She remembered that. She remembered how her father had hung from a beech tree until the birds came and picked him clean. She had stayed hidden in the streets, only coming out at night to steal, looking on his bones that fell, one by one, beneath the tree, watching as dogs carried them off, tails high and wagging.
It had all started, or ended, on a beautiful morning, cool air and burning sun. The miller’s grindstone had just begun its low growl as it started to turn for the day. Chickens pecked at bugs in the dirt outside her father’s shop. She had gone to fetch a remedy from the herbalist. Her father had been out drinking the night before, celebrating the completion of Tyndale’s forbidden Bible. Her father did not often have time to get drunk, so when he did, he did not do it well. He had no experience in it. He had been lying in bed that morning, groaning when the light hit his eyes, ignoring the other jobs begging to be done at the press. The last chapter of How to Be A Good Wife was yet to be printed. Mia danced around the press, yelling for her father to wake up and get on with it.
Mia knew the shopkeeper—a friend of her father’s—would have something to make him right again, so she took a few coins from their hiding spot and ran out the door. The shopkeeper began acting so odd when she came into his shop. His wife pursed her lips and poked him, prodding him to do something. Mia could not guess what. Without a mother of her own, older women were a mystery to her.
“Wouldn’t you like to look around?” he asked. “Surely that is not all you’re buying. We have excellent remedies for gout.”
“What gout? My father’s quite well. He’s just hungover—that is all.”
“Yes, I know.”
His wife butted in. “We all know, Mia. Your father was not himself last night. He told many tales, to many people.”
“What do you mean?”
The wife sighed a loud, laboring noise. Her husband tried again.
“Wouldn’t you like something for yourself, too? Maybe a treat for a good girl who serves her father so well? Have you tried these almonds my wife makes? They’re spiced and so filling. You wouldn’t even need to make a meal today. Come, I will fill a bag for you.”
Mia’s stomach had tingled as if she should be afraid.
The shopkeeper came round the counter, reaching for her with an odd smile. Mia didn’t think it was a good smile. It was a smile that hid something.
She backed up as he edged closer to her. She moved nearer the bottles of remedies left by the door. She knew the one her father needed to cure his hangover.
In a blur, he lunged. Before he could catch her, she threw her money on the floor, grabbing the violet-colored bottle she had spied, running out the door. Her heart pounded as he chased her out into the street.
“Do not go home, Mia!” he screamed after her. “I am trying to help you!”
People everywhere stared, something new in their eyes. They looked at her with something awful, something like pity.
She ran without stopping, losing the man easily. He threw his hands in the air and shouted after her, but she kept running. She did not slow until she turned the corner on the dirt path that led past the ivy-covered walls to her father’s shop and saw horse droppings on the path.
No one Mia knew rode a horse. Not to see her father anyway. His business involved too many rebels and revolutionaries, men who did not sit proud and obvious on a horse’s perch, men who had to sneak and hide and look over their shoulder.
Her father screamed. She ducked behind the wall, watching as men dragged him out of the shop, beating him until he fell and did not move. Smoke billowed out from the door of the shop, black and greasy.
“Where’s Tyndale?”
“He’d not be fool enough to hang round the place.”
“Is it all burned?” a man called to someone, someone still inside her father’s shop. The man emerged, his face covered in soot, marred by hatred.
“Not all of it,” the man said, kicking her father. She screamed, making the men look in her direction. Mia dropped the bottle, the glass shattering around her feet, the dark fluid wasted on the cold stone. God in His great mercy made her legs fly into a run, even before she knew what to do. Mia tore down the street, threading her tiny body through narrow passages and jumping out to run down other lanes. She ran until she found another village, where she stayed for days, coming out only at night to look for garbage to eat, to listen at windows for bits of news about her father and Tyndale.
Those men had raided his print shop on orders from someone important back in England. They had burned the press and everything in the shop. They had hung Mia’s doll in effigy as a joke, a warning to anyone who tried to scavenge through the wreckage. A black greasy hole stared at her where his shop had been.
Tyndale himself was never heard from again. Mia walked miles some nights to return to the shop’s empty space, thinking he would return for her.