Queen's Lady, The

by Kyle, Barbara

  “Though I doubt, sir,” Honor had teased him then, “that she had first rejected invitations from the King of France, Mary of Hungary, and Sigismund of Poland, all begging her to make her home with them.”

  He had fluttered a hand disdainfully. “To be a puppet at their courts, you mean.” Pretentiousness was not among Erasmus’s many foibles. He had finally accepted the modest house in Freiburg, placed at his disposal by his friend King Ferdinand, the Emperor Charles’s brother, mainly because the climate agreed with his delicate health.

  Marthe snatched up the plate of fish. “Starve, then, you miserly bag of bones!” she shouted in German.

  Not understanding, Erasmus huffed in Latin, “I’ll starve before I eat such dregs!”

  Honor looked from frazzled housekeeper to pouting academic. It was difficult to know to which unlikely creature she owed more. Though he had known Honor only through her letters, the fastidious old bachelor had taken her in, a penniless, pregnant woman with a hungry boy in tow, and had asked no questions. And when she finally came to explain that she had been hunted out of England as a criminal against church and state, Erasmus, who had made non-partisanship an iron principle of his life, merely nodded, offering no recriminations. But Marthe had a strong claim on her too, for it was thanks to her calm midwifery six months ago that Honor, after a difficult labor, had been safely delivered of a healthy daughter.

  “Just bring fruit, please, Marthe,” she said, entreating peace. “We’ll have it in the garden. And bring Isabel out too, if she’s awake.” Grudgingly, Marthe accepted Honor’s arbitration and flounced into the kitchen.

  “Did you really have to eat slop in the monastery?” Honor asked with a smile as she and Erasmus rose. They spoke in Latin, for although Erasmus had once taught at Cambridge—a stint, he assured her, that he had barely endured, aghast as he was at the filth of English houses, and depressed as he became at the backwardness of English letters—Erasmus knew no more than a smattering of the English language.

  “Gray salt fish, day in, day out,” he answered. “And around us, moldy walls and stinking privies. And a flogging for any infringement of the myriad rules.” He shuddered. “Thus are those of callow and tender years disfigured under the pretext of religion.”

  “Whyever did you stay?”

  “As an orphan I was shunted into the monastic life. Once there, and finding a friend or two to lighten my misery, I made the hideous mistake of taking the vows. It was a coarse and frigid life,” he concluded mournfully, and tugged his heavy furred robe closer to his throat, though the evening was balmy.

  They were strolling arm in arm into the small walled garden, moving slowly, the pace ordained both by Erasmus’s arthritic joints and by a mutual wish to savor the golden, early evening light. It gilded everything—the broad leaves of the chestnut tree, the cherry blossoms floating down from frothed branches, the fiery red flowers on the climbing beans.

  “Ah,” Erasmus smiled as they came to a table where a canvas pouch lay, “Pieter has been feeding the birds again.”

  “And left the seed out. Again.”

  “No matter. See? They have come for their supper.” He tugged open the pouch’s drawstring and scattered a handful of seed. Birds fluttered out of branches and drifted down around their feet. “Is he staying at Froben’s again tonight?”

  “Yes.” Honor smiled. Pieter, now fluent in German, had become entranced with the printing press at the home of Erasmus’s publisher and his wife. “And it gets harder to scrub the ink off him each time he comes home. Oh, I haven’t told you yet. They’ve offered to take him on as an apprentice.”

  “Ah, that’s good,” Erasmus said. “He’s happy there.”

  “Happy? He’s ecstatic. He talks of nothing but tympans and friskets. And he’s positively poetic when he sighs to me of half Gothic and Italic type styles.”

  Erasmus chuckled. “Just like young Froben’s father. Revolutionized the trade. If I did not love that man for introducing Roman type, I positively bless his memory for making my books small and inexpensive. Even a baker’s son can afford them. Do you know, when I was a boy—before the printing press—it took twenty-five sheepskins to make enough parchment for a two hundred page text. A fortune! And a scribe needed five months to copy it out.”

  They sat down together on a bench under the cherry tree. Erasmus flung out another handful of seed.

  Honor watched the birds peck in the grass between the flat stones. “You love this place, don’t you? This garden where cardinals and princes and learned men come to visit you.”

  “Most of them strangers, and too many of them fools,” he said, eyes twinkling. “But yes, this garden is my blessing. My favorite spot on earth.”

  “And mine,” she said softly. “An island of sanity in a world gone mad.” She stretched her legs and her neck, cramped after the afternoon spent at the desk where she was helping Erasmus compile a new edition of his Latin Adages. She took a deep breath of the blossom-fragrant air. She had found contentment here. Isabel was her joy. Pieter was thriving. And the sorrow over Thornleigh’s death she was trying with all her will to put away, as friends here told her she must. She tried to imagine grief one day coming to an end, like a wound finally run dry of blood. But still, some nights, the flow was impossible to stanch, and came in hemorrhaging tears. However, she was trying to force herself to think of the future for her daughter’s sake. To imagine, one day, even going back to England. So far, she had not even written home. Adam, she knew, would be well taken care of by his aunt. For now, it was safer for him, for everyone, if they knew nothing of her whereabouts. Yes, here she’d found security and comfort and, in assisting Erasmus, fulfilling work. Why not peace, then? She rubbed her neck, evading her own question, for she knew that, quite apart from missing Thornleigh every hour of every day, the answer had to do with Sir Thomas. And she did not want to think about Sir Thomas.

  “Epicurus would have us spend all our days in gardens,” Erasmus was saying.

  Honor smiled. “But only with friends. And definitely no fools.”

  “Then on both scores I am blessed, my dear, since your arrival,” he said, patting her hand.

  She was moved. “Sir, you honor me.”

  “Most fitting,” he chuckled, “since you are Honor itself.”

  She leaned back against the tree trunk. Somewhere, far beyond the ivied walls, a woman was singing a lullaby. “Your Garden of Eden,” she murmured.

  He frowned. “Oh, I hope not. That garden of the Old Testament is a terrifying place. A scene of suspicion and dread, of deceit and fury. And of no turning back. It makes me quite nervous,” he said seriously, and Honor laughed. “No,” Erasmus said with a smile, “I prefer a quieter garden. Something like More’s setting for his Utopia is the ideal. His affable storyteller, Raphael, sat on a bench much like this one, I imagine.”

  Honor ran her fingers along the stone seat. Memories flooded back, despite her will to dam them. “And I first read that tale sitting on a bench under Sir Thomas’s own oak trees by his pond,” she said.

  “That is charming.” But Erasmus’s smile had already faded at his own inadvertent injection of More’s name. These days, they both avoided speaking of him. The news from England was too distressing.

  For thirteen months More had been a prisoner in the Tower of London. The day after Honor had arrived in Freiburg, Erasmus had told her all he knew about it. They had been sitting over dinner in this very garden.

  “More has refused to swear some reprehensible oath,” Erasmus had explained. “The King is calling himself Supreme Head of the Church in England—vanity of vanities!—and Secretary Cromwell has decreed that every man in the kingdom must swear to acknowledge him as such. But More will not do it.” He had irritably batted away a fruit fly as if it represented the tyranny of monarchs. “Now More and Bishop Fisher are being held without trial, and accused of misprision of treason, whatever that odious phrase means.”

  Honor had tried to clamp down her shock at
the news. “It means criminal resistance to the government short of conspiracy or rebellion,” she had explained, as steadily as she could. “The penalty is imprisonment at the pleasure of the King.”

  “A shameful king!” Erasmus had said with feeling. “More has served that prideful man for almost twenty years.”

  Honor had struggled to grasp the scope of Cromwell’s gambit. She had suggested this oath to him only as a means of quieting Sir Thomas. But the whole realm made to swear?—it was extraordinary. No, she thought, she should have anticipated Cromwell’s thoroughness, she who knew his zeal for efficiency. But Sir Thomas’s response had been even more extraordinary. Who could have foreseen it? Indignation had risen in her, sudden and sharp, but unlike Erasmus’s hers was not directed at the King. “Why would he take such a reckless stand?” she had said. “How can he be so foolish?”

  Erasmus had shrugged. “More is a man of passions.”

  And then, one drizzly day in November just after Isabel was born, the house in Freiburg had received a further shocking report. Cromwell and King Henry had pushed another Act through Parliament, a new Treason Act. In a stroke, this statute made it high treason to deny the King any of his titles, or to speak or write a word against him. And the penalty for high treason was death.

  “How can Englishmen allow it?” Honor had cried. “Making treason out of words alone.”

  “Still, such words must be written or spoken for a man to be in jeopardy, and if I understand this correctly,” Erasmus had said, tapping the letter from a former student in England, “More has refused to say why he will not take the Oath. As long as he says nothing, it seems he is safe. They cannot execute a man for silence.”

  After that, they had heard no further news from England until two weeks ago, the first of May. Four Carthusian monks had been executed for refusing the Oath. And Sir Thomas More still lay in the Tower.

  From the kitchen came the clang of pots, and the birds foraging in the garden rose in a cloud and hovered in an undulating layer like a shaken blanket, waiting for what would follow, crisis or calm. The blanket broke apart, some birds fluttering again to the ground and some, too timid, spiraling into the cherry tree. Petals drifted down on Honor and Erasmus.

  Erasmus spoke up brightly as if to dispel the gloom he had invoked with More’s name. “Epicurus’s school in Athens was called The Garden, you know. And unlike Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum he admitted women students. Yes,” he said, brushing petals from his lap, “Epicurus’s vision is a fine one.”

  Honor spelled out that vision with mock earnestness, like a pupil reciting a lesson. “Practice of all the virtues, from which pleasure is inseparable. A simple life, quiet and withdrawn, where philosophy becomes the art of living, and where human relationships find their highest expression in friendship.”

  He smiled. “You have been reading your Lucretius.”

  “Your Lucretius, sir, for I never read his philosophy until now. Your library holds treasures that Sir Thomas’s and the Queen’s did not.”

  Erasmus folded his arms contentedly and closed his eyes against the slanting, golden rays. “Epicurus is a perfect example of the immortality men enjoy through books. For what would we know of Epicurus’s thought without his student Lucretius’s great poem, On the Nature of Things?”

  “That’s the only immortality available, according to Lucretius,” Honor teased. From the bench she picked up a cherry blossom, freckled with decay, and twirled it in her fingers, musing. “That dread of God’s wrath in Eden that you spoke of—it’s really the dread of death, it seems to me.”

  “Hmmm,” he murmured, considering the idea.

  “A hard punishment, don’t you think, that God should turn his wrath on man simply for tasting of the tree of knowledge? Lucretius suggests that knowledge can dispel the fear of death. If we can understand that the soul dissolves with the body, he says, and that nothing of us exists after, then death is nothing to us.”

  “So he did,” Erasmus nodded dreamily, the master mildly encouraging the student. “The very idea of not existing instills the fear that he considered to be the cause of all the passions that disorder men’s lives.”

  “And so,” Honor said thoughtfully, intent on the blossom, “we comfort ourselves with the fantasy of immortality.”

  Erasmus’s eyes popped opened. He shifted on the bench. “You cite your Niccolo della Montagna. Again. Forgive me,” he grumbled, “I cannot share your enthusiasm for that man’s thesis.”

  She tossed away the blossom. “You must at least admit that the journey his little volume made to find you was a brave one.”

  “I admit no such thing,” he huffed. “Nor can I imagine why della Montagna was so eager, all those years ago, to gift me with such a strange treatise.”

  “Because, sir,” she smiled, “you have been, and are, the beacon of goodwill to those who stalk the lonely frontiers of unconventionality. You champion mankind’s ability to reason.”

  “Ah, the ancient battle: reason over faith,” Erasmus sighed, clearly exasperated. “As if God has not given us challenge enough just to live together in harmony. And look how miserably the whole world fails at it!”

  Honor was silent for a moment. “Sir Thomas used to tell me that faith is stronger than reason. That since the Church has taught immortality of the soul for so many hundreds of years, and it is believed by so many millions of people, custom bestows truth on the belief, just as custom bestows truth in the law. He used to quote Aquinas’s dictum that the natural desire of everyone for immortality proves that the soul is immortal, just as the innate desire of a child to eat proves that there is food.”

  “Codifying the unknown is a futile pursuit. I, for one, am fully occupied in trying to live this life as Christ bade us.”

  “And I,” she said somberly, “am now a long way from Aquinas.”

  Erasmus looked at her with concern. “My dear,” he said, “the immortality of the soul is God’s promise to us. The sweet certainty that, with His grace, we will one day dwell with Him.”

  “Being certain of something does not make it true,” was her steady answer. “Take this Polish man who has written you with his extraordinary proofs that the earth revolves around the sun. Copernicus? Is that his name?”

  “A mathematical theorem only.”

  “But what if it is true? Then all those people who are certain that the sun revolves around the earth are wrong. Have been wrong for centuries. And we may have deluded ourselves about the life of the soul in just the same way. Della Montagna says that, like the mule who has all the instruments of generation but cannot attain it, man yearns for immortality but cannot attain it. Della Montagna says—”

  “‘Della Montagna says’ . . . Are you a parrot?” he cried. “Can you not think for yourself?”

  “Indeed I can, sir,” she said with quiet fierceness. “But to speak truly of where my thinking has brought me would be to grieve you more than I already have, and that I am loath to do.”

  For a few moments they sat in strained silence.

  “Where is that wretched woman with our wine?” Erasmus said testily.

  “Sir,” Honor blurted, “consider this. If man has created the concept of immortality simply to ease his fears of death, then surely we must ask whether other beliefs are not mere fabrications as well. Whether the fables of Heaven and Hell have been plumped up by generations of churchmen and legislators merely to keep citizens on the straight path. Even whether—”

  “No!” He threw up his hands and turned away. “Do not say it. Over that precipice I can never follow you.” He looked back at her, his face drawn as if with pity. “A godless universe? How can you bear to imagine it? How could we live on in such darkness? How find any structure for morality?”

  “But should we allow fear to create untruths?”

  “Some things are unknowable. They must be taken on faith.”

  “What you call faith Epicurus calls conjecture. Man can only conjecture whatever does not a
ppear, he says, and he warns that when man does so, thought moves into a sphere where error is possible.”

  “Good heavens, child, Epicurus lived before God revealed the truth of Christianity!”

  “But men continue to tear one another’s throats for conjecturing—and in the name of God.”

  “I have always taught that it is madness to do so.”

  “And I revere you for that. Yet you remain loyal to a Church that burns people for questioning. For tasting of the tree of knowledge.”

  “For years I have begged the Church—popes and cardinals—to desist from such violence. Inquisitions and heresy-hunting are abominable to me.”

  “But the Church teaches—”

  “The Church, like every other institution, is flawed by the nature of human desires. By abuses and wicked practices. But these are not reflections of true Christian behavior. We must all advance in faith and love, and leave the unknowable to God.” He sighed heavily. “But my voice is drowned out in the cacophony of the age.”

  She held her tongue, for she saw that she had distressed him. He was an old soldier in the battle against intolerance, one of the first, and armed only with his eloquence. When all around him howled down his pacifism as cowardice, or as a lack of Christian steadfastness, he remained the only leader unwilling to kill for his beliefs. Tolerance remained his obsession, and his despair.

  “The hope,” Erasmus said with a strength of will that belied his weary face, “lies in all of us rejecting the externalities of religion. We must focus on its substance, on the desire for peace and brotherhood that is the truest imitation of Christ. No—” he shook his head—“I cannot repudiate a Church that has endured for fifteen hundred years, has brought the light of education and hope to millions, and still teaches at its core the blessed message of love for one another that Christ bequeathed us. The Church has been my mother, and until a better way is shown me, I will remain with Her.”