The Serpent Garden - Judith Merkle Riley

by The Serpent Garden (epub)

  “Really?” she said.

  “In truth, and most honorably, I do beg you to marry me.” Anything, anything to stop that infernal weeping.

  “Take me from this horrible place,” she said.

  “That I promise,” he answered, relieved.

  Outside, Francis and several of his courtiers were waiting.

  “Well?” asked the king. “What said the White Queen to your suit?”

  “She has accepted, Your Grace.” Francis winced internally at the hidden insult. Once again, the Duke of Suffolk had not addressed him as king. Was he acting under orders from the English king? The man never quit. Suffolk deserved everything that was in store for him. His king would behead him for treason, and the White Queen would be so thoroughly disgraced by marrying beneath her that she could no longer become the center of plots against his throne. Any current or future pregnancy would be laid at the door of this petty English duke. All that, and he would take her out of the country as soon as possible. Perfect.

  “Congratulations, my dear chevalier,” said Francis. “I have already summoned the priest to my chapel. I myself will serve as a witness.”

  Only later did Charles Brandon begin to comprehend the true outline of Francis’s plot against him. Disgrace, ruin, death, all encompassed with a woman. How French. He sat, pale faced, in the apartments given him and his new wife by the French king.

  “My lord, you must not sit like that, staring at nothing,” said Queen Mary, who had decided to retain her title, despite marrying a duke.

  “We are ruined,” said her new husband.

  “I think not,” said Mary, firmly. “But you must give up my dowry to my brother. He thinks a great deal of money.” Brandon, the man who had married before, for dowry money, did not catch the irony in her voice.

  “I will write to my brother and remind him of his promise at the waterside.” The duke was silent, still brooding. “I will write to Archbishop Wolsey, and he will smooth my brother’s mind,” said his wife. The duke looked up at her. How could she not understand what would become of him?

  “But first, you must write the news to my brother, before he hears of it from elsewhere. The man must write first. I can only write after you have told him.” She took out paper and ink and laid them on the writing desk. “I’ll leave if you want,” she said.

  “It will take time,” he said, beginning to feel his hands sweat. What could he say? How would he start? The duke was no writer. Alone in the room, he crumpled start after start and threw them away before the lackey came in to light the candles. Perspiration was pouring down his forehead, and he could barely grasp the pen in his big, sweaty hands. I’ll write Wolsey first, he thought, and he’ll mend what can be mended. How to explain? It was easier to Wolsey: “The queen would never let me be at rest till I granted her to be married,” he wrote. “And so to be plain with you, I have married her heartily, and have lain with her, insomuch I fear me lest she be with child.” Ah, that made it easier, he thought. But what shall I tell the king? How can I make him understand? At last the pen scratched across the page, offering this as his only explanation for the tangle: “I newar sawe woman soo wyepe.” Spelling was never the duke’s strong point.

  Archbishop Wolsey sat close to the fire in his paneled cabinet in York House. Outside was a fog so thick that no man could see his hand before his face. The chill was everywhere.

  “Master Warren, add to the letter I have written to my lord of Suffolk that never have I known man in such mortal danger. He must not return to England until the king’s wrath has faded. Ah, the fool, the fool.” Wolsey sighed heavily. His policy was in ruins. The Queen of France was returning in disgrace, and it would take all his wiles to make sure she was not soon a widow for the second time. Francis, who cared little for the treaty, would be king. Already, French ship captains were seizing English ships, and Francis had not hindered them. What would come next? England could not face war with France without allies. Must Wolsey’s king endure the infinite pricking insults of the new French king?

  Ah, but here was Tuke at the door with a new mountain of correspondence. Something about Tuke’s face irritated him. Ever since Ashton had left, the man seemed to be expanding like a toad. The pleasant pliability had become more weasel-like. I need to set him down, thought Wolsey. I think I shall favor Master Warren for a while. Ah, would that it were so easy to set down King Francis the First. Silently, he opened once again a little wooden case and looked at the face of his adversary. Young, but sly and foxy beyond his years. Arrogant. Lascivious. Willful. A fierce and devious enemy, with a smiling, glittering surface. The portrait said it all.

  “Another letter from the Queen of France, Your Grace, and one in cipher from Master Ashton. There is also another little packet.”

  “At last. What has he been doing over there, anyway? I’ve had nothing for over a month, since he sent me some rubbish about a conspiracy in the south of France and this portrait of King Francis. Useless dithering. Master Tuke, I’ll want the letter decoded at once.” Tuke snapped a finger at the code clerk, who bowed to hide the anger in his eyes, then sat to decipher the letter. While he labored with code wheel and candle flame, Tuke, still as smooth as silk, showered Wolsey with flattering, amusing remarks. With rising irritation, Warren heard Wolsey’s responses. My lord of York was clearly charmed. Who works, and who flatters? thought Warren, gouging the paper with his pen, so that the quill split and splattered, and he had to sharpen another.

  As the decoding proceeded, Wolsey undid the oiled silk and, with a pleasurable anticipation, opened another of the familiar little wooden cases. At least Mistress Dallet serves me well, he thought. Staring up at him were a pair of resentful dark eyes, implanted like smoldering brands in a narrow, arrogant face. Ambition, betrayal, and war were written there. And to think, thought Wolsey, he was probably delighted to sit for this, never realizing he was betraying every secret. Splendid, splendid. Who was this? Ah, the Duke of Bourbon. Constable of France. A bold commander. Definitely a man to be watched.

  “Your Grace, your letter here,” said Tuke at last, with a deft movement handing the archbishop the product of the code clerk’s labors.

  “Fascinating, fascinating. There was a failed conspiracy to take the throne, led by the Duc de Bourbon.” Well, well. As one mind-compartment in the archbishop’s brain began to work over the idea of this new conspiracy, another began simultaneously to calculate about the writer of the letter. So Ashton has joined forces with the paintrix? He couldn’t have made it clearer if he’d written it. Ha, this must be his latest method of trying to worm his way around Tuke. Suppose he wishes to consolidate his position by marrying her? I imagine I might allow it—after all, it will keep her in my service. I’ll make him promise me that she continue to paint. Ah, how delightfully that will offend him! Should I cut her wages after she is wed? Perhaps I’ll raise his by the amount I lower hers. After all, they shouldn’t starve. I think I’ll begin by opposing the wedding. I’ll denounce it, just to see the look on his face. Yet even as this mind-compartment generated a certain enjoyment, the first one was still churning with the news in the letter.

  “Bourbon’s role in this has not been discovered, and he continues to ingratiate himself with King Francis daily. The conspirators—ha, they are fools. Next time, Bourbon will choose a more powerful group of allies.” Bourbon, calculated this mind-compartment in Wolsey’s brain, heir to half the territory of France, with some slight claim to the throne. If Francis were wise, he would behead him instantly on some false charge. In statecraft, Francis is still young, thought Wolsey. Then he leaned back in his great oak chair and thought, tapping his fingers on the wooden arm of the chair. Yes, yes. Bourbon. Interesting. I think I might wait until he shows overt signs of discontent, then contact him. Let’s see. An alliance with the emperor and Bourbon against Francis. It could be done, Wolsey thought. Bourbon would split France in half, and Francis would come begging for the old alliance again. And I, I could choose…

 
“Your Grace,” said Tuke, interrupting Wolsey’s musings. Quietly, the archbishop filed it in yet another mind-compartment, under “Alliances, Treacherous,” which was not far from “Cardinalate, Progress On,” and “Hampton Court, Rebuilding of Waterworks Of.”

  “Ah, yes, Tuke, the latest letter from the Queen of France. How shall we disentangle her?” he asked.

  “Ah, Madame la Duchesse was right. This is lovely work,” said the abbess. She was seated at the great desk in her plain, whitewashed cabinet. Marguerite d’Alençon’s letter was open in front of her, and she was looking through what remained of my sketches and little paintings. Nuns came in and out on errands, and also the head of her gardening staff, who was a man, and the nuns’ confessor, who was an old priest with so little gray hair left that he didn’t need a tonsure. Nan and I sat together, waiting to see what else she’d say. “It is a great enterprise, a convent of this size. I am sorry I have not been able to give your story uninterrupted attention. Ah! What is this angel? He is the loveliest thing you have brought.”

  “Madame, that is the angel Hadriel.”

  “Hadriel? I have heard of Gabriel, Uriel, Raphael, and Michael, but never a Hadriel.”

  “He appeared to me in a dream once. I drew him as I saw him.”

  “You are fortunate, to be able to draw out your dreams. Did he give you a message?” She sounded very professional. I guess abbesses know a lot about people with visions and dreams.

  “Well, actually, he did, but I never understood what he meant. So I just drew his picture and kept on as I was.” The abbess smiled.

  “Usually people amend their lives when they are given such a dream. Just what was it he said?”

  “He said if I could catch the rainbow with my hands, I could keep it. But I’ve never done it because it’s obviously impossible, and all it’s done is rain ever since I came here into France except for when it’s snowing, and I’ve never even seen one bit of rainbow. It was all just nonsense. But nice nonsense, I guess. Maybe if I’d been a better person, I might have been granted a dream I could understand.”

  “Oh, what a strange message! What did you do after that?”

  “Well, my husband was killed, and so I made my living painting.”

  “Hmmm,” said the abbess, as she tapped one finger on her desk and looked into the air. “I’m thinking of your interpretation. It’s not easy. I will ask for guidance. Visions and dreams, they always have meaning. You are meant to do something, and obviously you haven’t done it, or you wouldn’t be in all this trouble. Well, I am asking Sister Claire here to show you and your companion two beds in our dormitory. Are you good at gilding? We have manuscript illuminators and copyists here in great plenty, but Sister Agatha, who did our gilding, passed on not so long ago, leaving the regilding of the altarpiece only half done.”

  The next few days were very peaceful and regular. There were prayers and singing every two hours which is soothing to the mind and makes a person forget evil pale green eyes shining insanely in the dark and also shapeless black things that eat people, at least for a little while. The birds had to live in the kitchen because the rules said no animals even though everyone was hiding cats and little dogs just about everywhere and besides it was warmer there. Nan was so very worried about me, and also so prying, that at last I cried and cried and told her about Crouch’s end due to the horrible black things from hell that he summoned up.

  Nan promised to keep it a secret, but then it worked on her mind so much that she had to tell the abbess all about the great wickedness of the lord who pursued me and how he studied evil arts to work his wicked way and had black things from hell for his servants, all in strictest secrecy. Then she took to helping in the laundry because she said it would take all the washing in the world to wash out the very thought of those black things, and soon she was remembering that she saw them herself, just as she so often saw the Devil and other menacing Signs that proved the end of the world was coming. After that, everybody was asking her about the fiery black devils that were sent by a wicked practitioner of sorcery all because I wouldn’t give him my virtue. And of course Nan told them all in strictest secrecy, and they were very scandalized but I was so happy to have my Nan back again that I just couldn’t resent her for telling my secret over and over and being so happy making a sensation among all those holy ladies.

  As for me, there were many things to mend such as a very pretty little Madonna who had gotten rained on by accident from a leak in the ceiling and also some old pictures of abbesses that were not well done and the paint had come off. I think they must have kept them in some cellar where the damp got them, they looked that bad. I also worked on those miniatures for the duchess, and so you see hiding was really very pleasant except for the worry that bad people would come, because I was very tired of bad people altogether. I decided that if I were an old woman, this would be the best way to spend my time, but just now I was too young, because the thought of Robert Ashton was always in my mind and that showed I did not have the makings of a nun.

  The afternoon had brought out the sun, where it sparkled on the frosty branches and frozen puddles in the road, but still, men’s and horses’ breath showed like steam. Across the rolling, frozen landscape, two riders on little, winter-coated horses made their way, leading behind them a packhorse with a packsaddle only half laden. Robert Ashton and his man, heavily bundled against the cold, paused at the crossroad. Two narrow tracks, rutted, pawed up, half-frozen mud, crossed the winter-bare fields and seemed to meander nowhere. Which one was right? Beyond the crossroad, a track led to an ice-choked stream, and a little village of shapeless thatched huts, smoke escaping from their roof peaks.

  “Down there,” said Ashton. “They’ll know the way.” A barefoot, sooty-faced woman answered their knock.

  “The convent?” she said. “It’s easy. Follow the road to the north, the one marked with fresh hoofprints. There’s a dozen armed men ahead of you, and if you hurry, you can catch up. It’s no good travelin’ alone like you are, these days.” She watched as the two men glanced at each other in alarm. “If you be wantin’ to avoid them, take the other road,” she said.

  “Did they say who they were?” asked Robert Ashton.

  “Soldiers from the Connétable de Bourbon. But they paid me,” she said. Ashton leaned over in the saddle and pressed a couple of sous into her hand.

  “How far is it from here?”

  “Oh, three or four hours’ ride—that is, if your horse don’t slip on this ice and break a leg.” The riders returned to the road and, despite the risk of ice, pushed their horses to a trot.

  “Pilgrims, eh?” said the captain. “Why pilgrims in this season?”

  “A vow to my mother on her deathbed,” said Robert Ashton. “I’ve never seen the place. Almost got lost looking for it. I hope they’ve a good guesthouse. I don’t want to ride on in this cold.”

  “You’d best ride back with us, when we’ve made the arrest. There are robbers on this road, even in this season.”

  “An arrest?” Ashton made his voice sound merely curious.

  “A criminal. A murderess, who has taken sanctuary. Who’d believe it, eh? Women are getting as bad as men these days.”

  “It’s the times,” said Ashton, shaking his head sympathetically. Ahead of them, on a low rise of ground, were the convent buildings, plain whitewashed stone, almost barnlike in their simplicity, huddled together around a church with a tall, unornamented steeple. At a distance from the other buildings, but still inside the abbey walls, could be seen the pointed, slate roof of the kitchen building, smoke boiling from its chimneys. The great gates were barred from within. While his men waited, the captain rode to the gate and shouted. There was no answer. With a gauntleted hand, he lifted the iron knocker and battered it against the door. Still no answer. After he had repeated the process several times, a little wooden shutter behind a tiny grille beside the gate opened, and half a woman’s face appeared.

  “We are from the Connétable de
Bourbon, with orders for an arrest. Is one Suzanne Dolet, a painter, hiding within?”

  “We have here a woman who claims the right of sanctuary. You must wait forty days before Suzanne Dolet must leave.” A murmur of threats came from the armed soldiers, with coarse suggestions of what they might do if crossed.

  “What is this nonsense?” replied the captain to the face in the grille. “Let us in now. You are ordered to do so.”

  “It is not our custom to admit armed men to our holy precincts,” said the face, firmly.

  “You had best consider changing that custom, or we shall set fire to the gate and enter anyway.”

  “Let me consult with the abbess,” said the face, and the little shutter banged shut. While the horses stamped and moved about in the cold, the armed men waited, the captain cursing all the while. Ashton’s mind was teeming with ideas. If he could only get in ahead of them…

  But his hopes were dashed when the face reappeared at the grille.

  “Monsieur Captain,” a different half-face said, “we would be delighted to open our gates immediately to you, but we must warn you that there is plague inside our community.” The captain shuddered and several of the soldiers crossed themselves. But still the captain persisted.

  “Where is Suzanne Dolet?”

  “Alas, Monsieur Captain, she is one of several who have received the last rites. They are lying in our poor little infirmary, awaiting the inevitable meeting with the eternal.”

  “I cannot leave on your word alone. How do I know you are not deceiving me?”

  “There is no doubt that by morning she will be dead. Do not disturb the dying, monsieur. Even your orders do not require that you risk infecting yourself. In the morning, those who have perished will be laid before the high altar for the funeral service. Come then, satisfy your eyes for the sake of your master and your orders, and leave before you risk death. That is our abbess’s suggestion. She says also that she regrets not offering you the hospitality of our guesthouse, but under the circumstances, you might prefer billeting your troops in the village below the abbey.”