The Heretic’s Wife

by Brenda Rickman Vantrease

Apple tarts and clotted cream and a fine soft cheese followed the lampreys, but after the first bite of sweet tart cream and mellow cheese burst on his taste buds he chewed absently. Before consuming it all, he called for writing materials and a messenger. Belching loudly, he pushed aside the half-eaten cheese, wiped his mouth on the edge of the tablecloth, and picked up the quill.

  To His Holiness, Pope Clement VII

  From God’s loyal servant in England Cardinal Wolsey

  Regarding the serious threat to the Holy Roman Catholic Church in England . . .

  When he had finished his letter, he sealed it with his cardinal’s seal and handed it to the messenger. “This is for Carpeggio’s eyes only. Bid the messenger be swift of foot.”

  Captain Lasser must have concluded the passenger was no threat, Kate thought, or he would not have invited him to dine with them in the captain’s quarters. He was far too mercenary to bite the hand of Humphrey Monmouth by betraying them. Still, she was apprehensive. How could she help it? Her world was changing so fast apprehension was a constant companion these last days.

  In the space of one week she had gone from being a single, lonely woman without prospects to a new bride. A married woman! With a whole new world of adventure opening before her. It seemed like some impossible dream. But she knew how fast it could all be snatched away. The vision of the misery of the Fleet was not an easy thing to forget. With a fluttering in her chest she watched her new husband open the door of the cabin that had been their bridal chamber for the last five nights—not as sumptuous as Lady Walsh’s chamber, but its intimacy afforded some delights.

  She had to admit the passenger certainly didn’t look like a threat. He was a youngish man—older than John but younger than the captain. His neatly trimmed reddish beard had not a streak of gray, though when he removed his cap his hair was lightly thinning at the crown.

  “I’m Stephen Vaughan, emissary of King Henry,” he said in a friendly manner as he extended his hand to her husband.

  “John F—”

  “Gough. From Antwerp. Master John Gough and his wife Kate,” the captain interrupted.

  So perhaps the captain didn’t trust him completely.

  “John and his wife are in the export business. They are returning home from visiting family.”

  How smoothly he lied, she thought. She could almost believe this herself.

  Endor tapped the captain on the shoulder and extended her open palm toward the table in a gesture that said the meal was ready.

  “Come sit,” he said. “I’m famished.”

  “Very gracious, Captain Lasser,” the newcomer said as they crowded around the small table. “I had not expected . . .”

  “You are welcome. Now let’s eat.”

  Endor had managed some savory meat pasties and a mash of turnips on her small cook box—probably their last meal on the ship. It was good that the captain was sharing it with them, she thought, and the thought surprised her. But John seemed to enjoy his company, and she had learned to suffer it. In spite of his occasional sarcasm, she liked his ready wit, and when the talk inevitably turned to his sea adventures, she never found him boring and self-serving. He possessed a cynical but honest view of the world and his role in it. And there was Endor. She still was unclear about his part in that, but she had ceded to him a grudging admiration.

  “Gough?” The newcomer looked thoughtful as he took a drink of the cider his host provided. “Didn’t there used to be a bookseller down by St. Paul’s Churchyard by that name?” Kate noticed how his hazel eyes glinted as though he teetered on the brink of discovery.

  “Distant cousins . . . very distant. We hardly knew them,” she said quickly.

  She felt her face flush. The captain looked amused.

  I don’t lie as easily as you, she wanted to say, but she just looked away, a little angry at the expression in his face, but grateful when he jumped in to divert the conversation.

  “So you are the king’s agent, Master Vaughan,” the captain said. “That must be exciting work.” He plunged his knife into the center of the meat pie, releasing a little puff of aromatic steam.

  “Exciting, yes, but sometimes a little off-putting. Like today. Called upon without even a moment’s notice.”

  “Must be some urgent business, then.”

  “All the king’s business is urgent.”

  “Very hush-hush, I suppose?” John entered the conversation, eagerness in his voice.

  “Not so much this time,” Vaughan answered between bites. “I am to make inquiries, and I might as well begin now. That’s why I mentally stumbled on your name.”

  He paused for a drink. John and Kate exchanged a look then looked quickly away lest he notice.

  “The man, men actually, that I’m looking for are learned, probably connected with the book business. One is named William Tyndale, and the other is a young scholar by name of . . . Firth . . . no, that’s not . . . Frith. Yes, Frith, that’s his name.”

  Kate’s throat closed. She did not look at John. She did not look at the captain, but down at her lap.

  “I thought you might know them. It is thought they are in Flanders since they are bookmen and Antwerp is a printing center. At least that’s what I’m told. I don’t read a lot myself—don’t like the smell of ink.”

  The table swayed in front of Kate, the turnip mash suddenly turning to wool in her mouth, the aroma of the meat pie nauseating.

  The stranger appeared not to notice as he helped himself to another bite, exclaiming, “This is delicious, Captain. I left in such a hurry I didn’t even have a chance to eat. The king can be a demanding master.” And then before putting it in his mouth, “If you encounter either of them, William Tyndale or this John Frith, you can leave word for me at the glovers’ guild.”

  “So you are a glover in your spare time, when you are not on the king’s business, then?” Captain Lasser asked.

  Kate marveled at his casual manner. Of course, he had much less at stake than they. He would only incur the displeasure of a patron. John would lose his freedom, maybe even his life, if he did not recant. Recant. The word took her breath away. She recalled her brother’s dilemma with a more urgent understanding.

  “It is a family business,” she heard the stranger explain, his voice riding a receding wave. “My father was a glover. My older brother runs the business, but I am a journeyman in the guild.”

  “Why does the king want these men? Have they committed some offense?” John asked.

  Kate hoped Vaughan did not notice the breathless quality in his voice. His voice sounded small and far away, riding the same wave as the other. The bite she’d just eaten threatened to return.

  The captain motioned for Endor to fill up Vaughan’s empty cup, then added casually, “The Goughs are in the wool trade. They would not likely travel in the same circles.”

  Kate stood up unsteadily. She’d just lost her sea legs.

  EIGHTEEN

  It has been and is my earnest wish to restore Christ’s religion to its primitive purity, and to employ whatever talents and means I have in extinguishing heresy and giving free course to the Word of God.

  —YOUNG HENRY VIII IN A LETTER TO ERASMUS

  Kate was well enough by the time the Siren’s Song approached the estuary that she could appreciate the sunset. It would be their last at sea, and surprisingly that filled her with sadness. The reflected afterglow washed the tanbark sails of dozens of ships with red and mauve and orange and tinted the water a shimmering sea of myriad colors. The sight nearly took her breath away.

  “They look like giant butterflies hovering over the sea,” she said to John.

  “River,” John corrected her. “Antwerp actually fronts on the river Scheldt and not the North Sea, like London on the Thames.”

  “The river Scheldt,” she repeated, trying to wrap her tongue around the strange word.

  Master Vaughan joined them on the quarterdeck. “The prettiest—and busiest—port in all of Europe,” he said. “You mus
t be glad to be getting home, Mistress Gough. The color has returned to your lovely face. I’m glad you are feeling better.”

  “Much better, thank you,” Kate said.

  And that was no lie. For apparently the king’s spy believed their story. It looked as though they had made it, and that, she realized, was largely due to Captain Lasser. She watched him steer the ship into the river channel and upriver toward the harbor, a small smile livening his face as his eyes searched for the channel markers. This is truly a man who has found his calling, she thought, noticing every detail: the way his full sleeves blew in the sea breeze, blue-white against the ocher of his suede doublet; his captain’s stance, arms akimbo, legs spread wide for balance. She tried to picture him in a priest’s robe with his black hair trimmed in a tonsure instead of pulled back and tied with a riband, and almost laughed aloud. If ever a man was ill-suited to the Church, Tom Lasser was. He probably had a woman in every port.

  Endor had come out of her little hut to watch them enter the harbor as well. She held her face up to the fine spray thrown up in the ship’s wake, and Kate was both gratified and surprised to note that she wore an expression of contentment—almost bliss. She is happy, Kate thought. Even in her circumstances, she is happy. Kate almost envied the wounded woman that contentment. Was that what suffering did? she wondered. Place you in such pain that with its lessening, contentment came more easily. Or maybe just being in the presence of the man she loved was enough.

  The last of the ship’s sails was trimmed and the vessel slowed, rocking gently in the wakes created by the traffic. A few minutes later, it bumped against the jetty with a grinding noise and a great creaking of ropes on pulleys as the anchor dropped and the gangplank lowered to the dock. The afterglow had deepened, bruising the sky in streaks of deep orange and purple and casting the warehouses along the wharf in shadow. People rushed hither and yon, shouting in a language she did not understand and hustling between wagons and carts that waited to be loaded and unloaded. Everywhere horses clip-clopped and whinnied and drovers cursed at them impatiently. The sounds of commerce overwhelmed her.

  Strange voices.

  Strange buildings.

  She had a sudden yearning for home, for something, anything, that was familiar. Even for the cramped cabin in which she’d spent the last five nights, nestled with John like two spoons in a wooden cupboard.

  John reached down to pick up her trunk, waiting at her feet.

  “I’ll get that, sir,” one of the sailors said, and before John could thank him, he heaved the heavy box onto his shoulders and started across the gangplank with it. It was their signal to follow. This is it, she thought, with a moment’s panic.

  In her anxiety she forgot all about Endor until the woman approached her and groping for Kate’s palm pressed something into it. Kate looked down in surprise at the crude tin medal Endor always wore on a string around her neck. She recognized the emblem: a door with two women, an older woman standing behind a younger woman who held a child in her lap. The mother of the Virgin Mary. The grandmother of Jesus. Saint Anne. The patron saint of childless women. Kate felt a fierce tugging at her heart. A sacred amulet for a woman who had lost a child, a gift to a woman who desired a child. How could she know that desire? Kate had not told her. But it was a rare woman who did not desire children. Perhaps Endor was just acting on supposition.

  “Thank you, Endor, but I don’t want to take your medal. You will be lost without it.”

  Endor frowned and mimed putting the necklace around her neck and pointed to Kate.

  “Put it on,” the captain said. “She wants you to have it. She will not be satisfied unless you take it.”

  So. He had been watching. Kate bit back her tongue to keep from asking if he knew the importance of this particular saint to a childless and impoverished woman such as Endor, but of course she could not with Endor present. She put it on. “I shall treasure it and always remember the kindness of the woman who gave it to me,” she said. “I feel protected now.”

  Endor nodded somberly, as though she had just encountered a catastrophe and was satisfied she had done all she could do. That expression of satisfaction made Kate suddenly remember the night Endor had run from the room after gazing into the bowl of water. The gift was a sharp reminder that she might need protection—as if she needed a sharp reminder with the king’s agent standing so close—and there was something soothing about the weight of it. Not that she felt protected by the cheap piece of tin, but that she felt comforted by this woman who had so little and seemed to care so much.

  “Well, Captain, thank you for your . . .” John couldn’t say it properly, not with Vaughan so close. “Your . . . kindness and your hospitality.” He reached for the captain’s hand and shook it heartily as if trying to say with the handshake what he could not say with words.

  “Yes, Captain Lasser, we are most grateful,” Kate added, trying to tell him with her eyes what she could not say.

  “I make this port often. If you need passage sometime in the future, just look for the Siren’s Song or inquire on the docks.”

  He said it casually, offhand. A mere pleasantry. A polite answer. As though they were just two passengers he might or might not ever encounter again—which of course they were.

  The pressure of John’s hand at her back guided her onto the plank. “Steady now,” he said. “It’s the wrong time of the year to go swimming.”

  There was no trace in his voice of the kind of anxiety she felt. And, she realized as she stepped carefully onto the dock, no trace, either, of the man who had carried her trunk. She scanned the crowd. He’d had brown hair, hadn’t he? Yes, brown hair. And he’d worn a blue kerchief knotted around his head instead of a cap. John’s hand was still at her back, the pressure firm and insistent as he lengthened his stride.

  Vaughan shouted after them, “Don’t forget, Master Gough, if you should see Frith or Tyndale, tell them I have an offer of pardon from the king.”

  “Keep walking,” John whispered as they hurried toward the most crowded portion of the dock. “Pretend you don’t hear. Next he’ll be asking where we live.”

  Somebody jostled her and stepped on the hem of her skirt. She felt it tear but kept up her pace. “John, he said pardon . . .” she said between breaths, “an offer of pardon from the king . . . maybe we should go back and—”

  “Or maybe it’s just a trick,” he said. “Keep walking.”

  A few minutes later they looked back to see that Stephen Vaughan had disappeared into the crowd, but John did not slacken his pace. Kate was beginning to get a stitch in her side, but she soon forgot about that discomfort. She stopped abruptly, almost causing him to stumble.

  “My trunk, John,” she wailed. “All our things. What happened to the man with our trunk?”

  “Don’t worry about your trunk. We may have been lucky to get out with our lives.”

  Dusk had descended quickly and with it a chill that threatened frost. The foot traffic had lessened as well. Even the dockworkers had deserted, no doubt anxious to find a warm hearth. She pulled her cloak tightly around her, moaning inwardly—all her pretty things. Bad enough to start a new life among strangers, but with nothing but the clothes on your back! Stop whining, Kate. She tried to sound braver than she felt. “Do you know how to find the house we are to go to?” she asked.

  “I was going to ask the captain,” he said ruefully, then looking around at the rapidly thinning crowds, “It’s probably not safe here after dark.”

  “What does Antwerpen Grote Markt mean?” Kate asked, pointing to an arrow with the words burned into it.

  “Town Square. That’s where the guild houses are. We’ll ask there for directions.”

  By now they were a couple of furlongs from the docks. The dim outlines of the ships bobbed in the distance. She could no longer tell which one was the Siren’s Song, but it didn’t really matter. They turned in the direction of the pointing arrow, leaving the river behind them. At the end of a narrow, winding street,
where the smells of cookfires and roasting meat mingled with the night smells of the river, a lantern beckoned on a lamppost.

  As they headed for it, Kate heard footsteps keeping pace with them.

  “John—”

  “I know. I heard it too. Walk faster.”

  “I can’t walk any faster.”

  And just then, “Master Frith, wait up. I have your trunk.” It was the voice of the sailor who took their trunk.

  “I have been trying to catch up to you. Captain said to follow you and see you get where you’re going. I almost lost you back there.”

  If Kate had breath enough, she would have sighed with relief.

  Endor’s body jerked as she slept on her pallet within the small enclosure in the bow of the ship. The dream was always the same.

  She was running down the narrow alley that was Rottenhouse Row. Running hard. Breathless and afraid. They were behind her, gaining on her, their footsteps loud, loud, louder, pounding, pounding. Like her heart. Five of them.

  There had been a sixth with them behind the tavern where she’d gone to deliver the bread. She saw the knife blade slice across his throat, heard the gurgle of his blood, watched in frozen horror as it spurted from his neck.

  I won’t tell, she cried. I won’t tell, as they grabbed her. Ye won’t tell. Nay, witch, ye’ll not tell. One bent her arm behind her back. Please, please, let me go. I won’t tell. But they raped her one by one, their brutish bodies smothering her, hurting her until she lay choking, gagging on her own shame and vomit, as the last one stuck a fist in her mouth and pulled on her tongue until she feared he would rip its roots from her throat. But that was not his plan. One crude chop and another and another—as she struggled to wrench free while they held her—all with the same knife he’d used to kill the man. Then there was nothing left in the whole universe but the taste of rusty metal and blood and an agony that seared itself into her brain as surely as white-hot metal sears flesh.

  She always woke trying to cry for help with words that could not form—only helpless, shame-filled moans.