The Heretic’s Wife (54 page)

By arguing for the bishops, who were too craven to plead their own cause, and against Henry, he had risked everything. He had already lost the king’s favor over the great matter of his divorce. Now with this failed parliamentary campaign in favor of the bishops’ maintaining their power and
privileges, he had incurred the king’s wrath. But so be it. Thomas More had been true to that which mattered to him most in the world. There would be no coward’s stain on his honor. Consequences be damned.

He had to call the boatman twice. “Richard!” Sharply the second time, accompanied by a swat on the shoulder from a rolled-up writ.

The boatman, who was sleeping on a bench beside the stair, jumped up. “Begging your pardon, my lord. I had not expected you so soon.”

“My business here is finished,” Sir Thomas said curtly. “Take me home.”

If the boatman heard any finality in his voice, he did not voice it.

As the boatman rowed silently up the sun-dappled Thames toward Chelsea, Sir Thomas did not notice the perfume of apple blossoms in the air or feel the warm breeze against his skin. In his heart it was still winter. He plotted his next move in his own great matter, and he was glad his father was not alive to see it.

“I am sorry it has come to this, Thomas,” the king said two days later, after the clergy had acquiesced in Convocation. (They had little choice given their craven natures, Thomas thought. Cowards all—except Bishop Fisher, who alone had stood with Thomas against the tide. Even Stokesley was strangely silent.)

Thomas found the king in the garden at York Place, playing with the dogs beneath a shower of pink petals. Wordlessly, Thomas handed him the white kid bag containing the chancellor’s seal and chain of office. Judging from the laboring of Henry’s breath, His Majesty’s body was overheated from the exercise, but his voice was chilly.

“I had thought, by appointing a layman chancellor, to avoid such adversarial circumstances,” he said, falling heavily onto a bench beneath a canopy of blossoms. He indicated that Thomas should sit beside him.

“It is my health, Your Majesty, which as you know has not been good since my father died. I cannot under such circumstances serve Your Majesty as Your Majesty deserves.”

Henry laughed, but Thomas knew that laugh. He’d heard it when he refused to sign the king’s petition to the pope. It was a laugh that carried no mirth.

“Pretty words. You are a complicated man, Thomas,” Henry said, accepting the bag, then flinging it on the bench between them as though it were a small thing and not the symbol of the second-most powerful man in
the realm. One of the great mastiffs came up to him, and he scratched it behind its ears. The dog stood at attention.

Thomas said nothing. When no persuasive argument could be made in one’s defense, saying nothing was the least objectionable option.

“I miscalculated in making you chancellor, Master More. I had grown exceedingly weary of stumbling over clergy, always at my head and foot and side, whichever way I turned. I thought with your appointment to be rid of this unceasing intrusion into affairs of state.” He sighed, exhaling such a great breath the dog’s hind leg quivered. “But now I see that you have more clergy in you than any archbishop I know.”

He stopped scratching the dog’s ear. The dog sat obediently at his master’s foot, so quietly he might have been carved in stone. His companion, a bitch with skin the color of smooth ale, lay some few feet away, watching, her ears peaked as if waiting for a signal.

Even the dogs will not challenge his discipline,
Thomas thought.
You have not as much sense as they do.

“It is my health, Your Majesty, only my health, which prompts me to surrender the seal. I simply wish to retire in peace,” he said quietly.

“And I wish to abdicate the throne and move to France to be a bootblack to Francis I,” Henry said just as quietly, each word heavy with sarcasm and threat.

Then the king stood up and, whistling to his dogs to follow, strode back into York Place, leaving Thomas alone on the garden bench with the white kid bag holding the abandoned symbol of power.

“You
are
getting fat as the baker’s wife.” John laughed as he patted his wife’s gently protruding stomach beneath the light linen of her summer shift. “But I’m glad the sickness has passed. I like seeing you eat again,” he said.

After she’d told him her news, he’d gone down to the kitchen to pilfer a bit of dried apple and cheese and bread—“and buttermilk if there is any, please.” He’d come back with it all, the buttermilk too, and now they had it spread out between them on the bed in a midnight picnic. He watched her now as she munched.

“What are you looking at, John Frith? Haven’t you ever seen a woman eat before?”

“Not like this,” he said, laughing as he reached up and wiped the milk mustache from her upper lip, then licked his finger clean.

She leaned across the spread of food between them and kissed him. “I love you, husband,” she said.

“You say that now,” he said, nibbling a slice of dried apple, then offering her the other half. “But when the child comes, you’ll only have eyes for him . . . or her.”

“Well, I won’t, but if I did you’d hardly notice. You have your work and your friendship with William and Chaplain Rogers and the gang of merchants that promote your cause.”

“Our cause,” he corrected her. “And I will notice.”

“I was afraid you wouldn’t want the baby,” she said, abandoning her food lust, suddenly hungry for reassurance. “That’s why I waited so long to tell you.” She watched him carefully, alert for the flickering glance, the lowered eyelid. She would know if he lied to her to protect her feelings.

His gaze did not waver. “I want only what you want,” he said. “And I will try with all my heart to be a good father.”

That was a good enough answer, but somehow, unlike the victuals of the midnight picnic, it left her vaguely unsatisfied.

She was in her fifth month when he told her he was leaving to go back to England. It was mid-July and hot at midday. John had taken to walking with her in the shade of the garden each day, at first so careful and solicitous of her that she felt cramped until she reassured him that this time would be different.

The roses were in bloom and there was a turf bench beneath a plane tree. “Let’s linger here a minute before we go back in,” he said. “Tyndale is out on one of his charity runs, and Purgatory can wait.”

He spread his handkerchief so she would not get grass stains on her skirt and held her hand as they sat side by side on the grassy bench.

“I felt the baby kick this morning,” she said. “It was the strangest thing, a little like a butterfly flutter. My heart fluttered with it.”

“How do you know it wasn’t just bilious humors from all the strange foods you’ve been eating lately? You said you didn’t like pickled herring, and last night you ate your portion and half mine.”

“Your half went to the baby. Apparently he—or she—likes pickled herring. You don’t begrudge it, do you?”

He laughed. “I can begrudge you nothing. You could have taken it all—you know that.”

“There! It’s happening again. Feel it?” She placed his hand on the place where she felt the fluttering. It stopped abruptly.

“He doesn’t like me.”

“Of course she likes you. You are her father.”

“I didn’t like my father. I thought he was an ogre.”

“But you are not an ogre.”

“Neither was my father.”

“Daughters always like their fathers.”

“How do you know it will be a girl?”

“I don’t,” she said. “Does it matter to you?”

“Only if it matters to you.”

That answer she also found unsatisfying—as if his only interest in the child were secondary.

“Can I get you something to drink? Or more pickled herring?”

She smiled. “No, we are prepared,” and she reached into the pocket of her skirt and brought forth a new apple. “It’s a bit tart, but refreshing.” She held it out to him.

“Of course, Eve, I’ll take a bite of your apple,” he said, then grimaced as he crunched down on the sour apple.

She laughed. “I expect Eve’s were sweeter,” she said, “but mine bear no curse. It seems our child has a taste for sourness. Last week it was sweet. I sucked honey from the comb as wildly as John the Baptist.”

The noonday sun pressed the roses into releasing their fragrance. Kate inhaled,
smell that, little one,
as she spoke wordlessly to the child in her womb. This was a moment of perfect joy, she thought, if only she could keep it forever. John was unusually quiet as she reached over and kissed him lightly on the cheek.

“Kate, I have something to tell you,” he said. “And I don’t want you to get upset. It won’t be good for the baby.”

The perfect moment was gone as quickly as it came. The apple tasted bitter in her mouth. The roses wilted in the heat.

“There has been another burning,” she said. “No. Don’t tell me. I do not want our child to hear such words.” She could not bear to hear them either. Ten men had been burned since Thomas More was named chancellor. Each telling had made her heart clutch with fear. Each telling had prompted smoke-filled dreams that startled her awake in the dark of the night.

“No. It’s nothing like that! Indeed, it looks as though things may be turning for the better. Parliament has stripped the English clergy of its connection
to Rome and placed it under the jurisdiction of the king. The best news is that Thomas More has resigned the chancellorship in protest. Also, the bishops no longer have the power of arrest and interrogation in matters of heresy. That now belongs to Henry.”

“You mean he is both king and pope?”

“Something like that.”

“Well then, that should make him happy. He can grant his own divorce. Though I can’t believe the bishops went along with that. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury?”

“Warham is in very ill health. They say Cranmer is being groomed for the post. He is one of the Boleyn faction—very reform minded.”

“But that is wonderful news! Why should I be upset?”

He reached for her other hand so that he was holding them both. “Since things are improving, Tyndale and I think it might be time for me to make another effort. I’m going back to England. Just a quick trip. I’ll be back well before the birthing. If I can get to the king or Thomas Cranmer or even Cromwell, I’m sure I can convince them to extend this new atmosphere of tolerance to letting the Bible be licensed in England.”

Snatching her hand away, she jumped up from the bench, her precious burden momentarily forgotten in the heat of her anger. “No. I will not hear it! You will not go! Is Thomas More dead? Is that new Bishop of London—Stokesley—that you said was more dangerous than Tunstall, is he dead?”

“No,” he answered quietly. “They are both very much alive. But both are in disfavor. Their influence has been severely curtailed.”

His carefully modulated tone infuriated her, as though he were explaining a concept any simpleton should understand. She turned on him then. “You are a fool, John.”

He looked at her as though he couldn’t believe his usually even-tempered wife had turned into an obstreperous shrew.

“Calm yourself, Kate. It’s not good for the baby.”