The Tapestry: A Novel

by Nancy Bilyeau

  “And they’re equal in death, too,” I said. “Isn’t that why you created the woodcuts for The Dance of Death?”

  Holbein nodded, but winced a little. The topic of that book was still troubling to him.

  Geoffrey said, “One thing I have never understood is how the peasant armies were defeated when they possessed far superior numbers.”

  “Ah, but you know so little of the German princes and dukes,” exclaimed Holbein. “They’ve spent generations fighting one another for land and titles, but when a cause unites them, such as marauding armies of peasants, they take all of their military strength and their wealth and become an unbelievable force. The prince elector of the Palatine and his clan were relentless. The Duke of Bavaria, now that he no longer feuds with the House of Hapsburg, is a man who could take on the armies of France and England. The peasants were no match.”

  “I’ve seen hunger and poverty and I hate them,” said Geoffrey. “But there must be law of the land, or else what will become of us as civilized men?”

  Holbein smiled. “Spoken like a true constable,” he said, but in a more amiable tone. His rant was over. “One thing it is very important for you to learn, so that you will come to no harm in your journey, is that there is no one law in the German lands. Each kingdom, each dukedom, each principality, has its own laws. It’s easy to make mistakes, but those mistakes can be hard to recover from.”

  Holbein stood and stretched. “Ah, enough of my frightening you. I have hope, too. Art can be the medium to express, reveal, break down, and rebuild the world. We may be on the way to a new and higher form of life. Let us watch the sun disappear. There’s nothing like watching it on a ship.” We watched, transfixed, as that glowing ball of fire bobbled on the horizon, then slipped behind it.

  Holbein bade us good night, but Geoffrey said he would enjoy the open air as long as possible. I wanted to stay with him, to try to enjoy it, too.

  For a long time, we didn’t speak, just watched the sky darken slowly, and then, one by one, the stars emerge. The moon, unshrouded by clouds, glowed bright. No one else was above board except for the man steering the ship on the deck, and he wouldn’t have been able to see us at all should we move a bit closer to the door leading to the cabins.

  It was a beautiful evening, but I couldn’t stop thinking about what Hans Holbein had said. The journey to Salzburg sounded more difficult than I’d imagined.

  “Geoffrey,” I said, “why do you want to find Edmund?”

  I waited for him to launch into his usual cryptic explanation, or to refuse to answer. But this time, with the moonlight bathing his face, Geoffrey gave his true reasons.

  “I came to believe, after Beatrice and the baby died, that I was cursed, Joanna. I mean, not the sort of curse inflicted by a witch or seer but something I had done. What crime did I commit that would make God take away a young woman’s life so cruelly? And one night, I knew: it was what I did in Holy Trinity Church that day, when I said that you and Edmund couldn’t be married, that must be the cause. John Cheke is right—Parliament’s bill had not been enacted yet, and you should have gone forward and wed. Afterward, there might have been permission granted, as with John and Agatha Gwinn. But I was unable to overcome my jealousy and I put a stop to it, as the constable of Dartford. I believe, in my heart, that I blighted all four of our lives that day. I didn’t know about Sommerville’s addiction, that he would react in such a manner after our fight. I didn’t foresee his disappearance.”

  How guilt and sorrow over Edmund blighted all of our lives.

  Geoffrey looked at me, gauging my reaction. Whatever he saw gave him the strength to push on. “Joanna, I had no inkling that your ruined marriage would set you on the path it did, committing acts I can only imagine since you won’t confide in me. Beatrice paid the price of my pride, and our child. It caused me unbearable pain, until I came upon the idea that if I found Edmund in Europe, brought him back, restored his life somehow, that I could find . . . forgiveness. And no one knows which way the king will go—he could easily reverse those laws forbidding those who’ve taken vows of celibacy to marry. You could still be Edmund’s wife.”

  My heart swelled as I looked at Geoffrey—I felt sadness, and admiration, yes, but something else, too.

  What if I don’t want to be Edmund’s wife any longer?

  I wanted to say it, but I couldn’t. Not after he had spoken so movingly of Beatrice and all of our losses.

  “So it’s a vow of sorts to do this—that is what led you to go to John Cheke and begin your inquiries?” I asked carefully.

  “Yes, I’ve come to think of it as a covenant I’ve made with myself,” Geoffrey said.

  I shrank from him, grasping the railing of the boat. I couldn’t believe I’d heard that word from his lips. Yet it was a word most benign. It was Hungerford who’d turned into something frightening.

  “What’s wrong, Joanna?” he said.

  “Nothing—nothing,” I insisted. “I am just surprised by learning this.”

  He nodded and said, “I think enough has been said for one night. Let me take you below to your cabin.”

  The thought of that stifling hot, crowded room, with its lack of privacy, repelled me. I needed more time to calm myself. It had been only a coincidence that the same word was used by Surrey, Culpepper, and Hungerford. That was it.

  “May I have a few minutes here, alone?” I asked. “I will follow you soon enough.”

  Geoffrey hesitated, glancing up at the man at the ship’s wheel on the upper deck. “Very well, you seem safe enough. But I will come back for you myself. I’ll find something to drink first.”

  After he’d left, I folded my arms and leaned down on the railing, hoping that a few drops of sea spray would fly high enough to cool my face. I needed something to help me order my thoughts and feelings on what I’d just learned.

  No more than a moment had passed when I heard a soft step behind me.

  “That wasn’t very long,” I said, smiling a little, and turned around.

  There was no Geoffrey. My body froze against the railing as a tall white form floated toward me—resembling some sort of spirit. I opened my mouth to cry out but was too frightened to make a sound.

  The spirit was no more than six feet away, hovering, when I recognized the light gray cloak of Mistress Collins. For a few seconds I felt relief, but then spreading confusion. How was she able to walk toward me unaided when she couldn’t see?

  She came forward a few more steps, and raised an object, swiftly, before darting all the way to my side. A long silver knife quivered at my throat.

  “Make a sound and I’ll kill you,” she said, but her voice had changed. It was stronger, and much lower. Her eyes were no longer bandaged; they glittered deep within her hood.

  My throat burned where the knife pierced. With her left hand, she seized my arm and began to pull me closer to the cabin entrance, to the place where the man at the wheel couldn’t see. This was no blind, old woman, but a strong and determined assassin.

  “When attacked, don’t submit.” I remembered Jacquard’s teaching as if he were whispering in my ear. “Your assailant is counting on you to go limp from shock and fear. Do the opposite.”

  She’s pulling me to a place where she can kill me unseen.

  That realization shot through me, and with it, the determination to use one of Jacquard’s exercises to save my life.

  My left hand was not my lead, but I used it to stick two of my fingers into the woman’s eyes as hard as I could. I felt bone and something wet.

  “Joanna!” someone shouted behind me. It was Geoffrey. But my focus was on getting away from Mistress Collins, who had let go of my arm, howling in pain and slashing the knife in the air in desperate arcs but not stabbing me because I had scrambled away from her.

  “What’s happening down there?” called out the man on the deck above.


  My attacker clutched her knife, cupping the left eye, which seemed to be causing most of the pain.

  “Get behind me, Joanna,” ordered Geoffrey, and I did so, as he pulled out his own knife and pointed it at my attacker. “You. Come with me—now. We’re going to see the captain.”

  She didn’t move toward Geoffrey. Instead she pulled down her hood and lowered her hand from her eye.

  “Mother Mary,” I gasped.

  This was no woman. I looked on the cropped brown hair of a man of medium height and slender build. A thin line of blood trickled from the eye I wounded.

  His mouth quivered in the bright moonlight and, turning to me, he said, “Welcome to the Palace of Whitehall, Mistress Stafford.”

  I flinched as if he struck me. I knew that voice and, staring at him, I knew the man. He was the page who escorted me that first day at Whitehall. No beard now—but it was him.

  He tossed his knife away, groped for the top of the railing, pulled himself up, and paused for a second, straddling it in that long gray cloak of a blind woman. A truly bizarre sight.

  “Christ’s blood!” Geoffrey grunted, springing forward, hands outstretched. But he wasn’t fast enough. With one final determined heave, the man jumped overboard and disappeared into the dark sea.

  31

  Geoffrey didn’t seem angry with me on the ship. No time for it. There was the shock of what happened and then questions to be answered. The ship’s captain turned out to be terrified of scandal and determined to keep it from the passengers that a man, dressed as a blind old woman, tried to stab a passenger. “No one will ever book passage on a ship of mine again,” he said, wiping his face.

  The captain later knocked on the door of the women’s cabin and told the German women that Mistress Collins had fallen ill and was removed for the night. The next morning, her condition was publicly changed to fatal. Everyone was told Mistress Collins had died in the night and been buried at sea, as regulations required. Mother Lowe and the others expressed the customary amount of regret for a woman they had known, slightly, for two days.

  The captain put more effort into concocting a story to explain the disappearing passenger than looking into the crime itself: “A madman—how else can anyone explain such actions?” he said, throwing up his hands.

  Geoffrey withdrew into silence, for he knew, as well as I did, that the man who threw himself off the boat was not mad. Quite the opposite. The planning, the cunning, the ability to anticipate and improvise—these were all indications of sanity and intelligence. Geoffrey asked me if he was the same man who attacked me on my first day at Whitehall, and I said yes. This attack was even more audacious than the others, and revealed, as Geoffrey had pointed out before, the presence of resources. Of men. It was not a single person; far from it.

  It’s only a matter of time before they succeed. That is what ran through my mind that sleepless night, lying rigid and terrified in the cabin, made slightly more spacious by the absence of “Mistress Collins,” now floating lifeless in the sea.

  I felt profound gratitude for the presence of Mother Lowe and the three other Germans. If it weren’t for them, I would have been alone with my killer that first night, a prospect that was unbearable. To have gone to sleep, unknowing, beside that vicious predator? It made my breath catch in my lungs. And yet he was just a tool. Who was behind this, who would pursue me so relentlessly? Bishop Gardiner had placed a stowaway on board the last time, to watch me. But not to kill me.

  It was close to dawn when the realization crept over me that there was something about the character of this attack that seemed familiar. I’d also felt that in the litter being conveyed to Dartford but attributed the sensation to fever. I knew that a disguise of an old blind woman had been used before in some way that I’d not personally witnessed but knew of nonetheless. With a shudder, I remembered: At Dartford Priory, when I was a novice, I’d heard that after the infamous Sack of Rome in 1527, the pope escaped from the Castel Sant’Angelo by use of disguise. One day Pope Clement VII walked out of the castle, in the clothes of a peddler, some say. But others say he was dressed as an old blind woman.

  As the water lapped against the side, and the oblivious women snored in the darkness of our swaying cabin, I tried to put a name to this hunt for my life. There was something significant about the choice of disguise of a desperate pope, but I couldn’t, try as I might, push my way through to a conclusion. I would bring this nagging sense of familiarity to Geoffrey. Together we could find answers.

  That day, the third day, our ship reached Antwerp, one of at least fifty to arrive during the daylight hours. I tried to force myself to act in a normal fashion. I did not want Master Holbein, or anyone else, to know what happened.

  As we walked through the city, it seemed even more prosperous than when I’d seen it a year before—the flat, tidy streets teemed with hundreds of smiling, laughing tradespeople. Nothing impeded the flow of goods to the center of commerce for all of northern Europe.

  Master Holbein knew of a respectable inn, favored by many English wool merchants, that let rooms for a short time. The plan was to rest overnight and then continue on to Brussels, a three-day ride on horseback. Geoffrey made sure the lock on my door was a good one.

  Exhaustion captured me, and I slept deeply the first night in Antwerp. I knew nothing until I heard a pounding on the door. I opened my eyes to full daylight.

  “Joanna, dress yourself,” Geoffrey shouted on the other side of the door. “Joanna—hurry!”

  In a panic, I threw on a bodice and kirtle and unlocked the door. Geoffrey pushed it open with the palm of his hand, and stormed inside my room, his face twisted with fury.

  “Do you know what this is?” he asked, shoving a small vial in my face. It contained a deep red powder.

  “No,” I said. “Why are you upset?”

  “This was in the box of the man who tried to kill you, along with a change of clothes, rope, a map of Antwerp and a sizable amount of money. I took the vial to an apothecary and he analyzed it. This is poison, Joanna. Slow-acting poison that is of the highest quality in Christendom—or the worst quality, depending on how you look at it. I had to buy the apothecary’s silence. I think he wanted to send for the magistrate after looking at this, he was so alarmed. He might still do so.”

  I struggled to take it in. “So I was to be poisoned, rather than stabbed and thrown overboard?”

  “Well, that would have been the most intelligent way, should your assassin wish to evade suspicion. But once the other women were put in your cabin and he lost direct contact to you, he had to improvise.”

  “That’s why he decided to stab me.”

  “Yes, and then no doubt throw you overboard. He had to silence you first so you wouldn’t scream and then hope no one heard the splash.”

  Frightened, I tried to back away. But Geoffrey wouldn’t allow it. He seized me by the shoulders, and shook me.

  “What do you know—what do you know?” he demanded.

  “Know what?” I shouted.

  “Don’t parry with me, Joanna. You know something so dangerous—or you’ve betrayed someone so powerful— that there’s a plot to kill you the likes of which I have never seen before, never heard of before in my nine years as a constable. But you won’t tell me what you’ve done. I have to try to protect you without full knowledge. It’s like fighting with both arms tied behind my back. And what an opponent! The person behind it all is so formidable that an operative would throw himself into the sea rather than risk betraying him.”

  I twisted out of his grip. How could I tell Geoffrey all that I knew, of the truth about the prophecy, the plan to kill Henry VIII that I was at the heart of? Or the more recent treasonous plot to destroy Cromwell, using the dark arts of magic? Such knowledge would put him at risk as much as me—more so, if he went to the English authorities, as I feared he would feel compelled to do.
r />   “Who trained you?” he said, his voice as hard as steel.

  How did he know about Jacquard Rolin?

  “Train me to do what?” I threw back at him.

  “To stick your fingers in a man’s eyes. It’s not what you learned in the priory, is it, Joanna? And when I first knew you—and I saw you in some terrible spots, too—you never defended yourself in such a way. But something happened to you after Edmund left England. Who did you spend time with? And why?”

  Geoffrey was closer to the truth than he’d ever come before. For a few wild seconds, I wanted to tell him everything. I wanted to share with him the frustrating feeling two nights past that I knew the person who wanted me dead. But was that the right thing to do for him? I was so distressed, tears smarted.

  “I’ve opened myself to you—I’ve trusted you with my open heart, not just on the ship when I spoke of my covenant, but before that, several times,” he said, anguished. “But not you. You have never put your trust in me, Joanna.”

  Now the tears poured from my eyes.

  “I do trust you,” I said.

  Geoffrey laughed at me.

  “Why don’t you leave me to my fate then, Geoffrey?” I asked, a sob catching my voice.

  “It is tempting,” he roared. “But you won’t have it that easy, Joanna. You’re coming with me to Salzburg.”

  Wiping my eyes, I said, “No, I will stay in Brussels while you travel.”

  “You’d be dead in a month,” he said. “As soon as word got back to England that the attempt failed, another plot would form, and without me in Brussels or any friend, they’d have a clear path.”

  “Then I will book passage to London. I’ll return to Dartford alone. I’ve always been safe there.”