The Queen's Lady (19 page)

“I saw Edward run out the back. Then I looked for you. In those clothes, you were not difficult to spot. I only hope the Sydenhams escaped, too, after Edward.”

Honor watched him, wondering . . .

“Brother,” she blurted, “did you know Ralph Pepperton?”

“Pepperton? No.”

That was all.

“I must go,” she declared suddenly. “I have been away too long. If Her Grace finds me gone—”

“Her Grace? Do you mean . . ? Have you a place at court?”

“Yes,” she said, drawn by his stare. Despite his ugliness, his pale blue eyes shone with a power both mesmerizing and disturbing. “I wait on the Queen.”

“I knew you were worth a risk!” Enthusiasm lit up his face, sweeping away all his shyness. “Lady, hear me. I have come from exile with Tyndale in Antwerp—”

“Exile?” she interrupted cautiously.

He shrugged as if to say that his personal situation was of no importance. “Arrested for preaching in Lincoln. I slipped the Bishop’s bonds. But,” he resumed in earnest, “I’ve returned to rouse support for the English Brethren. So many of us are poor—scholars, bookbinders, glaziers, bricklayers. Oh, we’ve attracted a sprinkling of well-to-do merchants like good Master Sydenham—God help him, now. But we need more friends, powerful friends. And with your ear at court you could do much to help us find them. No, do not draw back!” His small hands grabbed her shoulders. “I am not mad, I promise you. I know that there are men at court who would support us. You could sound them out. I have heard whispers that an influential gentleman sympathizes with us—a man on Cardinal Wolsey’s staff, no less. A Master Cromwell. Alas, I cannot reach such men. But you can. And there are others. Even the Lady Anne Boleyn, so I have heard—”

“What?” She pulled out of his grasp. “You’d have me plot with my mistress’s enemy? Brother,” she said severely, “I was glad to bring a warning tonight for I would not see any of you burn. But I assure you I am not one of you. For God’s sake, you are a heretic!”

Frish smiled as he would at a child, and murmured, “For God’s sake, indeed.” He cocked his head at her and asked in a matter-of-fact tone, “Mistress, did you never catch your father in a lie?”

Warily, she asked, “Your meaning, Brother?”

“I’ll tell you a story,” said Frish. “My father was a tenant farmer. I labored in his field from the day I could lift a load. When I was nine, the landlord stopped by our cottage to see my father, and when he left, my father told me the landlord had accused me of stealing some of his pears. I was desolate, not only because I was innocent, but also because the landlord had always been a friend to me, always told me I had promise. My father beat me for the theft. Years later I found out that the landlord, who had no son, had not come that day with any such accusation, but rather with an offer to pay for an education for me. My father, you see, preferred to retain my labor.” He looked Honor in the eye. “The Church keeps us from God, mistress. It frightens us and punishes us in order to keep us enslaved. But I have caught the Church in its lie.”

Again, she saw Bastwick standing over her own father, punishing him with the terror of hell, all for a mortuary.

“Are you so sure you are not one of us?” Frish asked gently.

She could find no words. Objections and denials withered under those fiercely pure eyes.

He lowered his head, disappointed by her silence. His body slumped again into meek self-consciousness. “Forgive me,” he mumbled, “I’ve made a mistake. I’ll go.” He stood. “You will not want me to escort you. I would only endanger you further.”

He flipped the hood of his tunic over his fair head. Instantly, it cut off the beam from his eyes. Without another word he left her side, his footsteps falling noiselessly. As he passed beyond the lantern’s feeble halo, clouds blotted the moon, as if some massive hand in heaven covered it to shield him, allowing him to go in darkness.

But Honor heard his clear voice as he called back softly from the end of the alley, “God be with you!”

10

“I
s the litter for the Cardinal, Master DeVille?” Honor asked, looking down at the activity in the courtyard.

She was standing at a window of the library in the Bishop of London’s palace. Cardinal Campeggio, the Pope’s special envoy, had been a guest here since his arrival in London the week before. Now, his retinue was assembling for a move to quarters across the city. The palace was attached to St. Paul’s, and in the shadow of the cathedral’s spire servants and clerks jostled and shouted among horses, mules, and baggage carts, while at the center of the commotion the Cardinal’s horse litter sat motionless. Honor glanced over her shoulder at the young cleric writing at a book-strewn table. “Is the Cardinal ill?”

“He suffers from gout,” Percy DeVille answered without glancing up from his ledger. He was cataloging a shipment of books just arrived from Florence. DeVille was an assistant to the Bishop’s librarian, and Honor had dealt with him on several occasions, borrowing rare books for the Queen. “It took him weeks to get here from Dover in that litter,” he added.

Honor looked out again and caught a glimpse of the pale, balding man frowning out from the brocaded interior of the curtained couch. “Perhaps delay is his strategy,” she said.

“Strategy?” DeVille asked, finally looking up.

“His best hope is that, given time, the King will change his mind about the divorce. Then the Pope would not have to act at all.”

“Change his mind?” DeVille smirked over the rim of his eyeglasses. “Don’t let affection for the Queen cloud your reason, Mistress Larke.”

Honor turned from the window. “While your own affection bends toward the King?”

“Only toward the Church, mistress,” he murmured, “only toward the Church.” His pen scratched another entry.

Honor glanced at a far corner where a couple of priests, the only other people in the library, stood chatting. She was waiting for them to leave. A week ago she had paid DeVille to check the Bishop’s records for information about Ralph’s death, and she had come this afternoon to hear what he had discovered. But the priests were laughing softly, making no haste to go. She moved to DeVille’s table and restlessly fingered the cover of a large, beautifully embossed volume of Cicero. “And in the King’s ‘great matter,’ which way does the Church’s affection bend?” she asked.

He raised an eyebrow. “Fishing, Mistress Larke?”

“Only for what will rise to the bait, Master DeVille.”

He chuckled. “I’m afraid you’ll take no great catch from these waters. Though I will say this much—under normal circumstances the King’s case would be strong, based as it is on the scriptural injunction in Leviticus.”

“But the Queen’s case is surely stronger,” Honor argued. “The former Pope dispensed with Leviticus in a papal bull that allowed the marriage. It’s there in black and white.”

“But the question is, can a Pope legally dispense with a scriptural injunction?”

“Come now, Master DeVille. Historically Popes have issued hundreds of such dispensations, and all sorts of royal marriages have been contracted on the strength of them. How can a papal dispensation be called illegal?”

“That,” he murmured cryptically, “is the heart of the matter.” He frowned at his dulled pen, took up a knife, and began to whittle the quill tip. “I understand from what one of the lawyers let drop that even the King is shrewdly skirting this issue. I hear he is planning to keep Leviticus in the background, and will argue to Cardinal Campeggio simply that the wording of the Pope’s bull of dispensation was faulty, and therefore void.”

Honor flipped through the Cicero to mask her excitement at the news of this legal twist; it would greatly interest the Queen. “You mean, then,” she said, “that the King dares not attack the fundamental principle of papal authority.”

“Not if he hopes to win.”

“As you think he shall?”

DeVille smiled and examined the sharpened quill. “If I possessed the art of divination, Mistress Larke, I would not be a poor assistant librarian.” He shrugged. “Who knows how Campeggio will rule in the name of Rome? As I suggested, normal arguments apply under normal circumstances, not the crisis we face today, what with the Emperor breathing down the Pope’s neck. And look at it from the Pope’s point of view. The King’s demand for a divorce has led his Holiness into the jaws of a trap. He is being asked to declare that the judgment of a former Pope was wrong. If he admits that, he will be admitting to all Europe that a Pope has erred, and that is precisely what the arch-heretic Luther has been raving about, saying Popes have always subverted the eternal law of God and substituted their own corrupt judgments.”

“How does Luther come into this?”

“Great heaven, mistress, look about you. The Emperor’s German lands are awash with Lutheran heresy. That outlaw monk has brought the German people to the brink of anarchy. Luther and his followers threaten to tear Christendom apart. A false move now by Pope Clement could lead to a fatal rift.”

“I cannot pretend to bewail such considerations if they help the Queen’s cause,” Honor said sincerely. Then she dismissed the idea with a flick of her hand. “But all that disorder is happening in the German lands. This divorce is an
English
wrangle.”

“But it is a sticking point for the Church. On the one hand, to grant the divorce may rupture Christian unity. On the other hand, if the King’s desire is not satisfied many are afraid he will create a rift
here
, between England and Rome, to the great harm of the English people. And then how quickly might the spread of Lutheran heresy infect our weakened island?”

“But that’s absurd. The King is renowned for his orthodoxy. The Pope himself awarded him his title of Defender of the Faith.”

“Ah, but that was before the Lady bewitched him. Now, who can say where this will lead us?” DeVille laid down the pen, peeled off his spectacles, and rubbed his eyes. “What a kettle the King has set to boiling. And all,” he snorted, “for a woman. By the way, have you heard the people’s name for her? The goggle-eyed whore. Though it is my belief she has not yet earned that epithet.”

“Goggle-eyed, or whore?” Honor asked dryly.

“The latter. No, I believe she has kept her royal lover from proceeding to the ultimate conjunction. You look surprised, Mistress Larke,” he said with satisfaction, “and I daresay most of the court, like you, accepts that the Lady shares the King’s bed. But I think not. She is shrewd, if nothing else. She has learned from her sister’s experience the value of soiled goods.”

Honor considered this. Anne Boleyn’s sister had once been the King’s mistress, and when he had tired of her he had married her to one of his gaming cronies and shunted her off to a backwater. Honor knew Anne to be ambitious. DeVille, she realized, could be right. However, gossip about the King’s private life was not what she had come here for. Impatiently, she glanced again at the two priests still talking in the corner.

But DeVille continued in a self-important whisper, “And I will tell you something else about the Lady. Many of the English bishops fear her.”

“Why should they?”

“She has many admirers among the rogues at court, and several of them are tainted with suspicion of heresy. Seeing the Church has no love for her, she encourages these men. Now, if Queen Catherine were cast aside and this shrewish woman rises up in her place, what evil might she then brew against the Church?”

Honor was surprised. Two weeks before, in the alley of Sydenham’s warehouse, Brother Frish had spoken of high-placed supporters of the Brethren, but she had dismissed it as wishful thinking on his part. “But can a few mischief-makers really be such a threat?” she asked.

“More than a few, mistress. And they support others elsewhere in the city who are hard at work. My lord Bishop’s agents recently uncovered a site of their trade in forbidden books. English Bibles, even.”

Honor stiffened. “Really?” she asked. “Where?”

“Coleman Street, I believe. There was a raid, and the ringleader was arrested.”

“What will happen to him?”

“He’ll do penance round the cathedral if he abjures. If he gives trouble at his examination they’ll hold him in the Lollard’s Tower for a while.” He jerked his head toward the southwest tower of St. Paul’s.