Aye, listen close, ye that dwell still in the living world, for I AM Richard Roose, called Rouse, or Rose, or Cooke, as suited whomsover the tongue that spoke my name. I speak now from beyond the grave, though the memory of my death remains with me even now, just as if it clings like grease to a skillet.

I was but a lowly cook in the household of the good Bishop John Fisher of Rochester, at his place in Lambeth Marsh. No grand fellow was I, just a man who knew his pots and his spices, who stirred the pottage and tended the fire, and took what wage and board the Lord provided. In those days the Bishop was a holy man, strict in his fasting and fierce in his faith, and the King, – God save him, though I know not if He did, had already set his heart against the good Bishop for standing firm against the divorce of Queen Katherine.

Whispers ran through the kitchens and the streets that the Lady Anne and her kin wished the Bishop harm. I heard them, as servants hear all, but I paid them little mind. A cook’s business is the hearth, not the court.

It was the eighteenth day of February, in the year of Our Lord fifteen hundred and thirty-one. I had made a vessel of yeast, or barm, for the pottage that was to serve the Bishop’s table and the poor who came for alms. A white powder was given me, it was by a stranger, I swore then and I swear now, he told me it would make the folk merry, loosen their bowels a little, set them running to the jakes in sport. A jest, I thought it. A kitchen prank, such as cooks have played since Adam first burned the broth. I cast it in. God forgive me, I cast it into the pot – and sealed my fate with one flick of the hand.

The Bishop himself ate nothing that day; he was fasting, as was his wont. But the others, his folk and the beggars who took the leaving, they fell sick, sorely sick.

Two died: Bennet Curwen, a gentleman of the household, and Alice Tryppyt, a poor widow who had come just for charity. Their end was hard, and the rest suffered long.

When the hue and cry rose, they took me. They put me to the question, first on the rack, then the irons, cast in a dark cell that smelt of the rot of death itself.

I cried out that it was but a jest gone foul, that I meant no death, that the powder was not of my making. Yet what is the word of a simple cook against the Will of a King who feared poison as much as other men fear the plague?

Henry the Eighth himself took the matter into his own hands. He had a horror of the hidden death that arrives in a cup or a dish. Parliament made a new law just for me alone at first, the Acte for Poysoning – declaring that to kill by poison was an act of high treason, and that I, Richard Roose, stood attainted without trial, without benefit of clergy, to be boiled to death.

Boiled! As if I were a piece of beef sent to the pot. They said it was to match the crime, to show the realm that poisoners would suffer as their victims suffered. I think, just as some swords are doubled edged, that it was also to quiet the poisonous tongues that spoke badly of the Lady Anne and her father, and to warn any of the King’s enemies who might strike by such means.

They carried me to Smithfield on a day in April, of thirty-one or thirty-two; time grows cloudy when flesh is not a consideration. A great cauldron stood ready, the water already bubbling and boiling. They chained me tightly and hung me from a gibbet, and lowered me in, then raised me up, then lowered me again, over and over, so that the boiling might take a slow and deliberate course.

The crowd was large – merchants, apprentices, women big with child, even some come to see just how a cook was cooked. I screamed. Oh my God’s bones, how I screamed. The water bit  like a thousand teeth; the flesh blistered and slid off; the pain was a living thing that continued and would not let me die clean. Two hours it lasted, so they told of afterward. When at last the light left my eyes, I was naught but cooked meat in a pot.

Do I feel bitterness still? Aye, of course a measure. I was no assassin or killer although I had killed. I was a simple fool who trusted a powder and a stranger’s word that it would make merry. The times were such that a fool’s jest could be twisted into treason if it touched a man the King disliked.

Yet I feel sorrow more than rage, for Curwen and the widow Alice, who died of what I had placed in the pot; for the Bishop, who saw his household torn and lived but for a brief while longer ; for myself, who ended as a warning rather than a man.

In the afterlife the fire is cooler, and the truth sits clearer.  I now understand that the mask of merriment that I had accepted, lay over darker purposes that guided my hands toward ending the Bishop’s objections. The stranger never step forward to claim his proposed jest. The King never asked further once the law was made and the cauldron filled.

So here I stand, or float, or whatever the dead do – telling the tale as a cook would tell it: plain, without gilding. I stirred the pot that day, and later the pot stirred me.

God rest the souls that perished, and God have mercy on the soul of Richard Roose, who paid the full price of a kitchen folly in an age when kings and bishops and ladies played for higher stakes than a cook could ever understand.