The Heretic’s Wife (55 page)

“As long as Thomas More draws breath, you and your friends will be hunted down and given no more consideration than a hound gives its prey. There are many in England who cling violently to the old faith. You and everything you represent are anathema to them. Let William go if he thinks it is so necessary.”

“Shh, Kate. Lower your voice. The whole of Antwerp doesn’t need to hear our discourse. Tyndale cannot go. He is a bigger prize than any of us.”

“And you’re expendable, is that it? Does William Tyndale have a wife? Does he have a child?”

The heat in the garden suddenly became unbearable and rose up from the ground in shimmering waves. Kate struggled to get her breath. She felt her knees go weak. John caught her as she fell.

When she came to herself, she lay on the turf bench, and he was on his knees beside her, bathing her brow with a cool rag. She tried to sit up, but her head was still swimming. Mistress Poyntz was there as well. “The baby . . .” Kate murmured, “is the baby—”

“The baby is fine, my dear. You just swooned in the heat.”

John’s face hovered over her. “Everything will be well, Kate. I will not go if you don’t want me to. I promise,” he whispered. But the misery in his face reminded her of the way her brother John had looked when he told her he’d abjured. She knew that in the end, it was not her decision because she could not bear to see that look on his face every day of her life.

She is of middling stature, with a swarthy complexion, long neck, wide mouth, bosom not much raised, and in fact has nothing but the king’s great appetite, and her eyes which are black and beautiful . . . She lives like a queen and the king accompanies her to mass and everywhere.

—D
ESCRIPTION OF ANNE
B
OLEYN
WRITTEN BY THE
V
ENETIAN AMBASSADOR
(1532)

I
t is a noble sacrifice you are making, Kate,” Tyndale said as they watched the boat sail out of the harbor.

John was waving at her from the deck, and she was frantically waving back, trying to keep from crying out to him to come back. No. It was a mistake. All a mistake. She needed him. Their child needed him. She should never have agreed to let him go.

“He would not have gone if you had naysayed it. I am sure of it. You are the joy of his life. Try to be of good heart. He will take no foolish chances and will be back before his child is born.”

He was the only joy in my life, and now he is gone,
she thought, as she watched the ship sail out of sight until she could no longer see John’s waving figure, wishing that she had Tyndale’s certainty, wishing she, like Endor, could see the future in water. She stared into the murky green liquid of the harbor, but all she saw among the floating bits of debris was the rippling
reflection of a fat woman standing beside an old man. For a moment she was startled, not recognizing the reflected silhouettes.

“I wish John had your gift for disguise,” she said, noticing the slump of Tyndale’s shoulders, the general weariness in his posture, the powdered gray streak in his hair. “You could probably go right up and knock on Thomas More’s door, and he would not know you.” She hoped her words did not betray the resentment she felt in her heart.

“He wouldn’t know me. He has never seen me.”

“Then why does he hate you so?”

“You know the answer to that.” He smiled at her kindly. “It was part of your argument against John’s going. Everything we believe in, our very existence, the way we question the Church’s received wisdom, received from powerful men and not from God—there is only one revelation of God, and it’s not a man sitting on a throne in Rome but a book of ancient Scriptures interpreted by every man as the Spirit of God leads him—that belief is anathema to Thomas More and all those who uphold the ‘whited sepulcher’ that the Roman Church has become. They cannot suffer that belief to live—or those of us who teach it—” He broke off with a sigh and, putting his arm around her, said, “What you need to hear from me right now is that when we said that someone should make a return trip, I did offer to go. It was John who insisted that he should be the one.”

That did not make Kate feel better. “We’d best get back,” she said. “You to your work and I to . . . my worrying.”

“John told me about the women’s Bible study,” he said. “I think it’s a wonderful thing you’re doing. I understand. But it is not without risk.”

“Don’t let that trouble you,” she said, feeling the words in her mouth dry as wool. “I’ve given it up. For the safety of my child. It’s no longer just me.”

He patted her shoulder in a gesture of comfort. She was not comforted.

She was even less comforted later that night when she was tidying John’s desk, and found stuck within the pages of his
Disputation on Purgatory
the carefully forged papers that would have established his identity as a Hansa merchant. She prayed fervently that he would notice they were missing before he was called upon to produce them.

So far so good, John Frith thought as he disembarked without challenge on the Essex coast and hailed a small cargo packet to ferry him to Reading. His first mission was to visit the prior at Reading Abbey who over the years had
acted as a conduit for funds and information, both of which the Antwerp contingent needed badly right now. The translators had sold their winter coats to pay the printer for the last printing, counting on this trip to replenish both their funds and their wardrobes.

He could get a bath at the abbey and a shave, God willing, he thought as he wiped the sweat from his brow and scratched at his ragged beard. He had purposely let it grow as a disguise against the spies and Channel watchers that dotted the coast. Maybe the prior would tell him that the wind now blew so fair in England that a disguise was rendered unnecessary.

The approach to Reading reminded him of the first time he’d seen Kate. It was in one of these cottages scattered throughout the English towns where the Word was read and the cottagers risked everything to support the reform movement. It had been hot that day too, but she’d been dressed in a man’s heavy cloak and breeches. Yet even then, even thinking she was a man and he being so ill from the ordeal of the fish cellar, he remembered finding her oddly attractive.

They’d laughed about that later, after she’d told him shamefacedly that her brother had abjured and she was determined to take his place smuggling the books. He’d made a joke about it, saying he’d wondered at the time if he was like so many of the monks who sought forbidden alliances to assuage their sexual hunger. Though he hadn’t thought that; he’d been too weak to care, and besides he knew his nature. He’d joked about it only to take away the shame she felt for her brother’s recanting.

He hoped fervently that he would never bring her such shame. But how did a man know if he had what it took to withstand torture and maintain honor—especially when he had a wife and child to consider? That was the same decision her brother had faced, poor man. John suddenly felt a kindred spirit with him. If his travels led him near Gloucestershire he would call on him to see how he fared.

By the time they reached Reading, the better part of the river was in evening shade. He watched idly as the packet pulled up to the dock to let him disembark. A knot of men were quarreling on the dock.

“I’d stay clear of that lot if I was you,” the boatman said.

“I’ll heed that advice, my good waterman,” John said, picking his way among the hogsheads stacked in the middle of the boat. He reached in the small purse tied at his belt and tipped the man with his last coin.

“I’m not the sort to take a man’s last farthing,” the boatman said, eyeing his empty purse. “You’ll be needing that for your supper, I expect.”

“I’ll get supper at the abbey. I have friends there,” he said, pressing the coin into the boatman’s rough hand.

The ruffians on the dock had stopped arguing and started exchanging blows.

“Somebody ought to call the town constable.”

“I think somebody already has,” John said, nodding at the two men who approached the thugs with drawn short swords.

By the time John strode across the jetty, the drunks were already shackled together with their arms bound behind them. They would probably spend the night locked up in the magistrate’s cellar, he thought, for drunken disturbance, no worse for wear in the morning than a bad headache and some angry wives.

“Hey! You there, halt.”

John looked around to see who they were talking to. He was alone on the dock. The boatman had already pulled away. Maybe if he pretended not to hear, just kept walking. They probably wanted him for a witness.

“Halt in the name of the law!”

Sighing, John stopped, put down his small valise and turned to look at them. One of the drunken louts was grinning stupidly. Adversity loves company, he thought.

“Did you wish to speak with me? I only just arrived as you did. I assure you I know nothing of this affair.”

“You look like a stranger. I don’t recollect seeing you in this shire.”

“I’m a friend of the abbey.”

“Well, pardon me for saying so, but you don’t look like a friend of the abbey. The prior’s friends are usually more elegantly turned out.”

“I’ve come a long way. I’m a merchant. A Hansa merchant attached to the London Steelyard.”

This seemed not to impress his inquisitors. “Here, I have papers to prove it.” He pointed to the valise at his feet. “If I may?”

The constable nodded and John reached into the small bag, searching through his soiled linen—he’d brought only the barest essentials so that he could travel easily—even looking inside the pages of his Homer. Nothing. He shook the book of Homer’s poems, but the only thing that fell out was one of Kate’s hair ribands that he used to mark the page.

Then he remembered.

He’d stuck the forged credentials inside his
Disputation of Purgatory,
thinking he could work on it, then wisely deciding that if he were searched
it would be damning evidence. He’d left the credentials behind with the book.

The grinning lout had found his tongue. “If he’s a friend of the prior, I’m a fat whore’s keeper,” he said in a slur of words.

“You are a fat whore’s keeper,” one of the rogues responded with a snigger. “I’ve had your wife.”

“You whoreson, I’ll cut off your cock and feed it to the crows before your very eyes, I’ll—”

“You’ll shut your filthy mouth before I shut it for good,” the constable responded, giving weight to his words with a poke of his sword. Then he nodded at John. “Bring this one in too. The magistrate’s already going to be mad at being pulled from his supper. Might as well give him a vagrant to plump his warrants.”

“If you’ll just send to the abbey—” John said, becoming really alarmed now.

“Do I look like a messenger boy?” the constable grumbled. “Tell it to the magistrate.”

“Yesh, tell it to the magishtrate,” the drunkest of the rogues mocked.

John hoped the magistrate was more reasonable than the constable. This did not augur a good beginning to his travels, he thought as he trudged up the hill with his stomach growling and not a farthing to his name.