The Heretic’s Wife

by Brenda Rickman Vantrease

  It was as though Henry had not even heard him.

  “You will leave immediately. Don’t wait for the tide and don’t go down to the docks. We wish to keep your mission known only to us. A royal boatman will take you out to meet a ship. Just show the captain the king’s seal on that package and say you are his messenger. No captain can refuse you. You’ll be in Antwerp by tomorrow.”

  Leave immediately! For the brief time it takes an arrow to reach its mark, Stephen considered protesting. He had affairs to attend to. Who knew how long he would be gone. Finding a man who did not wish to be found in a city such as Antwerp—assuming he was even in Antwerp—was no easy thing. But he did not ask for more time. He merely nodded and, backing out of the king’s presence, promised to do his best.

  “One more thing, Master Vaughan. I almost forgot,” he said, ringing for the servant that was to take Stephen to his ship. “There is another scholar that may be in Antwerp, a friend of Tyndale’s. He is also a fugitive, but he has found an advocate in Lady Boleyn. His name is . . . Frith . . . I think. If you encounter him, extend the king’s grace to him as well. Tell him to come home to England. He has friends here.”

  Stephen nodded his assent, but backed out hastily, lest it occur to the king to add yet another name to his burden.

  SEVENTEEN

  [The clergy] have with subtle wiles turned the obedience that should be given unto God’s ordinance unto themselves.

  —WILLIAM TYNDALE,

  THE OBEDIENCE OF A CHRISTIAN MAN

  Tom Lasser considered the woman leaning against the quarterdeck rail, her proud profile raised to the sun’s rays, bright hair blowing in the wind. She should be standing in the bow, he thought, like Fair Helen, the face that launched a thousand ships.

  “I see your sea legs are still working,” he said.

  She turned her face away from the sea, toward him, and smiled. “As long as I have Endor’s magic concoction.”

  “I think you’ve brought us good luck and fair winds,” he said, pointing to the full sails.

  “God brought the fair winds, Captain, not I.”

  He supposed she was right. A man made his own luck, but he couldn’t command the winds. They had rounded the toe of England in two days. Two more days and nights had put them into the Straits of Dover, the narrowest Channel crossing leading to Calais and close enough to the English shore to hear the terns nesting in the white cliffs. They had been challenged only once, when they neared the bend that led to Rye, but the tide and the wind had been favorable and the ship had been able to outrun the small customs boat.

  “Is that wide estuary the mouth of the Thames?” she asked, pointing to where the sea met the river’s brackish waters.

  “It is,” he said, giving a fair turn to the wheel to steer the Siren’s Song east toward the Continent. He was in an uncharacteristically good mood. A firm breeze gave a light chop to the sea and the sails were full. England still lay to the west and vigilance was still required, but one sharp turn eastward should put them on the docks at Antwerp by nightfall, just one more legitimate merchant ship among the many hundreds that accessed the port each day. But they were not there yet. He was careful to steer in mid-channel, avoiding the English coastline.

  “London is just up the river,” he said, “if you sniff the wind you can probably smell it.”

  They’d reached the Thames estuary at low tide. Another stroke of luck, he thought, too many mudflats for the London tidewaiters or the customs officers to bother with.

  “It smells like home,” she said, a sadness creeping into her voice. He had a sudden urge to smooth the little frown line that formed around her mouth. He was trying to think of some glib remark to make her lift her face to the sunshine in that pose he’d just admired when her husband joined her at the rail.

  Tom felt a moment’s discontent as he watched John Frith slip his arm around his wife’s waist, as easily as though it belonged there—which of course it did, he reminded himself.

  “The Siren’s Song has done her job well, Captain. It has been a good voyage. We are grateful to you and your fine ship. Ulysses could not have done better.”

  Tom laughed. He couldn’t help it. He liked the man, liked his easy grace and optimism as though nothing ill had ever touched him. Amazing. Even after all he’d been through, and Tom knew what he’d been through. They’d shared a few pints of ale together and swapped enough stories that Tom would remember him as an amiable companion—and the woman too, he realized, watching her.

  “May I ask you a question, Captain Lasser?” she said, her wide mouth tensing in concentration as though she were not sure she really wanted to.

  “Ask away,” he said, thinking she was going to ask about the working of the ship, the places he’d been. She’d been full of questions since she found her “sea legs.”

  “What happened to Endor’s child?”

  That took him unawares. Her husband, too, from the startled look on his face.

  When Tom didn’t answer for a startled moment, she continued, “I thought . . . that is, when I saw her outside Fleet Prison—”

  “You thought right,” he said, interrupting her to relieve her embarrassment. “She gave birth to the child before I could get her out. It was stillborn. A little boy.”

  “Oh.” The puzzled expression crumbled into pain. “That is so sad.”

  “It was probably just as well,” he said abruptly, probably too abruptly, but he was anxious to relieve her obvious distress and himself of the subject. His answer did neither. Her expression hardened into anger.

  “That is a cruel thing to say about a child—or about its mother!”

  “Maybe. But it’s the hard truth. Life can be cruel. Often is.”

  Her expression did not change.

  He sighed, sucking in the salt air. “Endor was raped. The child would have never known his father.”

  Just the cold hard facts. That was all he could bring himself to say. Even that made the rage boil up inside him, bringing bitterness to his mouth. Rage—and guilt. He gazed out to sea, watching as a seabird dived into the waves and came up with a wriggling fish in its beak. Predator and prey—the way of all things.

  “A child is a gift from God.” She said it with indignation, with fervor, as though she were a lawyer before the King’s Bench pleading for the life of the child.

  But he would not back down. She might as well know the bitter all of it. Life would not be likely to treat a woman kindly who was married to a refugee.

  “This child was a gift from a man, one among many who raped her, cut out her tongue, and left her to bleed to death in a ditch.” Her hands flew to her mouth, her eyes wide with horror. He almost repented his brutal words but he could not stop. “Why, Mistress Frith, would any woman choose to keep such a ‘gift’?”

  One small cry escaped her mouth. Her husband hugged her to him. “The captain saved her, Kate,” John said gently. “He took her to a surgeon and they cauterized her bleeding tongue.”

  Her bleeding stump of a tongue. Tom could still hear her screams. And when it was over he’d left her with a little money in a rooming house. Alone. To fend for herself. Hardly the follow-up act of the Good Samaritan.

  “Still, to lose the baby,” Kate said, some of the anger drained away, some of the misery returning. “It was her child. It might have given her comfort.”

  “I don’t think so,” Tom answered as gently as he could in the face of such naïveté. “Most like she would have watched her little boy starve.”

  “He would not have starved,” Kate answered levelly. “I think you would not have let him starve, Captain.”

  “Don’t be so quick to make me out the hero of some romantic legend, Mistress Frith. There are few men among us who are really heroes.”

  “I disagree, Captain.” This time it was her husband who objected. “You are to be commended. You took her in.”

  But he would not accept this, could not. “When Endor was arrested with me—she used to follow me
around whenever I was in London. They said she waited by the docks for the Siren’s Song. I’d give her a little money, buy her a meal—anyway, she was with me when they arrested me for smuggling French wine. Fine French wine. That was a bottle you enjoyed last night. I’d just lost at cards, and I didn’t have the money to buy them off. So they threw me in the Fleet and Endor with me. If it hadn’t been for Humphrey Monmouth, we’d both still be there. When she got out, she was so weak, I took her on board just for the night. We were to lift anchor the next morning.” He gave a rueful little laugh. “You see, she’s made herself pretty much at home. She did it. Not me.”

  “Still a heroic act,” John said and then added, breaking into a broad smile, “You know Sir Humphrey, then? So you are one of us?”

  “One of you? Oh—” He laughed. “No. Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m no follower of Luther.”

  “You hardly behave like a good Catholic,” Kate said frostily.

  “Must a man be one or the other? I’m a ship’s captain. I don’t pretend to be a theologian—and except for your congenial husband here, I’ve never met one of any stripe that I would care to pass an hour with.”

  “Then why risk—”

  “A little risk lets a man know he’s alive. Besides, Sir Humphrey was a friend of my father’s. I’m a second son. Destined for the Church . . . well, as you said . . .” He pointed to the sea where the sun was glinting off the water, showers of diamonds with each ripple. “Have you ever seen a cathedral as glorious as that? Sir Humphrey lent me the money to make the gap to buy the Siren’s Song. I work for him, and he happens to be working for . . . the Lutherans or heretics or whatever you want to call them.”

  John did not answer readily, his gaze having wandered out to sea. He pointed back toward the London shore. “Captain, is that something we need be concerned about?”

  Tom saw it in an instant. A pilot ship had left the estuary and was headed toward the main channel with all due speed. “Could be going to meet that galleon riding south of us, I guess.”

  But the small boat didn’t turn south. It continued on, straight for them.

  “All hands on deck,” Tom yelled. “Hoist the mainsail.” There was an immediate scurrying of legs and hands and elbows as the mainsail was unfurled. “The lateral too,” he shouted. If they turned slightly north they could easily outrun it. But at that precise moment great Neptune sucked in his breath, and the wind died. Not even a hiccup. The sail hung slack-jawed.

  The small boat was manned with six oarsmen and she was gaining on them.

  “She’s flying some kind of flag,” Kate said.

  “It’s the Tudor green and white. We’ll have to let them board if they want. Get below.”

  “But—”

  “Get below,” he shouted. “We don’t know what they’re looking for. You don’t need to incite their curiosity.”

  So close, he thought. So close, as the small boat pulled alongside.

  “Request to board, Captain,” a man standing in the bow shouted.

  “Who makes the request?”

  “King Henry of England, Captain. We have a passenger for you.”

  He groaned inwardly. Just what I need. Another passenger.

  “Permission granted,” he said.

  Probably just some courtier not wanting to wait for the tide. They would be in Antwerp by nightfall and he’d finally be rid of the lot of them—even the woman who kept popping up at every turn of the bend and was beginning to pop into his head at odd times and unbidden. She was another man’s wife, but with any luck he’d never see either of them again.

  A tap on the door and Thomas More did not look up from his desk. He’d been closeted in his study since early morning, hard at work on the polemic text of his answer to William Tyndale’s The Obedience of a Christian Man. It was the translator’s most insidious, most heretical work besides his New Testament with its vile Lutheran glosses.

  “What is it, Alice?”

  “I’ve brought you something to eat,” she said, swinging open the door with her wide hips as she carried in the tray.

  “Just leave it,” he said tersely. He did not look up. He heard her deposit the tray on the table beneath the window behind him, but he was not to get off so easily. The next moment he felt the brush of her cap against his neck as she peered over his shoulder.

  “What is it that occupies you so? I suppose we have to get used to this preoccupation now that you are wearing the great chain of office.” Her ample bosom swelled with such pride it threatened to break the stitches of her bodice. “Don’t cover what you’re writing,” she said. “I have a right to see—unless it is some private matter of state that you must not speak about?”

  “I don’t have to cover it. Your Latin is not that good. Not that I have any reason to hide it.”

  “Then what does it say?”

  “It is an answer to Tyndale’s latest heresy. It says that William Tyndale and his like are heretics. It says that their perfidious writings, which seek to make every man his own priest, will kindle the flames that consume their loathsome bodies should they return to England’s shores. It says that we will seek them out in their fox’s holes and bring them to account for their unpardonable sins.”

  “That’s the weighty business of the lord chancellor! Not war with France or new taxes or—” Her gray eyebrows knitted the seams of her forehead in indignation. “It is no wonder you have no appetite. I can make out some of those words. My brothers used to scrawl them on their slates when the tutor wasn’t looking. That’s the language of baseborn men. Hardly noble enough for the discourse of the chancellor of England. Anyway, how can it matter so much?”

  He picked up the pen and, stabbing at the inkwell, sighed. “You do not understand, Alice. This is more important than one man’s hearth and home, more important than one kingdom even. This heresy pouring into England from this one man and his friends with their English Bible could bring down the Church. To weaken it is to destroy it. Not I—nor any good Christian—can stand idly by and let that happen. The Church must be protected at whatever cost.”

  “I’m no Lutheran, but I fail to see how reading the Bible can—”

  He waved her to silence. “You don’t understand, Alice. Wherever the Bible is read in the vernacular, ignorant peasants misunderstand its lessons. It incites them to murderous rebellion. There must be discipline and order in all things. Without order there is the kind of chaos and unrest afflicting the Rhineland. The Church is the established order. Its truth has come down to our days by continual succession for fifteen hundred years. If you do not see the importance of defending that, then God help you!”

  She bristled at his tone, as she always did when he said to her, “You do not understand.” And he had said it twice. He should have been more judicious in his choice of words for the sake of familial harmony.

  She gave his manuscript a little shove. “One would think it was the Church of Thomas More and not the Church of Jesus Christ. Methinks the Good Lord can protect His Church if it needs protecting without the sacrifice of your dinner.”

  “You just don’t—”

  She flounced out of the room in a huff before he could repeat the offending words but returned before he’d written two more lines, slapping down a roll of sealed parchment in front of him. It bore the seal of Cuthbert Tun-stall, Bishop of London. He tore it open and scanned it quickly as she left the room without a word.

  The student John Frith, whom Sir Thomas wished to interrogate, had apparently slipped the net. All inquiries had yielded naught. The bishop speculated that he might have joined his former tutor, William Tyndale, on the Continent. If only they’d been able to put a spy on his trail!

  If only! Bumblers! Thomas threw down his pen angrily, blotting the last word. He couldn’t do it alone. The hair shirt scraped against his back, which was still irritated from its morning scourging. He got up gingerly and went over to the window and looked out at the landscape. Winter was setting in. The trees were already ba
re, and there had been a hoarfrost last night. Soon the Christmas revelries would begin at court. God, how he hated those! Maybe he could plead an ague. He thought of Cardinal Wolsey, banished from court, and wondered how he was bearing his exile. Thomas had not thought Henry had it in him to take on such a powerful man. It had to be the influence of the Boleyn woman.

  He lifted the lid off the steaming platter on the tray before him. Lampreys.

  He had no fondness for lampreys.

  He put the lid back on the stewed eels and returned to his desk. He didn’t have time to eat anyway. There was much work to do, and Holbein was coming this afternoon to work on the portrait of the new chancellor of England in the proud bosom of his family.

  Lampreys were likewise on the menu in the archbishop’s quarters in York, in the north of England. Unlike Thomas More, Cardinal Wolsey had a real liking for the eels, especially when he had the best French wine to wash them down. Though he had to admit the edge was taken off his pleasure in them by the surroundings in which he had to consume them. His apartments in York were not nearly so grand as those lost to him in London. But he was not the sort to wallow in it. At least he had gotten out with his head. He might not be chancellor of England anymore, but he was still a Roman cardinal, and if he played his cards right, he might yet find a home in Rome. So England was lost to him. What was England but a provincial little island with a small-minded despot for a ruler who had a taste for tarts? The cardinal had his eyes on a bigger prize.

  As he spooned the lampreys in their rich broth into his mouth, he thought of Sir Thomas More who, his spies had told him, had been offered the great chain of the chancellor’s office. Well, he wished him well of it, though he doubted the most brilliant legal mind in England possessed the kind of cunning the job required. If Cardinal Thomas Wolsey had tripped up on the king’s great matter, Sir Thomas surely would. It would be interesting to watch it play out, but if his plan worked he’d be well away before then.