The Bishop's Last Meal

It was a small cell. Three edifice-like walls of indistinct stone and one made of iron bars, rusting in the damp squalor of the underground cavern. Water dripped from the ceiling, as the indistinct muttering of the condemned rippled the deathly silence and  the undeniable scuttling of rats crawled across the mind.

Horace sat on the damp floor praying. He may not have the ornate robes, or the small Bible he always kept about his person but the jailor had allowed him his crucifix. What else was he to do but pray? They had not accepted his last meal request, he had nothing else to do.  

“Why are you in here?” the voice came, meek and alone.

The Bishop stood, padded over to the bars and looked out into the semi-darkness. A small boy stood there. He wore simple, worn clothes, bare feet like the Bishop and a look of confusion set beneath a mop of untidy brown hair. He couldn’t have been older than seven, or eight and his face held a sweet, innocent expression. It was so at odds with the gloomy, fraught prison, that the Bishop caught his breath.

The boy stared, his buck teeth jutting out, his blue eyes wide as he repeated the question.

“Why are you in here?”

“What is your name my child?”

The boy screwed up his face and shuffled his feet.

“Benjy.”

“And what do you do Benjy? Surely this is no place for a boy like you to play?”

Benjy scowled, his face suddenly taught with the kind of upset reserved for young children. It told of misunderstanding adults and not getting your own way.

“I don’t play,” he said, stamping his foot in frustration.

“I work. I’m a man now, a real man.”

A set of keys fell from his string belt and he jumped before scrambling about on the grime-ridden floor to retrieve them.

“I see,” Horace said smiling.

“Well you must be doing a good job.”

Benjy eyed him suspiciously, as he stood, the keys now firmly back on his belt, “you’re not like the others, you’re different, you were praying weren’t you?”

“I was. I find God can help me in these troubling times.”

Benjy looked confused. He touched one index finger to his protruding teeth and pondered for a moment.

“How can God help you? I heard you were swinging tomorrow.”

He suddenly scowled and once again brought his bare heel down on the ground in a stamp of frustration.

“But no one will tell me why, no one, so I came down to ask you. They didn’t give you a last meal; they said that you weren’t to get a last meal, why?”

The Bishop smiled again. Ah the curiosity of the young, it truly was a mighty driving force in them, a source of inspiration, a motivating giant, the hand of God pushing them on.

“I am to be executed Benjy but God will protect me, why don’t you sit down? I can tell you why I’m here.”

Benjy looked perplexed but sat all the same, bringing his knees up to his chest and letting his blue eyes peer over them at the Bishop. A watcher in the gloom.

“Go on then,” he said. “Tell me.”

“Where is the jailer first? I don’t want our story to be interrupted.”

“He's drunk and asleep,” he said the words like he didn't really know what they meant.

“Drunk and asleep, well that's unfortunate isn't it?”

The boy stared, “no, I like coming down here when he's asleep, I can do what I like.”

The Bishop nodded. An adventurer? He thought. A young mind so excited by the dark world and so eager to explore it alone. The energy of them, so infectious, it feeds the mind.

“Ah well, you must be a brave young boy to do that.”

The boy nodded. Agreement, or understanding? Neither? Who could tell when it came to some children?

Horace coughed and met the boy’s gaze evenly. Letting his black eyes bore into the blue ones.

“I was a Bishop before I was in here, well, I’m still a Bishop, even if I’m to be put to death.”

The boy shook his head vigorously, as though he was dislodging a fly from his eyes.

“No one will tell me what you did wrong, I want to know,” the small freckled face had twisted once again into a scowl of disdain.

“Well I suppose I should tell you what I did before and that story will then tell you why I’m here.”

Horace beamed at the boy, the smile stretching either side of the iron bars that lined his face and body. The metal cage cast long shadows over his life and visage, the cage that separated him from the small figure.

“Do you see?”

Benjy gave him a more than suspicious look.

“So being a Bishop has something to do with what you did, what you did wrong?”

Horace’s smile opened further by way of response and the boy understood.

“Go on then.”

Here we go. The tale of tales, my tale of woe, the story that excites and scares and mystifies the child. A tale concerning children of his age, children just like him.

A small, subtle shiver shot up Horace’s spine, touching every vertebra and causing him to twitch slightly. The boy did not notice.

“I am a wandering Bishop, I move across the lands, tending to orphanages where there are children who need to be baptised.”

The boy’s eyes did not move from the Bishop’s face.

“Why do you baptise them? What is that, why do you do that?”

Horace’ eyebrows cranked up like a drawbridge, the mock surprise visible from a mile away, even in the darkness.

“You don’t know dear boy?”

“No,” the boy looked suspicious once again.

Suspicious, yet he is still curious, I see it, I see it in his blue eyes, in his flesh.

Another small spasm racked Horace’s spine, making the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end, his left hand shook slightly. Calm, he thought. Keep calm.

“Well,” he stood, clearing his throat before pacing the cell, carefully selecting each word, like he was meticulously setting a table for dinner.

Ah dinner. Food would be so welcome right now. So welcome. No last meal, not yet anyway.

“Baptism is where someone goes through a special ceremony and in that ceremony, their lives are given over to God, it is the first stage on their journey into his open arms, it is the first step they take on their long path to salvation.”

He ceased his pacing and beamed at Benjy, who looked confused.

“What’s the ceremony? Why is it so special?”

Oh I wouldn’t call it special, it’s really very ordinary. The water, the basin, the meaningless words of the father, the son and his most unholy ghost, the sign of the cross, it’s nothing that compares to the elation that comes after, not for me.

“It’s really quite simple, the recipient is dressed in white, I take holy water which I have blessed and draw the sign of the cross on that child’s head. I say a prayer and it’s over.”

Benjy looked unimpressed.

“Doesn’t sound special.”

“But it is,” the Bishop responded quickly.

“The symbolic nature of the baptism, bringing one closer to Heaven, to God, that’s what makes it special. The ceremony would be more elaborate if the child had parents but I have to act with haste, I perform twenty baptisms a day when I visit the orphanages. Poor souls.”

He sighed deeply.

Benjy didn’t say a word. Thinking, mulling it over, as children often do. Suddenly, the boy stood crossing his arms, propelled by a fresh, newly found rage.

“You still haven’t told me why you’re here! Tell me.”

The Bishop kept smiling and stood with his own arms crossed, mirroring Benjy’s stance.

“I travelled from orphanage to orphanage for years. They are horrible, dirty places my dear boy, not unlike these cells. I performed baptisms to ensure that, when the children died, their souls would go to Heaven. Unfortunately orphans die all the time. Orphanages have little food, physicians visit infrequently and, I am very sorry to say, the conditions are awful.”

He sighed again deeply, looking directly into Benjy’s deep blue eyes.

“You would not believe some of the things I saw Benjy, awful things, I only hope my baptisms helped, that some of those who passed were accepted by God.”

“You still haven’t answered my question,” the boy said, narrowing his round eyes.

“Patience, I have almost finished my story,” the Bishop said.

Ah the annoyance, the thirst for knowledge, the desire for more. Their young minds feed me, oh it is an endless, boundless energy that I must have.

His left eye blinked, the eyelid fluttered, his right hand spasmed and twitched. It had become more noticeable.
Horace ploughed on, hoping that the boy had not seen.

“Many children died, some went missing at the orphanages, runaways, some decided to leave, or some were just simply lost. Last month, a young lad, not much older than you, called Sam, went missing from an orphanage I had just visited. I had baptised him and several others there.”

He sighed again.

“They never found Sam, or his body, God save him, but they said I had killed him, can you believe that Benjy? They said I killed him and other children, missing children. Children who ran away from other orphanages. They blamed me, the one who spent his life trying to help these poor lost souls.”

Horace fell to his knees dramatically, voice cracking, the kind, gentle demeanour broken. Two gnarled hands swooped up to cover his eyes.

“The watchmen came, and I was carted off here.”

There was a tense silence and then he heard Benjy’s bare feet slapping the stone as he approached the cage.

“They said you killed the children?”

“Yes.”

“But you didn’t?”

“Oh no Benjy.”

Horace gave a gulp, dragging in hot, fast breaths as he sobbed, his hands still covering his face.

“No.”

There was silence.

Mulling it over, considering the words, the information they hold, the tale he has been told.

“But they’ll kill you, for something you haven’t done?”

“Yes.”

He split the fingers of one hand, letting the dank light flood through the gaps, just far enough to see Benjy but not for Benjy to see him back. The boy’s eyes were wide with disbelief, chubby cheeks flushed, two fat hands wrapped about the bars of Horace’s cell.

I’m close enough to hear the strong breath, the young taking in the air. It drives me on. Oh he is so small, so innocent, so-

“But can’t I help you? Can’t I do something?”

Yes, you can.

The strength with which Horace’s hands clamped around Benjy’s was more terrifying for the boy than any could imagine. His gnarled fists were vice-like in their white knuckled grip and it was only then that the small boy noticed the dirty, claw like nails that tipped the Bishop’s fingers, the dead, hungry look in his black eyes and the raw sores at the corners of his mouth.

***

The gallows stood before him, the noose a void, the chasm that stretched into nothing.

“Bishop Horace Bathwells, you are sentenced to hang by the neck until you are dead, for the heinous crime of killing and devouring the flesh of many children.”

The crowd were silent; it was a crime so shocking few had the energy to gasp, they only had the strength for anger and hatred.

The red-nosed jailer finished the announcement and approached Horace with the familiar white hood, the flag of death to the condemned.

“Do you have any last words?”

Horace looked at him with the same dead eyes that had fallen on the children he had baptised and sent to their maker.

“I enjoyed my final meal.”