The Story of Francis Cludde by Stanley J. Weyman

A younger generation has often posed me finely by asking, "What, Sir Francis! Did you not see _one_ bishop burned? Did you not know _one_ of the martyrs? Did you _never_ come face to face with Queen Mary? " To all which questions I have one answer, No, and I watch small eyes grow large with astonishment. But the truth is, a man can only be at one place at a time. And though, in this very month of February, 1555, Prebendary Rogers -- a good, kindly man, as I have heard, who had a wife and nine children -- was burned in Smithfield in London for religion, and the Bishop of Gloucester suffered in his own city, and other inoffensive men were burned to death, and there was much talk of these things, and in thousands of breasts a smoldering fire was kindled which blazed high enough by and by -- why, I was at Coton End, or on the London Road, at the time, and learned such things only dimly and by hearsay.

But the rill joins the river at last; and ofttimes suddenly and at a bound, as it were. On this very day, while I cantered easily southward with my face set toward St. Albans, Providence was at work shaping a niche for me in the lives of certain people who were at the time as unconscious of my existence as I was of theirs. In a great house in the Barbican in London there was much stealthy going and coming on this February afternoon and evening. Behind locked doors, and in fear and trembling, mails were being packed and bags strapped, and fingers almost too delicate for the task were busy with nails and hammers, securing this and closing that. The packers knew nothing of me, nor I of them. Yet but for me all that packing would have been of no avail; and but for them my fate might have been very different. Still, the sound of the hammer did not reach my ears, or, doing so, was covered by the steady tramp of the roadster; and no vision, so far as I ever heard, of a dusty youth riding Londonward came between the secret workers and their task.