The Queen's Lady

by Barbara Kyle

  “Ha!” Henry laughed, and his eyes sparkled with the thrill of beaten danger as he bent to slap dirt off More’s robe. More’s hose were torn and his shin scraped, but he was not injured. Despite his protestations, however, Henry insisted on sending Bryant for the doctor. When they were alone again Henry chuckled, his pleasure vast. “You’ll live, Thomas, but I’d advise a change of hose before you join the ladies.”

  More’s heart still pounded. “Words, Your Grace, are insufficient to—”

  Henry waved away the thanks. He looked down at his fingers and thoughtfully picked off flecks of hemp. “Thomas, before we go down, tell me, once and for all. In this great matter of my marriage, can you not see your way clear to come with me?”

  More’s face creased in a private torment.

  Henry sighed. “No, I see that you cannot. Well, I would not put a man in ruffle with his conscience. And you said you have no wish to thwart me.”

  “Nor never will!” More blurted ardently.

  “Then pledge me as much. Pledge your silence.”

  “I do, Your Grace, right willingly.”

  “Good. I’d not lose your council on other matters. Nor your friendship.” He looked up at the stars, his voice heavy with sadness. “In these dark days, Thomas, a king must watch over every friend he has.”

  7

  News

  A pair of swifts skimmed over the placid surface of the pond at More’s Chelsea estate. Honor sat on the bank under the oaks with her foot in the water and watched tiny ripples radiate away from her ankle. Cecily, More’s daughter, sat on a bench behind her and rummaged inside a satchel. She lifted out scissors, balled linen strips, and a jar—all of which she laid beside her on the bench. Cecily’s year-old baby was sprawled on the grass at his mother’s feet, his mouth open in blissful sleep as bronzed leaves spiraled gently down around him from the oaks. Past the lawns that sloped to the Thames, the laughter of maidservants cutting rushes at the river bank drifted up on the late-afternoon air.

  A trout sprang out of the pond for a fly. Its body twisted, flinging droplets like a shower of diamond chips. Cecily’s hand jumped to her bulging belly. “Goodness!” she gasped. “One more hungry fish like that, Honor, and you may have to act the midwife!”

  Honor glanced up and almost smiled. Absently, she pushed a loose lock of hair under her pearled headband, then turned back to her reverie.

  Cecily’s brow creased. “Now, enough daydreaming,” she scolded. She patted the bench to coax Honor over. “Come. Let me dress those blisters.” She pulled the stopper out of the jar and held the potion up, waiting with a stern expression as if Honor were a stubborn child refusing to come for its medicine.

  Barefooted, Honor came and sat beside her.

  Cecily took up one of Honor’s listless hands and began smoothing a salve onto the palm. “They’ve healed very well, dear,” she said. “And after just two weeks.” When she had finished applying the ointment to both hands she cut fresh bandages from the linen strips. “Really, these are hardly necessary now,” she declared.

  She swathed Honor’s hand, and sighed. “Ah, such pretty, tapering fingers. You know, if I were capable of envying anything in such a dear friend it would be the trimness of your body. ‘Delicate’ is the word that springs to mind. But no, that’s not quite right. ‘Delicate’ suggests something rather passive, doesn’t it? A kind of feminine passivity that isn’t…well, it just isn’t you, dear, is it?” She laughed. “There,” she said cheerfully, finishing. She had wrapped the linen around both palms, leaving the thumb and fingers free.

  Honor smiled her thanks, hating herself for the lie she had told: an accident in heating the Queen’s wine at the fire. The Queen, for her part, had accepted that the “accident” had happened here at Chelsea. Honor loathed the deception. But Ralph’s death was too painful even to think of; speaking of it would be unbearable. She had told no one.

  “Will the Queen spare you to sit for the family portrait?” Cecily asked. “It’s next Thursday, you know.” She bent awkwardly to pick a crinkled leaf off her baby’s forehead. “Little angel,” she cooed. She straightened, then settled, and the exertion made her puff her cheeks with a laugh. “I fear Master Holbein will already need a larger canvas just to fit me in.”

  “I’ll try to come,” Honor said. She smiled. Cecily was her best friend and Honor loved her—when she’d lived here they had shared a bed, and all their secrets—but her matronly contentment rather amused Honor. After all, Cecily was only eighteen months older than herself. Today, though, she found Cecily’s blanket of solicitude strangely soothing.

  “Speaking of Holbein,” Cecily said brightly, “let’s hear the letter you said dear old Erasmus has sent you. Then I can give Hans the news from Basle when I sit for his sketch tomorrow. I know he hungers for tidings of his home.”

  Honor roused herself, and with stiff fingers drew a paper from her sleeve. Her letters from Erasmus were delights that she always shared with the More household. She had never met Erasmus—he had not visited England in over a decade—but following his gracious reply to the essay she had sent him, they had continued a lively correspondence. Honor was aware that it was a mark of some distinction to be one of a handful of females among the international body of colleagues with whom the scholar communicated. “Forgive me, Cecily,” she said. “I meant to bring the letter before this.”

  “That’s all right, dear, I’ll hear it now,” Cecily murmured good-naturedly. “Though heaven knows when I’ll be able to pass the news along to Father,” she sighed. “We haven’t seen him for weeks. This latest epidemic of the Sweat has driven the King from Greenwich, first to Hunsden, then to Titten-hanger, and now I don’t know where. And where His Grace goes, there must Father go as well. I’m so sorry you missed him.”

  Honor could hardly express how sorry she was, too. Her guardian was the one person to whom she felt she might unburden her heart, and she ached for a half hour of his wisdom to help her ease her sorrow. But, though hoping to find him home, she had hardly expected it.

  She opened the letter and read:

  “To Mistress Larke, and all alumni of the academy in the house of Thomas More: greetings.

  Sad to say, the howling over Luther continues unabated. It rises to fever pitch when he attacks the trade in saints’ relics, though there is no doubt the trade has become shameless. The Archbishop of Maintz boasts an exhibition of eight thousand items, including a clod of the earth from which Adam was created, a toenail of Saint Stephen’s, a dollop of manna from the wilderness, a twig from the burning bush, and a drop of the Virgin’s milk. And this goes on everywhere! There are so many splinters of Our Lord’s cross displayed in church reliquaries throughout Europe that a warship could not hold them all.”

  Cecily looked up wide-eyed. “He hasn’t mellowed in his old age, has he?”

  “He never hesitates to speak his rather formidable mind,” Honor agreed, but her smile was weak, for Erasmus’s faintly blasphemous satire brought echoes of the charges of heresy at Smithfield that chilled her. But then Erasmus, she knew, was an eclectic thinker; he always saw through cant. Though he was a priest, trained in the monastery, he had secured a special dispensation years ago that had released him from his vows of obedience to the Augustinian order.

  She read on:

  “People shriek at me because I do not denounce Luther. And, indeed, when he speaks the truth, I will not. Yet they should not worry; he speaks little enough of it. Lately he has fallen to raving about the ‘German soul.’ I fear he is the tree that bears the poison fruit of nationalism. Von Hutten has now joined in, urging ‘we Germans’ to stick together in the present danger. If things continue on like this I shall soon declare myself to be a Frenchman!

  Certainly, one place that will never claim me again is Louvain. There, the selling of meat on Fridays or during Lent was punishable by law—unlike exploitation or war-mongering. I have been much happier here at Basle, where meat is always sold. Though my heart is Catholic, my
stomach is Protestant.”

  Cecily and Honor exchanged smiles. Erasmus’s notoriously finicky appetite was one of his more endearing quirks.

  The gilded, late-afternoon sky was ripening into a rosy sunset. The maidservants ambled up from the riverbank with their bundles of reeds. From the kitchen, voices and the aromas of fresh bread and baking apples wafted across the lawn.

  “But, tragically, even here in Basle [Honor read on] we are on the brink of civil war. The Lutheran Evangelicals have taken over the Council, expelling the Catholic leaders. There is talk of the University being suspended. I fear I must seek another home. But where? The lust for war boils over across Europe. Some people cry for a holy massacre of Luther’s followers, some for a bloody crusade against the Turks. My essay, ‘War Is Sweet to the Inexperienced’ has infuriated all who do not want the world to come to its senses.

  No, I cannot go with St. Bernard who praised soldiers, or St. Thomas Aquinas when he sanctioned the ‘just war.’ Why should we be moved by the arguments of these men more than by the words of Christ? Crusade, indeed! The Turks are clawing at the doors of Vienna, and all because Christians are too busy snarling at one another over Luther. I say to them: Do you wish to terrify the Turks? Then live in concord amongst yourselves.

  But no one wants to hear me, though they love to hurl my tired old name, missilelike, into one another’s camps. When I travel, people snatch up the stubs of candles I burn in the night, for souvenirs. I tell them they would do better to use my ideas as candles.”

  A bell chimed from the house.

  “Goodness, so late,” Cecily exclaimed. “Supper in an hour.”

  “That’s really all there is, in any case,” Honor said. She glanced again at the hastily written postscript, but kept it to herself:

  “I have had no luck tracking down the book you asked me to seek. No title page with a single blue flower has passed under my nose. I promise, however, that I shall not abandon the search.”

  Honor felt a familiar pang of regret. She had thought that if anyone could find a copy of the foreigner’s little volume, it would be Erasmus. Not only was he a renowned book collector, he was also in touch with all the ground-breaking authors in Europe. But his disappointing postscript deepened her conviction that she would never discover what mysteries had been written inside the foreigner’s lost gift.

  Cecily was pushing her bulk up from the bench to go inside. Honor picked up the baby and placed him in his mother’s arms, then went back to the edge of the pond to put on her stockings and shoes.

  “You’ll stay, won’t you, Honor?” Cecily asked. “Lady Alice has baked some apples. With honey, just the way you like them.”

  Honor was tying her shoelace. “I can’t, Cecily. I must get back to Bridewell. The Queen likes me to read to her. The evenings are long for her these days.” She did not raise her head as she spoke, for this was another lie. The Queen’s comfort was not her reason for wanting to hurry away. It was something else, something gnawing inside her that frightened her.

  She knew well the routine of the household. At supper one of More’s daughters—Margaret or Cecily or Elizabeth—would read from Latin scripture. Afterwards would come family prayers in the chapel. Even when Sir Thomas was away he insisted on his family’s strict observance of the practice. Now, Honor dreaded it. Since Ralph’s death she had not been able to pray. She could not force herself into the meek and grateful state of mind required. Supplication, contrition, thanks: the prayers had always flowed so unconsciously. Now the words—the very thoughts—shriveled in her heart. She would not, could not, pray. It was terrifying.

  Another manifestation of her grief shocked her, too. She had expected to feel grief as dullness, a dull ache. But instead, every sense throbbed with an acute awareness of life, of life’s textures, of the vivid, simple joys that Ralph would never know again. The scent of new-mown hay. Crickets. The impossible yellow of sunflowers. Girl’s laughter. Salt on the tongue. Every day, in mind and body, she was excruciatingly awake, tender as a bruise. If only she could feel dullness.

  But that was not all. At night came something worse. At night, when Ralph’s crusted face loomed, anger came. How could a just God inflict such horrors of body and soul on a man so good, so purely Christian, as Ralph Pepperton? The question had festered inside her into an indictment against God. And against His priest, Bastwick, for engineering the death.

  Instead of prayers, her lips now formed a twofold vow, repeated every day. First, she vowed that she would never forget what Ralph had suffered. In her heart she whispered a solemn promise to him. “Every time I see a flame, I’ll see your face, and remember.” Then, she would pledge her oath that, somehow, she would discover how Ralph’s murderer had worked his evil, and she would expose him. She was certain that if she scratched beneath the surface of Bastwick’s new respectability she would uncover some criminal action. How else could he have risen from near ruin after her trial to a position of authority under the Bishop of London? How else could he have snared Ralph? She knew very little about Lutheranism or its adherents, but she did know Ralph. No contact with heretic sects, however pernicious, could have corrupted him into a bad man.

  And she knew Bastwick. She recalled how, at Tyrell Court, his hunger for advancement was voracious. When he wasn’t toadying to Lady Philippa, he was hounding Tyrell for another benefice with tithes and glebe lands, or insinuating himself into the affairs of the neighbor Abbot, helping to collect the Abbey’s bridge tolls and court fines in order to connect with the Abbot’s powerful Church connections in Exeter. Honor had come to understand what drove Bastwick. One day she had overheard an argument between him and Tyrell. Tyrell shouted that Bastwick’s father had been a villein—a peasant bondsman—and Bastwick had stormed out without denying it. She realized then. It was dread of the poverty out of which he had crawled toward the Church that had been the crucible of his character. Now, even after the crushing setback she had inflicted on him at the Star Chamber trial, he had obviously clawed his way back up, all the way into the Bishop of London’s staff.

  But she had never doubted his will to revenge himself on her for that setback. And she realized now, with a bitterness she could almost taste, that Ralph’s death neatly satisfied Bastwick’s twin desires. What better way to rise even further in the Bishop’s estimation than by delivering heretics to the stake? And what better way to slake his hatred of her than by burning someone she loved?

  The bell chimed again. Honor glanced at the house. Though she could not face the family prayers, it seemed too rude to rush away without saying good-bye to Lady Alice. “I’ll come in for a bit, Cecily,” she said, and they walked up to the house, arm in arm.

  Once inside, though, she could hardly refuse a goblet of wine from Margaret’s husband, Will, or ignore their young son’s eagerness to display to her his collection of chestnuts and pine cones. So it was almost an hour later, with Lady Alice insisting she carry a dish of baked apples back for the Queen, and the rest of the household drifting into the hall to eat, that she kissed Cecily good-bye and stepped out the front door to go down to the waiting barge.

  Twilight was settling, cool and quiet. Above her, a scattering of only the boldest silver stars pulsed. With the warm dish cradled in her arm, she was almost at the gate that led to the lawn and the river when the solemn drone of Margaret’s reading caught her through an open window of the hall: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen…”

  She felt the hairs lift at the nape of her neck. She quickened her footsteps. But the words of St. Paul pursued her, insubstantial yet persistent, like the cloud of gnats darting around her ears. She hurried on until the sound of scripture died away behind her.

  But as she crossed the lawn and came to the stairs that led down to the pier, other voices reached her, men’s voices drifting up from the barge. She stopped, held in check by their tone, low and private, as though they dealt in secrets. There were two forms, mere silhouettes against the d
ying light on the river.

  “Heretics. A filthy clutch of ’em,” the boatman said. He was lounging in the middle of the barge, gnawing at a leg of the leftover Michaelmas goose that Matthew had brought him from the house. Matthew was squatting on the pier, listening. “Oh, my ears are always open, lad,” the boatman added.

  “And who’s this merchant they suspect?” Matthew asked, excited.

  “Sydenham? A skinner, so I hear. I warrant he’s spent too much time peddling hides in the stinkpot heretic cities across the Narrow Sea.”

  “Tomorrow? That’s when the raid’s to be?”

  “Aye. After curfew. Midnight, mayhap. Leastways, that’s what I heard the Bishop’s man to say.” The boatman’s lips slurped along a greasy tendon. “And you can see the cunning in it. If this Sydenham has called a gathering, and if the Bishop’s man hopes to catch ’em all together, best to give ’em time to get their heathen antics underway.”

  There was a thrill of fear in the young man’s next question. “And will they burn?”

  The boatman belched philosophically. “Well, the devils’re crafty, ’specially your foreigner heretics. They may forswear, and only suffer penance ’round St. Paul’s. But, aye, if their prating be heretical, they’ll burn. And if you ask me…”

  “Boatman!”

  At Honor’s voice, Matthew sprang up and the boatman tossed his goose bone overboard.

  “Matthew, go inside,” she said. There was no mistaking her tone. Matthew touched his cap to her and was gone.

  The boatman plied his oars and they glided downstream under the river of brightening stars. Honor sat rigid in the stern. The humped, black waves beat the hull in a chaotic rhythm, as if the thudding of her heart against her ribs was rendered audible, for the men’s whispering had brought all the horror of Ralph’s torture swarming back. She saw it again—Ralph writhing under his chain, and Bastwick smirking his twisted revenge. And, suddenly, she saw, like a ghost standing between them, a hunched man, shackled, waiting to be burned. A stranger named Sydenham.