William Tyndale
Against the Tide It was a dark, murky night in London. Fog wrapped around the city walls. It lay over rooftops and wound along dark alleyways, snaking through the city streets. Misting up along the River Thames like a long woollen blanket, it turned seeing men into blind ones beneath its thick cover. It was hard to see your hand in front of your face. In one corner of the city, in a small, modest, white wooden house, a night watchman looked at himself in the mirror, adjusted his black worker’s cap, and brushed the specks of dirt from his dark blue shirt. Just preparing for an evening of night watch, he gave a proud, contemptuous sniff at the mirror. “Lawbreakers,” he scoffed peevishly at it, a ratty, malevolent gleam in his eye. “If I catch you,” he said angrily, shaking a long, gaunt finger for emphasis, “you’ll be sorry you were ever born. King Henry’s orders,” he added importantly. Meanwhile, as he spoke, five miles away a boat with books came sliding smoothly up the river. Packed just that morning at the back of the print shop, stuffed in unmarked packing crates, the books now sat on the boat, jammed underneath and in between wooden boxes, cider barrels and an old, crusty, weatherbeaten wheel. “Thought we were going to get caught last night,” one burly man with scraggly, unkempt red hair said nervously to the man next to him.
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18/09/2009 12:47:20