The Paper They Want Signed

They have brought her outside for this. There is a scaffold, and a crowd, and a cart, and the executioner is already standing beside it.

She is nineteen. She cannot read the document they are holding out. It says that she admits her voices were lies, that she led men astray, that she submits to the Church in everything, and that she will not wear men's clothes again.

Sign it and the fire does not happen today. She goes back to a cell, for life, in a prison full of English soldiers, in a dress.

Refuse and it happens now, in front of these people, and the last thing she ever says publicly is that she stands by what she heard.

She has answered them for three months without once slipping. She has never conceded that the voices might have been her own mind. But the cart is right there, and she has never seen a burning, and nobody in the crowd is going to remember which sentence she was arguing about.