeked of cheap smoke. “What the hell happened to you?”

“Trouble at home,” he admitted with a flash of teeth. Within a blink, he was tearing into the man’s throat. He inhaled blood and cigar fumes until he was iron-grey, until he was at his prime, until he was a youth. Hating the taste with every gulp. Unable to glut himself further, he sighed and twisted the man’s head off. The heart he tore out with more relish than he preferred to admit. He crushed all three pieces of the body as if crumpling paper and did not rise to the deck until he sensed it was unoccupied. Up he went, tossing the balled up remains into the waves. “My thanks,” he whispered after it.

The corpse had provided him with something like a lackluster disguise. A jacket to match the rest of the seafarers.’ He hoped the sight of it might let him go unbothered on deck. Though it was an easier thing to simply slip back down to the cargo’s shade, he wanted the openness of the night and the sympathetic frown of the moon peeking through the clearing clouds. He looked up to it now the way a drunken man sulked up to his barman. A barman who had waned a few phases since he was last seen.

The moon had been so full the last time he saw Jonathan. Rather, times.

Once while alive. The other…

“Which one are you, then?” Swallowing a curse, he slid his gaze to his right. A man with a flask stood there, pausing mid-sip to scrutinize him. His lip curled as he gestured with the liquor. “Who said you could have hair like that and work a vessel, eh?” He did not pause for an answer before shaking his head and taking a full drink. “Arnold’s getting sloppy if he’s hiring from…from…” A cloud of hazy concentration came and went on the ruddy face. “What? The Nordics? The Slavs? One of those lots with hair to their knees.”

He did not answer. Only looked again to the moon. He imagined the wedge of it gazed back at him with apology. The man blundered forward a step, reaching to take him by the shoulder.

“I’m talking to you, boy—,” A callused hand passed through his shoulder like mist. For it was. The flask made a tinny sloshing sound as it struck the deck. “Oh.” It was a small sound. The frightened moan of a child in a rancid dream. Feeling the moment warranted it, he turned his young man’s head to fully face the man. Letting him see the maimed display of the left eye. The dried maroon crust that streaked his cheeks. The man made another noise, even reedier. “Oh, Christ. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Arnold never said anyone died on this one. It’s too new, he said.” His throat worked like a thin tangle of pulleys. Bloodshot eyes bulged. “The Persephone’s only been on the water three years and no one’s ever…”

“Newness is no guarantee against death any more than age is a guarantee against foolishness,” he grated out.

“Right. Right, of course, apologies. I’ll just—I’ll just—,” the man didn’t seem to know what he’d ‘just’ for several tediously agonized seconds. But, between the drink and the rarity of the moment—How often did one cross paths with a spirit, after all?—his feet remained anchored. Then, “…How did you die?”

Of idiocy. Here and now. Requiescat in pace.

“I was betrayed. Over a woman.” Sour needles pricked along his throat. “Over a child. The years made me blind. Soft. Comfortable. So certain that all was in order, that I held everything in my hands. But I lived among thieves without knowing it. I woke one night to find all that was mine was gone, stolen, and the one I had handed my heart threw it away as though it were the sole piece of filth that could not be bothered with. And then…” He gestured to the mark upon his face. His eye now a ball of blazing arterial red set in a spray of wild scarring from the lightning bolt. Even after a deep meal, he felt that the damage had scarcely receded. Had he not twisted in time, the blast would have struck him square through his skull.

The wretched woman had fine aim.

And that’s not all she has, is it?

“Sorry to hear it, son,” came from his right. The man had retrieved his flask again. It winked like tarnished silver in the moonlight. Though his face showed a bleary bafflement as to what exactly the manner of death could have been, he went on, “And here I figured the worst that could happen to a man at sea was drowning.”

“Terrible ends can happen anywhere. But if it saves you worry, I will not remain on this ship forever. I will disappear once it docks in England.”

“Reckon you’re off to haunt the bastard who did this to you?”

“Not yet. First I must go to my son, who they sent away all oblivious to their work. Then,” his hand drifted of its own accord to his chest, dipping under the hanging coat to feel at the lump in a high pocket. It sat cold and out of place there, like an elaborate little tumor. Touching it brought back the pain to his chest and eyes. “Then I shall see to the traitors.”

“Cannot say I envy them.” Another sip, nearing the bottom.

“Few would. They thought me a monster to slay together. But they have yet to meet the worst of me. For they grew comfortable too, seeing me docile, hospitable, giving them my home and my love and a thousand allowances that no other in my life has ever wrung from me. Yes, I will haunt them. I will hunt them. And I will deliver to them a recompense so much worse than death.” The man was trying again to drink from his flask and finding himself thwarted. “Empty?”

“Afraid so. Do you ever miss that, being dead? Getting to drink?”

“No. I still drink. But I am full for the evening.” He bared his teeth in a gleaming crescent. Some of the man’s crewmate still stained his fangs. He watched the man’s face abruptly lose all its tint. “I am glad you got to enjoy your own. It is a rarity not to face this part sober.”

So saying, he plunged his hand into the man’s chest. He twisted out the heart with the ease of one plucking a ripe apple from its bough. The man croaked out only a small noise at this. Nothing more than a damp little bleat, smothered by the steady roll of the waves. He was still gawking at his heart in one clawed hand while the other snared him and hurled him overboard. The sound of the splash was nothing. Sighing, he shrugged off the apparently useless jacket and cradled the heart in it to prevent a drip. Back to the cargo hold it was. Down to the dark and the dirt and—

He left it waiting for you. Even in the midst of all the confusion, the haste needed to get out, to be gone, he made sure to leave it right there in the sow’s coffin.

The cold lump shifted in its pocket.

He bit down a curse as his eyes stung, burned, boiled.

A roost was made in the furthest corner of the hold. The heart sat in his hands. Huge and dense with old smoke and liquor and fatty seaside meals. He’d lied to Jonathan before, about how certain consumed vices changed the blood’s quality. There was no alteration in what it fed, but the taste shifted. Between the crewmate he’d siphoned and the swollen muscle in his fingers, he realized he was indulging in the nearest thing he had to slovenly eating after a hard day. He took an experimental taste of a ventricle.

Immediately acrid. A rich and awful tang that ran to the back of his throat.

Nothing like the spigot that had flowed for him like careful clockwork for two decades. So meticulously tended by diet, by caution, by the vessel it sprang from. Twenty years of ambrosia meted out in scheduled mouthfuls and the occasional drop snuck between meals, as was his right.

“No, my friend, not the wrist. The boy would know someone was taking extra. And from his own plate! So to speak. Undo your collar, you know she will not complain…”

And Jonathan had. The brilliant eyes sliding away from his Master as he stole one, two, three, four or more little tastes from neck and shoulder, collarbone and breast. A single sip from each bite. He had not even winced. Not until Jonathan’s Master brought his mouth up to his face. Printing the blood there like a girl with her kiss’ lacquer. It had taken his Master’s hand around his jaw to make Jonathan turn and face the second one, pressed into his own lips. Eyes shut against the threat of a trance, mind fluttering frantically out and away.

He had let him then, back in those early nights. Always so shy, his Jonathan. Even after the whirlwind of that long-ago summer, the thresholds crossed and barriers erased for the sake of playing his Scheherazade, still he quailed from the gentler edges of his better. Hiding up in his head or in his Master’s teeth or under the flimsy shelter of his duties whether they were self-assigned or not. Anything to not accept what lurked and grew under the veneer of mere surrender to an enemy.

Had that too been a trick? Laying bait the way his Master had once drawn the hunting dogs back to his genius loci with the woman already tainted?

A Wolf did not chase if the prey did not run. And he did love to chase. To play. Up to a point. He had tried more than once to smother the overgrowing feeling in him as the years marched and his friend continued to drop his eyes and tense away from tenderness. When that failed, he told himself it did not matter. He owned his friend through the woman and their son, and whatever performance he sought—the rent owed to many a charitable landlord, really—could be ordered from him.

And he had ordered it.

In specific, he had, on a particularly maudlin night, ordered his friend to kiss him as he would her. He would know the difference. He’d leeched through her senses on occasion when they were, quote, ‘alone’ together. Sometimes he thought Jonathan even saw him staring out of her eyes. Or else the woman simply gave him away by some private sign or other. Whatever the case, Jonathan had never once withheld his love with her.

So, the order. Out of curiosity. Out of boredom. An order given without even a trance to smooth the act, just to see how he would muscle past the walls of indignity and a lover’s loyalty as he had back when he thought he had been charming for his life in their supple sabbatical once upon a time.

Instead, a magic trick.

Between one blink and the next, Jonathan had been the self he reserved for the woman. Even the smile kept for her had been there. A necessary prelude to the hands that bookended his Master’s face and pulled him level. Just like that, there were their mouths together. Not the press of a patient doll’s lips as its owner mashed themselves there in pantomime of intimacy. If he had not known better—

But Jonathan made sure he did. As soon as the kiss elapsed, he’d receded into himself. Less a tortoise into his shell than a closing fist praying not to be pried open lest the treasure in it be snatched away again.

“Was there anything else, Sir?” asked in the rug’s direction. Shame and a miserable whiff of apology yet-to-be had stamped him. He would throw himself into making amends to the woman, of course. Whether or not he wounded her with tattling on this little service, he would meet her with whatever kindnesses he could muster that were not already given. It was one of many moments in which he was convinced that his friend would give of himself until he was down to bones and then try with his last breath to gift someone his ribs. “Sir? Am I dismissed?”

He was not. All at once, his Master had a list of tasks for him to perform over the course of days. Weeks. Months. A year and more. And was that not where the mistake of it all had begun? The willing leap at addiction? Commanding his friend, his immaculate actor, his Scheherazade, into a hundred little indulgences. And not just in matters of sampling each other. Sometimes he would wring whole nights out of the man, without even the boy to perform for, trapping him by the fire or in a moonlit room or down in that half-secret glade by the stream where they played hunter and hunted and hid together from the walls of domesticity, spurring his friend into the easy and smiling talk of companions, of intimates, of…

Go on, old devil. You can admit it. Why not? What point is there in pretending he did not perform so well as to leave you reduced to this?

Fine.

Talk of those in love.

Yes, he had used the exact word. More than once.

Do this, do that, do any and all these things as if you loved me. Just as you do her.

And Jonathan had. Always with the bracing misery before and the shuddering withdrawal after. But he served his Master’s wants. He did so with such an ease that his Master had invented half the trap himself; he had convinced himself somewhere that he was giving his friend permission to do what he truly wished to do, freed from the yoke of duty and fealty to the woman, to his morals, to his sanity. Yes, that was it. He was giving his friend release. Lifting away the leaden weight of his beloved martyrdom and letting him know, yes, it was alright, he could want something other than what was ‘right’ or ‘good.’ What had such scruples brought him besides pain? God and humanity no longer had a place for him or his family or his love; that bottomless fount that had more to give than his veins ever would.

Here, my friend, I will take it. I will catch it all as it spills. Love me. Love and be happy. It’s alright.

The cold lump in his pocket felt heavy and frigid as a glacier on his chest. Scrubbing his hand clean on the jacket, he fished the hateful treasure out of its home and glared at it in his fingers.

A brooch the size of a dove’s egg. Antique gold ringing a garnet of such brilliance it might have been frozen claret. Splitting it was an ornate dragon, rampant, seeming to cling to the stone like the mythic hoards of legend. One of few mementos kept in his bedchamber from mortal days and nascent immortal nights that had gone sour in recalling their joy. He had taken it from its hiding place of velvet, shined it until it glowed, and, at the end of another race through their wilds, another capture, another victory drunk from the won throat…

“You have been here five years. Yet still I get word that you are not always recognized as being in my service.” This was fractionally true. At least in the sense that he knew there was a certain level of laxness that existed between Jonathan and a handful of those he did business with in the towns. Little mistakes or a dragging of feet on assorted exchanges and services that his friend would try to paper over with excuses on their behalf.

Once, only once, he had even tried to get away with hiding a newcomer’s attempt to swindle him outright. He had only seen a tourist of means with an Englishman’s lilt and tried to rob him over a new toy for the child and a novel for the woman. Jonathan had not pushed back, only gutted his allowance while the seller’s neighbors threw their shocked and silent looks. Perhaps that would have been the end of it but for Jonathan idly mentioning the encounter to the woman as they shared his bed post-feeding, thinking little of it. His Master, listening through her, had thought otherwise. Enough to find and inform the seller of his misstep personally. The next time Jonathan went to town he came back somewhat shamefaced with a burden of extra wares given ‘as a courtesy.’ The peasants were careful to point him out to new citizens ever-after.

All this in mind, Jonathan had looked at him oddly over the excuse.

“If that is the case, it has not hindered me in any way. The people have been nothing but gracious when I come through.” Gracious and afraid, he knew not to say. His Master had shooed the words away like flies.

“You remain ever lenient, my friend. You would apologize to the wheels of a carriage as they ran you over. It is for your own good that you must wear this, lest you and your goodwill are trampled by the opportunists among the chattel.” Out had come the brooch. “You will have this visible at all times. Be it to clasp on your coat or wear at your throat. Do you understand?”

“Yes, S—,” A look was caught. No, no. He knew the rule out here. Away from mother and child. “Yes, balaurul meu, I understand.”

Not well enough, of course. Not even when he was made to sit still, his chin up so that his Master could pin the thing in place. No, he had not understood then. Not until the next night when he took his place in bed for the family meal. There he had sat, undoing his shirt collar—with the brooch nowhere in sight. Not before the feeding. Not after he buttoned himself up with strengthless fingers. Not even on his nightstand.

The boy and the woman had looked up with curiosity and ire respectively when Father hadn’t taken his usual leave for the saccharine post-bleeding period with Papa. Papa himself had looked concerned and lost. No one had made a mistake, had they?

“Father? Did you want to stay too?” from the boy. A thread of worry in his voice, as was natural whenever Father deviated from his routine, but far more of eagerness. Father so rarely lingered overlong with the entire family in the room. And, he would admit it, it stung to deflate the child’s hope.

“I am staying,” he’d said, “But you and your mother must go for a time. There is something important I must speak with Papa about.” There had been some bristling at that. But he had yanked the woman’s leash and the woman had taken the boy away by the hand, thinking soft assurances and lies at him until they were out of the tower. Jonathan, dear oblivious Jonathan, had peered at him with genuine confusion.

“What is it? Has something happen—,”

His Master had flung the full weight of the trance into him like a boulder. A boulder that became a crushing fist around the flailing mote that was Jonathan’s ostensibly free will. Having hold of it, he wrenched his friend up to his feet and prodded sharply at his mind until he turned to where he’d stored the brooch. There, the wardrobe. Go. Fetch.

Jonathan had managed two steps before the weakness of his emptied veins dropped him to hands and knees. He crawled the rest of the way. Staggered back upright. Worked the doors open and shuffled with trembling hands through the hanging clothes. Here was the coat. There, fastened at the chest, was the brooch. He fumbled at it with twice the difficulty of fastening his shirt. So much so that it pricked his thumb bloody and slipped through his fingers. He made a small despairing sound before falling back down on his knees, searching in the shadows and shoes for it. When his hand finally closed on it, his Master tugged again at his mind, ordering him back the way he’d come. Across the floor, up into the bed. Holding the brooch.

His Master tugged again. Jonathan held the brooch out on his palm. The one now striped and smeared from the bleeding thumb.

“What did I tell you to do with that, Jonathan Harker?”

“To—to wear it in town—,”

“No.” He’d paused to watch Jonathan’s face. The shift of expression that sketched such a perfect epitome of dread, especially in a bloodless face. “I said, You will have this visible at all times. And where was it instead? Thrown away, out of sight, out of mind. Is it not so?”

“N-No. No, I did not mean to—,”

“Must I make it simpler for you? The boy still has the collar he never bequeathed to the trapped wolf. I am certain it would fit you. The emblem would never be misplaced again.”

“Sir—,”

“Do you think I gave it to you as a whim? Another token to cast aside, to ignore like all the rest you are showered with all unconscious to, stewing in your precious stringency, self-deprived as a monk?”

“Please, I swear, I only thought—,”

“What? What did you think? Do tell.”

“I thought,” his voice caught and rasped, trying not to be a cough. “I thought it was meant for strangers. As something official, part of a uniform. I’m sorry, Sir, I didn’t know it was…” But here the words dried and his face showed again that crumpled confusion. The pain of a kicked dog unsure of what mistake he’d made, only knowing he had erred. Jonathan’s eyes had found his Master’s, as much plea as fear.

What? the look begged. What is this? What did I do wrong? I cannot act without my lines.

There was no questioning of his Master’s anger. Such storms were known to pass and one could only brace and weather them. This was all he knew.

But you knew better, didn’t you, old devil? It took you a moment to catch up to yourself. To truly admit it to your own mind, even knowing from what happy old era’s dust you fetched the thing from. You made no ceremony of it. You buried the giving of it in a disguise. But the meaning was there even as you fastened it to him without fanfare, without warning. All you did was stitch an importance to the ornament that was invisible to him. And look where it led.

Jonathan hadn’t blood enough in him to hold rigid as he usually did before his Master’s moods. He shuddered even as he fought to be still. Afraid. Cold. Eyes of pale blue glass pinned to his Master, searching desperately for a reason to it all, for the thing he must make amends for.

Still with his hand outstretched. The brooch in a bloodied palm.

Just as it is now. Here in the brine-scented shadows. It looked more precious in his.

It had.

Jonathan had kept the hand out even as his Master joined him on the bed. As his Master plucked the brooch up, tasting it clean of the red stain, then kissing away the same from the bleeding thumb. As his Master gently tilted the quivering chin up and fastened the emblem in its proper place. As his Master did not move except to close the last of the gap between them, stroking the white curtain of hair from his brow.

“I am sorry, draga mea. You did not know because I did not explain. It is too easy to forget you are the only one here who does not go walking into others’ minds. So often you fool us all into believing otherwise.” The stroking hand traveled down to trace Jonathan’s jaw. No longer shaking. Not as badly, anyway. “You did not recognize that it had a mate, did you?” Jonathan turned his head an inch, frowning. His Master tilted up his own chin. For a moment, more confusion. Then realization.

The stone worn at his Master’s throat had no beast stretched across the stone. His was a coil that encircled it entirely, an ouroboros of a dragon.

“I know that rings are the tradition. But you are a creature of loyalty and I did not wish to test my Harkers’ ire in demanding you remove the gold band for something of mine, be it a signet or a stone. This is as close as we can come the way we are. At least until the night of consummation. Baptism. Whatever you prefer.” He trapped Jonathan’s eyes with his. “When that time comes, we can talk of more classic rites, insofar as our arrangement allows for such things.”

Jonathan had nodded at this. Perhaps tried to speak. A ‘yes, Sir’ seemed to snag on his tongue. The shock was too much to work around on his own, so his Master hoisted him over it with a final hook of the mesmer and gave him words to say:

“Of course, balaurul meu. I look forward to it.” His mouth had snapped shut around the last word, pallid eyes huge and almost teetering in their sockets. He was shaking again. Ah, it was too much as he was, poor thing. His Master had left him swaddled in another blanket, asking if he was prepared to see mother and child now. Jonathan could only nod, his hand rising and falling away from the space before the brooch. As though he feared the thing would bite him.

Good.

Good enough, you reasoned. He would grow into it. He would accept it. He had accepted it already. Enough that you had to deal with a particularly entertaining round of aftermath from the woman’s mind. For all her collaring of herself when she had to grovel for something—and was her own peasant’s past not fine training there?—the Vampire of her could not be smothered when it came to theft. Not even sharing! This, when you could have ordered the ring off him. Could have had him write up divorce papers for the dead, if only as a prop to hang in the office. But then the boy would have questions. Perhaps even tears. Was Papa not allowed to love more than one parent? It would not do. To think you offered to let her be Maid of Honor.

Amusing fireworks had ensued.

They had cooled, he thought, as the years continued to stack. On and on until the end of their second decade made its way to them. Jonathan never misplaced the brooch again. The woman appeared resigned to joint custody of both her Loves in her sullen way. And the boy, his little diavol, barred from full knowledge and unhappiness, had grown to manhood under their care.

A fine excuse the latter had made.

He thought back to it now. That last scene with the grey and ghastly shape of his friend in his surreal mortality. Another cigar lit, the smoke curling out the library’s window. What a strange image he’d made. He had looked like…

A month or so ago he had found his friend thumbing through an American magazine of all things. Some publication or other that had made its way across the Atlantic and the Channel to join its English siblings. It had been one of his few vices over those latter years, catching up on the newsworthy pulses that beat outside their mountains. The American one had shown an advertisement at the back. A rather charming illustration of a man in what had to be a modern eveningwear suit. Arrow Collar and Shirts for Every Occasion the image declared.

Jonathan had seemed to be a macabre translation of the man posed in the picture.

Seeing this, an abrupt needle of mourning had pierced his heart. Twenty years of feeding had made his friend into this wasting enigma. Twenty years of allowing the arrangement to unspool on and on without end, simply for the fact of Jonathan continuing to breathe and bleed unimpeded, as if his will alone were enough to hold his half-life existence together. Twenty years of letting his friend’s incessant need to give of himself down to the marrow get in the way of sense. Of what was right. Of what was long past due.

How did you allow this? How did you agree to let this carry on so long? Look at him, look at the calendar. So many years lost in which he could have already been what he was meant to be. Why? For your agreement? For the charade of the bitter conqueror taking his consolation trophy? It made sense at the start, perhaps. Those early years of gloating. It was your due. But once the sting was gone, once it became clear what he was to you under the vitriol of old, what excuse was there to drag this on, to make a living ghost of him? What excuse is there now? Look at him, old devil. Look at him and think of what he could have been, should have been, for the last quarter of a century.

And he had. He’d stood in the doorway, staring, overlaying the haggard reality with what should have been. Here was Jonathan Harker, forever young, the flesh back on his bones, his eyes free of shadows and crimson as an opened throat. Jonathan Harker, still and strong, a beautiful killing thing like a spider waiting in its silk.

Instead, he was this. A ghoul waiting to find out the when and how of his death before the year concluded, seeming far deader than the thirsty revenants he called his family. The unfairness of it wrenched in his Master’s chest. Worse still was the hindsight of its pointlessness. As if this arrangement of the household had done anything but ruin his friend and cripple their son against the reality of the wider world waiting for them. He had even felt a twitch of pity for the woman, if briefly. She had lost her Love to the needs of their hunger and their Master’s whim, watching every year as that Love was shriveled and shifted into a wretched grotesquerie of what he ought to be. Her prized possession spoiled by mishandling and a refusal to simply tear their Jonathan free of his scruples and do what needed doing.

“Was there something you needed, Sir?” Jonathan had asked without turning. His eyes were on the moon. Full as a pearl.

“There was. Is.” His friend did not jump upon seeing him abruptly at his side. Nor did he turn his head. “You are almost replenished.” It wasn’t a question.

“I am.” A tap of ash. Still not taking his attention from the sky. “Did you wish to steal a drink ahead?”

“It is not stealing. Only taking what’s owed.” There was a soft sound of fabric pulling away. Jonathan had turned and froze. His Master had removed his own clasp and the cravat under it. Vest and shirt hung open. The skin above his heart was already cut open. “And giving what is long overdue.”

“Sir, that’s not necessary. Not already.”

“When, then? How much longer will you reduce yourself like this? They are beginning to go hungry even with your sacrifice, my friend. Mother and child both. But he is not a child anymore, is he? He is grown. He must feed as such. Yet he tries to feed only as a boy, just as his mother feeds in her little halved tastings. Even I have taken less than my share. All to bow to your craving for self-destruction. No more of it.”

“This seems somewhat—,” Jonathan first tried to sidle away from the sill, only to have himself caged back against the stonework by his Master’s arms, “—abrupt.”

“You have until you finish the cigar.”

“Case in point.” Another drag was taken, neither rushed nor prolonged. Jonathan blew his stream of smoke out into the breeze. Then, “Was that why you had so many of these on hand before? The food and drink and assorted sensory comforts?”

“Before?” Jonathan looked at him. Waiting for him to—, “Ah. Then. No, not precisely. There was an act to perform. Had it been Peter Hawkins there in your place, he would have had the same to consume before his…dismissal.”

“That’s what I mean. You were always planning to either ‘dismiss’ or ‘retain’ your solicitor of choice. You went out of your way to provide the equivalent cuisine and indulgences of a noble’s home, even when the reality of things had set in. I might have had, say, a week’s worth of fine dining and then bread and water from then on. But you kept at the kitchen regardless. Why was that?”

“To drop the quality would be to ruin the masquerade,” his Master said, wondering at the turned subject. Knowing not to be swayed. “Had you proven to be a lowly churl not worth my time beyond the completing of paperwork, you would not have eaten at all. The wolves would have had your bones for toys in the same week.”

“Mm,” another puff. Jonathan was halfway through. “My mistake, then. I had assumed you were interested in giving your pawn a long last meal before his life ended, permanently or otherwise. That or fattening the metaphorical calf. It was hard to imagine you enjoyed playing the role of host and staff without it being part of some standard habit.”

“So it might have been when you returned home.” Oh, only twenty short and endless years ago. Still with their enemies’ blood under his nails. Begging sanctuary for his Loves, bartering his own throat. Memories, memories. “For some reason, you seemed hesitant to trust my culinary skill a second time.”

“Yes, well. Blame that on a joke too many made about the wine and red meat on the menu. I’d not expected you to throw aside pretense to the point of…” Jonathan nodded at his Master’s bleeding chest. “…this.” More ash tapped over the stone sill. A third of the cigar was left. Jonathan’s eyes floated from the oozing cut to the moon. The effect erased all but the furthest edges of blue from his irises and made them into coins of silver. His brooch glowed like fire. “Do you know what I ate on my wedding night?”

Stop. Plug your ears. A trick. A trap. Laying bait again, old devil, do not listen, do not let him talk, do not hesitate, this is how he works, how he has always worked, how he has been the only one in all the infinite hell of your unlife able to steer the storm of you. In pain, in suffering, in servility or supplication, the silver of his tongue did more to tame you than any holy relic, and you knew it and you did not care, did not think to care, because he made himself satisfied with crumbs, with vapor, even when you tried to force bounty into his hands and down his throat, do not listen, do not wait, take him, own him, seize his mind and soul and senses now now now before it is too late—

But this was the bellowing of the present into the past.

All he could do in the ship’s dark was muffle his curses by biting into the bloated heart as the memory unfolded in all its hopeless reality.

“No,” he’d half-whispered to his friend. “You never said.”

“I had what I’d been having since I was taken in by the nuns. Broth and bread. Small simple soft things. I was half-dead then too, albeit in a different direction. Mina and I married and made love on my sickbed, in a rush of joy and tears and illness. I left our wedding venue with one hand in hers and another on a cane. Now I am here, twenty years on, with another marriage to begin in haste. The marriage that will also be my death knell. Lenore again, but without any hope of resting in peace.”

Jonathan watched his Master through his lashes.

“When I am drunk from a last time and I drink in turn, it will be the moment I say farewell to what is left of the good man who existed before I turned the kukri on those I trusted with my life and who I would have died to shield, had it not been for God putting my Loves on the same altar He set before Abraham. The last of that good man will die to the blood baptism, to an unbreakable chain of connection with what is reviled by the divine. Fickle thing that it is. But before I was a Christian, before I was taught the lie that God is absolute love, I already held Love as holy. I held kindness unto others as a mission. It hurt me then as it hurts me now to envision pain wrought on another without cause but profit or cruelty.

“But that feeling will be sunk into a spiritual chasm once I turn. Already I dropped a piece of it into the dark when I bloodied my hands. The rest will follow and I shall become a Judas not only to a select few, but to the whole of humanity. While I can see the logic in throwing myself into consummation for fear of turning back at the last second, I do not think I can stomach yet another threshold where I do not get to walk, but must hurl my way across. Another sprint, another crash into one world out of the last. I would ask—,” his throat had caught, eyes gleaming, “—I would like to have the day.” He cracked a sad smile. “St. George’s Day. A fitting hour to say good-bye to the good of me. And for our son’s birthnight, we shall have our last family meal. No meager shares. No restraint. I shall be too weak by then to hold off. And it will not be done behind closed doors. Behind my Loves’ backs, like another secret. Please.”

The eyes, the eyes, no power in them but what his Master put there, but they held and they drowned and pleaded for this, this last meal, this final allowance, and—

And you swallowed it. Inhaled it. Drank it from him like he’d slit himself open over your mouth. You did, old devil.

He had.

He’d looked his friend in the eye—eyes still vulnerable, still susceptible, still able to be hooked and pinned like the rest of him, ready to be stolen away into his thrall without another puff of the cigar left between them—and said, “Very well. But know that I will accept no hesitation tomorrow. No rescinding, no stalling, no last-minute dawdling. You make your good-byes to yourself tomorrow. Make your peace and apologies to the world if you must. But then I will eat the martyr out of your blood and fill the space with something better. Understood?”

“Yes, Sir.” This he said before taking his handkerchief from its pocket and wiping the dark smear from his Master’s heart. For almost a minute said Master held still enough to pass for a waxwork as Jonathan righted the shirt, the vest, the cravat. He took his Master’s brooch from a clawed hand that had turned suddenly feeble before pinning it to the silk. It wasn’t until Jonathan tried to pull his hands away that they were caught.  “Was there something else?”

“Yes. You finished,” he’d nodded to the smoldering nub of the Romeo y Julieta, “and I will not go without something for my patience.”

“I need my hands if I’m to open my collar.”

“Everything I want is above the neck.”

“As myself? Or is this a commission, balaurul meu?”

“Surprise me.”

“Only if you do not bite your tongue.”

He’d not understood. Not until his face was brought down and he had seen the flash of parting lips and teeth and then—

You should have bitten your tongue. Should have trapped his head in your hands as he played at catching yours, should have bitten and fed yourself into him while he was snared. If he would dare lie to your face your deserved to bleed yours into his. Bastard. Delilah.

He thought these and a thousand curses even as he warred with the recollection of that taste, that consumption in two directions. What he had thought was a mere prelude to all the ages yet to come for them. Never thinking for an instant that it was only the last helping of honeyed poison. Even the sheepish fraction of a laugh that had left his friend was another dose of venom to numb him with.

“Forgive me. I just now imagined how we must look. An old man preying on the youth.”

“Indeed. You are still all but a gamin, draga mea. In any case, this is hardly novel for us, is it? Merely a change of position. A slow dance.”

“We must all be cautious about said dancing in England, you know. The laws are still—,”

“I am aware. Just as I know what lawmaking parties are at the top of my list to be invited to dinner once we secure the new estates…”

And they had talked. And talked. On and on toward the sunrise. Jonathan had insisted on taking himself to sleep lest he spend his grand farewell to humanity passed out the whole day. Away, Master, away. Shoo.

Off he had gone. Dense and careless.

Did you smell coffee on the way down? Did you? If so, did you think it only imagination or just shrug it away? Your friend, ever disdainful of wasting an hour. Fine, fine, let him wring St. George’s out in his way. What did you care? Fool.

The boy had still been up with his books and, he saw, some his Papa’s magazines. Odd. No less odd than seeing him return to the coffin rather than exercise his ability to doze where he liked; his miracle of a child, born alive and undead at once, able to sleep without a grave earth as bedding. Odd, odd. But he had not cared, had he? What reason was there to care when he had tomorrow night already dangling before his eyes?

The woman was already in her coffin, either sleeping or feigning sleep. He had not bothered to check. Had not cared whether she knew of her husband activity or not. If she now mulled the vision of her Master tasting what was hers, his, theirs, making plans for the future while she gathered dust in the chapel. How pleased he’d been. How sure.

“Father? Are you alright?”

The boy, the child, the son. His son. A young man who’d looked now so agonizingly like his fathers it sent a shamefully fond dart through his chest. Bless the fluke of the woman’s own features, kin of his kin, blood of his blood, by design or accident. He had smiled. Not grinned, not leered, but smiled with an ease he had forgotten he was capable of for so long. The look had made the boy’s face go even slacker with wonder.

“Yes, I am. Why do you ask?”

“You look different.”

“Do I?”

“Yes. You look…I don’t know. Not younger, but,” the boy had fumbled for a word, “lighter, I guess. Did something happen?”

“No. But something will. Ah-ah, no prying,” when the boy perked up in his coffin, “Go back to your books. You will know more tomorrow.”

“Alright,” came the half-false sulk. “Good-day, Father.”

“Good-day, diavol.”

And he had gone to bed in his tomb fattened on bliss and craving more.

And then.

And then.

Bastard. Delilah. Thieving scheming viper of a traitor.

So much accomplished and destroyed within a day and night. Oh, his treacherous Harkers. Had they only been loyal, been wholly his in mind as much as will, he would have drowned them in praise and prizes for such work against a foe. The patience of it all. The skill. The performance. It surpassed the immaculate and made him ponder for one dumbstruck instant in the midst of his rage whether they had ever been human and not some stealthy pair of incubi come to prey on him.

Such a theory was only an excuse, he knew. It would not do to whittle down their ability to that of mere imps. No, they were but a man and a woman, however altered now, and they had proved themselves to be of such sterling cores of concentrated resolve that their Master had laid barely a scuff mark upon their joint machinations all these years. Their labors had born an unthinkable fruit; one it would have doubly shamed him to behold had he been victim to anyone less canny. But no, no. He had harbored his Harkers for a reason. They were uncommon creatures. Singular. Rare pets he’d thought he could tame. And given another century, perhaps he’d have managed it.

But like the fool who mistakes a tiger for a housecat, he had let his guard down too soon. Too quick. A mere two decades. And now his beasts had bitten and torn and robbed him.

His boy, his son, gone inside a day. Shipped away and on toward the teeming masses of England. This alone had been enough to spur him on. Or would have been.

If not for the impetus that the clever sow and her stolen Lessons from the Mountain had brought down on his head. He had fled before the next bolt could strike. Running, running. Just as he had been running since missing the boy’s departure, since realizing he was the only one left in the castle.

What had actually come first? His mind still spun when he tried to concentrate things into a clear order. The entirety of that period was still a swimming blur in the way the events of a nightmare will reach the waking mind as disjointed pieces.

He had awoken to the nettling pressure of the wild rose upon his coffin lid. The annoyance, the struggle, the hard toss and soul-deep agony that had come with booting the thing off. The blossom crushed. A resignation letter crumpled under the cracked ebony of the lid.

He had known his son was missing.

He had thrust his mind throughout the castle and known he was abandoned in full even before he tore away the lid of the woman’s box.

He had seen the glint of Jonathan’s brooch left on her pillow.

He remembered a vision. Sent from her. Brief. Teasing. Baiting.

Jonathan looking upon her with exhaustion and exultation, with relief, with want, with Love. Drinking from her like a man in the desert finding his oasis. Just the two of them in that boxed dark of her coffin. Mere hours before he found them gone. Eloped. So to speak.

She had left a message for him too, though it had come later. The one that came firing out of the roiling sky he’d thought was solely his. Once again the bait had been too much to ignore, even in his hunt.

It had been him.

How long had it been since he’d first tried to claw his way back into the woman’s mind, into her senses? He could not say. Only that he had been shocked to find himself barred except when the moon was high. She had been hardening herself up from within. There was more of a fortress around her will within two decades than his first trio of Loves had built up in centuries. She had been playing lame all this time. Preparing. Working in the shadows cast by her the distraction of her husband. Sharpening herself all along.

What irony, that they had left Jonathan’s old toy behind. The forgotten memento left in its hiding place in favor of being out and away before their Master fell upon them. Before he thought to whip them into the chase after their child. He’d had the kukri on his hip when he came upon the mist. A tell-tale wisp made visible only by the flash of lightning.

You recognized the essence in it. You knew it and you knew what it would lead to. And still, old devil. Still you threw yourself after him, maddened as a Wolf outran too long by his prey.

Only now it was not a Wolf and a hare, a Wolf and a hart. This was the bitch’s dog, her hunting hound, made to race and tear and follow commands—but not his. Not directly. No lashing of his will into Jonathan Harker’s mind would slow him. No order, no threat, no curse found traction upon the spectral rush of him. Cloud and man and spirit and beast flitting away, away, away, a parody of the hunts of old down their hill. It seemed his friend had been playing lame too.

He knew the speed of the Vampire, as was natural. Man or woman, fit or ill before their change, would have roughly the same gait.

But where he and the woman held that equal speed, Jonathan Harker was lightning on the ground. What had he truly been before he was turned? What blight or miracle had he kept hidden under a guise of constant frailness? He had not cared enough to mull it then. It was simply another frustration for the pile. Another nettle, another spur. The whole of it grated to the point of torture as, idle as a child at play, Jonathan had slowed long enough to throw a look back over his shoulder.

Grinning. Mocking. And there, at last, his own internal voice flying back into his ex-Master’s face:

Have you truly grown so slow, Count?

Through trees, over hills, onward, away, steering him off course, away from where the coast waited. The ships. The boy on the other side of the Channel.

Again, you did not care. Once in bliss, now in wrath. You went blindly after. Never learning your Lesson, old devil.

I see you wear my knife. Is it for my head? Or is it just to let you pretend something of me will still hold you against my will?

His own mind had leapt out after the fleeting shape, all champing teeth and thunder. Not in words. There was too much anger to fashion into coherence. Only the intent made its way out. Hate-fury-hate-fury-hunt-catch-punish—

Mine!

It had slipped from him. Flown. Bright and cutting and horribly naked in what was both a craving and a declaration. Had his eyes stung? It did not matter. The thought-snarl came again.

Mine mine mine mine mine mine you are Mine as the boy is Mine as the woman is Mine and you You YOU were Mine first by right by claim MINE and I will not be robbed by her by you thief traitor bastard Delilah—

Here came an echo from the deepness of the past, that cruel Lesson that Jonathan had once taught them all as his preying family warred over the greater claim to him, tugging at his mind like spoiled children over the same plaything, and Jonathan had thought those horrid sharp thoughts, the woman think-scream-ordering…

You can't, Darling, no, no, no, never. Don't you take yourself away, no one can steal my Jonathan, not even you.

But now here he was. Jonathan stealing himself out of reach. Just out of reach. His claws had scraped the back of his shirt, a lock of his hair. Close. So close.

Never yours, Jonathan had thought back. Never. You knew it then, you know it now. If you were ever so oblivious as to think otherwise, my Darling would have been slain the moment the Conqueror became the Coveter. When it stopped amusing you to see us huddled together and instead began to fester. Red eyes turning green. Because you knew. For all you made us do, all you ordered from me, it was only possible because I belonged to my Love. First, foremost, always. While you were only ever the thief stealing from her bed.

A thunderclap above. A pounce upon the quarry below. Just slow enough. Just as they made it to the clearing.

They had tumbled and Jonathan had thrashed until he was pinned in the grass. His grin had curdled then, deforming into an expression barely an inch removed from that of a bat’s grimace. He did not look at his captor, but bared his teeth in feral loathing at the hands locked around his wrists. There was a hiss as the grips tightened; enough to have broken bones had he been human. Jonathan’s face contorted into a horror of twitching muscle, his fangs crowding with the spires of sharp neighbors that jutted out and snapped so close they might have torn a swatch of flesh from his ex-Master’s face.

“Off me,” came a glottal excuse for a voice. The quintessence of revulsion.“Off me get off me off OFF—,”

“No,” he’d grated back, daring the nearness of the rabid jaws simply to press himself nearer. The closeness itself seemed to repel another bite as Jonathan twisted under him. “I am Master of your Mistress, thief. I am lord of your lady. If she is above the Son, I am above All, and the moment I loop my thrall through her blighted skull, I shall make a noose of the collar your soul donned for her and drag you screaming by it.”

Thunder had rolled again. Louder, louder, until it had irritated. He could not hear himself aloud and was barely better in his mind.

Why so coy now, draga mea? You have missed the wedding night and your funeral! Not to worry. I have what you left for me. It will stick so prettily in your throat.

The sky roared. And its Master, its Weathermaker for over four-hundred years, puzzled at that. He was not ordering the tempest to make such a din. Under him, another change. Jonathan was still. The monstrous face smoothed. Still unhappy, but abruptly devoid of any emotion greater than disdain. Perhaps with a hint of disbelief.

“Even now you insist upon the act. I had thought you would finally drop your mask entirely for the sake of rage, but no. Still you insist on pretense as though sincerity were as great an anathema to you as Him.” The grimace shifted briefly to an upturned rictus. In a lilting voice, brittle and musical as tinkling glass, “You yourself never loved. You never love! Ha. Twenty years of playacting fooled me no more than it did them after half a millennium.” Jonathan’s face hardened again, the grin turned to a razor. “I will never return to your stage again, Dracula. No more acts. No more charades. No more using me and the imitation of affection as another thing to steal from her. We are all but finished with you.” His fangs bared to the gums with a smile. “Now comes the denouement, balaurul meu.”

Then, fired into his head:

This is the last time you will touch me.

And like that, Jonathan Harker was gone. Dissolved and slithered away with such speed he might have been a puff of smoke blown away by the storm. The thunder boomed again. Not by his will.

There was a sound almost lost under the noise. An animal’s cry. A bird?

He looked up, feeling the skim of something familiar—

Her, her, the woman, thief, wretched bi—

—and had only a heartbeat in which to notice first the silhouette of a great owl outlined against the clouds, then the bolt of lightning racing down to find him.

He had dodged. Not quite fast enough.

Not before the pain landed and made its home from face to neck to arm to everywhere, everything, every possible niche of being that could feel agony. A blast that would have killed a mortal man. Had it taken both eyes, the second bolt may have landed too. But he was not blind and so outpaced that one. And the next. The woman was trying to track his motion once again, the old reverse turned on her Master, but he threw up the wall of fire between them and shot away toward the waiting coast. Running from his own sky. His own creatures.

Now here he sat in the present. In the gloom and the sea-salt air, crammed hastily away with a bed of thin earth in a stolen crate, hunting after his own son while his subjects herded and hounded him, dancing through the gaps they had found in his grip upon them. The old tricks of his perished Loves who had known that his hold was not as complete upon a mass as he would have wished. Animal minds were simple to coerce. The Vampire was its wants before all else and that very nature could war with a Master or Mistress if the focus was split enough.

And his focus was in splinters now. 

You would have laughed to see another suffer it, wouldn’t you, old devil? You took all that was hers once upon a time. Now she takes away all that is yours. Even your storm. Even the shapes of the animals. And him, of course. But then, he gave himself away. Is it not so?

“Silence,” he hissed to the cold mound of the heart. The blood was already starting to congeal within it. “Silence, damn you.”

If you have resorted to talking to yourself, you may do well to keep a diary of your own. Record your last nights for posterity.

He sat up quick enough to crack his neck.

I do apologize for the interruption, Jonathan hummed on. I can only assume you are terribly preoccupied. Either trying to pry into her head or trying to keep her out of yours. Even now, I remain banished to the outskirts of the conversation.

He felt himself smile for the first time in too many nights.

Oh, dear. His poor unschooled friend, who had not had needs or means to build up the walls as his wife had. Well. Let this be a Lesson for him then.

His own mind sprang upon Jonathan’s like jaws snapping shut. He felt the younger psyche spasm and raise phantom hackles at the intrusion. Scrabbling with an unpracticed grip at the Presence that bulled its way in, clawing, breaking, crushing his way across the waters that he could not pass in flesh, and then they were—

How do you like flying now, my friend? Everything you hoped it would be?

In the theatre of the mindscape he was launching himself and his catch back across water and shore and hill and mountaintop, wind whistling around false bodies. He was the Bat, Jonathan pierced a dozen times in his teeth. They were—

This is enough for me.

In the snow, the sun frozen an inch from setting, dead men watching as Jonathan brought down the kukri. Head, heart, limbs, over and over, carving and splitting. There was no collapse into elemental dust here. Only the mincing of a carcass. Even here, even wearing the skin of the living man he’d been, his eyes ran red. They were—

Ah, for a thief, still you go after too little. Let us at least be comfortable.

In Jonathan’s bed, each bite into his throat another night, and all those nights were his ex-Master’s. Kissing, mauling, drinking, sinking teeth to the gums. Only now his friend fought in his jaws. Jonathan’s teeth and claws tore at him as if he meant to shred him out of existence. To no avail. He was the practiced mind, the greater mind, greater will, and in mind and flesh his will was Law. But now he heard the whistle of air overhead, metal and timber swinging down. They were—

You still feel this one, don’t you? Mina feels the one in her throat on the same day it cut her. Does yours come like a blow at the end of each June? Again, Count, my apologies. You’ll not suffer the headache of me once your head is gone.

In the morning of departure. The shovel was in Jonathan’s hands, the edge bloody. No basilisk gaze pinned him now and his ex-Master’s brow was not merely scratched, but cracked like a grisly egg. The spade came down again. His ex-Master’s hand came up. They were—

But my friend, you know from experience how much I love to suffer you. To suffer for you. Saving—

In the ladies’ chamber, Jonathan torn out of three different suckling jaws as the dead Loves of old shrilled and grasped at him—

and sheltering—

In the grim first night, the woman in a deathly Limbo in Jonathan’s arms, the boy barely more than a twitching thought in her belly, on his knees, knife cast aside, bartering and pleading for the safety of his Loves, thankless and ungrateful already in his traitor heart—

 and supporting you all this time. Even now! Do you think me angry for your little trick? Your theft? Your lies? Why, it is nothing but heartening! To think I ever worried you were too soft for the eternity ahead of you! You, so cunning and patient, laying your tripwire over twenty years’ worth of convincing me—me!—that you were a thing worth trusting. Once we clear up this mess with the boy and your pending penance, I could see you eating holes through whole countries with your sweet venom.

Jonathan was in his hand now. A cursing, struggling mote trapped in a fist the size of a small house. The hand tightened. Jonathan howled. Not with pain, for there was no real sensation here. But the revulsion was true enough. He fought and pried at the knuckles of his ex-Master’s grip as if trying to break free of a cesspit.

The fist broke into other hands. A hundred thousand flashes of as many memories, cold clawed touches finding him wherever they felt like landing. Not injuring, of course. Would he hurt his dear friend? No! Only come closer, draga mea, the better to see you, feel you, count your pulses, that is all.

Jonathan bayed and swung and shuddered in the flurry. Every forced turn of the head with a hand on his jaw. Every talon of a nail tickling along chin and throat. Every idle raking of hair or stroke of his shoulder. Every seized arm, caught hand, grabbed hip, rubbed back. All of these blasted Jonathan’s unvarnished hate and disgust through the shared plane of their mind. And the worst of them all had been—

There.

The window in the library.

Their last night as man and monster. When he had spoken his last lying promise and slipped it into his ex-Master’s mouth like candy. Only hate had been there. Hate, disgust, shame. The weight of it staggered.

He staggered.

Jonathan broke free, but did not run, pausing to bare psychic teeth.

I can feel your scandal from here, Count. Even had you been short all the hundred other evils I had to ignore, I think your hypocrisy alone would have nauseated me. How do you sit there stunned at the obvious? Did you seriously believe my mind so pliant a thing that it would ignore the cruelty you held over our heads at every hour and fool myself into think you capable of love? This, when we both know you only consented to the terms for the sake of my payment in pain. Another performance, meant to last all of eternity, as you reveled over how I sunk to nightly agony behind every measured word, every smile, every taste of me ‘freely given.’ Our precious little summer together made infinite.

Here was the crackling fireside, a client and his solicitor beside it, white hair and dark switched around again. One of the early nights to judge by the healing cut on Jonathan’s cheek, the newness of the shadows under his eyes. Eyes whose fear had been so carefully reined in as he’d goaded his host into talk of the land, of its history, of himself in the guise of ancestors. Rapt young thing. After, he had sat then as he sat now, trapped against the arm of the couch, his host almost crushing him into the tufting as the old devil purred incessant questions about what there was waiting for him in England. Were there others like Jonathan there? Ah, he should not build up his hopes too much, souls such as his young friend were a rarity in any place…

Now the pleasant-pleading eyes flamed. Running red again.

This here. Even before the Weird Sisters laughed the truth in your face and you insisted on a lie of a rebuttal. This game was the core of all the years to follow. And now you complain because I played it too well and ran away while you were having fun? Over four-hundred years old and still a petulant child throwing tantrums over a lost toy.

The castle fell away into the heart of a storm. Veins of lightning wound through the black of it as the ex-Master loomed over his subject, his vassal, his traitor, his—

A toy? This alone?

Jonathan was seized in thunderbolts. Marionette strings that burned scarlet.

This is what you think would earn my interest? My protection?

Jonathan bowed and danced and split his face with grinning as the strings pulled.

I could have that from anyone, Jonathan Harker. I could have had that from you for twenty years, no longer leaving the sword hanging above your head, but walking and talking you through every night while your mind sat bound and mute behind your eyes. I could have laughed in your face that November night after I had twisted your head off your shoulders and burned what was left of your wife on my fire. I would have too. If you were anyone other than yourself.

The strings were a net were a web. Jonathan strangled in it, unable to die, to move, to look away as the parade of that prelude to his life in Castle Dracula came and went before him. The deaths and undeaths, the pains and the promises. Mother and child, Master and vassal with the blood never clean from their hands.

 All of this, my friend. All of this is because of you. You, who came to make the sale of Carfax. You, who refused to stay in your proper place among my lost Loves, waiting for my return and all the future I would bring. You, who set the hunting dogs upon me and so forced my hand with the woman. You, who faced the consequences of going among good men, pretending you were a mere hound instead of a jackal, striking them down for a Love you put above their mandates and their cherished divinity. You, who brought that Love to my door, groveling for the sake of your selfish heart.

You, Jonathan Harker. You are my equal in this ‘game’ you say I played. It is one impossible to play alone. If you had not baited me, not teased and strung me along, not made yourself into a vital thing to my heart rather than a mere curiosity, all would have ended swiftly.

 Something shifted. He couldn’t say what. A tipping, a sliding. The fraying of some final tether left straining in his friend’s mind. Jonathan had despised his touch and shown it well enough. Jonathan had raged on behalf of his Loves and the slain and their life that would never be. Jonathan had even managed to offer wrath on his own behalf.

This was not that.

This was an incandescent, a righteous, a Holy conflagration of fury that turned the clinging threads to ash and boiled away the storm into a flaming void. For a moment, Jonathan was not Jonathan at all. He was only a blistering red light. The fire trailing behind him spread like wings, either those of Eros or one of the Fallen. Whichever he was, he seared in his ex-Master’s mind like a torch.

Your heart? YOUR HEART?

A hand of flame pierced him, cooking the centuries-old heart before it was torn out as a cinder.

Even now! Even in your own skull! Even with the stage forsaken and the audience of our son finally free, still you must shroud yourself in this act!? STILL YOU FEIGN KNOWLEDGE OF LOVE BEYOND USING IT AS COLLAR AND CUDGEL!?

Jonathan fractured then, an inferno of indignation and devotion, flaring with the memory of all he had cherished and loathed in his life. Mother and child for the former. His ex-Master for the latter. All smiled for, all made happy as he could endeavor. Yet only mother and child were given all of himself in earnest, their own love reflected back into him, keeping filaments of joy alive even as he brutalized himself with the conviction of his being a worse monster than they could ever be in potentia, deserving of nothing, of worse than nothing, of—

Flashes of his ex-Master, of his voice and embrace and the steady grinding away of his sanity and will and soul under the lord of the castle’s heel, crushed by the weight of self-loathing, dragged up and eaten again and again by the bottomless pit of his ex-Master’s want, of the threat that he must play the game or leave his family to suffer, of a conviction that all of this, every minute of every night, was no more than entertainment, a distraction to grow bored of and smash to pieces should he fail to cozen and serve and be a good Scheherazade ever-after. His penance for the dead men. For his wife. For their son.

That was all it was. All it ever was to Jonathan Harker.

The shock of it came on too quick and too heavy for its owner to catch before it tumbled into the mindscape. It shattered open as it fell and showed all that had been true behind its owner’s eyes. Twenty years’ worth of truth. What he had taken for truth.

The woman, no longer even dreamt of as a companion, but a brittle-bitter comfort. A sibling he had never asked for, but could not deny for her use in keeping his own barbs sharp and for the guarantee of what she anchored to him.

The boy, so suddenly grown, his love uncomplicated and real and awed, an experiment fostered and festering, burrowing into his Father’s heart as blithely as an insect left to gratefully build its nest in the home of a welcoming corpse.

Jonathan Harker.

Jonathan Harker.

Jonathan Harker.

The keystone against which the sheltering of mother and child, the performance played for the boy, the willingness even to entertain the farce in the first place, all leaned. Why? Why, when he would not have suffered any other victim, any other enemy, any other dear friend to wring such a feat from him like blood from a stone? Why, unless..?

He could not hide it. Could not bury it. Could not raze or deny or shred it into dust. It was too loud, too vivid, too strong. Too starved.

It lunged at Jonathan like its own living thing, an excited Wolf gone mad with hunger, seeing the only thing it wished to eat. Raced, leapt, pounced, dissolved into a frantically grasping wraith of red tears and a heart, unburned but hanging open and raw in its cleaved chest, coiling around Jonathan’s mind and forcing the reality of itself down his throat. Choking on it, the fire of Jonathan Harker went out. Only the man—what had been a man—was left. Staring.

Now would come the laughter. The insult. The dismay. The sour-mocking questions. Oh dear, old devil. Had he really tripped and fallen so? Had he really dared to think that the feeling was returned?

Jonathan, no longer flame or fury, only stood in the black of their shared mind. Still staring. Still…

The shock was not just his ex-Master’s.

The void cracked and splintered. Now. Now the laughter would come. Now another act. Now a sardonic bat of lashes, a false swoon, a coo of cloying flattery, or else the woman herself would dare to graze his mind with her own, the better to jeer alongside her Love, yes, yes, any moment now. Now. Now.

Count. I did not know.

The laughter did not come. No act. No sneer. Not even a ripple of disgust. Nothing. Nothing but—

I’m sorry.

The sentiment was attacked with a thousand tearing teeth. Shredded down to psychic atoms in the hunt for the disingenuous core, the hidden chuckle, the lie, the trick. But Jonathan was no less bare than himself in this space. There was no more to find in the sensation than the feeling itself. It repeated:

I’m sorry. And, just as sincere: I never intended to break your heart. Only to impale it.

The whole of it saturated with an honesty and apology that cut deeper than any bludgeoning of hate.

Sorry is not good enough, my friend. There is no taking it back.

Jonathan, a pillar against the abyss, nodded.

I know. Not for either side. I did tell you. This will end before the year is out. We shall kill you or you shall kill us. It is all that’s left.

Now came a laugh; a familiar hideous sound that unfolded into a trail of chuckling. Giddy, almost.

No, Jonathan Harker. You misunderstand once again. Yes, you and the woman mean to slay me at last. But I remain nothing but loving in my design. All that is left is that you kill me, or—

The void was gone.

They stood in the castle’s chapel. With the certainty of a dream, they knew that the boy was returned. Their only witness as he clung and wept over his mother’s coffin. She had been willed into paralysis by her Master, moving only to maim herself in the box or to gorge herself. Her meals’ dried carrion lay piled and broken around the coffin. The infants’ heads lined in rows while the tiny hearts were left to shrivel.

‘Please, Papa, you have to, please…’

And Papa was, of course. The woman’s Master had slipped the noose of himself through her at last, and now her orders were his orders, and the order was being carried smilingly out by their dear Jonathan. Pardon, his dear Jonathan. The picture of bliss despite his running eyes. Under his chin, the brooch shined. On his knuckle, the gold band had been replaced with a matching stone and clutching dragon. His vows, leaked through the permanent stamp of his grin:

‘I will never look at her again. I will never respond to any word from her. I will speak of her only as if she were dead. And I will love you as you are owed. I will be yours alone. Always. This I will do, or she shall never leave the box or know a moment without pain again. Te iubesc, balaurul meu.’

‘Te iubesc, draga mea.’

And then they were together, in the snug gloom of the great coffin that had been built and delivered in secret months before, undetected in the same chamber as the kukri. Two Grooms lay within it, one joyous and one merely smiling as he wept a stain into his Master’s breast and eternity finally began.

This is how our game ends and the next begins, draga mea. There are consequences to becoming what a monster loves, by accident or intention. He crushed Jonathan to him in their box, hissing. You stole our son. You stole my heart. You stole yourself. I will have all back in time. And you will never slip free again.

 For just a moment, he felt it. Fear breaking through Jonathan’s miasma of shocked anger and distaste. But it was not the whole of him. Horribly, cruelly, crawling up and out from the center of his friend, was that unbroken condolence.

Again. I am sorry, Dracula. This will not come to pass. And even in the dreams where you paint this future as reality, you will still have my sympathy in this single thing. Your love is only a chain. Never an embrace. Only a noose, not a held hand. Our son is perhaps the first and only soul to love you without coercion, and he does so only because we spent his life hiding the worst of you from him. You will shatter that illusion if you think to steal him back. And then what will be left? Only this?

Jonathan’s hand was on his cheek, sweeping away something damp.

I had thought your pretenses only another knife to twist in us. But the performance was for you as well, wasn’t it? It was as close as you could get.

Jonathan was crushed again. Tighter, closer. Enough to snap an ordinary man in half. The arms, illusory though they were, trembled.

 Do not dwell like this. You have your conquest to think of, don’t you? Your march on the Living? Return to that, if it helps. You are four centuries deep in this existence. Twenty years should be nothing to scrape aside. We were a distraction, all of us. Let us go. Let us be enemies. It will hurt less.

There was no need for breath here. No more than there had been a need for breath for anything but speech since the day he ceased to live as a man. Despite this, he buried his face in Jonathan’s neck, his mouth opened to bite, but releasing only a choked and shaking sound. It was followed by more. Then:

I will—I will conquer. I will slaughter. I will rule. But I will not be alone. If I must have you all on tethers, so it will have to be. You should not have made me happy, draga mea.

There was no true contact in the mindscape. No touch, no sense. He shivered just the same as Jonathan’s arms slipped around him.

I promise to make you very unhappy once we cross paths in person. My hate is rivaled only by my Love’s and her endings for you are as imaginative or worse than my own. In the interim, I shall do my best to gain your hate, Count. But that shall be another time.

There was a change. A softening in the phantasmagoria of the dark as the characters in it began to lose their edges. He grasped at Jonathan all the tighter.

I have not dismissed you. It is a long way to England yet. I hope the woman is satisfied with riding the rest of the way with you in a coma.

The thoughts leered, but the intent begged. It wound around Jonathan in a serpent’s coils, holding, clutching, trapping—

Let me go, Count.

No.

Tighter and tighter on the disintegrating form, becoming a cage, a coffin, a clutching fist, a dragon winding around and around its treasure, no no no, mine mine mine—

Before it’s too late.

No!

Within the mind and above the Persephone, thunder cracked and lightning struck. A great, blinding, devastating bolt. It had her voice and a single message to share.

MINE.

And with that, he was back in the cargo hold. The sailor’s heart had been crushed to pulp in his hands. His fingers and eyes ran with the same scarlet runnels. Above deck, he felt the riot of a storm that was not his battering the ship. He cursed and threw himself out to it, wrestling until dawn to hammer the weather smooth again.

In another patch of water, under the same voyeur moon, the Aurora cruised on under a starlit sky. A girl and her young man stood on the deck, her hand over his as he gripped the railing so hard it bent to the shape of his fingers. The young man’s eyes snapped open, lungs jerkily refilling with a gasp they’d not yet learned was reflex more than need.

 Jonathan?

“I’m fine. …How long was that?”

Less than two minutes.

“It felt longer.”

It’s like that. Even when conscious, it will try to drag things into dreaming. Ever a showman.

“Did you trace him? Do you know which ship?”

Yes. The Persephone. Our ports won’t be far apart.

Her smile curved, red as rose petals, thorn-sharp.

And I believe their vessel has hit some stormy weather just now. Though it is endeavoring to ease the worst of it.

“Do you need..?”

No, Darling. I only press when I feel it slacking. It will be wrung out by the time it reaches shore. I will merely be peckish. 

Her smile dimmed a shade as she searched her husband’s face.

Are you certain you’re alright?

“I am, Mina. Even if I weren’t, we could not risk it being you. Not while he’s still scrabbling to take your reins again.”

It showed you, didn’t it?

“Showed what?” Mina looked at him. Read him. Turned over the stone that her husband had freshly laid over the revelations bled out into his mind. “Ah. That.”

That. Was this what hurt you in there?

“I am not—,” Her hand went to his cheek. A rust-colored drop was swept away. “Oh. I thought I felt lightheaded.”

Do not distract. Was learning it what hurt you?

“It did not hurt. Only shamed me, somewhat. It casts a different light on his pending demise.”

A slaying made into euthanasia?

“…That is certainly a word for it.”

There are few others to choose from. Extermination. Justice. Recompense. Safety. But, in its thinnest terms, yes, euthanasia. I would not be surprised if he welcomed it in the end. I think I would.

His hand seized around hers.

“Why?”

She smiled back. The ghost of the living girl made its edges soft.

You would not understand. You do not know what it is to love and be loved by you, Jonathan. To imagine the latter was a lie? Worse, a lie you assumed was known by the one who loved you? I do not know if I could suffer it. More, you remain Love himself. Coveted and giving and, even for the Thing we hunt, pitying. For you champion the feeling in its own right, even as you did not guess that you were more to the Thing than a trophy.

They were silent for a time. Feeling the creep of dawn coming for the horizon. Jonathan looked to her again. Searching.

“Mina. Did you know?”

The possibility occurred to me. It did not mourn the Weird Sisters for more than a year, despite their time with it. Lucy it was bitter for losing only because she was the first conquest of a new land, slain before she could be enjoyed. I, the supposed new companion, was relegated within months to an afterthought. No more or less than a necessary evil in its mind—the hostage there to keep you there. With it. And it speaks volumes that it kept even a fraction of its word to you at all.

It could have taken you at any time, Jonathan. Pounced and bit and fed and turned, all with no one to stop it. But it didn’t. Not merely to see you suffer through the performance as you had before, but because it wanted to hide in the fact that you had free will. That you were immune to all but the most superficial pulls of the mesmer rather than the permanent leash upon my mind. It wanted you free and human and in its company, ‘of your own choosing.’ Or near enough. I can think of no reason for it beyond the Thing hoping for the act to become real.

“I cannot tell if that’s a mark of insanity or sadness.”

Perhaps both. And you do not have to cover yourself in barbs here, my Love. There are things we do not wish on enemies, even if they are deserved. That being said—,

“My plans have not changed, Darling.” He leaned his face into her palm, smiling. “We will dance on his ashes for what he’s done. For what he means to do.”

When we finish, we can pour what’s left of him upon a garden of wild roses. Perhaps it will carry some peace after him.

The rest of their conversation was not in words. It carried on even as they pressed their lips into the perfect mold of each other’s, the tableau of them spied only by another couple who thought they must be their elders as they went along to their own room.

“Now when was the last time you kissed me like that?”

“Oh, hush. I’m sure it was only yesterday I did. Sometime after the banquet, wasn’t it?”

“Mm.”

“And anyway, it’s not the sort of thing for our age, dear. These young people are growing ever brasher out in the open.”

“Yes, in public, on a boat. Most brazen. Lord knows there’s scads of witnesses…”

Daybreak came and the storm departed with it. The one in the sky, at least.

Down below, in the dark, in the dirt inside a box, a smaller tempest raged. Tried to rage. Tried to hold to thunder and lightning and hail. But the death-sleep melted it down into its truer shape, freed from the whipping of desperation in the guise of anger. The grave earth became rosy mud as new tears rolled. Between this and the toll of keeping back the storm, even nursing from the crushed heart had barely helped in stalling the change. Black hair had turned to iron, iron to ancient white.

Dreaming dragged him down and away from his own will. Through the foam of futures yet unborn, through the penalties and precautions yet to be inflicted, all the way to a moonlit window in the library. His friend stood before him. Alive and undead. Wasted and hale. Blue-eyed and red. Cold lips smiling and pressing into his. Joy frozen in place.

In the world outside his mind, the cadaver of an old man moved just enough in his bed of soil to hold the brooch tighter. Enough so that the clasp split his skin and poured ichor over the golden dragon and its treasure. He did not feel it.

But wept just the same. 

[scotianostra]

On January 30th 1649 King Charles I was executed.

On January 30th 1649 King Charles I was executed.

His execution caused a change of sides by most of the Scots who had previously supported the Parliamentarians in the English Civil War as, for all his faults, Charles was still a Scottish Stuart king.

I love these accounts of what happened on occasions like this, it brings history alive for me and I can imagine being in the crowd at the time, I have a similar type post lined up for February 8th but this is an from tells us of a bitterly cold January day. Charles was wearing two heavy shirts so that he might not shiver in the cold and appear to be afraid. The following details of the event comes from an anonymous observer and begins as the doomed King addresses the crowd from the scaffold.

“[As for the people,] truly I desire their liberty and freedom as much as anybody whomsoever; but I must tell you that their liberty and freedom consist in having of government, those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own. It is not for having share in government, sirs; that is nothing pertaining to them; a subject and a sovereign are clear different things. And therefore until they do that, I mean that you do put the people in that liberty, as I say, certainly they will never enjoy themselves. Sirs, it was for this that now I am come here. If I would have given way to an arbitrary way, for to have all laws changed according to the power of the sword, I needed not to have come here; and therefore I tell you (and I pray God it be not laid to your charge) that I am the martyr of the people…

And to the executioner he said, ‘I shall say but very short prayers, and when I thrust out my hands - ’

Then he called to the bishop for his cap, and having put it on, asked the executioner, 'Does my hair trouble you?’ who desired him to put it all under his cap; which, as he was doing by the help of the bishop and the executioner, he turned to the bishop, and said, 'I have a good cause, and a gracious God on my side.’

The bishop said, 'There is but one stage more, which, though turbulent and troublesome, yet is a very short one. You may consider it will soon carry you a very great way; it will carry you from earth to heaven; and there you shall find to your great joy the prize you hasten to, a crown of glory.’

The king adjoins, 'I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown; where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the world.’

The bishop: 'You are exchanged from a temporal to an eternal crown, - a good exchange.’

Then the king asked the executioner, 'Is my hair well?’ And taking off his cloak and George [the jeweled pendant of the Order of the Garter, bearing the figure of St. George], he delivered his George to the bishop…

Then putting off his doublet and being in his waistcoat, he put on his cloak again, and looking upon the block, said to the executioner, 'You must set it fast.’

The executioner: 'It is fast, sir.’

King: 'It might have been a little higher.’

Executioner: 'It can be no higher, sir.’

King: 'When I put out my hands this way, then - ’

Then having said a few words to himself, as he stood, with hands and eyes lift up, immediately stooping down he laid his neck upon the block; and the executioner, again putting his hair under his cap, his Majesty, thinking he had been going to strike, bade him, 'Stay for the sign.’

Executioner: 'Yes, I will, and it please your Majesty.’

After a very short pause, his Majesty stretching forth his hands, the, executioner at one blow severed his head from his body; which, being held up and showed to the people, was with his body put into a coffin covered with black velvet and carried into his lodging.

His blood was taken up by divers persons for different ends: by some as trophies of their villainy; by others as relics of a martyr; and in some hath had the same effect, by the blessing of God, which was often found in his sacred touch when living.”

A bust of Charles is on the wall outside the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall, London near the spot of his execution, and today as usual supporters of the Stuart King will lay flowers

There are no shortages of depictions of the execution, I have chosen a few.

[lovingsylvia]

“And I am married to a poet. We came together in that church of the chimney sweeps with nothing but love & hope & our own selves: Ted in his old black corduroy jacket & me in mother’s gift of a pink knit dress. Pink rose & black tie. An empty church in watery yellow-gray light of rainy London. Outside, the crowd of thick-ankled tweed-coated mothers & pale, jabbering children waiting for the bus to take them on a church outing to the Zoo.

And here I am: Mrs. Hughes. And wife of a published poet.”

—from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, Cambridge Diary, Monday afternoon: February 25 1957

...

Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes first met on 25 February 1956 at party in Cambridge, England. They married only four months later on 16 June 1956 at St George the Martyr, Holborn, Camden, London in honor of Bloomsday with Plath‘s mother Aurelia being the only wedding guest. They have been married for six years and four months until Plath died by  suicide on 11 February 1963.

Even though they have been separated for five months since September 1962, they never got a divorce. Maybe today would have been their 67th anniversary, if they were alive and stayed together.

Picture: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes photographed by Lettice Ramsey at Ramsey & Muspratt in Cambridge, England in 1956.

This picture is one of 10 Plath and Hughes had taken a few moths later in November 1956 as their official wedding photos. They are wearing their actual  wedding attire and Plath wore a “pink knitted suit dress”.

They both ended up hating the photographs.

If you want to find out more about their wedding and the story of these wedding pictures, I highly recommend you to read Ann Kennedy Smith‘s blog post at https://akennedysmith.com/

Photo source: http://thiswomanisdangerous.blogspot.com/

[greater-than-the-sword]

As Reformation Day Approaches...

Many will wish to talk about Martin Luther. Which makes sense because he famously nailed the 95 theses to the church door at Wittenburg on October 31st.

But what better time to commemorate all of the OTHER important figures and reformers of the Protestant reformation? Of whom there were many.

Wikipedia lists 284 people burned in England under Queen Mary I, as she attempted to consolidate her power. Her new laws declared anyone teaching against Catholic doctrines to be guilty of heresy and subject to the death penalty. The Catholic church has never denounced these murders committed by its members on its behalf.

These laws affected famous and regular people alike. Over time I may make a series of posts with more detail about some of these persons.

Incomplete list of the protestant martyrs in England under the cut. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Protestants executed under Mary I

1. John Rogers City of London clergyman – preacher, biblical translator, lecturer at St. Paul's Cathedral burnt 4 February 1555 Smithfield, London

2. Lawrence Saunders City of London clergyman – preacher, Rector of All Hallows Bread Street, London burnt 8 February 1555 Coventry, Warwickshire

3. John Hooper Gloucester and Worcester clergyman – Bishop of Gloucester and Worcester under Edward VI burnt 9 February 1555 Gloucester, Gloucestershire

4. Rowland Taylor Hadleigh, Suffolk clergyman – Rector of Hadleigh, Suffolk burnt 9 February 1555 Aldham Common, Nr Hadleigh, Suffolk[5]: p.98 [59]

5. Rawlins White Cardiff, Glamorgan fisherman burnt March 1555 Cardiff, Glamorgan[60]

6. Thomas Tomkins Shoreditch, London weaver burnt 16 March 1555 Smithfield, London[61]

7. Thomas Causton Horndon on the Hill or Thundersby, Essex gentleman burnt 26 March 1555 Rayleigh, Essex[62]

8. Thomas Higbed Horndon on the Hill or Thundersby, Essex gentleman burnt 26 March 1555 Horndon-on-the-Hill, Essex[62]

9. William Hunter Coleman Street Parish, London apprentice burnt 27 March 1555 (or 26 according to Foxe) Brentwood, Essex

10. Stephen Knight barber burnt 28 March 1555 Maldon, Essex[64]

11. William Pygot (or Pigot) butcher burnt 28 March 1555 Braintree, Essex[64]

12. [n 6] William Dighel burnt 28 March 1555 Banbury, Oxfordshire [65][66]

13. John Lawrence (or Laurence) clergyman – priest and former Blackfriar at Sudbury, Suffolk[50] burnt 29 March 1555 Colchester, Essex[64]

14. Robert Ferrar St David's, Pembrokeshire clergyman – Bishop of St David's under Edward VI burnt 30 March 1555 Carmarthen, Carmarthenshire[67]

15. George Marsh Dean, Lancashire clergyman – curate to Laurence Saunders and minister at Dean, Lancashire burnt 24 April 1555 Boughton, Cheshire[68]

16. William Flower Lambeth, London surgeon and teacher burnt 24 April 1555 Westminster[69]

17. John Cardmaker Wells, Somerset clergyman – prebendary of Wells Cathedral burnt 30 May 1555 Smithfield, London[70]

18. John Warne Walbrook, London upholsterer burnt 30 May 1555 Smithfield, London[70]

19. Thomas Hawkes (or Haukes) Essex gentleman burnt 10 June 1555 Coggeshall, Essex

20. Thomas Watts (or Wattes) Billericay, Essex linen draper burnt 10 June 1555 Chelmsford, Essex[7][72]

21. John Ardeley (or Ardite) Wigborough, Essex husbandman burnt 30 May 1555 (or 'about 10 June', according to Foxe) Rayleigh, Essex[7][73]

22. John Simson Wigborough, Essex husbandman burnt 30 May 1555 (or 'about 10 June', according to Foxe) Rochford, Essex[7][73]

23. Nicholas Chamberlain (or Chamberlaine) Coggeshall, Essex weaver burnt 14 June 1555 Colchester, Essex[7][74]

24. William Bamford (or Butler)[n 8]Coggeshall, Essex weaver burnt 15 June 1555 Harwich, Essex[7][74]

25. Thomas Ormond (or Osmande)[n 9]Coggeshall, Essex fuller burnt 15 June 1555 Manningtree, Essex[7][74]

26. John Bradford City of London clergyman – prebendary of St Paul's Cathedral burnt 1 July 1555 Smithfield, London[7][75][76]

27. John Leaf (or Jhon Least) Christ Church Greyfriars, London (born in Kirkby Moorside, Yorkshire) apprentice tallow chandler burnt 1 July 1555 Smithfield, London

Canterbury Martyrs of July 1555

28. John Bland (or Blande) Rolvenden, Kent clergyman – vicar of Rolvenden, Kent burnt 12 July 1555 Canterbury, Kent [7][78]

29. Nicholas Shetterden (or Shitterdun) burnt 12 July 1555 Canterbury, Kent

30. John Frankesh Adisham, Kent clergyman – parson of Adisham, Kent burnt 12 July 1555 Canterbury, Kent

31. Humphrey Middleton Ashford, Kent burnt 12 July 1555 Canterbury, Kent

32. Nicholas Hall Dartford, Kent bricklayer burnt 19 July 1555 Rochester, Kent

33. Christopher Wade Dartford, Kent linen-weaver burnt July 1555 Dartford, Kent

34. Margaret (or Margery) Polley Pepeling, Calais widow burnt 17 July 1555 Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent[80]

35. Dirick Carver (also spelt Deryk; also known as Dirick Harman) Brighthelmstone (now Brighton), Sussex beer-brewer burnt 22 July 1555, Lewes, East Sussex

36. John Launder Godstone, Surrey husbandman burnt 23 July 1555 Steyning, West Sussex

37. Thomas Euerson (or Iueson, Iverson or Iveson) Godstone, Surrey carpenter burnt (day unknown) July 1555 Chichester, West Sussex

38. Richard Hook (or Hooke) lame man [66] burnt unknown date in July 1555 Chichester, West Sussex

39. James Abbess Stoke-by-Nayland, Suffolk shoemaker burnt 2 August 1555 Thetford, Norfolk (or Bury, according to Foxe)

40. John Denley Maidstone, Kent gentleman burnt 8 August 1555 Uxbridge, Middlesex

41. Robert Smith Windsor, Berkshire clerk at the college in Windsor, Berkshire and painter burnt 8 August 1555 Uxbridge, Middlesex

Canterbury Martyrs of August 1555

42. William Coker burnt 23 August 1555 Canterbury, Kent [7][89]

43. William Hopper Cranbrook, Kent[79] burnt 23 August 1555 Canterbury, Kent [7][89]

44. Henry Laurence burnt 23 August 1555 Canterbury, Kent [7][89]

45. Richard Collier (or Colliar) burnt 23 August 1555 Canterbury, Kent

46. Richard Wright Ashford, Kent[79] burnt 23 August 1555 Canterbury, Kent

47. William StereAshford, Kent[79] burnt 23 August 1555 Canterbury, Kent

48. Elizabeth Warne (or Warren)[n 13]Walbrook, London widow of John Warne, upholsterer burnt 23 August 1555 Stratford-atte-Bow, London

49. Roger Hues (aliases: Curryer, Corier) St Mary's, Taunton, Somerset burnt 24 August 1555 Taunton, Somerset [66][7][91]

50. George Tankerfield London (born in York) cook burnt 26 August 1555 St Albans

51. Patrick Pakingham (aliases: Packingham, Pachingham, Patchingham or Pattenham) burnt 28 August 1555 Uxbridge, Middlesex [7][87]

52. John Newman Maidstone, Kent pewterer burnt 31 August 1555 Saffron Walden, Essex [7][87]

53. Robert Samuel (or Samuell) Barfold, Suffolk clergyman – minister at Barfold, Suffolk burnt 31 August 1555 Thetford, Norfolk[7][93]

54. Stephen HarwoodWare, Hertfordshire brewer burnt 30 August 1555 Stratford in Essex[7][94]

55. Thomas Fust (or Fusse) hosier, August 1555 In the environs of London or Ware

56. William Hale (or Hailes)Thorpe, Essex, late August 1555 In the environs of Barnet, London

57. William Allen Somerton, Norfolk labourer burnt early September 1555 Walsingham, Norfolk

58. Roger Coe (or Coo or Cooe) Melford, Suffolk shearman burnt date unknown September 1555 Yoxford, Suffolk

59. Thomas CobHaverhill, Suffolk butcher burnt date unknown September 1555 Thetford, Norfolk

Canterbury Martyrs of September 1555

60. George Catmer (or Painter) Hythe, Kent burnt about 6 September 1555, according to Foxe (or 12 July 1555) Canterbury, Kent

61. Robert Streater (or Streter) Hythe, Kent burnt about 6 September 1555, according to Foxe (or 12 July 1555) Canterbury, Kent

62. Anthony Burward Calete (possibly Calais) [98] burnt about 6 September 1555, according to Foxe (or 12 July 1555) Canterbury, Kent

63. George Brodbridge (or Bradbridge) Bromfield, Kent burnt about 6 September 1555, according to Foxe (or 12 July 1555) Canterbury, Kent

64. James Tutty (or Tuttey)Brenchley, Kent burnt about 6 September 1555, according to Foxe (or 12 July 1555) Canterbury, Kent

65. Robert Glover (or Glouer)Mancetter, Warwickshire gentleman burnt 14 September 1555 Coventry, Warwickshire

66. Cornelius Bongey (or Bungey) capper burnt 20 September 1555 Coventry, Warwickshire

67. Thomas Hayward (or Heywarde) burnt mid September 1555 Lichfield, Staffordshire  

68. John Goreway Holy Trinity Parish, Coventry, Warwickshire [50] burnt mid-September 1555 Lichfield, Staffordshire Ely Martyrs

69. William WolseyUpwell, Norfolk constable, one of the Ely Martyrs burnt 16 October 1555 Cathedral Green, Ely, Cambridgeshire

70. Robert Pygot (or Pigot) Wisbech, Isle of Ely, Cambridgeshire painter, also an Ely Martyr burnt 16 October 1555 Cathedral Green, Ely, Cambridgeshire

Oxford Martyrs

71. Hugh Latimer (or Latymer) Baxterley, Warwickshire [103] clergyman – chaplain to King Edward VI burnt 16 October 1555 outside Balliol College, Oxford

72. Nicholas RidleyFulham Palace clergyman – Bishop of London under Edward VI burnt 16 October 1555 outside Balliol College, Oxford

Canterbury Martyrs of November 1555

73. John Webbe (or Web) gentleman burnt 30 November 1555 Canterbury, Kent [7][105]

74. George Roper burnt 30 November 1555 Canterbury, Kent [7][105]

75. Gregory Parke (or Paynter)[citation needed] burnt 30 November 1555 Canterbury, Kent [7][105]

76. John PhilpotWinchester, Hampshire clergyman – Archdeacon of Winchester burnt 18 December 1555 Smithfield, London[7][106]

77. Thomas Whittle (or Whitwell)Essex clergyman – priest or minister burnt 27 January 1556 Smithfield, London[7][107]

78. Bartlett (or Bartholomew) GreenTemple, London – born in Basinghall, London gentleman and lawyer burnt 27 January 1556 Smithfield, London[7][107]

79. Thomas BrownSt Bride's parish, Fleet Street, London – born in Histon, Cambridgeshire burnt 27 January 1556 Smithfield, London[7][107]

80. John TudsonSt Mary Botolph parish, London – born in Ipswich, Suffolk artificer burnt 27 January 1556 Smithfield, London[7][107]

81. John Went (or Winter or Hunt) Langham, Essex artificer burnt 27 January 1556 Smithfield, London[7][107]

82. Isobella Forster (or Annis Foster) St Bride's parish, Fleet Street, London – Born in Greystoke, Cumberland wife of John Foster, cutler burnt 27 January 1556 Smithfield, London[7][107]

83. Joan Lushford (or Jone Lashforde, or Warne) Little Allhallows parish, Thames Street, London maid burnt 27 January 1556 Smithfield, London

Canterbury Martyrs of 1556

84. John Lomas (or Jhon Lowmas) Tenterden, Kent burnt 31 January 1556 Wincheap, Canterbury [7][108]

85. Annes Snoth (or Annis Snod) Smarden, Kent widow burnt 31 January 1556 Wincheap, Canterbury [7][108]

86. Anne Wright (or Albright); alias Champnes burnt 31 January 1556 Wincheap,Canterbury [7][108]

87. Joan (or Jone) SoaleHorton, Kent wife burnt 31 January 1556 Wincheap, Canterbury [7][108]

88. Joan Catmer Hythe, Kent 'wife (as it should seem) of George Catmer', burnt in 1555 burnt 31 January 1556 Wincheap, Canterbury [108][n 15][7]Ipswich Martyrs of 1556

89. Agnes Potten Ipswich, Suffolk wife of Robert Potten burnt 19 February 1556 Ipswich, Cornhill [7][n 16][109]

90. Joan Trunchfield Ipswich, Suffolk wife of Michael Trunchfield, a shoemaker burnt 19 February 1556 Ipswich, Cornhill

91. Thomas Cranmer Lambeth Palace clergyman – Archbishop of Canterbury (former) burnt 21 March 1556 outside Balliol College, Oxford[7][110]

92. John Maundrel Beckhampton, Wiltshire – brought up in Rowde, Wiltshire husbandman burnt 24 March 1556 outside Salisbury, Wiltshire

93. William Coberly Wiltshire tailor burnt 24 March 1556 outside Salisbury, Wiltshire

94. John Spicer (or Spencer) Winston, Suffolk[50] freemason or bricklayer burnt 24 March 1556 outside Salisbury, Wiltshire

95. John Harpole (or Hartpoole) St Nicholas Parish, Rochester, Kent burnt 1 April 1556 Rochester, Kent[7][112]

96. Joan BeachTunbridge Wells, Kent widow burnt 1 April 1556 Rochester, Kent

97. John Hullier (or Hulliarde) Babraham, Cambridgeshire clergyman – curate of Babraham, Cambridgeshire burnt 16 April 1556 Cambridge, Cambridgeshire

98. William Tyms (or Timmes)Hockley, Essex clergyman – curate of Hockley, Essex burnt 24 April 1556 Smithfield, London

99. Robert DrakeThundersley, Essex clergyman – minister or parson of Thundersley, Essex burnt 24 April 1556 Smithfield, London

100. Richard SpurgeBocking, Essex shearman burnt 24 April 1556 Smithfield, London[7][115]

101. Thomas SpurgeBocking, Essex fuller burnt 24 April 1556 Smithfield, London[7][115]

102. George AmbroseBocking, Essex fuller burnt 24 April 1556 Smithfield, London[7][115] 103. John Cavel (or Cauell)Bocking, Essex weaver burnt 24 April 1556 Smithfield, London[7][115]Colchester martyrs of April 1556

104. Christopher ListerDagenham, Essex husbandman burnt 28 April 1556 Colchester, Essex [7][116]

105. John MaceColchester, Essex apothecary burnt 28 April 1556 Colchester, Essex [7][116]

106. John SpencerColchester, Essex weaver burnt 28 April 1556 Colchester, Essex [7][116]

107. Simon Joyne sawyer burnt 28 April 1556 Colchester, Essex [116]

108. Richard NicolColchester, Essex weaver burnt 28 April 1556 Colchester, Essex

109. John HamondColchester, Essex tanner burnt 28 April 1556 Colchester, Essex [7][116]

110. Hugh Laverock (or Lauarocke) Barking, Essex painter, (a lame man) burnt 15 May 1556 Stratford in Essex

111. John Apprice (or Aprice) blind man burnt 15 May 1556 Stratford-Atte-Bow or Stratford in Essex

112. Thomas Drowry blind boy burnt about 15 May 1556 Gloucester, Gloucestershire [7][n 18][118]

113. Thomas Croker bricklayer burnt about 15 May 1556 Gloucester, Gloucestershire [7][n 18][118]

114. Katherine HutBocking, Essex widow burnt 16 May 1556 Smithfield, London[7][117]

115. Elizabeth ThackvelGreat Burstead, Essex maid burnt 16 May 1556 Smithfield, London[7][117]

116. Joan (or Jone) HornsBillericay, Essex maid burnt 16 May 1556 Smithfield, London

117. Thomas Spicer Winston, Suffolk labourer burnt 21 May 1556 Beccles, Suffolk

118. John Deny (or Denny) (possibly a female Joan or Jone) Beccles, Suffolk burnt 21 May 1556 Beccles, Suffolk

119. Edmund PooleBeccles, Suffolk burnt 21 May 1556 Beccles, Suffolk

120. Thomas HarlandWoodmancote, Sussex carpenter burnt 6 June 1556 Lewes, Sussex

121. John Oswald (or Oseward) Woodmancote, Sussex husbandman burnt 6 June 1556 Lewes, Sussex

122. Thomas Reed Ardingly, Sussex burnt about 6 June 1556 Lewes, Sussex

123. Thomas Avington (or Euington) Ardingly, Sussex turner burnt about 6 June 1556 Lewes, Sussex

124. Adam Forster (or Foster) Mendlesham, Suffolk husbandman burnt 17 June 1556 Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk [124][125]

125. Robert Lawson Mendlesham, Suffolk linen weaver burnt 17 June 1556 Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk [124][125]

126. Thomas Wood clergyman – pastor burnt about 20 June 1556 Lewes, Sussex

127. Thomas Milles Hellingly, Sussex burnt about 20 June 1556 Lewes, Sussex

128. Thomas Moor servant and husbandman burnt 26 June 1556 Leicester, Leicestershire

Stratford Martyrs, 11 men and 2 women.

129. Henry Adlington (or Addlinton) Grinstead, Sussex sawyer burnt about 27 June 1556 Stratford-Atte-Bow[7][126]

130. Lawrence (or Laurence) ParnamHoddesdon, Hertfordshire smith burnt about 27 June 1556 Stratford-Atte-Bow[7][126]

131. Henry WyeStanford-le-Hope, Essex brewer burnt about 27 June 1556 Stratford-Atte-Bow[7][126]

132. William Holywell (or Hallywell)Waltham Holy Cross, Essex, smith. burnt about 27 June 1556 Stratford-Atte-Bow

133. Thomas Bowyer (or Bowier)Great Dunmow, Essex weaver burnt about 27 June 1556 Stratford-Atte-Bow

134. George Searle White Notley, Essex tailor burnt about 27 June 1556 Stratford-Atte-Bow

135. Edmond Hurst St James's Parish, Colchester labourer burnt about 27 June 1556 Stratford-Atte-Bow[7][126]

136. Lion/Lyon Cawch City of London merchant/broker burnt about 27 June 1556 Stratford-Atte-Bow[7][126]

137. Ralph Jackson Chipping Ongar, Essex, serving-man burnt about 27 June 1556 Stratford-Atte-Bow[7][126]

138. John Derifall (or Dorifall) Rettendon, Essex labourer burnt about 27 June 1556 Stratford-Atte-Bow[7][126]

139. John Routh/Roth Wickes, Essex labourer burnt about 27 June 1556 Stratford-Atte-Bow

140. Elizabeth Pepper St James's parish, Colchester wife of Thomas Pepper, weaver burnt about 27 June 1556 Stratford-Atte-Bow

141. Agnes George West Barefold, Essex wife of Richard George, husbandman burnt about 27 June 1556 Stratford-Atte-Bow

142. Roger Bernard Framsden, Suffolk labourer burnt 30 June 1556 Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk [124][125]

143. Julins Palmer Reading, Berkshire schoolmaster burnt about 15 July 1556 'The Sand-pits', Nr Newbury, Berkshire

144. John Guin/Jhon Gwin shoemaker [66] burnt about 15 July 1556 'The Sand-pits', Nr Newbury, Berkshire[7][128]

145. Thomas Askin/Askue burnt about 15 July 1556 'The Sand-pits', Nr Newbury, Berkshire

Guernsey Martyrs – (Three women and one unborn male foetus)

146. Catherine Cauchés (sometimes spelt Katherine Cawches) St Peter Port, Guernsey, Channel Islands burnt 18 July 1556 St Peter Port, Guernsey, Channel Islands[129]

147. Perotine Massey (pregnant) St Peter Port, Guernsey, Channel Islands wife of NormanCalvinist minister burnt 18 July 1556 St Peter Port, Guernsey, Channel Islands[129]

148. Guillemine GilbertSt Peter Port, Guernsey, Channel Islands burnt 18 July 1556 St Peter Port, Guernsey, Channel Islands

149. Thomas Dungate (or Dougate) East Grinstead, Sussex burnt 18 July 1556 Grinstead, Sussex

150. John Forman (or Foreman) East Grinstead, Sussex burnt 18 July 1556 Grinstead, Sussex

151. Anne Tree (or Try) West Hoathly, Sussex burnt 18 July 1556 Grinstead, Sussex

152. Joan WasteAll Hallows', Derby, Derbyshire blind woman burnt 1 August 1556 Derby, Derbyshire

153. Edward Sharp glover (possibly)[66] burnt early September 1556 Bristol, Gloucestershire/Somerset

154. Rose Pencell burnt 17 October 1555 Bristol

155. William Shapton weaver burnt 17 October 1555 Bristol[131]

156. John Kurde Syresham, Northamptonshire shoemaker burnt October 1556 or 20 September 1557 Northampton, Northamptonshire

157. John Noyes Laxfield, Suffolk shoemaker burnt 22 September 1556 or 1557 [133]

158. Thomas Ravensdale burnt 24 September 1556 Mayfield, Sussex[85][122]

159. John Hart burnt 24 September 1556 Mayfield, Sussex [85][122]

160. Unknown man shoemaker burnt 24 September 1556 Mayfield, Sussex [85]

161. Unknown man currier burnt 24 September 1556 Mayfield, Sussex [85]

162. Nicholas Holden Withyham, Sussex weaver burnt 24 September 1556 Mayfield, Sussex

163. Unknown man carpenter burnt 25 September 1556 Bristol, Gloucestershire/Somerset

164. John Horn burnt late September 1556 Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire

165. John Phillpott Tenterden, Kent burnt 16 January 1557 Wye, Ashford, Kent

166. Thomas Stephens Biddenden, Kent burnt 16 January 1557 Wye, Ashford, Kent

Canterbury Martyrs of January 1557

167. Stephen KempeNorgate, Kent burnt 15 January 1557 Canterbury, Kent [136]

168. William WatererBiddenden, Kent burnt 15 January 1557 Canterbury, Kent [136]

169. William ProwtingThurnham, Kent burnt 15 January 1557 Canterbury, Kent [136]

170. William LowickCranbrook, Kent burnt 15 January 1557 Canterbury, Kent [136]

171. Thomas HudsonSelling, Kent burnt 15 January 1557 Canterbury, Kent [136]

172. William HayHythe, Kent burnt 15 January 1557 Canterbury, Kent [136]

173. Nicholas Final Tenterden, Kent burnt 16 January 1557 Ashford, Kent

174. Martin Bradbridge Tenterden, Kent burnt 16 January 1557 Ashford, Kent

175. William Carman (or Carmen)[n 28] burnt day and month unknown 1557 [138]

176. Thomas Loseby burnt 12 April 1557 Smithfield, London

177. Henry Ramsey burnt 12 April 1557 Smithfield, London

178. Thomas Thyrtell (or Sturtle) burnt 12 April 1557 Smithfield, London

179. Margaret Hyde burnt 12 April 1557 Smithfield, London

180. Agnes Stanley (or Stanlye) burnt 12 April 1557 Smithfield, London

181. Richard Sharpe weaver burnt 7 May 1557 Cotham, Bristol[141]

182. Thomas Hale shoemaker burnt 7 May 1557 Cotham, Bristol[141]

183. Stephen Gratwick (or Steuen Grathwick) Brighthelmstone (now Brighton), Sussex burnt at end of May 1557 St. George's Fields, Southwark, Surrey

184. William Morant burnt at end of May 1557 St. George's Fields, Southwark, Surrey [7][142]: p. 272 [143]

185. Thomas King[66] burnt at end of May 1557 St. George's Fields, Southwark, Surrey

Maidstone martyrs

186. Joan (or Jone) Bradbridge Staplehurst, Kent Presumably a relative of Widow Bradbridge, burnt 19 June 1557[144] burnt 18 June 1557 Maidstone, Kent [7][145]

187. Walter Appleby Maidstone, Kent burnt 18 June 1557 Maidstone, Kent [7][145]

188. Petronil Appleby Maidstone, Kent wife of Walter Appleby burnt 18 June 1557 Maidstone, Kent [7][145]

189. Edmund Allin (or Allen) Maplehurst Mill, Frittenden, Kent miller burnt 18 June 1557 Maidstone, Kent [7][145]

190. Katherine Allin (or Allen) Maplehurst Mill, Frittenden, Kent Wife of Edmund Allin/Allen, miller burnt 18 June 1557 Maidstone, Kent [7][145]

191. Joan (or Jone) Manning Maidstone, Kent burnt 18 June 1557 Maidstone, Kent [7][145]

192. Elizabeth (surname possibly 'Lewis') blind maid burnt 18 June 1557 Maidstone, Kent [7][145]Canterbury martyrs of June 1557

193. John Fishcock/Jhon Fiscoke burnt 19 June 1557 Canterbury, Kent [7][145]

194. Nicholas White burnt 19 June 1557 Canterbury, Kent [7][145] 195. Nicholas Pardue/Perdue burnt 19 June 1557 Canterbury, Kent [7][145]

196. Barbara Final burnt 19 June 1557 Canterbury, Kent [7][145]

197. Bradbridge's Widow (Bradbridge's Wife) Probably Tenterden, Kent Probably the widow of Martin Bradbridge, burnt 16 January 1557 burnt 19 June 1557 Canterbury, Kent [145]

198. Mistress Wilson (also referred to as 'Wilson's Wife') burnt 19 June 1557 Canterbury, Kent [7][145]

199. Alice Benden, possibly also referred to as 'Benson's Wife' Staplehurst (or possibly Cranbrook), Kent[146] burnt 19 June 1557 Canterbury, Kent

Lewes Martyrs

200. Richard WoodmanWarbleton, Sussex iron-maker burnt 22 June 1557 Lewes, Sussex [7][82][147]

201. George Stevens (or Steuens) Warbleton, Sussex burnt 22 June 1557 Lewes, Sussex

202. William MainardMayfield, Sussex burnt 22 June 1557 Lewes, Sussex

203. Alexander HosmanMayfield, Sussex servant of William Mainard burnt 22 June 1557 Lewes, Sussex

204. Thomasina WoodMayfield, Sussex maidservant of William Mainard burnt 22 June 1557 Lewes, Sussex  

205. Margery Morris (or Morice) Heathfield, Sussex burnt 22 June 1557 Lewes, Sussex

206. James Morris (or Morice) – son of Margery Heathfield, Sussex burnt 22 June 1557 Lewes, Sussex

207. Denis Burcis (or Burgis) Buxted, Sussex burnt 22 June 1557 Lewes, Sussex

208. Ann Ashdon (or Ashdown; also referred to as 'Ashdon's Wife') Rotherfield, Sussex burnt 22 June 1557 Lewes, Sussex

209. Mary Groves (also referred to as 'Gloue's Wife') Lewes, Sussex burnt 22 June 1557 Lewes, Sussex

210. Simon Miller (or Milner) Lynn, Norfolk burnt 13 July 1557 Norwich, Norfolk

211. Elizabeth Cooper St Andrew's Church, Norwich, Norfolk wife of a pewterer burnt 13 July 1557 Norwich, Norfolk [7](which calls her 'a woman')

212. George Egles/Eagles hung, drawn & quartered, August 1557 Chelmsford, Essex[7][150]Colchester Martyrs of August 1557

213. William BongeorSt Nicholas Parish, Colchester, Essex glazier burnt 2 August 1557 Colchester, Essex [151]

214. William Purchase (or Purcas) Bocking, Essex fuller burnt 2 August 1557 Colchester, Essex [151]

215. Thomas Benhote (or Benold) Colchester, Essex tallow-chandler burnt 2 August 1557 Colchester, Essex

216. Agnes Silverside (or Smith) Colchester, Essex widow burnt 2 August 1557 Colchester, Essex [151]

217. Helen (or Ellen) EwringColchester, Essex wife of John Ewring, miller burnt 2 August 1557 Colchester, Essex [151]

218. Elizabeth Folk Colchester, Essex 'young maiden' and servant burnt 2 August 1557 Colchester, Essex [151]

219. William Munt (or Mount)Much Bentley, Essex burnt 2 August 1557 Colchester, Essex

220. Alice Munt (or Mount) Much Bentley, Essex wife of William Munt (or Mount) burnt 2 August 1557 Colchester, Essex [151]

221. Rose Allen (or Allin) Much Bentley, Essex spinster, daughter of Alice Mount burnt 2 August 1557 Colchester, Essex [151]

222. John JohnsonThorpe, Essex labourer burnt 2 August 1557 Colchester, Essex [151]

223. Richard Crashfield Wymondham, Norfolk burnt 5 August 1557 Norwich, Norfolk[7] which records 'one at Norwich' in July[152]

224. Father Fruier burnt August 1557 Rochester, Kent[7][150]

225. Robert Stevenson burnt August 1557 Rochester, Kent[153]

226. Sister of George Eagles burnt August 1557 Rochester, Kent

227. Unknown Woman burnt August 1557 Rochester, Kent[7]

228. Agnes Prest Boyton, Cornwall Spinner burnt 15 August 1557 Southernhay, Exeter [154]

229. Thomas Benion weaver burnt 27 August 1557 Bristol[141]

230. Joyce Lewis Mancetter, Warwickshire gentlewoman burnt September 1557 Lichfield, Staffordshire  – may be the same as Joyce Bowes, August 1557 (the Regester)

231. Ralph Allerton/Rafe Glaiton Much Bentley, Essex burnt 17 September 1557 Islington

232. James Austoo (or Auscoo) burnt 17 September 1557 Islington

233. Margery Austoo (or Auscoo) burnt 17 September 1557 Islington[7][157]

234. Richard Roth (or Rooth) burnt 17 September 1557 Islington

235. Agnes Bongeor (also known as Bowmer's Wife), wife of Richard Bongeor (similar name but different death date) burnt 17 September (or unknown date July) Colchester, Essex (or March 1558, Colchester)

236. Margaret Thurston/Widow Thurston-similar name but different death date burnt 17 September (or unknown date July) Colchester, Essex [132](or March 1558, Colchester)

237. Cicely Ormes St Edmund's Parish, Norwich, Norfolk wife of Edmund Ormes, worsted-weaver burnt 23 September 1557 Norwich, Norfolk

238. Thomas Spurdance servant of the Queen burnt November 1557 Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

239. John Halingdale/Hallingdale/Hollingday carpenter burnt, 18 November/or day unknown October 1557, Smithfield, London

240. William Sparrow burnt, 18 November/or day unknown October 1557 Smithfield, London

241. Richard Gibson gentleman[66] burnt, 18 November/or day unknown October 1557 Smithfield, London

242. John Rough/Jhon Roughe London/Islington, Middlesex clergyman – minister at London/Islington, Middlesex burnt 22 December 1557 Smithfield, London

243. Margaret Maring (or Mering) burnt 22 December 1557 Smithfield, London

244. [Unknown forename ...] Lawton burnt March 1558 Huntingdon, Huntingdonshire

245. Cuthbert Symson/Symion London/Islington, Middlesex clergyman – deacon of the church in London/Islington, Middlesex died 28 March 1558 Smithfield, London

246. Hugh Foxe hosier[66] died 28 March 1558 Smithfield, London

247. John Devinish/Jhon Denneshe wool winder, died 28 March 1558 Smithfield, London

248. William Nichol burnt 9 April 1558 SM9515 Haverfordwest/Hwlffordd, Pembrokeshire/Sir Benfro

249. William Seaman (or Symon) Mendlesham, Suffolk husbandman burnt 19 May 1558 Norwich, Norfolk

250. Thomas Hudson Aylsham, Norfolk glover burnt 19 May 1558 Norwich, Norfolk[166] described as 'Glouer' in [7]

251. Thomas Carman[n 28] burnt 19 May 1558 Norwich, Norfolk

252. William Harris burnt 26 May 1558 Colchester[7][127]

253. Richard Day burnt 26 May 1558 Colchester, Essex [7][127]

254. Christian George (female) burnt 26 May 1558 Colchester, Essex her husband had previously been married to Agnes George, mentioned above

Islington Martyrs

255. Henry Pond (or Houde) burnt 27 June 1558 Smithfield, London

256. Reinald Eastland (or Launder) burnt 27 June 1558 Smithfield, London

257. Robert Southain (or Southam) burnt 27 June 1558 Smithfield, London

258. Matthew Ricarby (or Ricarbie) burnt 27 June 1558 Smithfield, London

259. John Floyd (or Flood) burnt 27 June 1558 Smithfield, London

260. John Holiday (or Hollyday) burnt 27 June 1558 Smithfield, London

261. Roger Holland London (taken in or near St John's Wood) merchant tailor burnt 27 June 1558 Smithfield, London

262. Sir Richard Yeoman (or Yeman) Hadleigh, Suffolk clergyman – curate of Hadleigh, Suffolk burnt 10 July 1558 Norwich, Norfolk

Islington Martyrs (second group)

263. Robert Mills burnt 14 July 1558 Brentford, Middlesex [167]

264. Stephen Cotton burnt 14 July 1558 Brentford, Middlesex

265. Robert Dynes burnt 14 July 1558 Brentford, Middlesex [167]

266. Stephen Wight (or Wreight) burnt 14 July 1558 Brentford, Middlesex

267. John Slade burnt 14 July 1558 Brentford, Middlesex

268. William Pikes (aliases: Pikas, Peckes) tanner burnt 14 July 1558 Brentford, Middlesex [7][167]

269. John Cooke sawyer burnt about 25 July 1558 Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk [170]

270. Robert Milles (or Plummer) shearman burnt about 25 July 1558 Bury St Edmunds

271. Alexander Lane wheelwright burnt about 25 July 1558 Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

272. James Ashley bachelor burnt about 25 July 1558 Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

273. Thomas Benbrike/Benbridge gentleman burnt unknown day in July 1558 Winchester, Hampshire

274. John (or Richard) Snell Bedale, Yorkshire burnt 9 September 1558 Richmond, Yorkshire

Ipswich Martyrs of 1558

275. Alexander Gooch (or Geche, or Gouch) Woodbridge or Melton, Suffolk weaver of shredding-coverlets burnt 4 November 1558 Ipswich Cornhill

276. Alice DriverGrundisburgh, Suffolk wife of a husbandman burnt 4 November 1558 Ipswich Cornhill [173]

277. Philip Humphrey (or Humfrey) burnt November 1558 Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

278. John David/Jhon Dauy (brother of Henry David) burnt November 1558 Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

279. Henry David/H. Dauy (brother of John David) burnt November 1558 Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk [174]Canterbury Martyrs of 1558

280. John CornefordWrotham, Kent burnt 15 November 1558 Canterbury, Kent [175]

281. Christopher Brown Maidstone, Kent burnt 15 November 1558 Canterbury[175]

282. John HerstAshford, Kent burnt 15 November 1558 Canterbury, Kent

283. Alice Snoth burnt 15 November 1558 Canterbury, Kent [175]

284. Katherine Knight/Tynley an aged woman burnt 15 November 1558 Canterbury

[mybeautifulchristianjourney]

Today in Christian History

Today is Monday, September 30th, 2024. It is the 274th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; Because it is a leap year, 92 days remain until the end of the year.

653: Death of St. Honorius of Canterbury.

1736: Three slaves are admitted into the church by baptism on St. Thomas Island by Frederic Martin who had replaced the original Moravian missionary Leonard Dober. They are the first converts on St. Thomas. When he is unable to pay a fine, Martin will later be imprisoned for refusing to take an oath in court where he was summoned to testify against a robber.

1751: Phillip Doddridge, clergyman and author of the influential book The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul sails from Falmouth for a warmer climate in the hope of recovering from consumption. He will die a month later.

1770: Death of George Whitefield (pictured above) in Newburyport, Massachusetts. The English revivalist had preached his last sermon the evening before.

1824: James “Diego” Thomson, Scottish Presbyterian and colporteur of the British and Foreign Bible Society, arrives in Guayaquil, Ecuador, with 800 New Testaments to distribute, which will later be considered the first significant Protestant influence on this Catholic nation.

1865: Death of Francis Wayland, Baptist preacher and educator, at Providence, Rhode Island.

1882: Death of Johann Jakob Herzog, German Reformed theologian, educator, and a major contributor to The German version of the Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge.

1943: Death from a seizure of the Orthodox priest Seraphim (Nicholas Zagorovsky), considered a martyr because of the years he spent in exile and because after his release he was forced to live a life of privation and suffering in order to hold religious services in secret.

1958: Death of Elsie Singmaster, an award-winning and internationally renowned Lutheran novelist and historical writer, whose books featured Pennsylvanian Germans.

1991: Death of Moses Okesiji, a prominent Baptist pastor in Nigeria who had been associated with many efforts in behalf of his church and his people.

2011: A Muslim mob ravages the St. George Coptic Church in Edfu, Egypt. Islamic officials and local media put the blame on Christians.

[dream-in-fall]

Red-blue reflections.

There are a lot of red and blue colors in the film. Often these two colors mark opposites and/or couples in one way or another. Crowley and Aziraphale, Sergeant Shadwell and Madame Tracy, Adam and Pepper, Maggie and Nina's shops, and so on. A cup of coffee and an apple of Eden. My interpretation of these colors. I assume that the color symbolism is taken from the Christian religion of the Renaissance.

In this case, the Red color means everything earthly, sensual, full of life, sexual, chaotic. Sometimes it's something aggressive (Anathema saw the red aura of an angry villager). But aggression can also be righteous bravery like Pepper, who stood up to the War. The color red does not appear symbolically in Hell and does not directly mean evil. The Blue color means everything unearthly, reasonable, calm. This is order, discipline, loyalty and stability. The blue color also does not symbolize Heaven and does not directly mean good.

I would add here the fact about two Christian saints - St. George and St. Andrew. Saint Andrew is the patron saint of the Scottish flag. The flag of Scotland has a white oblique cross on a blue background. And St. George the Victorious (the man who defeated the snake /dragon) patronizes the flag of England (this flag has a red cross on a white background. Saint George and Saint Andrew are also opposites of each other - one is a warrior (red), the other is a martyr (blue), respectively. I think it would be interesting to see these characters in the second coming?

One more color thought. Here is a screenshot. (S1E3 [54:24])

This is an image of a monitor in an office at a nuclear reactor. At the moment, there is no fuel in the nuclear reactor, there is a yellow candy that Adam placed there. The monitor shows that this yellow candy gives energy by splitting into blue and red colors. Yellow (gold) color in Christianity is a Divine color, the color of divine energy and grace. People who see it say "it's impossible". They witnessed a miracle. I associate this episode with another one.

(all subtitles are original) In this scene our angel and demon exchanged bodies and Death itself says that it is "ineffable". Death stated that it was a miracle.

I will also mention White color in my color reflections. He appears in the series four times (something I noticed.) White in this theory means purity, innocence and/or sacrifice.

1.The third baby in the S1E1. He was wrapped in a white blanket. He was a victim of circumstances. I haven't read the book, but fish were mentioned in the movie in the context of the baby. These few little facts lead me to think that this child may appear in the third season. And he will play a direct role in the second coming, as the new incarnate Christ (the fish is a symbol of Christ and also the white color his symbol too.)

2. In the theater with a red interior (1941), Aziraphale takes out a white handkerchief and theatrically waves it. I think it reflects the purity of his intentions to help his demon. And also the fact that he is the only one in this "vicious" place (where illegal alcohol is sold and people stare at half-naked girls) is a pure immaculate soul.

3. Gabriel wears a white fur coat when he goes out to the demons in the second season. He obviously intended to sacrifice himself for the sake of saving people.

4. Muriel - everything is obvious here. She's a blank slate. I really hope she doesn't fall victim to any dramatic circumstances in S3. I love Muriel).

There is also a Violet color. I have already talked about him a lot in my other posts, for example in the post about Gabriel's eyes or about the joint miracle of Azikro. I'll just mention a funny little fact here. When Aziraphale gets inside Madame Tracy, her sleeves turn violet (because she herself is marked in red, and the angel is blue, respectively.)

Violet color appears once more at the end of S2E6. When we see that Shax and Furfur are up to something together, they unite. And we see them disappearing into a violet haze. I think we need to find out exactly what this couple is up to in S3.

I assume that the violet color here means unification, union, expansion, reaching a new level.

[historian-in-pearls]

There are nuns here at the museum today!!! (Well, sisters.) I saw them from a distance; I can tell they’re Franciscan for sure and I’m 99% sure Sisters of St Francis of the Martyr St George. Hoping they come into my area at some point so I can say hi.

[divinum-pacis]

Pilgrims rest on a bench while celebrating the feat day of Saint George in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Wednesday, April 24, 2024. Hundreds of Haitians flocked to a hill in the capital of Port-au-Prince on Wednesday for the annual celebration of St. George, a Christian martyr who was believed to be a Roman soldier and is revered by both Catholics and those who practice Voodoo. They offered him money and prayers in hopes they would make it through Haiti's economic and political crisis. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa)