A Chorus of Innocents Read Free

shelter, and he ate whatever the poor people he lodged with could give him. He preached from his Bible whenever anyone asked him to and always on Sundays.
    Nobody had ever seen or heard of such a strong minister, such a mad churchman, who had said publicly that he gave not a feather for vestments and as for the Papists—well, hadn’t he been a Papist himself once, before he read the Bible and understood God’s Word better? And surely most of them were good men misguided, with only a few actively serving the Evil One.
    What was more he never laid a hand on girl or boy, though he had no wife either. Many were the snares and traps set for him by cunning mothers with girls who would have liked to be mistress of his rumoured large and comfortable living in the south. When a gentlewoman twitted him on his wifeless state across her dinner table, with her daughters on either side of him, he smiled and toasted her and her daughters.
    â€œYou see,” he told her, “I swore before the altar of God to keep chastity and although I was certainly a sinner when I was young and hot-blooded, now I am old and tired and no use whatever to a woman.” He smiled and bowed to both the girls who blushed. The mother found herself wondering about his deacon who had died of the fever but she said nothing and nor did he. All the girls who had hopes of his rumoured magnificent house at Houghton le Spring were sadly disappointed.
    He only came to the Borders in summer. For the rest of the year he kept a school at Houghton le Spring, boarded likely boys at his own expense, and paid for some of them to go to Oxford where he himself had studied Divinity and sung the Masses with the rest of the young men before Henry VIII’s divorce.
    Slowly, little by little, some of the men of the surnames came to like him, the women too, despite his obstinate refusal to wed any of them. The children had loved him from the start and the lads ran to meet him when they saw his solitary silhouette with his soft flat churchman’s cap and warm cloak over a ridge along the road from Berwick.
    Then in 1583 sad word came. He had been trampled by an escaped ox in Houghton market, lay wounded for a month and died of lungfever on the fourth of March. Both sides of the Border were stricken at the news and Jock o’ the Coates Burn and some of the headmen from south of the Border as well went to pay their respects in the south at Houghton le Spring, and with them they brought some of the boys Gilpin had taught, the bigger ones, to sing for him at his funeral. Jock died a few months later, leaving his grown son Ralph as headman and the grandsons grown as well—a lucky life Jock never admitted he attributed to not cutting Gilpin’s head off when they had met at the chapel in the early 1570s.
    And the seeds that Gilpin had sown, dangerous and revolutionary seeds that they were, lay in the soil of the people’s minds, and here and there they set down their roots.

Thursday Afternoon 12th October 1592
    The men had been riding for two days, and were now into the broad fat lands of the East March of Scotland where the Humes held sway. They had instructions but those had been vague on the important point of position.
    â€œOch, we’ll never find him,” complained the younger one. “A’ the villages look the same.”
    The older one shook his head. “We ainly need his kirk,” he said.
    â€œAy, one kirk in hundreds.”
    It was surprising and the older one thought a little shocking that there were so many kirks, and not all of them burnt or in ruins like in the Low Countries. Some old Catholic churches had been torn down and a new one put up, but more often they were just altered with the heads of the saints knocked off and the paintings whitewashed. Not every village had a kirk, by a long way, but a lot did.
    They came over the top of a shallow hill and saw another little scatter of cottages and the kirk on the next