Sacrilege by S. J. Parris Page A

talking to herself.
    "To relatives, I suppose."
    "What if their relatives will not take them in? Coming from a plague city?"
    I shrugged. "Then they will have no choice but to return to London, I imagine."
    "To the plague," she whispered, barely audible. She appeared stricken; I watched her for a moment as she turned back to take a last look at the child and the baby. She has a new understanding of what it means to be a refugee, I thought, a raw sympathy with the desperate, those who must throw themselves on the mercy of others. I remembered my own early days as a fugitive on the road to Rome and then north through Italy; how quickly I was exposed to the best and worst of human nature at close quarters. I was taught to survive by bitter experience, but I learned more about compassion in those months than I ever did in thirteen years of prayer and study as a Dominican monk.
    "No one has yet seen any sign of plague," I reminded her.
    Sophia turned to me with a distant smile, as if seeing me properly for the first time since we had set out.
    "So you would not believe there is plague in London until you see a man fall dead of it at your feet, is that it?"
    "I would ask for some proof beyond marketplace rumour, if that's what you mean."
    "And yet you will believe that the Earth goes around the Sun, and that the fixed stars are not fixed, and the universe is infinite, full of other worlds, all with their own suns? Where is your proof for that?"
    "There are calculations based on measurements of the stars--" I began, until I noticed the smile of amusement playing at the corners of her lips. Her chin jutted defiantly. "Very well, you are right--I have no firm proof that there are other worlds. The question is, rather, why should we assume there are not? Is it not arrogance to think we are the only creatures in the cosmos who know how to look up at the night sky and consider our place in it?"
    "The Holy Scriptures say nothing about any distant worlds."
    "The Holy Scriptures were written by men. If there are people who inhabit other worlds out there"--I gestured with one hand--"it is reasonable to suppose they would have their own writings, no? Perhaps their books have no mention of us."
    She smiled, shading her eyes with one hand as she turned to look at me.
    "Have you put all this in your book for the queen?"
    "Not all, no."
    "Just as well."
    She laughed briefly before retreating into her pensive silence again, but there had been warmth in that laughter. The brief exchange had offered a glimpse of the old Sophia, as if she had thrown me a scrap of what I had hoped for from this journey, the conversations we had known in Oxford, when I had sensed she wanted to sharpen her intellect against mine. Perhaps I had been a fool to imagine we would have the leisure for that kind of talk, with such a burden weighing on her shoulders. But to a hungry man, even a scrap is enough to quicken his appetite.

    B Y EVENING WE had reached the small market town of Dartford. As if sensing an end to the journey, the horses slowed their pace along the main street as I scanned the painted signs that hung immobile from the eaves of low timber-framed buildings in search of a suitable inn. The fierce heat of the day had begun to subside, but the air remained heavy and it was a welcome relief to ride into the shade of houses. At the end of the high street we found an inn that must have stood in that spot beside the river for more than a century; I pictured generations of long-dead pilgrims pressing through the wide gates into its yard, footsore and dry-throated, hoping desperately--as was I--that there would be a room.
    I pulled my horse gently to a halt outside the gate and turned to Sophia. She had remained unusually quiet through the afternoon's long hours of riding as the sun hammered down, the road affording littlerespite except for the few brief stretches where we passed between copses of beech trees. Now she raised her head to reveal a face streaked with