The Hard Places

by William Tyndale, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

Alice Cotterell found the place by counting leaves. The book had chapters but no numbers inside them, and so she kept a red thread at the leaf where they had stopped, and she opened it there, and she put her finger on the line.

There were five of them in her kitchen that night, and the dog, and a rush burning in the iron clip on the table. Hugh, her husband's brother, sat nearest the light, because he liked to see the page although he could not read it. His boy Davy sat on the floor with his back to the settle. Old John Kyte, who thatched, sat by the hearth with his good ear towards her. Bess Lowle had brought the baby and was feeding it under her shawl. The shutter was barred and there was a sack against the foot of the door.

"Acts," said Alice. "The fourteenth. We left them at Lystra."

"They stoned him," said Davy. "Paul. And dragged him out of the city for dead."

"And he rose up," said John Kyte, "and went in again. I liked that."

She read. She read slowly, because the letters were small and the ink had run a little in the printing, and because she had found that if she read fast, Bess lost it and John lost it and Hugh began to talk. She read how Paul and Barnabas went back through Lystra and Iconium and Antioch, strengthening the disciples, and how they ordained them seniors by election in every congregation, and prayed and fasted, and commended them to God.

"Seniors," said Bess.

"That is the word."

"Old men, then."

"It says seniors."

Bess laughed, and the baby came off the breast and complained, and she put it back. "Then John Kyte is our priest. He is the oldest man in the parish."

John Kyte said he would want paying.

Alice did not laugh, and Hugh did not laugh either. Hugh had gone still in the way he went still at the loom when a thread broke, before he swore.

"Read it again," he said.

She read it again. By election. In every congregation.

"There," said Hugh. "Sir Robert was never elected by anybody. The bishop's man sent him. Nobody in Nibley chose him. And it does not say priest. It says senior." He put his hand flat on the table beside the book, not on it. "It does not say priest anywhere, does it, Alice? You have read us the whole of it from Matthew to here. Did you read priest once?"

She thought. "The priests of the Jews. The high priest. Those."

"Not one of ours. Not one that Paul set up."

"No."

"Then he is not one." Hugh looked round at them. "Then we have none."

"We have Sir Robert," said Alice, "and he buried Walter, and he did it well, and he would not take the mortuary cow because I had only the one."

"That is not what I am asking."

"I know what you are asking. I am telling you what I know." She put the red thread in at the end of the chapter and closed the book. "The book says they chose seniors. It says it of them, at Lystra. It does not say Hugh Cotterell shall go up to the church on Sunday and tell Sir Robert he is nobody."

"It does not say I shall not."

That was true, and she could not say it was not, and so she said nothing. The rush had burned down to the clip. Bess wrapped the baby and went out first, and then John Kyte, feeling for the latch, and Hugh last with the boy. At the door Hugh turned round.

"Who chose the bishop?" he said, and went out without waiting.

---

The book had cost her what Walter left in the box under the bed, less what the burying took. She had bought it in Bristol from a man who sold wool-cards and had other things under the cards, and she had brought it home in her sleeve, past the bridge, with her arm held stiff, as if she had hurt it. She had not told Hugh what she paid. She had told no one that she could read, until the night she told them all, because there was no use having it otherwise.

Her father had been parish clerk at Dursley and had taught her her letters because she was the only child that sat still. He had taught her on his own primer, which was Latin, with the English written in beside it in his hand, the English down one side and the Latin down the other, and she had learned the Latin a little to please him and forgotten it again. But she had never forgotten the shape of the two columns. The English ran along like a man walking: and, and, and, this, then this. The Latin hung back, and kept its meaning shut up until the end, like a box you could not see into until the last word opened it. When she read the new book aloud, she did not have to wait for the end of anything. The words came in the order the thing happened. Bess could follow it with a baby on her. John Kyte could follow it with one ear.

There were things in it she did not understand, and she had a thread for those too. It was black, and it was at two places already, one in John and one in the Corinthians, and she did not go back to them, because her rule was to read on and not to choose. If you chose, she thought, you would choose what you liked. Hugh would have had her read the Acts over and over until the pages came loose.

On a Thursday in September she went into Wotton for thread and salt. There was a crowd at the cross, and a man from Gloucester talking, and she stopped at the edge of it with her basket. They had dug up Master Tracy at Toddington, the man said. He had been dead a year and more. He had written in his will that he trusted in God only and not in the saints, and that he would leave no money for masses to be sung for him, and the archbishop had called the will heresy, and the chancellor of Worcester had sent men and dug the body up, and burnt it.

"What was left of it," said somebody.

"What was left of it."

A woman asked what good it did to burn a dead man. The man from Gloucester said it was not done for the dead man's good. Alice bought her thread and her salt and went home by the field path and not the road, and that night she put the book in the bottom of the meal ark under the sack of oats, which was where she always put it, and lay awake.

On Sunday Hugh did not go to mass. Davy came, and said his father had a flux. Alice knelt where she always knelt, near the back, by the font, and watched Sir Robert's back as he went up to the altar, the white alb over the brown gown, the hem dirty from the lane, and she heard him say the Latin, which he said quickly and not well, and she thought of Hugh at home saying: who chose him? And she thought: nobody chose him. And she thought: he came out at two in the morning when Walter was dying and sat with him till it was light, and he did not have to.

Both of those were true, and neither of them gave way.

After mass Sir Robert stopped her at the porch. He asked after her, and after the boy, and he asked whether Hugh's flux was a bad one. He said that the rural dean would be riding through at Michaelmas, and that there was talk of books, and that he hoped there were no books in Nibley that he would have to hear about.

"I would not like to hear about them," he said. "I would rather not hear."

She said she understood him. He nodded and went back in. She saw that his hands were shaking, and that he put them into his sleeves so that she would not see, and she was sorry for him, and she was afraid of him, and she did not know which she was more.

---

They came on Tuesdays and Fridays, all five, through September, and they were still coming on the Tuesday before Michaelmas.

Hugh was well again. He had been to the alehouse on the Saturday, Bess said, and not for the first time, and talked, and two of the Stinchcombe men had listened to him and one had not. Bess said it to Alice in the yard, low, with the baby on her hip, and then went in, and Alice stood for a moment with her hand on the doorpost before she followed.

Inside Hugh had already pulled the bench up to the table. "We are in the Romans," he said. "We have been in it a fortnight and I have not understood a word."

"You have understood more than that."

"Then I have been thinking," said Hugh, "about what we do now. About Sunday. If we are a congregation —"

"Let me read."

"If we are a congregation, as it says, then we may choose. That is all I am saying. We may choose a senior and we may break bread in this house as they did, from house to house, it says that, you read it to us, and we need not go up the hill to be told things in Latin by a man the bishop sent."

"Hugh."

"I can say it, can I not? It is in the book."

"Some of it is in the book." She opened at the red thread. It was hard going and Bess had fallen asleep twice. "Let me read on. Then you can say what is in the book."

She read the twelfth chapter to its end, which they had begun on Friday: bless them that persecute you, be not wise in your own opinions, if thine enemy hunger feed him. John Kyte nodded at that. Then she turned the leaf, and saw what was there, and stopped.

"Go on," said Davy.

She could have turned two leaves. She thought of it. Hugh could not read and would not know, and Bess was half asleep, and John Kyte would only hear what she said. She could go on to the fourteenth and nobody in the room but her would ever know there had been a thirteenth.

That was what the bishops were said to do, she thought: decide for you which part you might hear.

She read it.

"Let every soul submit himself unto the authority of the higher powers. For there is no power but of God. The powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth power resisteth the ordinance of God. And they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation."

Nobody said anything. The rush spat.

"Read it again," said John Kyte.

She read it again. She did not read it more slowly or more quickly than before. She read the words that were there.

"What is a power?" said Davy.

Bess said, "It is the ones over you, love." And Davy said, "Oh," and Alice saw that it was so: that nobody in the room had needed to be told what it meant. Higher powers. The powers that be. A boy who had never been to school had it in one breath. There was nothing in the words that wanted a priest to stand beside them and open it up.

And still nobody in the room knew what to do with it.

"The king," said Hugh at last, "has forbidden the book."

"Yes."

"The bishops have forbidden it. The bishop of London burnt it at Paul's Cross, and the bishop's chancellor dug up a dead man for less. And the king is a higher power. And the bishop."

"Yes."

"Then we are damned for sitting here." He looked at the book as if it had turned on him. "By its own word. The book says we are damned for reading the book."

"It does not say that," said Alice.

"Then what does it say?"

"It says what I read. It does not say this book. It does not say the king of England. It says the powers that be."

"And who are they, in Nibley, if not the king and the bishop and Sir Robert?"

She opened her mouth, and found she had nothing to put in it, and closed it again.

It was Bess who spoke, with her eyes shut, as though she were still half sleeping. "Peter said a different thing."

They looked at her.

"In the Acts. When the council had them up and told them to stop. He said, we ought more to obey God than men. You read it us. In the spring, it was. I remember because it was the night the sow farrowed."

Alice did remember. She turned back, a long way, counting leaves the other way, and found it, and read it out. We ought more to obey God than men.

"There," said Hugh, and he breathed out, and he leaned back. "There. That is the answer. Where the king forbids what God commands —"

"Where does it say that?"

"It says —"

"It says what Peter said to the council at Jerusalem. It says that. And the other place says what Paul wrote to the Romans. Hugh, it does not join them up. I have them both under my two hands and it does not tell me how the one goes with the other. You have joined them. You want me to say the book did it."

"Somebody must join them!"

"Then somebody must. But do not tell John and Bess that the book did it for you, when it was you."

Hugh got up. The bench went over behind him and the dog got up too and stood with its hair lifted, not knowing what it was for. Davy picked the bench up. Hugh stood with his hands open at his sides.

"Then what are we for?" he said. "What is it all for, if it will not tell us what to do?"

"It tells us a great deal what to do," said Alice. "If thine enemy hunger, feed him. You liked that one. You nodded." Hugh had not nodded; it had been John Kyte. She let it stand. "It is not that it is hard to read. You understood every word tonight. Davy understood it. It is plain. It is only that it is not easy, and those are not the same, and I did not know that before I had it."

"Plain," said Hugh. "It is plain we are damned and plain we are not."

"Then say that. Say: here is a hard place, and I do not know. Do not go up to the alehouse and say you know."

He stood a while longer. Then he put his hand out, towards the book, and she thought he would take it from her, or shut it, or throw it in the fire. He touched the edge of the page instead, with one finger, the way he touched a cloth to see how it was fulled.

"I will pay my tithe-corn when the dean comes," he said. "And go up the hill on Sunday. "Not because of this."

"No."

"Because the rural dean is coming, and Sir Robert has a soft heart and a loose mouth, and I will not have Davy on a cart to Worcester for what I said to two men from Stinchcombe."

"No," said Alice. "Nor will I."

"And I do not take back what I said about seniors."

"Nobody asked you to. It says seniors."

He laughed then, once, short, without much in it, and took his cap off the peg, and said to the boy, "Come." But the boy did not get up at once; he was looking at Alice.

"Will you read it again on Friday?" Davy said. "The thirteenth. Or will you go on?"

"I will go on. That is the rule."

"But we did not finish with it."

"No," she said. "We did not."

She took the black thread from where it lay coiled at the back of the book, and broke off a length of it with her teeth, and laid it in the gutter of the leaf at the thirteenth chapter, beside the place, and closed the book on it so that the end hung out at the foot, black against the red. Three black now. Davy watched her do it. Then he got up and went out after his father, and Bess after him with the baby gone heavy on her, and John Kyte last, feeling along the wall for the latch, saying to nobody, "We ought more to obey God than men," and then, a few steps out into the yard, "Every soul," and then nothing.

Alice wrapped the book in its cloth and lifted the lid of the meal ark and put it down under the sack of oats. She pushed the sack to the side and back again so it lay as it had lain. Then she licked her finger and thumb and pinched the rush, and stood in the dark, in the smell of the hot fat, with her hand still on the lid.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem decimum tertium Kalendās Novembrēs (20 October 2026), ā Guilielmō Tyndalō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

William Tyndale, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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