The Tapestry

by Nancy Bilyeau

  I leaped to my feet, indignant. “Have they no decency, these men who grumble? Don’t they know of his dead wife, his stillborn child?”

  Master Gwinn looked up at me, shading his eyes from the sun with his grease-stained hand. “We all of us honor the constable’s loss, and especially those who have buried wives.” Agatha patted his arm. “But Scovill may be able to perform his duties better in a new town, away from memories.”

  I was seized by a powerful desire to jump onto my horse and ride to Dartford, to comfort Geoffrey, make amends, something. But the urge passed. I could do Constable Scovill no greater service than to stay away from him.

  When the Gwinns had finally finished every crumb of dinner, we set out again, the sun nearing its highest point. Soon we reached Southwark, the sprawling borough on the other side of the Thames from the City of London. The roads thickened with others on horseback, with wagons, with young apprentices on foot. We passed a few shops and a great many taverns.

  It was in front of one tavern, at a sharp corner of the road, that I first felt something. I turned, quickly, to see . . . what? Who? The inn’s shutters were thrown open and shiny-faced men leaned out of the windows, enjoying the spring day while they gulped their ale. Nothing looked amiss.

  I nudged my horse to catch up to the Gwinns. But before my mare had plodded five minutes more up the road, I swiveled again. There was no mistaking the feeling this time: someone watched me, someone followed. But when I turned, no one met my eyes. Every man and woman seemed bent on their own ordinary business.

  Was it because we neared London that I felt apprehension? My usual dread of the capital city and the king’s court was laced with fresh turmoil over the departure of Geoffrey Scovill. But as much as I tried to assure myself that must be it, I sensed something else. Something threatening.

  The string of shops and taverns had given way to a foul-looking marsh and, beyond that, the top of London Bridge, stretching across the Thames in the distance. I’d thought myself well prepared, but as London loomed, a sour dread clutched my stomach. Between that and my jangled nerves over being watched, I felt rather dizzy. I tried to breathe deeply, to steady myself, but it only served to suck in deeper the odor from a nearby tanning pit.

  When I first heard it, the rumbling was a welcome distraction. It resembled thunder—but that was impossible. It was a bright, cloudless afternoon. Tightening my hands on the reins, I slowed my horse to peer up into the sky and then all around us. The Gwinns heard it, too; Master Gwinn pointed at a long, high brick wall south of the marsh. Handsome brick towers rose beyond it. Perhaps this was someone’s fine manor house. A faint cloud of dust hovered just above the wall—it seemed somehow connected to the rumbling.

  “Shall we have a look?” asked Master Gwinn, his face crinkled with curiosity. Agatha agreed at once. Their lives in Dartford were predictable, prescribed. They were happily caught up in the strange sights and sounds of our journey.

  Turning points are not always evident to us when they appear. How different everything might have been for me if I had not nodded in agreement and then ridden with my friends to discover what was on the other side of that wall. But I perceived no harm in it. No harm at all.

  We fell in behind a group of men scrambling through an opening in the wall. We had entered a large, square courtyard. But despite the fact that this was a handsome property, worthy of careful tending, all was in disarray. A mountain of rubble stood in the middle of the courtyard. Planks of wood stretched across another part of it. Men shouted to one another. I heard the bellow of animals.

  “Secure the ropes, ye bastards!” screamed a man. “And clear the path if ye want to live.”

  The dust settled, and I could make out a long row of oxen. These were not like the farm stock I’d seen in a field earlier this day, but massive animals, chained to one another. Three of the walls of the courtyard stood, but the fourth had collapsed, and not by some failure of construction. These men must have torn it down. At the opposite side of the courtyard a stone structure abutting the main house was half collapsed. The workers now fastened ropes round the base of a tower that still stood at the base of that structure, a tall one with a cross atop it. As the workers pushed one another out of the way to clear a path between the oxen and tower, I realized, with a sickening rush, that the stone structure—tower and all—that man and beast struggled to demolish was a church. Why did no one protect it? I peered at the windows of the magnificent main house and realized they were empty of glass. This place had been stripped and abandoned.

  Master Oliver Gwinn, who had bent down to speak to someone standing amid the rubble, turned to his wife and me, his face grim.

  “Bermondsey Abbey,” he said.

  I knew of Bermondsey Abbey, as did every nun, monk, and friar. It was a revered Cluniac house, where once even queens lived in retirement, such as Elizabeth Woodville and Catherine of Valois. The abbey’s monks had obviously been ejected, the house’s precious belongings hauled to the royal treasury. Now the walls themselves must come down. It was happening from one end of England to the other, the destruction of the monasteries. My own beloved Dartford house was demolished down to the last brick. The king then ordered the raising of a grand manor house on the same land.

  But I had not witnessed my priory’s annihilation; all the nuns and friars stayed away, consumed with grief. It would have been like witnessing a murder.

  The man atop the wagon whipped the oxen, hard. The animals strained forward, and a thick chain grew taut and trembled. But the tower on the other end of the chain did not move.

  “Come down,” screamed the ox driver, standing to whip yet more. “Down.”

  There was a snap, followed by a groan, and a centuries’ old tower crumbled. Almost nothing remained now of the church of Bermondsey Abbey. Here was the will of Henry VIII and of Thomas Cromwell—they destroyed what was good and holy, and God did nothing to punish them.

  A new cry rose a moment later, as dust settled again. A pale female head peered above the ravaged base of the tower. For a terrible instant I thought it was a woman who had been trapped inside the structure. But then I realized what it was: a statue of a saint.

  “No, Joanna, don’t,” said Agatha. But I was already going forward, steering my horse around the people and piles of broken rock to get closer.

  She was beautiful—a pure, marble woman clutching a book to her bosom. It seemed a miracle that she survived the wreckage. Perhaps it was a sign?

  A snickering raced around the knot of men who’d also drawn closer. Something was about to happen.

  “No.” It was half groan and half gasp. No one paid heed.

  A young man ran past me, holding something. The others stood aside to clear the way for him. He charged toward the statue, raising the object, which I realized was a large hammer.

  With a grunt, he slammed his hammer into the saint’s face. Where there had once been eyes and nose was a savage, gaping hole.

  “Death to all Papists!” he shouted.

  3

  The toppling of the abbey church set forth a vicious glee among the people of Southwark, like a torrent of bright blood after a scab is ripped away.

  The destruction had quite another effect on me.

  A devouring rage dampened my senses. The laughter of the crowd faded. The odors I always choked on in Southwark and London—privy buckets, rotting food, ale, and burning lye—receded. The faces of those surrounding me blurred, with one exception: Agatha stared back at me, her hand clamped over her nose and mouth, as if her face had been mutilated and not that of the marble girl of the tower.

  A crowd of men swarmed to the tower. When the young man swung back his hammer to strike the statue again, another grabbed it from him. Laughing, the two of them fought over the weapon. A heavyset man pushed his way to the front of the crowd, pulled out a long knife, and raised it in an exaggerated arc, aiming for the
girl’s marble breast. He turned and leered to the crowd. Hoots of laughter sounded.

  How I wanted to stop them. Words of condemnation—angry and accusatory—burned my tongue. I dug my nails into my palms to force myself to stay silent. The old Joanna Stafford would have plunged into the fray. But I had sworn to govern myself with more caution. I must not call attention to our party. What would a crowd of at least fifty tough and coarsened men who hated Rome do to two women who’d once served in a Dominican priory, defended only by a farmer in middle years and two country servants?

  “Cease this at once,” shouted a voice. I touched my lips, unsure if I’d been the one to say it, but it was a man who’d given the order. And he was obeyed. The ruffian lowered his knife from the statue.

  I turned in the saddle to see. The man who stepped forward wore a plain, dark doublet and hose; he was hatless, and gray streaks lightened his hair, which must have once been as black as mine. He carried a bound book under his left arm. As he approached the tower, the mob fell back, sullen-faced. A few of them made a great show of resuming their tasks on the site.

  Master Gwinn leaned down again to make inquiry and then told us, “That man is an agent of the Court of Augmentations.”

  “A court?” Agatha asked, bewildered.

  “Not now. We must leave—we have no place here,” said Oliver Gwinn with unusual curtness.

  My fingers tightened on the reins. I knew what the court was and what this man represented. Thomas Cromwell had created it to administer the revenues of the monasteries. “Court of Augmentations.” Such fine words to describe theft, to justify taking all the holy objects within the abbey churches, the chalices and plate and books and illuminated manuscripts, along with all the land. Which toady of the king’s would receive Bermondsey as a reward for his loyalty?

  Master Gwinn paused to wipe his face with a cloth as soon as we were clear of the fallen abbey, sagging in his saddle with relief.

  We were safe now, but I was not glad of it. I was ashamed. Cromwell’s agent hadn’t stopped the mob from defiling the woman’s statue because it was the right thing to do but in order to preserve a valuable piece of pillage. A passage of Scripture flooded my thoughts, about the apostle Peter’s anguish after Jesus was taken. “I do not know that man,” Peter swore to those who pointed at him in the courtyard of Gethsemane, and then, when he realized he had denied Jesus Christ out of fear and weakness, just as had been predicted, he wept. Hot salty tears pricked my own eyes. I brushed them back with a furious hand.

  “Stop,” I called out. I was so loud Agatha jumped in her saddle. Everyone halted.

  “I will go to Whitehall today—or not at all,” I said.

  “Mistress Joanna, my cousin’s house is not far from here,” said Master Gwinn. “We are expected. We’ll stay there tonight and escort you to the palace tomorrow morning, as planned.”

  “No. Today or not at all.”

  Agatha nudged her horse to get closer. “Joanna, I know how disturbed you are, and I share your sentiment. But we need to rest, all of us. You cannot go to a king’s palace in those clothes.” She pointed at my garments—a plain, dark gray riding kirtle and bodice, layered with the dirt of the road. In the travel satchel carried by a Gwinn servant were my finest clothes, appropriate for the occasion.

  I said in a rush, “It does not matter what I wear, and after what we’ve witnessed, I could not bear to don finery to go before the royal household. With all my soul, I do not wish to proceed at all.” Arthur’s round face appeared in my mind. “But there are sound reasons to continue. If you would be so good as to point the way to London Bridge, I can manage the route to Whitehall alone. You can ride to your cousin’s house to rest, or return to Dartford, whatever you wish.”

  After a hushed conversation, the Gwinns, obviously reluctant, said they would accompany me to Whitehall this afternoon.

  “But what if no one will see you today?” Agatha asked.

  “Then I leave Whitehall having carried out my duty, which was to wait upon the keeper of the wardrobe. The summons didn’t say how long I had to wait. An hour or two will do. If he will not see me, so be it.”

  Master Gwinn opened his mouth to say something more, but Agatha shook her head. She knew how little likelihood there was of my altering course.

  Riding faster now—or as fast as we could up crowded streets—we made our way to London Bridge. As the horses plodded through that square tunnel stretching across the Thames, it happened. The sensation returned. While I was near blind with rage in Southwark, I had no awareness of being observed. But now that my anger had banked, I felt eyes burning into the back of my head once more. I didn’t bother to turn, for I knew that I’d see nothing, learn nothing.

  There was no other explanation for this. While my horse plodded across London Bridge, I concluded that my mind was twisted by Jacquard Rolin, the imperial spy who trained me as part of the conspiracy, demeaned me, and, finally, attacked me. Because the third part of the prophecy could only be revealed in Ghent, the birthplace of the Emperor Charles, Jacquard took me there. When the raven climbs the rope, the dog must soar like a hawk in the time of the bear. That was the full prophecy. After the hanging of the “raven,” the mystic nun Sister Elizabeth Barton, it was up to me, the Dominican, the order associated with the dog, to act swiftly in the time “of the bear.” And the objective was . . . to kill the king. When I had recoiled, Jacquard demanded, “Are you so stupid that you did not perceive that from the beginning this was the conspiracy to build the perfect assassin?” But no matter what King Henry had done to my family and friends, to my chosen way of life, I could not commit murder. I spent four harrowing months in Europe, most of it imprisoned in Ghent. After I escaped from Jacquard—when he nearly killed me—I managed to make my way back to England.

  In the peace of Dartford these last months, I’d never felt threatened, never been contacted again by those men of the shadows. None of these self-protective instincts Jacquard nurtured in me had stirred. But now, traveling to the most dangerous city in England, they were awakened.

  I reached up to press between my fingers the slender chain holding a crucifix, hidden beneath my bodice. When I returned home, I would seek guidance in prayer for how to return to true peace, the obedience and humility and wisdom of the Dominican Order that I would always revere.

  Our horses reached the other side of the bridge. Judging by the position of the sun, there was ample time for this mission. I’d been told king’s officials performed business until nightfall. That was hours away. We rode past the churches and taverns, the goldsmiths and grocers, the haberdashers and brewers, the salters and sadlers. And we wove around the Londoners who’d emerged from their narrow homes to embrace April—perhaps the first genuinely warm day of the Year of Our Lord 1540—with their pale, dirty faces turned upward to the cleansing rays of the sun.

  With the Thames now on our left, we rode on the Strand and then the King’s Street to the massive complex of buildings rising in the distance before us. We left the city of London for the liberties of Westminster, where the seat of government lay, whether it was the king’s grand palace, Parliament’s vast hall, or the church’s soaring abbey.

  I had not been inside palace or abbey. Last summer I came close. An anonymous woman, I’d watched as thousands of men marched before the king and council in the Great London Muster, proving their readiness to defend the realm. I remembered the men striding past a platform in front of a massive gatehouse.

  Today I approached the same gatehouse not from a park but from a street that grew so crowded that we had to dismount. The street continued under the gatehouse archway, beyond to the abbey and Parliament. Entrance to the palace itself on the left appeared to be through a large door in the side of the gatehouse.

  Now I faced a new problem. Perhaps one hundred men, many of them clutching papers, jostled to move forward in the mass of humanity trying to gain admittance
to that door. Master Gwinn, a bear of a man, pushed his way forward, creating a path for me and his wife. As we shuffled forward in his wake, one name was repeated, to the right and left, forward and behind: Cromwell, Cromwell, Cromwell, Cromwell. Once again I saw that precise script on my royal summons and shuddered. He had signed the document, but I was not here to see the Lord Privy Seal, I told myself. My humble business would involve only the wardrobe master.

  But would it be possible to see anyone today? The desperate petitioners formed a near-impenetrable wall before the gatehouse. Even with the efforts of the stalwart Master Gwinn, I might not succeed.

  A part of me did not want to succeed. From a distance, the gatehouse was majestic, and I assumed that on drawing nearer, it would diminish in grandeur, as official buildings often do. But the effect was the opposite—now that I was yards from it, the palace gatehouse dazzled. The entire building was made of stone carved and painted in a white-and-black checkered pattern. The raised squares gleamed, as if they had been not merely washed but polished. Two rounded towers stretched three stories high. Between the towers sparkled tall windows. The busts of four crowned heads stared sightless into the distance, representing members of the pitiless Tudor family. Fleurs-de-lis graced the stones, along with carvings of lions and dragons, greyhounds even. I couldn’t begin to guess how costly it must have been to fashion such a building, resembling a game board more than a gatehouse.

  I took a step backward as I strained to look all the way to the top of the octagonal turrets. To my surprise, two distant human heads peeked over the wall. From lofty heights, the people of the king’s court surveyed us. With a start, I realized that people peered at us from behind the thick glass of windows as well. Perhaps it amused them, to survey the grubby pack from within their lavish stronghold.

  The crowd shifted before me, and an opening yawned. Master Gwinn surged forward. Now we were in front and could finally be seen by the man in charge, tall and wide-bellied, planted in front of the gatehouse door.