The Heretic’s Wife (39 page)

“What news have you from England?” Kate asked after a dinner of roast chicken. She and her hostess were back in the kitchen polishing the plate. The kitchen wench was fine enough for scouring the pots, but Mistress Poyntz always saw to the polishing of the pewter and silver herself. Kate always helped.

“Not good news, I’m afraid, my dear. The rains had scarcely ceased before the sweating sickness broke out. First the floods, now pestilence. And if that weren’t enough, the cloth workers rioted on May Day to protest the presence of foreign workers. Several Frenchmen were killed—in Shoreditch, I think.”

She paused in her recital to call for one of the servers to take the great mastiff dozing by the kitchen hearth into the garden, then resumed her vigorous rubbing of the great platter with a paste of vinegar and salt. “The king’s soldiers had to be brought in to restore order. From what I hear it was
a bit of a massacre. Isn’t it a shame what God-fearing folk will do to other God-fearing folk when their livelihoods are threatened?”

Or even when only their opinions are threatened,
Kate thought. But the word
Frenchmen
had set her mind working in another direction, conjuring the young Winifred who had left the blue-eyed child on the floor of the bookshop to chase a cutpurse. Madeline. The child’s name was Madeline.
Her daddy’s a Frenchy
the woman had said. But she said he worked as a waterman in Southwark. The riots had been in Shoreditch and with cloth workers. She dismissed the thought.

Mistress Poyntz handed the platter to Kate to place in a drying rack by the fire. “You and Master Frith are fortunate to be well away from England now. Bad omens and ill tidings are everywhere. A great fish beached itself upon the shore and died; the astrologers are working overtime to explain some strange lights in the night sky; and some nun in Kent has prophesied that the pestilence and want are God’s punishment against the king because he’s trying to annul his marriage. Of course the Lutherans blame the Catholics and the Catholics blame the king for abandoning his Catholic queen. The king says it’s God’s punishment because he’s living in sin with his brother’s wife, with whom he no longer lives in sin—” She broke off with a little laugh. “Instead he lives in sin with Anne Boleyn.”

“She’s one of us, you know,” Kate said, removing the last of the dinner plates from the drying rack and polishing it with a warm scrap of linen.

“One of us?” Mistress Poyntz took the plate from Kate’s hand, and placed it in the cupboard.

“A protestant,” Kate said. “She protests some of the doctrines of Rome.”

“You mean she’s a Lutheran?” She looked at Kate in surprise.

“Lord and Lady Walsh say she reads Luther and William Tyndale.”

The servant had left the door open to the late-afternoon sunshine. Kate looked out into the bit of kitchen garden where the mastiff was lifting his leg, aiming expertly at a rosemary bush. His business done, he lumbered back in and resumed his place on the cool hearth. He was old and spoiled by the many patrons of the English House, who had numbered six merchants for dinner today, and Kate had smiled to see each slip him a morsel from the table when Lady Poyntz wasn’t looking.

“Well then, if Anne Boleyn should become Queen of England, that would be quite something, wouldn’t it?” Mistress Poyntz said. She placed the gleaming platter in the center and stood back to admire her filled cupboard. “That would mean quite possibly the king’s heir would be raised as a
reformer. I’m sure Princess Mary is Roman Catholic to the core.” She lowered her voice as if the walls had ears. “Speaking of Master Tyndale, we have had correspondence from him. He had to flee Cologne when the printing house he was using was raided.”

Kate listened in amazement. Lady Poyntz was better than the town crier.

“He’s been moving about ever since, trying to keep ahead of the English spies who would of course sue the German authorities for his immediate arrest if they found him. He’s in Worms now, but he’s coming to Augsburg in June to meet with Luther and some of the German reformers. Prince Frederick has called a special meeting of the diet to hear a sort of statement of faith from the Lutherans, to see where there may be points of reconciliation. I think your husband and Chaplain Rogers are hoping to seek him out there and bring him here to safety.”

“John hasn’t mentioned that to me,” Kate said, a little taken aback that this woman should know more of her husband’s plans than she did.

Lady Poyntz patted her hand reassuringly. “Don’t let that little oversight trouble you, dear. They’ve only been planning it for a week. I’m sure he will. They don’t tell us wives everything—only what they want us to know. Lord Poyntz will just suddenly announce that he’s to be gone for weeks on end . . .”

She droned on about some business adventure her husband was involved in, but Kate only half heard. It did trouble her. Not the fact that John had not yet mentioned it, but the fact that it sounded dangerous. And she would be separated from her husband for the first time since leaving England.

It was a sunny June day at Chelsea and well past three by the sundial in the garden. Margaret Roper had waited long enough to be summoned to a picnic with her father. On beautiful Fridays in June they usually dined down by the river. She had told William when they married that every day of the week belonged to him, except Fridays. Friday afternoons belonged to Sir Thomas.

She always looked forward to their conversations, but especially today. Today he was sure to mention her book. It was now officially published, bearing the king’s license, and they were free to discuss it. When no summons came, she decided to take matters into her own hands, and went in search of Dame Alice. She found her in the great kitchen, harassing the cook.

“Where’s Father? It’s Friday. It’s a beautiful day. Has he been summoned to Westminster again?”

Alice removed the lid from the great soup kettle hanging in the fireplace and ladled herself a taste. She frowned. “It needs salt and more flavor, maybe a touch of sage,” she barked. “And this time send some
cool
buttermilk with Sir Thomas’s dinner. It will not hurt you to go down the ladder steps into the cellar. Send the boy.” She gestured with a nod of her head toward the urchin tormenting the rooster that strutted around the open kitchen door. “He has little enough to do to keep the hearths in summer. He wants exercise.”

“So then Father is at home? Why are we not—”

“You can ask him yourself.” She was busy ladling the soup, adding a crusty hunk of still-warm bread, wiping a pewter tankard for the buttermilk with the snowy linen of her apron. “He’s in the study. As always. You can take his food in to him, not that he’s going to take time to eat it. He even neglects his devotions. I am that vexed with him.”

It was clear that she was “that vexed” with something.

“I suppose we should be patient,” Margaret said. “We should have expected now that he’s lord chancellor the king has full claim on his time—”

“Fiddle-faddle. ’Tis not the king’s business keeps him in his study night and day. The king is off on a hunting trip. Has been since March. ’Tis his own obsession. Heretics—heretics roasted, fried, or flambéed—that’s all he thinks about. I think he would send them all to hell himself, even your husband, and be glad of it if he had the power.”

“William is no heretic! Just because he keeps an open mind . . .”

The boy returned with the buttermilk. The cook had wisely disappeared into the pantry until the storm that was Dame Alice in one of her moods blew over. She snatched the pitcher from his hand, sloshing a milky drop onto the table. The boy retreated as his mistress filled the tankard, then assembled the tray and thrust it out at Margaret.

“Here. See if you can distract him from this obsession.”

A few minutes later, Margaret knocked tentatively on her father’s study door.

“Who is it?”

She recognized the tone he used when he did not wish to be interrupted.

“It’s Margaret, Father. I’ve brought your dinner,” she said above the scratching of his quill. She did not wait to be told to enter but shouldered her way into the room. The habitually tidy chamber was in disarray with books haphazardly strewn across every surface, some facedown and opened as if marking a place, manuscript pages spread out to dry. Even the window ledge was covered. She had never known him to be so careless with his books.

“Just put it down, Meg,” he mumbled. “I’ll eat it later.”

“Where?” she asked pointedly.

He looked up then, and she was shocked to see his face. Dark circles ringed his eyes. His cheeks sagged.

“Father, are you unwell?”

He put down his pen and began shifting some of the books to clear a space on the corner of the desk. “I’m fine. Just busy.”

“Alice prepared the tray herself,” she offered as she set it down.

He picked up the goose quill, dabbed it in the inkwell.

“Shall I sit with you while you eat?” she asked, and bent to remove a couple of open volumes from the chair.

“Don’t touch those,” he said curtly.

She saw that the one on top bore Tyndale’s name.

“You are writing a refutation of Master Tyndale? I thought you finished that weeks ago.”

“It is another. The heretics do not sleep; neither shall I. That devil Tyndale skips about the Continent, wreaking havoc as he goes. In the meantime I must provide an antidote for the poison flowing from his pen.”

A skin was already forming on the creamy soup as it cooled. “Surely Master Tyndale stops to sleep and eat.”

“There will be ample time for that later,” he said evenly, but she could tell she was trying his patience.

“What about the king’s business?” she asked.

“The king has no greater business than the pursuit and burning of heretics,” he said flatly.

She looked around the scattered books in the room, hoping to see hers. “I’ve obtained the king’s license to publish my translation,” she said.

“I know,” he muttered. “I have a copy here.” He cast a cursory glance around the room. “Somewhere.”

He’d already returned to the document before him. He wrote rapidly, rarely stopping to consider or pausing to scratch out a word, as if everything he wanted to say flowed fluently from his brain as effortlessly as rain.

“It’s Friday. I was hoping we could share a meal and . . . perhaps discuss . . . my translation.”

He did not even look up. “There will be other Fridays, Margaret. We will discuss it later.”

There could be no answer to such a profound dismissal.

There is no bond on earth so sweet, nor any separation so bitter as that which occurs in a good marriage.

—M
ARTIN
L
UTHER

K
ate was on her hands and knees scrubbing the deal floorboards of their bedroom when she first felt the pain in her back.

“It’s nothing,” she said aloud to the sketch of the ugly old woman. Then she muttered into the answering silence, “We should get a cat. At least I could talk to something that moves.”

You’ll be glad enough for the silence when the baby comes.

Now she was hearing voices—her mind carrying on both sides of the conversation. She was more desperate than she thought.

I should practice singing a lullaby. That way John won’t come home unexpectedly and hear his mad wife talking to herself.
She started to hum, and then she realized she knew no lullaby. And she didn’t know anything about babies or their care in general—not the first thing. Maybe John knew. He seemed to know everything, though she thought surely there must be some knowledge one could not get from books.

She scrubbed at a patch of green paint on the varnished boards, scratching at it with her fingernail. That patch of paint had been bothering her for weeks. John had even mentioned it once. She brushed a line of sweat from
her brow with her forearm and scrubbed harder. If she hurried, there was still time to finish this and freshen herself and get to the town market before he came home. She went over the list in her mind: wine, a good bottle of French—she’d been saving a sixpence a week since she’d first begun to think she was pregnant—and beeswax candles, and fruit and cheese and freshly baked bread and maybe a bit of smoked fish and a pie, yes, custard pie from the pie shop at the end of High Street, an extravagance but it was to be a celebration.