by Barbara Kyle
“No, sire, I mean the men you hold in your Tower. Fisher and More. The whole realm knows of their opposition to your will, and of their love for the old Queen. The potential rebel lords at least have sworn the Oath, but Fisher and More have not. A word from either one, and the rebels will cease to merely grumble. They will muster.”
Henry squirmed, then hauled himself from the chair. He moved to the window and looked out, his hands balled on either side of the casement.
Bastwick spoke to the massive back. “And of the two, sire, Sir Thomas More is the one you must fear. Bishop Fisher is old and has little fight left in him, and the people have no love for such a prince of the old Church. Indeed, he has shouted so long against your policies that many feel he has led himself into the Tower. But More is a layman. And well liked. And his silence has moved many hearts.”
Henry’s voice was very low. “Thomas could always do that. Could always move people with that gifted tongue of his. Now, with his silence, he moves them still.”
His fist thudded on the wall. “Moves them against me! God’s body, all have turned against me.” Rhythmically, his fist pounded the stone. “Wife. Daughter. Friend. All turned into enemies.”
There was a soft knock. The door opened. The royal chamberlain swept in, smiling with excitement. “The papal envoy is arrived, Your Majesty. He waits in your Presence chamber.”
Henry’s shoulders shivered as if to shake Thomas More from his back. He shunted himself around and stood with feet wide apart. “Well? What’s he like?”
“Most cordial, Your Majesty. An elderly, courtly gentleman. And, he says he is eager to give you great news.”
Henry’s eyebrows shot up. “Is he now?” He thrust his thumbs into his sash and pulled himself up to his full height, and his lungs inflated with the vigor of kingship. He glanced at Bastwick. “Well, Father, shall we see this eager pigeon from Rome? Perhaps he brings a clean slate with him. Come!”
Following the chamberlain, they strode together across the private chamber, then through the withdrawing room. A guard opened the door to the audience chamber, and a plump of gentlemen chatting near the canopied throne quieted for the King’s entrance. Henry stopped for a moment in the doorway. He cast a small royal smile on the Roman envoy whose ingratiating bow took his white head lower than the silver knob of his walking stick.
At this show of deference, Henry beamed. He leaned to Bastwick and whispered, “Perhaps God has heard my prayers, Father. This new Pope may be ready to bargain after all.”
“I’ll get it yet!” Honor laughed. She was panting from the exercise. “You can’t run away!” She was straddling the path to the gate in Erasmus’s garden, her arms stretched out to her sides to cut off Pieter’s route of escape.
Pieter was grinning and panting, too, from the game. He had just come with the Frobens from their house, and Johannes Froben, master printer, had proudly announced to Honor that Pieter had brought her a sample of his first solo work at the press. But Pieter, red-faced as he pulled the paper from his pocket, had been shy to present it; too many mistakes in it, he said. Honor had laughed and reached for it, but Pieter had jumped back, and soon the thing had become a contest. She had already chased him three times around the vegetable patch where Marthe was on her knees ruthlessly thinning a riot of carrot seedlings.
Honor wiped sweat from her upper lip. “Oho, you’re in trouble now!” Her grin was full of exuberant menace as she began a predatory stalk toward him.
“To the tree, boy!” Froben shouted through his laughter. He and his wife had been watching the chase from the bench under the cherry tree. Baby Isabel was solemnly watching, too, sitting on the grass between their feet. “Get behind the chestnut tree!” Froben urged.
Pieter darted sideways toward the thick trunk. Honor sprang after him, almost on his heels. She swiped his shoulder, but he zig-zagged out of her grasp. She lost her balance and lurched forward in an ungainly stumble, her arms windmilling to regain her balance.
The baby gurgled with delight and clapped tiny hands that were stiff with glee. That made Katerina Froben laugh so hard she had to lean against her husband’s shoulder.
Honor was laughing, too, and she was bending over with her hands on her knees to catch her breath when she heard the garden gate close behind her. A moment later she felt Erasmus’s bony hand grasp her elbow. She turned and was about to laughingly explain the mayhem in his garden, but he interrupted her.
“News,” he blurted.
She looked at his haggard eyes. This news could only be bad. “From England?”
Erasmus nodded, swallowing. He was out of breath as well. It appeared he had hurried to get home. Honor led him to a chair under an awning that stretched out beneath his upstairs study. As they both caught their breath, she glanced back at the others. Pieter had run up to the trio at the bench holding a huge sunflower in front of his face like a mask, and he was creating great hilarity as he ran around them in circles making lionlike roars.
Erasmus sat shaking his head in bewilderment. “So strange. So unaccountable. Is this new Pope bloody-minded or simply an imbecile?”
“The Pope? What do you mean, sir? What has happened?”
“The Pope has named Bishop Fisher a cardinal!”
“You mean, King Henry has released Fisher?” A spark of hope flared in her breast. If one prisoner had been freed, she thought, why not the other? “Released Sir Thomas, too?”
Erasmus groaned. “I mean no such thing.”
“Then how—?”
“The Pope, whether utterly blind to the events in England or simply wanting to terrify the King—who knows to what purpose?—sent his envoy to London to declare the appointment of Fisher as Cardinal. I just bumped into Hendrich in the square. His factor was doing business at the London court when it happened. He said the King was in a rage as never before.”
A hand tightened around Honor’s heart. “Why, what has he done?”
Erasmus pulled off his velvet cap and distractedly raked long fingers through his gray hair. He went on as if trying to make sense of the disaster. “Apparently, at the announcement, the King strode up to the envoy, a frail old gentleman, and snatched his walking stick from him and cracked it in two across his knee. He pointed a jagged end into the envoy’s face and shouted that very gladly would he see his bishop tricked out in a new, red hat—and to be sure of a proper fit, he would send Bishop Fisher’s head to Rome!”
Honor closed her eyes.
“And then the King stormed off, and several heard him say that he would not rest until he saw both the traitors’ heads impaled on London Bridge. He’d have it done, he swore, before the Feast of St. John.”
Erasmus threw up his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Ah!” he sighed, “what a chaos of misfortune my old friend More has brought on himself. Truly, it is perilous striving with princes.”
He edged from the chair. “I must go and send a message to our Bishop. Perhaps something can yet be done…a letter to the Pope…a plea to the King. Though,” he murmured, moving toward the house, “I fear that there is little hope.” At the door he glanced back at Honor. “Gracious Savior, what a world!” He hurried inside.
Alone in the shade of the awning Honor stared out at the garden. Its sun-hot colors felt suddenly blinding. Sir Thomas was about to die. Within the month. She would be sitting in this quiet garden, and across the Channel the ax would clang, severing his head from his body. And that would be the end of it. The end of the man who murdered Ralph Pepperton. Who gleefully sent Humphrey Sydenham to the stake, and loosed his dogs to run down Brother Frish. The end of his hold on her. And would she then rejoice? Rejoice to know that Sir Thomas More was dead?
Slightly dizzy, she turned her head. Beside the kitchen window two lean dragon-flies were dancing their silent courtship in midair. They alighted on the window sill, their bodies joined and trembling together in the sun.
She realized that Pieter was standing in front of her. Smiling shyly, he held out the ex
ercise he had printed on Froben’s press. He thrust the paper into her hand, then dashed back to join the others.
Honor’s eyes strayed down to the Latin words. The text Pieter had used for practice was St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians.
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.
And though I have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing…
When I was a child I spake as a child, I understood as a child. But when I became a man I put away childish things…
And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.
Honor stared at the paper. Some of the letters were slightly crooked. The last line was imprinted too faintly, and there was an error in the spelling of ‘fides’—faith. Yet…Out of the mouths of babes, she thought. Pieter. Despite all that has been done to him he lives without rancor. In his prayers he still remembers the priest who used and abandoned him. Pieter lives in charity.
She lowered the page. Slowly, an answer began to lap at the edges of her mind. The restlessness of weeks, the ambivalent anger of months washed away. All that was left was the knowledge that Sir Thomas was part of her. To imagine him dying was to die a little herself.
He had taught her to read. Taught her to think. “A book is like an acorn,” he had once told her on the bench under the oaks. “Just as the acorn holds within itself a colossal tree, a book holds within itself whole other worlds.” She saw that everything that had come to her in the years that had followed—the wrestlings of her conscience, the striving for some better social order, the fulfillment of love and the despair at its loss, the disillusionment at the self-deception of the world and the hunger to know why men craved such self-deception—all this turmoil was nothing less than life itself. And the turmoil, the sweet, exasperating search—consciousness, in fact—had begun at Sir Thomas’s side. If consciousness was life, then life was what she owed him.
She looked across the garden. Pieter stood grinning over Isabel and gently waving the sunflower, as large and as sunny as his face. He swept it like a sorcerer’s wand over the baby’s head as if he were invoking some shield of safe-keeping to surround her. Isabel’s arms shot up to touch it. Pieter flopped to his knees with a disarming smile, as if to say she had vanquished him, and he handed her the flower. The Frobens laughed gently.
Honor felt tears spring, yet she was smiling. What a circle her search had led her in! Strengthened by Della Montagna’s little book, she had cleared her mind to ask the most forbidden question of all: had man created God? But St. Paul—and Pieter—had cleared her heart to ask the only question worth asking. What did it matter if God existed or not when love and duty on earth required all of one’s self, both heart and mind?
It had taken only moments to realize that she did not want Sir Thomas to die. It took only a heartbeat more to realize that she could not allow him to die.
The Feast of St. John the Baptist, the King had threatened. Midsummer Day. Little more than three weeks off. Twenty-four days to race from Freiburg to London.
She heard Isabel’s cry. Her breasts tightened, the need in her baby’s voice tugging forth her milk. She looked at the child and felt the stab of separation. Heavens, was she mad? Abandon her child? Return to England? No, no, the risks were too great! If Bastwick should catch her…Erasmus was right. Sir Thomas had brought this crisis on himself. What had she been thinking of?
She hurried toward the bench where the crying child sat with the Frobens. Just then Pieter lifted Isabel up in his arms. Isabel kept crying and stretched out both hands to the couple who stood and crowded in, concerned. Marthe, too, was on her feet, slapping dirt off her apron and hobbling closer. Honor stopped at the scene before her. Anxious, generous faces encircled her baby. Even Erasmus’s white face had poked out from the open window of his study to look down. Pieter hugged Isabel and rocked her. Isabel stopped crying. Then, she snatched a fistful of Pieter’s golden hair. “Ouch! Isabel!” he cried, wincing, and the others laughed, even the baby.
Honor saw that she was not needed. Again, Sir Thomas’s crisis returned to her mind. But, she agonized, if she went, what would become of her child? The hollowness of losing Richard was still agony enough, but to lose Isabel, too…
Losing Richard. The cutting fact loomed larger than all others, still. It flayed her, still. She bled, still. And felt drained. Did it really matter, she asked herself, if Bastwick caught her? If Bastwick killed her? Life without Richard was a drab thing. And if, in hazarding that life, she could save Sir Thomas…if she could act one last time, act boldly out of love, not hate…
Honor watched the happy faces before her, feeling frozen, as if her body had disappeared from their view. Yet her spirit seemed to be floating above them all, just as Pieter’s giant sunflower had floated over Isabel. She had no choice, she realized. Life beckoned to Isabel with outstretched arms, and whether her life’s beginning was spent with her mother or with others, her bright future was undimmed as long as there was love. And, looking at these friends around her, who could doubt that there was love?
But for Sir Thomas all that beckoned was death.
She realized she was trembling. She closed her eyes. “Forgive me, Richard,” she whispered. “For this one, last risk, forgive me. It is a debt I owe.”
Thornleigh let himself be pulled up the dark nave of Münster cathedral, though he feared what the child might be taking him to see.
“Deurvorsts,” the boy repeated eagerly, tugging Thornleigh’s sleeve and pointing toward a chapel in the north transept. Deurvorst was the name Thornleigh had asked about as he had wandered for hours around the smoking city piled with emaciated corpses. This filthy boy had seemed to know the name, and, for a handful of coins which Thornleigh had gratefully poured into his small grimy hand, he was now leading Thornleigh to the end of the nave. Thornleigh felt light-headed from the mixture of dread and hope, for this could be the end of his search. But would it be an end that he could bear to see?
The search—months of dejected slogging punctuated by moments of optimism—had brought him this morning to the outskirts of Münster where an inn-keeper had sworn that Honor, with the Dutch couple, had entered the city just before the siege had begun. And so, before Münster’s walls, all Thornleigh’s hopes had stood ready to be fulfilled or blasted. The latter—he tried to face the fact—was by far the more likely, for he had arrived the morning after the Prince-Bishop von Waldeck’s troops had finally smashed into the city and taken their awful vengeance.
He and Legge had pushed their way past the others sifting through the gates in the wake of the destruction—camp followers; frantic people seeking relatives; looters and foragers—and Thornleigh had seen sights he would never forget, though he knew he would try all his life to do so. Ten-year-old girls had been raped and strangled. Old men—the Anabaptist “Elders”—had been flayed, some left to swing in chains from the town hall, some pushed from church towers to be dashed onto the cobbles below. The erstwhile leader of these people, “King” Jan of Leyden, had been strapped naked to a sizzling-hot iron throne in the market square, and a sizzling crown lowered to sear his skull. His twisted, enthroned, putrefying corpse still sat upright in a mockery of kingship. The foragers skirted it, crossing themselves.
And the inhabitants had been put to the sword. Only a handful of scrawny boys—Angels, they called themselves—had been nimble enough to evade the soldiers in the onslaught. Now, the soldier’s blood-lust had been slaked, and the boys felt bold enough to emerge. Thornleigh’s guide was one of these. But they appeared to be the only survivors. Most of the inhabitants, in fact, had died of starvation before the attack.
If Honor was alive in this cathedral, Thornleigh knew, it would be a miracle.
The child tugged him into a small chapel. “Deurvorsts,” he said again
, and again he pointed, triumphantly.
Thornleigh froze. Spread-eagled on top of the marble tomb of a crusader baron was the naked corpse of a middle-aged woman, dried blood clotted between her thighs. Below her feet a man’s headless body sat slumped against the tomb, a Dutch Bible stuffed into the bloodied cavity of his neck. The chapel held only these two dead people. No living being.
Thornleigh staggered out of the cathedral into the light. Afraid he might retch, he lowered himself onto the stone steps. The corpse-putrefied air of the street sickened him further. He lowered his head between his knees.
If she was in this city, somewhere among the mutilated dead, he did not want to know it.
“Sir?”
Thornleigh looked up. Legge stood before him. Even he had been made white-faced by hideous Münster.
“Place is a bloody charnel house,” Legge murmured, sitting with a thud beside Thornleigh.
Thornleigh looked out at the city square. A company of soldiers on horseback clattered arrogantly through, sending the knots of scavengers scuttling aside. Thornleigh watched a woman at the bottom of the cathedral steps as she tugged the boots off a dead man and handed them to a child with a sack of booty larger than himself.
“Sir,” Legge said, not without sympathy. “It’d be a miracle if she’d lived through this.”
Thornleigh flinched at this echo of his own desolate thoughts. He nodded slowly. In long-besieged Münster, where most had starved to death, the rest now lay massacred.
Could he hope for a miracle?
Thornleigh buried his face in his hands. He had never believed in miracles.
36
The Bell Tower
Summer thunder rumbled above the Tower of London.
It was dusk. Honor walked behind a guard up to the portcullis of the Lion Tower, the first of the three gate towers that defended the entrance across the moat. Like an executioner’s drumroll, the thunder accompanied her all along the route into the ancient fortress. She passed over the moat bridge, her eyes fixed on the stone nest of fortifications that loomed ahead. Royal garrison and arsenal for four hundred and fifty years, the Tower’s layers of encompassing walls had been added by generations of medieval kings to protect their palace and armories, treasury and mint. Though surrendered more than once by the garrison in civil wars, the fortress had never been taken by force.
