The Queen's Lady (12 page)

Honor forced her way again to the rope. Ralph’s head rolled back and forth against the stake. His heaving chest, stripped bare in the struggle to tether him, glistened with grimy sweat. The anguish in his eyes ripped Honor’s heart like a fishhook.

As the executioner stood by, the Bishop’s Chancellor read out from a scroll the condemned men’s heresies, beginning with the friar. “Divers and sundry times within the parish of St. Giles you have alleged that the sacrament of the altar is only bread, and not Christ’s true body . . .”

“Stinking Lutheran!” a woman yelled.

“. . . and you have alleged that no priest can absolve a man of sin; that tithes, mortuaries and oblations are not due to priests; that the pardons and blessings of bishops have no value . . .”

When he had finished the list, he looked at the friar. The crowd murmured, knowing the question that was to come. Would Friar Heywood, in terror of hell at this ultimate moment, recant and die in the bosom of the Church? There was no chance of pardon; both men, as second offenders, must burn. But by recanting and gaining absolution, the Church offered salvation for their souls. And so the Chancellor asked, “Do you abjure your heresies and return to the Church?”

Heywood smiled beatifically. “I trust I am not separate from the Church. I know that I am closer to God.”

Amazement coursed through the crowd, most people condemning his wickedness, a few praising his steadfastness. No one seemed interested when the Chancellor crossed to the second man. On his way, he looked apprehensively at the bruised sky clamping down on the square. Rain clouds. He rattled through the second man’s crimes: “You have on sundry occasions shown yourself to be of an erroneous opinion concerning the blessed sacraments . . .”

Honor strained at the rope to hear the charges, but she was too far away and the chattering people drowned out the Chancellor’s words. They were interested only in the famous friar, not this unknown man. She caught only the phrase “. . . selling illegal Bibles in the English tongue . . .” and when the Chancellor impatiently asked if he would recant his heresies, Ralph only shut his eyes tightly. Whether it was a gesture of refusal or only of agony, Honor could not tell. The Chancellor waited only a moment before quickly striding away.

The pit was now clear except for the executioner standing between the two chained men. The air above the sand shimmered as if breathing back the absorbed heat of former fires. The crowd stilled. A dog barked in an alley. A far-off church bell clanged.

The Mayor rose and lifted his arms. “
Fiat justicia
!”

The executioner turned to the friar and thrust his torch into the faggots. Instantly, flames roared up. The executioner withdrew the torch, turned, and thrust it in below Ralph. The straw kindled, then flared. Ralph’s body went rigid. Only his eyes moved, darting over the flames that licked his legs and hands and then subsided like the playful swats of torture a cat inflicts on a maimed bird.

There was now a wall of flame around the friar. All that could be seen was the top of his head. Clouds of gray smoke billowed over him. The hiss of the wood rose above the excited hiss of men and women who inched back from the blaze. Then, suddenly, it was over. His head slumped. The smoke had asphyxiated him.

The Lieutenant stepped forward. In a gesture of mercy he raised a sledgehammer and drove in the nail that held the chain at the back of the stake. The chain rippled away. The friar’s body slid down the stake and melted into the fire.

There was a moment of utter silence. Then a groan of disappointment that the drama was so swiftly concluded. Then, all eyes turned to the second man. The flames around him were not so greedy. At the sides they only skimped along the damp wood, though in front they were leaping up in three-foot orange tongues.

Ralph was writhing under his chain. His abdomen pumped as if in spasm. But with his immense strength he was straining through the twine that bound his feet. It snapped. The two pieces sprang up like fighting snakes, then dropped into the flames. He lifted one freed leg and kicked wildly at the glowing wood. The chain gnawed his ribs, smearing skin away.

Honor gagged. Beyond the flickering screen of fire she saw a slime of excrement darkening his leg. She caught glimpses of his foot . . . kicking, recoiling, kicking again . . . the skin of his sole charred black. People shouted and cheered, excited by his primal struggle. Honor wailed as if the fire was consuming her own flesh.

Ralph’s eyeballs bulged, dehydrated. Tears spilled, bubbled on his cheeks, evaporated. The tatters of his shirt curled and smoked. Sparks lighted in the bush of his beard. It flared like dry pine needles. Honor shrieked. Ralph shook his head wildly until the beard only smoldered.

The fire sputtered on endlessly, prolonging his agony. Not one merciful breath of wind rushed in to fan the flames. And Ralph’s own vast strength kept him conscious and fighting long past the time when most men would have fainted.

Honor thought she would go mad. Like a wild animal, she sprang. As if infused with some of Ralph’s strength, she clawed her way between two guards and under the rope. She tore across the open pit. As she neared Ralph the fist of heat punched her, scalding her throat, forcing shut her eyes, gagging her with the sweetish stink of his burning flesh.

She heard the rip of silk. A guard had snatched the back of her skirt. Without turning she bunched her fists and shot her elbows backwards into his ribs. His breath belched from him and he released her. Unbalanced, she toppled.

She scrambled onto her hands and knees. Two guards were racing toward her. She was almost at the holocaust beneath Ralph. She sprawled across the final two feet of scorched sand. Her brain flared a warning, but her hands, with a will of their own, pawed at the glowing logs.

She looked up. Ralph’s red eyes, reflecting red flame, met hers. He recognized her. His crusted face expanded with joy—a joy that, for one instant, quenched the agony. Then his eyeballs rolled up, white inside the red rind of socket. His backbone arched. Sparks jumped to his head. His hair flared. Smoke boiled over him. Honor’s ears were split by one harrowing scream from him. And then the fire engulfed him.

Both guards caught up with her at once. They lifted her arms above her head, twisted her limp body around, and dragged her facedown between them to the edge of the crowd the way Ralph had been dragged to the stake. At the rope barricade they pushed her underneath and dropped her on her knees. She knelt, stunned into immobility, and the guards decided it was safe to leave her. People near her, anxious to keep watching the man burn, shuffled in around her.

Her head slumped back. She was dimly conscious of a throbbing in her hands. They hung like bricks at the ends of her arms. She had not the strength to lift them. Nor to lift up her head. It hung back, so very heavy. The standing bodies around her restricted her vision to the shaft of sky above her upturned face. She blinked at the sparks drifting upward in this column of air—bright, spiraling stars that died to cinders against the gray sky.

The first, fat drops of rain splatted as warm as blood onto her forehead. Thunder crashed. The sky unleashed a deluge. People looked up. Several laughed, delighted at the relief the water brought. Then, suddenly, the wind rose. Rain began to lash them in whipping, stinging sheets. The mass of humanity around the pit began to crack apart. The water seemed to erode them into chunks, into small islands like the ones already forming on the baked roads leading into Smithfield. Men, women and squealing children scuttled away. Rain scythed across the stands, forcing the dignitaries from their seats. Hurrying down the stairs, they formed a current pushing through the eddying crowd. Running bodies swept out of the square like debris washed into a gutter.

As water pooled around her skirt, Honor opened her mouth and let the pins of rain sting and then die on her tongue. She gulped the drenched air, willing it to cleanse away the ash that clogged her throat and nostrils. She turned her head to the left. Across the pit, the weeping friar who had earlier collided with her horse kneeled too, in a silent anguish of his own. They were the only mourners.

The stake that had held the friar was demolished and rain pounded the hissing coals and washed the dead man’s remains. The stake that held Ralph still stood, half eaten to charcoal. Under the chain, his twisted body hung, a black, shriveled lump.

Honor bent forward and vomited.

Something made her lift her head. Straight across the pit one other person, she saw, had remained behind. Father Bastwick. He stood under the gable of the dry church porch, watching her.

Above them all, the blind stone saints on St. Bartholomew’s tower stood sentry in the sloping sheets of rain.

6

K
ing Henry sat with Anne Boleyn in the window seat of a gatehouse in a manor near Oxford. His head hovered over her naked breast, but she was staring beyond him at the night sky, which was cut up by the mullioned windows into starry squares. The whiskers of his beard stung her as his lips and tongue worked around her nipple. “Ow,” she murmured. He paused. Then he bit her.

“Ouch!” She clamped her hands firmly on both his bearded cheeks, lifted his head, and glared. His blue eyes looked up with all the apprehension of a child caught with a finger in the honey pot. He licked a dribble of saliva from the corner of his mouth and waited for his rebuke.

Anne’s eyes narrowed, tugging together eyebrows as lustrous as black silk. She leaned back against the stone casement. Above her lowered bodice her black hair lay in stripes over her small breasts. The pink, erect nipples peeked out like berries through brambles. She turned her head and looked out at the night as if she were alone.

“Woman,” he growled, “how long will you torture me?”

She watched a shooting star.

“Anne,” he pleaded, “come to my bed.”

“No.”

“But why?”

“You’ve had my answer”.

“But I don’t understand,” he whined.

Her tone was flat, businesslike, except for a note of weariness. “Your Grace cannot marry me, and the longer you single me out as you do, the more you jeopardize my chance of making a good match elsewhere.”

“Marry you! God’s wounds, am I not moving heaven and earth to do so?”

Her smile was disdainful. “Heaven is immovable, Your Grace, even by a prince as mighty as yourself. And as for earth, the patch beneath the Pope’s feet shows little sign of yielding. Meanwhile, you already have a wife to share your bed.”

She was forcing up the lemon yellow bodice of her gown, and he groaned at this signal that she was finished dispensing her favors for the evening. He grabbed her wrist to stop her. She stiffened in defiance.

Sudden, raw anger infused his face. He fought his way up from the undignified lover’s sprawl in the window seat and stood over her, bulky with red velvet, gold silk, and precious stones. Henry Tudor was six feet tall, broad of shoulder and long of leg. He had been a skilled athlete all his life, and even at thirty-seven, and heavy with years of gluttony, his body still exuded an athlete’s power. Behind him, the remains of the fire across the room illuminated his cropped, golden hair and seemed to make his huge form glow with majesty. But his lips, a small red bow in the broad face, pouted with indignation. “Have I not sworn to you that I no longer lie with the Queen? God’s blood, what more would you have me do?”

Anne snorted. She rose and pushed past him. The room, lit only by the dying fire, was bare except for a bed, a table, and a scatter of cushions near the hearth. She kicked a tumbled coal into the fire. “If you were a Prince of Lombardy you would dispatch the barren old woman with a potion and marry whom you please.”

Henry was genuinely shocked. Dignity crept back and inflated his chest. “I am, however, King of England. A Christian King. Such evils will not be countenanced in my realm.”

Anne whirled around and glowered at him, her hands on her hips.

“And you would do well to remember,” he went on, “that the lady you call ‘old woman’ is a Spanish Princess. Your great-grandfather rose from a mercer’s shop, Mistress
Bullen
, but in Catherine’s veins flows the blood of kings.”