The Queen's Lady

by Barbara Kyle

  Henry moved to More’s side, chuckling as he loaded the papers into his own arms in one unwieldy bundle. He dumped the lot onto the table. “No paperwork now, Thomas. Look at the night. The stars!” He gestured to the window as if the night sky were his private treasure hoard.

  More smiled indulgently. “Your Grace is in a mood for stargazing?”

  Henry was unlatching a door in the far wall. “I am, my friend, I am.” He grinned over his shoulder. “And for your council, Thomas.”

  More sighed, then followed.

  The door opened onto a stone staircase that wound up the octagonal tower of the gatehouse. After several turns it brought them to a door that opened onto the tower’s flat roof. They stepped out into the night.

  The waning moon was a paring of silver among the silver stars. The roof was rimmed with a shoulder-high wall, notched with crenellations that had been added for defense during the civil strife of sixty years before. From these battlements, archers had once rained down death on any foe who dared breach the moat to attempt entry at the main gates. The house sprawled around a central courtyard where a troop of men had spilled out from rooms crammed with Henry’s entourage. They lounged at a campfire, tossing dice, and their laughter drifted up to the roof.

  Henry sucked in a deep breath of the cool air, a relief after the hot day. Above his head a flag gorgeous with the Tudor arms rippled from a pole in the center of the roof. He looked up at it and frowned. “Can’t get a clear view here.”

  He moved to the far wall where a bridge of wooden slats connected this gatehouse tower to a twin tower. Normal access to the other tower was along a guard walk topping the wall above the gate. But much of the masonry on the guard walk had crumbled dangerously away—its disrepair was a result of the long peace—and so the makeshift bridge had been strung out to span the thirty feet between the towers.

  Henry stepped onto the rickety bridge and beckoned More to follow him. More tensed. “Your Grace, the bridge does not look strong…”

  But Henry was already halfway across. The slats creaked underfoot. On the wall-walk fifteen feet directly below him, shards of jagged rubble glinted like fangs above the faint ground-floor torchlight. Henry stomped on. Safe on the other side, he turned and laughed. “It’s fine. Come on!”

  More followed, stepping gingerly. He slid his hands in jerks along the rough rope barriers on either side. Once across he breathed more freely.

  Henry flopped down in the center of the tower. He stretched out on his back and bent one arm to cushion his head. “What a night.” He pointed up. “Look, Thomas, the Pleiades dancing. There.”

  More sat beside him and drew up his knees and faced the stars. A feeling of contentment crept over him. A shared love of astronomy had been a bond between him and the King for years. He could recall many a balmy evening they had spent together on the lead roofs of Greenwich palace, pointing out constellations and discussing the movements of the sun and the planets through their crystal compartments that encapsulated the earth. “The seven daughters of Atlas,” he mused. “But Electra, the ‘lost Pleiad,’ never among them.”

  “No need for Electra,” Henry said. “Her sisters do a fine job, twinkling down at a man like ripe virgins.”

  More laughed softly. “Your Grace is merry tonight.”

  “I am, Thomas, I am. The air here is clean. Hunting’s been superb. I’ll say that for Wentworth. Best hunting all summer. And I’ve been on the move since Whitsuntide, you know, outrunning the cursed Sweat.”

  More sighed. He knew. He had followed the King through most of his panicked moves after the sweating sickness had broken out in Greenwich in June. Henry had fled the palace and ordered the poor of the town herded out in an attempt to halt the disease. While the Queen had stoically remained at Bridewell, Henry had shunted around the country from one friend’s house to another, his host’s purse invariably emptied by the honor of victualing the huge retinue of gentlemen, servants, clerks and musicians that crowded in after the King. He had kept his doctor at his elbow, hurried several times a day to Mass, and every evening confessed his sins. He feared sleeping alone, and had his friend, Francis Bryant, sleep on a straw pallet at the foot of his bed. More shook his head. What lengths we go to, he thought, to try to outfox death.

  “At Hampton last night,” Henry murmured, “Robert Wodehouse died.”

  “I heard,” More said, lowering his voice in sympathy. He thought he read fear on the King’s face: the dread of his own mortality.

  Henry sat up. “We were boys together—Robert, Will Parr, and I. Trained together. Entered the jousting lists together.” He managed a weak smile. “Robert even unseated me. Once.” The smile crumbled. “He was two years younger than I.” Absently, he fingered the walnut-sized emerald on a golden chain around his neck. The laughter from the men at the campfire sifted over the battlements.

  “All quiet now, eh, Thomas?” Henry said, jerking his chin in the direction of the laughter. “But it was not always so. During the Troubles, Wentworth’s grandfather was murdered below this very tower. Did you know? He’d betrayed York, you see. Fed information to the Lancastrians so they could ambush a Yorkist brigade on the road to St. Albans. A week later Edward of York marched into London and took the crown. But not before his knights had settled the score with old Wentworth. Hacked him to pieces on his own drawbridge.” He shook his head. “My God, the bloody roses, Red and White. My mother told me all about the terrors of those days, Thomas.”

  “Terrors ended by your father, happily,” More ventured. But he saw that Henry was not listening.

  “The realm was virtually lawless then,” Henry went on anxiously. “And all because the King was an imbecile. A pitiful half-wit who couldn’t dress himself. Poor King Harry of Lancaster.” He turned to More, his face pallid in the scant moonlight. “If I leave no heir, Thomas, will the horrors start again? The mighty factions my father hoped to curb are straining again at their leashes. Some have snapped them, and nip at my very heels. Look at Buckingham. True, I cut off his treasonous scheming along with his head, but what of Norfolk? And the grasping Percys? What of the villainous dogs in Scotland, panting for an empty English throne? I must leave an heir, Thomas. Without a son I consign my realm to bloody civil war.”

  “Princess Mary…”

  “Bah! A woman’s hand cannot rule this stubborn people. Even if she could, she must one day marry some prince of Spain or France or Portugal, and then her obedience to her husband would reduce England to a sniveling fiefdom, the vassal of a foreigner.”

  “I think not, Your Grace. Your subjects have been accustomed for too many generations to liberty and the rule of English law.”

  Henry suddenly roared, “I must have a son!”

  More flinched. At the King’s outburst the laughter below at the campfire hushed.

  Henry hauled himself up and stalked to the wall and looked out over the dark valley.

  More had stood when the King did, the ingrained habit of obedience. He watched the breeze tug the silken skirt of the King’s gold tunic, and waited. The air was heavy with a melancholy smell of smoke and dying vegetation. Today’s the Feast of St. Michael, More thought with a shiver. The end of summer.

  The men’s chatter from the courtyard slowly resumed.

  Henry waved wearily behind his back. “Sit down, man,” he said, staring out. “Sit down.”

  More sat. An owl hooted from the forest.

  Henry’s hand slapped irritably against the stone parapet. “How I detest this waiting for a judgment. God’s wounds, I’ll breathe easier when the thing is done, Thomas. The infernal waiting. It’s enough to kill a man.”

  “Your Grace may not have to wait so very much longer,” More said quietly.

  Henry swung around. “What say you?” He moved in, wide-eyed with hope. “Thomas, what have you heard?”

  “Only a rumor, sire,” More said. He was far from happy to be the messenger of such news. Yet, he asked himself, how could he in conscience conceal it? �
��Just before supper your goldsmith arrived. He told me he had met a merchant on the road who’d come from Dover, having crossed from Calais. The merchant said he had seen Cardinal Campeggio’s entourage arrive at Calais from Rome.”

  Henry smacked his hands together, exulting. For months he had been pressing the Pope to send Cardinal Campeggio as a special envoy to judge the divorce. “I knew it,” he cried. “Knew it in my bones when Anne arrived today. Campeggio, soon in England! Ha! Making that Italian the Bishop of Salisbury was the best day’s work I ever did.” He laughed. “God smiles on me, Thomas.”

  “He always has, Your Grace.” More made no attempt to hide the affection in his voice.

  Henry smiled. He came and sat again beside his friend. “Thomas, I didn’t bring you up here just to stargaze. I wanted to seek your council on this great matter. Until now I’ve not asked your opinion outright. And”—he chuckled—“God knows you’ve not been forward in voicing it.”

  More’s palms prickled.

  Henry went on. “Everyone else has had his say, ad infinitum. But you—you’ve kept mightily quiet. Well, I’m asking now. It’s important. Give me your thoughts.”

  More tried to keep his face neutral but he feared the racing of his heart betrayed him. Fool! he chided himself. You knew the question would come one day.

  Henry gently grasped the back of More’s neck and leaned in to him as if to impart a confession. “I won’t deny I dearly want you behind me in this, Thomas. In fact, there’s no man’s support I’d rather have.”

  The sincerity, the generosity, unbalanced More’s shaky composure. He lowered his head to collect his thoughts. But his thoughts were in turmoil. Where did his duty lie? Should he march behind his King, right or wrong? Or leap in front to block him from this perilous false step? A pang of arthritis shot through his knee. He rubbed it. “These old bones bring news, too,” he said, and offered an apologetic smile. “They tell me autumn nears.”

  “Don’t change the subject, Thomas. Come, give me your council. Cannot you see God’s hand in this? I do. I see so clearly that if I had done my duty to Him all those years ago, had obeyed His scriptural commandment, I’d have a son beside me now.” His voice rose to indicate a quotation. ‘If a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing: he hath uncovered his brother’s nakedness; they shall be childless.’”

  More closed his eyes, sick of hearing yet again the scriptural passage from Leviticus. He had been appalled at how quickly the English bishops had jumped to mouth it back to the King. Bishop Fisher had been the only one to speak out for the sanctity of the marriage.

  “It’s as clear as the Dog Star above us,” Henry concluded confidently. “I sinned in marrying Arthur’s wife. As punishment, I am childless.”

  More cleared his throat softly. “But, Your Grace…” He hesitated. How to tell a king he’s wrong? He lifted his finger in a debating gesture. “Leviticus is a lengthy catalogue of such injunctions. They are the harsh rules of a nomadic Hebrew tribe, a people living in the fractiousness of close confinement, in tents.”

  He knew it was a safe enough beginning, for the King was used to this sort of intellectual opposition from him; theological debates were a pastime with them, and both could quote long passages of Latin scripture by heart. “The Church,” he went on, “has overruled many prohibitions in Leviticus, including the injunction against shaving off ‘the corner of the beard,’ and against eating the flesh of swine.”

  “Exactly, Thomas,” Henry replied swiftly. “Overruled. The former Pope, in granting the dispensation, bent the law. God’s law. The Pope was wrong to allow my marriage. He acted contrary to God’s law in scripture.”

  More answered cautiously but firmly. “Acted on his authority as the Vicar of Christ on earth, Your Grace.”

  They were sitting face-to-face. More looked into the eyes of his King, eyes so hungry for approval. Were they hungry, too, for guidance? Was that his duty, after all? He felt a pang of devotion and longed to say something that would hold the King back from charging like a mad bull at the bright banner—the unspotted fabric—of Christ’s Church. The traditions of civilization over fifteen centuries are embodied in the authority of the Church, he wanted to cry. Your marriage with the Queen has lasted almost twenty years. Custom and tradition make it sacred. And the Church has spoken.

  As he thought this, hovering on the brink of speaking what was in his heart, he shook his head almost imperceptibly. It was not a gesture of defiance, merely of concentration, but it seemed to trip the spring of a trap in Henry’s mind. His face darkened and bulged over his jeweled collar.

  “By Christ’s wounds,” he cried, “I will have this annulment, for God tells me it is right! I’ll not be thwarted!”

  More felt his heart beat fast with fear. “Thwarted?” In the forest the owl’s cry spiraled on the chill air. “Never by me, Your Grace.” He shuddered. He knew that his moment of courage had ebbed, and was forever lost.

  Henry was staring at his hands. “Thomas, I want you to understand something.” He turned, calmer now. “God is speaking to me,” he said. More listened uneasily, vaguely dizzy, for the crenellated walls around them blocked out the world, and shreds of cloud scudded overhead giving the illusion that the platform was moving. It seemed that he and the King were sitting alone, voyaging in some unearthly ship, adrift among the stars.

  “He is speaking to me in three ways,” Henry said with a low urgency. “First, through my intelligence, for canon law, as you know, is no mystery to me.”

  “All the world acknowledges that Your Grace is an accomplished theologian.”

  Henry hurried on. “Secondly, he speaks to me through my heart, for it has cracked with every babe that Catherine and I have buried.”

  Impulsively, More clasped Henry’s forearm in a silent communion of sympathy; More was a man who loved his children.

  “And now, Thomas, He is speaking to me through my blood.” His hand clamped down over More’s. “There is a yearning, a hunger in my blood for Anne that inflames me in a way I’ve never known.”

  More winced. Spare me this, he thought. As you are a merciful king, spare me this.

  “I have sinned in adultery before, Thomas.”

  “Please, Your Grace, I am no priest. These are matters for your Father Confessor, not for me. I beg you—”

  “But you are my friend. A priest cannot understand this. He does not live as a man, like you and I do. No, all my previous sins of the flesh were mere acts of lust, Thomas. The lust that every man feels for a comely woman.”

  Every man. The words echoed in More’s head like an indictment. In a flash, he saw Jane, his young first wife, lying naked before him. He cringed as if it had happened yesterday, remembering the lust that had consumed him on his wedding night. Another flash, and he saw Honor Larke running down to the water stairs to greet his barge, all smiles, her dark hair tumbled over the half-moons of her breasts swelling above her bodice. He clenched his fists in shame. Every man, indeed.

  Henry grabbed More’s collar. “No, Thomas, this is more than simple appetite. God has fired my blood for a holy purpose. He is telling me…commanding me…to beget a son.”

  More groaned inside. Such self-deception in a king!

  The door of the other tower slammed open. Lantern light pooled over its roof as a man stepped out. Henry looked across at his friend, Francis Bryant.

  “What is it, Francis?”

  “It’s…Sir William Parr,” Bryant called, his voice dry. “He’s dead…of the Sweat.”

  Henry’s face went white. More understood instantly. Parr was the last of the King’s boyhood mates.

  Henry rose unsteadily and moved to the edge of the bridge. As he stepped out onto it his eyes lifted to the Tudor flag above Bryant’s head. He blinked at it as if disoriented. His gait became an old man’s shuffle, and he clung to the hip-high rope barriers of the bridge as if to a lifeline.

  Alarmed, More hurried after him onto the bridge. They were moving acro
ss it together, More catching up, when a slat under More’s foot snapped. A shard pitched to the crumbling wall walk below, bounced off the sharp rubble, and plunged down into the moat. More fought for balance, but his ankle was caught in the shredded slat and he stumbled onto the other knee. He flailed, trying to grab hold of the rope lines.

  Henry whipped around. More was struggling to pull out his leg, but his weight splintered another rotting slat, enlarging the hole so that it swallowed his leg up to the knee. His outstretched arms wrapped around the rope behind him.

  Henry came close. As he neared the hole the weakened neighbor slats squealed under the pressure and split. With a jolt More fell farther and his leg disappeared up to the thigh. Henry lurched back. Then he crouched. He opened his legs wide to spread his weight. He grasped both rope lines and inched his feet closer to More, his body hulking like a wrestler as he covered the last few feet. He leaned over and reached for More’s chest and grabbed two fistfuls of his robe. But More clung desperately to the rope, his eyes fixed in terror on the jagged wall below.

  “Let go, man!” Henry commanded, his voice fierce with strain.

  More’s knuckles whitened. His arms quivered with the effort of holding himself up, but his panicked grip did not slacken.

  Henry’s voice softened to the coaxing of a parent. “Thomas, you’ve got to let me take you. Look at me. And let go.”

  Their eyes met. Henry smiled. More let go.

  Instantly, Henry’s hands flipped under More’s armpits. With a sudden, ferocious strength he grappled More to his chest. More’s foot was sucked free. Henry shuffled backwards toward the flag tower like a bear dragging home its prey.

  Safe on the roof, they leaned against the wall to catch their breath. Bryant, too, could breathe again, for the King was unharmed.