The Queen's Lady (21 page)

As their shears snipped, the morning stillness was jarred by a loud banging as of a heavy door slammed shut. It came from the direction of the New Building. Honor glanced back nervously at the doorway in the brick wall. She had hoped to be away on the river toward Greenwich, back to the Queen, before a chance meeting with Sir Thomas could take place. Still mortified, she could not face him without discomfort, and she flushed at the thought of seeing him open the garden door, coming up to the house after his hours of study and prayer. She had risen early just to avoid him, but Lady Alice had detained her, eager to send her off with gifts to impress the Queen with the bounty of her garden. Honor watched the door, her pulse drubbing against the basket-handle.

“It’s only riffraff being brought from the lockup,” Lady Alice grunted. She yanked out a weed by the root. “I swear, the lousels take up more of his time than the King’s business does.”

Honor relaxed. Of course, she thought, chiding herself with a smile. The slamming was not from Sir Thomas leaving the New Building. It was the lockup. As a Justice of the Peace he had always kept a jail for petty criminals. When she’d lived here she had heard the banging of its door often enough as drunkards and thieves were locked in or discharged. She almost laughed out loud at the timid state of her nerves. As she turned back to help Lady Alice, the barking voice of Holt, More’s bailiff, scaled the garden wall as if to convince her. “Move along, now!” he ordered his prisoner.

Honor frowned. She loathed Holt. She knew he was detested by all the servants as well. He had once divulged to Sir Thomas a planned elopement of one of the laundry maids with a groom from a neighboring estate. Sir Thomas, naturally, had to scuttle the affair, but the girl was shy and secretive and had told no one of her pregnancy. Four months later they had found her shivering in a ditch beside the pre-mature baby she had smothered in the mud. After that, Honor never trusted Holt. She often wondered why Sir Thomas kept him.

“One moment, I beg you,” the other man outside the wall said weakly. “My ankle . . .”

For a moment Honor thought she recognized the prisoner’s voice. Then she shook her head. This seemed to be a morning for odd fancies.

The men’s feet crunched by on the gravel walk.

When Honor hurried a few minutes later down to the pier with Lady Alice’s compliments to the Queen still droning in her ears, she was alarmed to see the Bishop of London’s plush barge tethered beside hers. It was not his presence in the house that concerned her: Bishop Tunstall and Sir Thomas, she knew, were old friends. But several of his cleric-servants were taking their ease on the bank as they waited for him, and she scanned the faces, looking for Bastwick. He was not among them. Thank goodness, she thought. That’s another encounter I would avoid this morning. There is much more I must discover before
that
meeting. Her boatman pushed away and strained at his oars, and she settled in the cushions, relieved to be gliding back to Greenwich and the Queen.

At three in the morning More rocked on his knees, alone before the altar of his stark, private chapel in the New Building. He was naked from the waist up. Flecks of blood had spattered the stone floor beneath him. A scourge lay limp in his sweaty hand. It was made of three knotted cords, each one ending in a tiny hook. He raised it again.

Slash!
The cords whaled over his back. The barbed ends ripped his flesh. Welts split open.

He had awoken in his bed at two, horrified to feel the sticky proof of sin smeared over his thigh. It was no comfort that the Church did not call it sin, not if a man spilled his seed while sleeping, unconscious of the devils in his body. But was I really asleep? he agonized. Did I not, in that semiconsciousness, willfully beckon forth the image of her naked body at the pond? Did my hands not prickle with lechery?

Slash!

Why this degrading lust? Why, when I was sure that Jane’s death, so many years ago, would release me from its bonds? Oh, God, even then, with Jane, I sinned most foully. I failed. St. Paul forgive me, I used my wife as a whore. Even before I wed, I failed. What a laughable attempt at piety, living with those good, Carthusian monks, yearning to be pure, like them. For two years among them I strove for chastity, for that state which the Church has always revered above matrimony. But only the strong can hold to such vows. The weak, like me, must marry . . .

Slash!

Sweet Lord, I did all I could to keep from sinning. When Jane died, I took a wife older than myself. An ugly woman, a stupid woman. A woman past child-bearing, so that intercourse with her was forbidden. I cast temptation out of my bed, and I thought I was safe in my constrained marriage. But the fire is always sparked from somewhere else.

Slash!

The pain of flesh scraped from ribs threw him forward with a strangled cry. He dropped the whip, and broke his fall with blood-stained hands on the cold flagstones. He rested on all fours, panting, his head lolling. The hair shirt that he secretly wore every day under his clothes lay on the floor nearby, mocking him in his failure. Soon he must rise and pull it on again, and the pulp of the raw ruts on back and shoulder and rib would stick to its pin-prick fibers, engorging it afresh with blood, reminding him throughout the day of his abject unworthiness.

But even as he contemplated his baseness, the vision of his ward’s moonlit body bent before him, her parted buttocks tormenting him. Crouched on all fours, dog-like, he could not suppress the craving to enter her, dog-like. His erection throbbed and made him weep in silent, wretched shame.

Slash!

Dear God, I suffer such agony of mind and body and soul! Suffer like Origen of Alexandria who finally castrated himself rather than befoul his body with lust. Suffer like St. Jerome who would beat his heart with stones, yet could not beat the maiden from his breast. No! Not like those blessed Fathers of our Church. To compare myself with them is abominable pride, the rankest of sins.

Slash!

The whip raged over his back. Blood speckled the floor. The single candle on the altar gasped, and More’s head dropped to his sweating chest, bowed with the unbearable weight of guilt and shame.

11

H
onor was still shaking snow from her hem when she entered the Queen’s suite at Greenwich and found several clerics lounging in the antechamber. Apparently part of a small delegation come to see the Queen, these assistants were taking their ease with some of her ladies-in-waiting, bantering over mulled wine and roasted chestnuts. The door to the Queen’s private chamber stood slightly ajar and male voices rumbled out. Inside, Catherine moved past the crack of the opened door. She glimpsed Honor and tensely beckoned her.

Honor went in. Catherine threw her a fleeting smile and a nod to close the door behind her. “Some wine, my lords?” Catherine suggested with obvious relief at the diversion Honor had brought.

Honor dutifully crossed to the sideboard to pour wine. In the silence, flames from the hearth leapt and crackled as if feeding on the fuel of tension between the three people she had interrupted. They formed a triangle: the Queen at the window, Cardinal Campeggio near the door, and the obese Cardinal Wolsey facing the fire. Both men were swathed from cap to shoe in the scarlet satin that blazoned the might of the Church.

“Your Grace is unkind,” Campeggio protested to the Queen as if there had been no interruption in their talk. He shifted off his gouty foot, visibly in pain. “I am completely impartial in this sad business. My one goal has been to reconcile you and the King. To restore harmony. It is always the goal of the Church in such matters.”

“Reconciliation. Bah!” Cardinal Wolsey grunted from the hearth. He kept his huge red back turned on the room, and as Honor offered him the goblet he waved it away with such vehemence that she stepped backwards too quickly and spilled some wine onto the Turkish carpet. “Can you reconcile the lion and the hyena?” Wolsey scoffed.

Catherine’s lips twitched, but she said nothing.

Campeggio closed his eyes tightly as if to regain his composure. Honor could see from his gray face that two months of this English standoff had left him drained. He waited until Honor brought him wine, then gulped it down, and gave her back the goblet. “If, however, reconciliation is impossible,” he went on doggedly, “then why, Your Grace, will you not agree to take the veil? Surely your retirement to a convent is the course that offers a blessed comfort to all. The King promises that your life in seclusion will be as rich and joyful as at any court. In whatever convent you choose, you shall keep state like a Queen.”

“But not
be
a Queen,” Catherine said witheringly.

Campeggio sighed. “No.”

“And such a course would leave my lord free to marry again, would it not?” she asked.

Campeggio looked down.

“Am I not correct?” Catherine insisted. “That you have discretionary power to dissolve my earthly marriage in favor of a spiritual one in a nunnery?”

“There is a pious precedent,” Campeggio urged. “The Queen of Louis XII of France took the veil—”

“Yes, my lord Cardinal,” she cut him off bitterly. “So I have been told. Several times.”

For a few moments the only sound above the fire’s hiss was the click of the Queen’s rosary beads slipping through her fingers, one by one.

Wolsey stamped his foot on a cinder. “By all that’s holy,” he growled, “you would lose nothing but the person of the King, and that you have lost already.” The remark was all the more malicious for having been delivered to the fire, not to her face.

She addressed his back. “Have the courage to answer me at least. If I take the veil, would the Church consider my lord a widower?”

The monstrous bulk of Wolsey turned. He sneered, no longer even bothering to mask his contempt. “You know it to be so.”

“As well as I know my duty!” Catherine flared. “Duty to God, who brought me to the vocation of marriage. Duty to our daughter, whom I will not desert. And duty to my lord, who, I doubt not, will presently shake off the wicked snares and vain councilors that beset him, and see where
his
duty lies. You spoke of lions, my lord Cardinal. Take care the royal one you serve, who seems to sleep, does not awake to maul you.”

The folds of Wolsey’s chins trembled in fury beneath his waxy face. Campeggio hobbled into the corridor of combat between the two adversaries, so ill-matched in stature, though equals in resolution. “Please, my lord. Please, my lady. We must remain calm.” Wearily, he pinched the bridge of his nose. “Your Grace speaks of the Princess Mary. Now, we understand the strain on you in not having your daughter near—”

“In being mercilessly
kept
from her!” Catherine cried. “Cardinal Wolsey has forbidden me to see or contact her these many months. And,” she added, her voice almost cracking, “you speak right. It goes hard, indeed.”

“But, there!” Campeggio said brightly. “It is only a matter of agreeing to take the veil and you shall be reunited with your child. In making this slight sacrifice you would honor God, and honor the scruple of your conscience, too, without loss of any of your temporal goods or possessions, or those of your daughter. Take this offer, my lady, for your sake, and for hers.”

“The scruple of my conscience do you call it?” Catherine stared at him, incredulous. “The holy state of matrimony is the state God called me to. Is that so little a thing? Shall I blaspheme against the sacrament of marriage? Shall I call myself a whore? My daughter a bastard? Call my union with one of God’s anointed kings a sin that has defiled my honor—and his—for nineteen years? Endanger my very soul? Never! I long with all my mother’s heart to see my child again, but never will I bargain for it at the cost of my immortal soul.”

“I marvel at your obstinacy, madam,” Wolsey sputtered. Campeggio, beaten, shuffled to a chair near Honor and slumped on its edge, apparently to ease the throbbing of his foot. Wolsey stalked to the center of the room with the breath wheezing out of him like wet moss squeezed underfoot. Honor instinctively backed up closer to the sideboard. She knew where Wolsey’s fury sprang from. All of Europe was watching him, England’s Chancellor, as this drama unfolded. His credibility with the King—his whole future perhaps—rested on securing the divorce. “You prate of the safety of your soul,” he said to the Queen, “but what of the safety of this realm if His Grace is thwarted in his rights? Without an heir, you abandon it to bloody civil strife. Are these such ‘little things’?”