York, 1586. Margaret Clitherow, a butcher's wife of the Shambles, keeps the forbidden Mass alive in a hidden room above her husband's shop, sheltering the priests of a hunted Church. She is a convert, a woman of the market streets, and she has made her house a door between two worlds. When the searchers come at last, they find the vestments and the altar breads, and Margaret is taken.
At her trial she will not plead. To plead is to send a jury to their consciences and her household to the gallows; to stay silent is to be pressed to death beneath a door laden with stone. She chooses the silence, and the sentence, and the morning of it.
Her confessor survives to write her life. But he carries a stranger burden, for he has always felt the wronged dead linger, and he is certain she will come to him. She never does. Across a year of silence, from the emptied rooms of York to an exile beyond the sea, he searches for a trace of her and finds nothing at all, until he learns, at a bitter price, what her silence means.
STANDING MUTE is a novel of faith, of grief, and of the cost of a soul wholly given. It follows the documented record of Margaret Clitherow's arrest, refusal and execution as closely as the record allows, and asks what it costs the living when the dead go quietly.
