by Barbara Kyle
She was trembling, and Thornleigh slackened his grip. “Look there,” he said gently, pointing. “Not death. Life.” He gave a soft laugh, and Honor saw why. At the side of the fire a mumbling old crone had lifted her skirt to warm her withered buttocks, as if it were a winter twilight and not a sultry summer eve. Across from the crone a young man was helping a buxom girl toss roasted chestnuts in a pan. The young man took the opportunity to brush his arm against the girl’s breast, and she shot an elbow into his ribs. Farther around the circle a boy, crouching with a stick, was singing to himself as he dreamily drew goslings in the ashes.
Honor felt a smile begin. Then she caught herself, and the smile vanished. She turned slowly back to Thornleigh, wiping her tears away with the back of her hand. He took her by her shoulders again, but gently this time. “You’re right, of course,” Honor said quietly, dully. “Now, let me go.”
But he did not. “Promise me you’ll put this obsession behind you?”
“I promise…to deal only in reality,” she said. “And one reality is that I am sworn. Let me go. I have important work to do. Tracts to write. Lies to set straight—”
“My God, listen to yourself! You mumble it like a catechism.”
“What do you know about it?” she flared.
“Everything. I once thrashed about in the same ditch of guilt. And I’d dug it for myself, just as you have done. I know what it’s like to have venom eating inside you.”
“Then let me be!”
“No. Listen to me. This anger is a poison only to yourself. It has no power to change what’s done. It can only corrode your own spirit.”
She opened her mouth to fling fighting words, but none would come. Her mind could not seem to grasp hold of any. “I…I must…”
“Why must you?”
She blinked, confused. It was difficult to remember why. “But…”
He tightened his grip. “Honor, you know what I say is true. Let this hatred go.”
“But how can I? As long as Sir Thomas hurls his poisoned arrows I must—”
“Oh, Christ, Sir Thomas!” Thornleigh groaned. “Always Sir Thomas.” He threw up his hands. “Usually a man’s rival is someone the lady loves, not hates!”
Honor felt slightly dizzy. The fire-sparked darkness seemed to be humming. “What do you mean?”
He shook his head at her as if at a stupid child. “I mean that I’ve been fighting Sir Thomas for you since the day you kicked that poker from my hands. The day you woke me up to life. Well, the time has come for you to choose between us. You can spend your life with me—a real life with me, mind—or you can run with your vendetta against More. One or the other. It can’t be both.”
She blinked at him, astonished. “An ultimatum?”
“God, Honor, what else can I do?” He spoke as though exasperated to the point of helplessness. “Look at me,” he said, thumping a palm on his chest. “What reality do you see here? What kind of man?”
She knew the answer in every fiber of her body. He was the standard against which she judged every other man and found all wanting.
Tenderly, he took her face between his hands. “If you see anything but a man who loves you,” he said, “who’s been waiting for you to work this fever of spite out of your blood, then you are blind indeed.”
He was staring into her eyes. His hands were hot on her face.
“Honor,” he groaned, “I can’t wait any longer. Choose. Which will it be?”
You, of course! she wanted to cry. And yet, must she forsake the work that could bring about so much good?
“Do I have to ask you again to marry me,” Thornleigh asked. “To truly be my wife?”
His need was irresistible. Honor could find no breath to speak.
“In law, you know,” he said cautiously, “silence is construed as consent.” He bent and, tentatively, kissed her. Heat swept through her. He drew back his head. He was smiling.
Her mouth opened, hungry for the feel of him, the taste of him, again.
There was a jangle of tambourines and a skreeling of pipes as musicians and tumblers capered into the square, surrounding them.
“Honor,” Thornleigh whispered, but before he could say another word she thrust her fingers into the red-gold tangle of his hair and stopped his mouth with hers.
27
Cromwell’s Summons
Honor rested back in warm bathwater sprinkled with lavender buds, took in a long, deep breath of the lavender perfume, and smiled. Buttery March sunshine was beginning to stream through the oriel window in the bedchamber at Great Ashwold, but despite the sun’s radiance the early hour had called for more warmth, and behind the pool of her blue silk robe that she had dropped on the floorboards, the flames of a newly laid fire danced in the hearth, banishing the morning chill.
She reached out to a stool beside the tub for three unopened letters that lay beside the pouch of lavender. The letters, just delivered by Honor’s maid, made up a flurry of communication from the larger world outside Great Ashwold that Honor found most exciting.
But she was glad Thornleigh had not seen them delivered; he had left her sleeping, and by now he would be saddled up for the two hour ride into Norwich. Honor had instructed her maid to give her such letters only in private. She regretted the subterfuge with Thornleigh but felt justified in using it, for she had kept her promise to him—on the whole. Since Midsummer Eve, through a quiet autumn and winter, she had not seen London—had strayed no further than to accompany him now and then when business took him to Aylsham or Yarmouth, for he always asked her to join him.
And she had been happy. She was absorbed in learning the intricacies of the woolcloth business. She had forged a delightful friendship with young Adam. She was deeply in love with her husband. What more could she want?
She looked guiltily at the letters. No, she thought defensively, she would not give up the innocent stimulation of outside correspondence. Nor give up the writing she still managed to do, though she was no longer involved with any printing. The writing was only for herself now—a calmer, and at the same time more intensely focused channel for her ideas about the justice that still had not come to England’s Church courts, for the King, having got his new Queen, had done nothing to change the old laws. However, she indulged these private interests only when Thornleigh was away. Harmless though they were, they represented to him a preoccupation he insisted was dangerous for her. If he knew, he would chafe. They would quarrel. It was better this way.
She shuffled the letters, examining them. One, with a plain exterior, gave no hint about its author, but the two others Honor quickly recognized. There could not have been more contrast in the appearance of the pair. The first was a creased and battered brown paper, its brown blob of sealing wax cracked, and the ink of its outer direction smeared with grease; all were marks, she guessed, of the letter’s long and tortured journey to reach her. The second was crisp and white, fastidiously sealed with red wax into which an imprint—the head of the Roman god Terminus—stood out in sleek relief. But even before she saw this well-known device of the writer, Honor recognized the elegant handwriting on the outside as Erasmus’s.
She placed Erasmus’s letter and the unknown one back onto the stool and tore open the bedraggled, brown one. It was unsigned, but its first words confirmed her assumption: Brother Frish. As she unfolded the paper she heard a walking horse’s hooves clack over the cobbles in the courtyard. That would be Richard, on his way, she thought. She settled herself happily against the tub’s back, sending lavender buds swirling around her, and read.
Frish was full of excitement. He had married! He spoke tenderly of his German, country-bred wife, and scathingly of the celibacy the Church required of priests and monks—“a mockery of God’s love,” he wrote. He was finally a whole man, he said, using body and heart and mind as God had made them to be used, for he was certain that the love between man and woman was pleasant to God, “implanted in us by Him.”
Honor smiled, underst
anding. She looked out at the budding chestnut boughs, their ripe tips crowded against the second-story window pane as if nestling close for fellowship. How beautiful the world was this morning. In the distance beyond the chestnut tree and the courtyard wall, the last shreds of silvery mist were lifting from the woods, and the strengthening sun struck gold on her arm, reminding her of the first yellow celandines and marsh marigolds she and Adam had seen the day before blooming across the woodland floor. Yes, she thought, how beautiful the world, and how sweet and powerful Frish’s words. “A whole man,” he had written. His eloquence moved her this morning more than she could say, for she was almost sure that she was pregnant. She had kept the discovery to herself, not wanting to speak of it until she was quite certain. Now, holding the knowledge with the delight of holding a gift in readiness, she wondered: when would be the perfect time to tell Richard?
She felt a tug of pity for two other women, two unhappy Queens. Anne Boleyn had been delivered of her first child, a girl, not the son the King craved. The princess had been christened Elizabeth, but Honor had heard that the King, foul-tempered with disappointment, had stayed away from the ceremony. And Honor thought of Queen Catherine. The fearful, dithering Pope had finally declared his verdict in the divorce, seven long years after the King had first requested it. And when it came, it seemed like some cruel jest on all concerned: the Pope had pronounced in favor of Catherine. Much good it did the lady now, Honor thought, locked away with her rosary, her prie-dieu, and her confessor in her bleak house on the fens.
She shrugged off these gloomy thoughts and turned back to Frish’s news. He rambled on in high spirits about his absorbing work in Antwerp with William Tyndale. They were embarked, he wrote, on learning Hebrew in order to tackle a translation of the Old Testament, one that he hoped would match Erasmus’s ground-breaking translation fourteen years before of the New Testament from the original Greek. The task would take years, Frish said, but he had never been happier. He closed, sending her his love and benediction. She folded the paper. Brother Frish, it was quite clear, was hale and hearty.
She picked up Erasmus’s letter and tore open the seal, eager to hear his witty version of the news from Freiburg where he now lived. But his familiar, gently mocking voice was now strained with discouragement. Religious battles, he wrote, had sunk the German territories into ghastly bloodshed. She had known, of course, that the Lutheran Evangelicals had taken many German cities and Swiss cantons from the Catholic authorities with the force of arms; she knew, too, that in the fighting, both sides had brandished Erasmus’s writings as moral ammunition. He wrote her now that, had he known an age like theirs was coming, he would never have written many of the things he had.
This saddened her. Erasmus had been one of the first and certainly the most eminent to accuse the old Church of decadence and decay. Years ago he had even congratulated Luther for “seizing the Pope by his tiara and the priests by their paunches,” and had hoped that much good would come of the German monk’s radical ideas.
But, [he wrote to Honor now] just look at the Evangelical people. Have they become any better? Show me a man among them whom their Gospel has changed from a drunkard to a temperate man, from a brute to a gentle creature, from a miser to a liberal person. There are few. Many have actually degenerated. I have never been in their churches, but I have seen them return from hearing the sermon, as if inspired by an evil spirit, the faces of all showing a curious wrath and ferocity.
Honor hurriedly scanned the rest of the dispiriting letter, barely taking it in. She had no desire to think of bloodshed and religious hatred, not on this bright morning. Besides, there was no time to loll about any longer; a full day lay ahead. Adam would soon be in the hall waiting for his Latin lesson with her, and there were arrangements to be made for the upcoming visit of Thornleigh’s sister and her husband. And, if enough time could be snatched for herself, Honor thought, she might make some headway today on a treatise she was writing, calling for reform of England’s still unchanged heresy laws. She went up on her knees to quickly finish washing, and then she remembered the third letter. She reached for it. It was plain, white, with no distinguishing marks.
Madam,
After my right hearty commendations, and trusting this intrusion on your quietness which you bade me not disturb will be forgiven when you know the cause, I am enforced to write my mind plainly unto you.
A grave matter has arisen touching the King’s Grace. It requires your immediate presence here. Forgive the silence of this letter, but more cannot be said until it be said unto your face, that I may therein know your mind.
Therefore come, madam, and come posthaste. I urge this of you, both in the discharge of my duty to the King’s Grace and in the manifestation of my hearty good will which I bear unto you.
From London, this 10th day of March,
Thos. Cromwell
Honor heard boots thud in the passage—a man’s heavy tread, approaching. Cromwell’s letter fluttered to the floor as Honor instinctively folded her arms across her breasts. Only then did she think of the letters. Quickly, she leaned over the tub, grabbed the two pages on the stool and shoved them, with Cromwell’s letter, underneath the stool. She dropped the lavender pouch on top to cover them.
The door swung open. Thornleigh was several strides into the room, absently sorting a handful of papers, when he noticed her. “Oh. Sorry,” he said, stopping. “Left a receipt in here.”
Honor relaxed. Still kneeling, she sat back on her heels, and her hands splashed softly into the hip-high water to pick up the soap. A smile crept over her lips; she loved the way his presence overpowered any room he entered. She watched him now as he scratched his cheek. The beard had long gone. A rush of warmth swept her as she remembered waking up in bed in Yarmouth the morning after Midsummer Eve to see him standing at the window, shaving.
Thornleigh hadn’t moved. His fistful of papers was forgotten as he watched her lather her neck, and all his thoughts of business, apparently, blurred.
She loved that, too—the way he always beheld her body with such straightforward, uncomplicated pleasure.
And he did behold her. Sunlight glinted on her hair, tied up loosely with a blue ribbon whose tips, water-dipped and dripping, clung to the nape of her neck. Her wet breasts glistened, the nipples tightening under his gaze.
He cleared his throat. “I’ll just get the book I wanted. The receipt, I mean.”
He went to a table, quickly found the paper he was looking for, and crammed it into his tunic. He turned back to her, his task completed, and slapped the belt at his hips. “Must go,” he said, rooted to the spot.
She smiled. “Safe journey.”
“Thanks.” He watched a milky patch of foam slide down from her neck and slip over her breast, curving around the red nipple. She raised the cake of soap and bent her arm to reach her back.
“Let me,” he said, striding forward. He tugged off his loose cloak and tossed it on the floor. He knelt at the side of the tub and took the soap from her, dipped it, and lathered it in his hands.
A sigh escaped her as he massaged her shoulder blades in small, then widening, circles. Her head slowly bent forward, her neck like a wax taper melting. With eyes closed she felt with both hands for the rim of the tub to steady herself as his pressure increased. His palms smoothed down her back and over the flare of her hips, molding her shape down to the water, then back up to her shoulders.
But instead of starting down her back again one hand moved around to the hollow of her throat. It went downward with the sliding foam and smoothed over her taut breast. She sensed that her nipple was hard against his palm, like a pebble. Behind her his other hand gripped the far rim, and she leaned back against the tensed muscles of his arm.
From the courtyard a young groom’s breaking voice cried out, “Mistress Agnes, where’s the master? Am I to keep holding Tess here, saddled up for him?”
But the boy’s question, and the answer if one came, neither Honor nor Thornleigh he
ard. As she parted her lips for his mouth his hand smoothed soap froth over her belly at the water line. Kissing her, he lifted her forward with his arm at her back, and she stood on her knees, water dripping from the triangle thicket of curling hair.
Slowly, gently, his fingers slid into the warm cleft that was slippery with foam and desire. She cast her arms around his neck with a moan, and pressed her cheek against his chest, her lips brushing the rough wool tunic. She shuddered against him, then pulled his head down by his hair to kiss his mouth again.
He scooped water and poured it over her shoulders and then gathered her in his arms. He lifted her from the tub and laid her down on the spread silk robe before the hearth and sat back on his heels to unbuckle his belt.
Honor opened her arms to the joy of him, the losing of herself, the finding of herself, the joy of him.
As they uncoiled, the young groom’s whine again breached the bedchamber. “Shall I take Tess in, then? Where’s the master gone to?”
This, Honor and Thornleigh heard. “To heaven,” he murmured into the softness of her neck. He rose and went to the window, stumbling on his scattered clothes, and called down to the boy. “I’ll be right there!”
He dressed quickly, and Honor propped herself up on an elbow and laughed out loud as he hopped in place with one boot on and a foot halfway into the other. He grinned, picked up his cloak and moved toward the door.
“Richard,” she said suddenly. “I need to go to London tomorrow.”
Halfway across the room he turned, still smiling, for her tone had been light.
“I want to buy some silver candlesticks for Joan,” Honor said, not really lying, since this gift for her sister-in-law was one she had given some thought to. “She’s been so kind. I’d like to make the purchase in person.”
