The Queen's Lady (3 page)

Ralph’s arm swung around Honor again. He toppled her over his shoulder like a bundle of cloth, edged around the fracas, and ran off down Cheapside.

*

By the time Ralph pushed through the gate of Christopher Larke’s townhouse Honor was half asleep in his arms. Ralph hurried across the courtyard, and Honor stirred as he hushed the yapping dogs and headed for the kitchen door. There, under a hanging lantern, Ralph stopped to catch his breath. He lifted his face to let the breeze cool his sweat-dampened hair and shirt.

Honor winced at a pain in her side. She found its source, a hard corner of the little book inside her sleeve. She pulled the book out. Under the lamplight its blue leather cover swirled with gilt-tooled leaves and petals. The leather was spattered with dried droplets of blood. She looked up at Ralph. “The foreigner man gave me this,” she whispered.

The book was fastened with two small brass clasps. She pried them up. Leaves of creamy, thick vellum fluttered, then settled open at the title page. Honor’s eyes drifted below the incomprehensible letters to a drawing. It was a single, startlingly beautiful painting of a flower—a winding stem with toothed, oval leaves of spring green, and a blossom of four, joined petals. The petals burst out in glorious blue, a gay sky blue, bright and bold.

“Speedwell,” Ralph whispered, smiling at the wildflower.

Honor’s fingers traced over the elegant characters of the title as if she might absorb their meaning by touch. What mysteries did such a beautiful book have to tell? she wondered.
“Never show it to a priest!”
the foreign man had warned, and then he had smiled, though he knew he was dying. Did his book hold some secret that had made him smile like that? Her eyes were drawn back to the flower, so fresh and lifelike beneath her stare. “Speedwell,” she repeated softly, and the blossom seemed almost to nod, as if trembling under her breath.

“Peppers,” Honor declared suddenly, looking Ralph in the eye, “I’m going to learn to read.”

He frowned. “Reading be for priests and clerks, not for ladies, mistress.” He clamped her nose between his knuckles and whispered with mock anger, “And what’s this ‘Peppers,’ if you please? That name was only for your lady mother to use, God rest her soul. Not wild little wenches like you.” Honor squirmed, trying to pry her nose out from his grip, and she giggled when he finally pretended that she had beaten him and won free.

The kitchen door burst open. Honor’s stout nurse, Margaret, gasped. “You’re here!” She was disheveled and bleary-eyed. “Oh, little mistress, we’ve been looking everywhere. It’s your father. Struck with the Sweat, he is.”

Her voice came high and frightened as she crossed herself. “Blessed Jesu, Ralph, the master lies a-dying!”

Honor’s father was writhing on his bed.

She stood near the doorway of the darkened chamber, Margaret on one side of her, Ralph on the other. Ralph tightly held her hand. Servants huddled along the walls. Some held apron corners or cloths to their noses to block the reek of putrid sweat.

Honor knew about the sweating sickness. It had killed her only other close relatives, two uncles. It frequently struck London in spring, and everyone dreaded it for the appalling swiftness of the death it usually brought. “Merry at dinner, dead at supper,” she’d often heard the servants murmur. But they had meant the sweating sickness in other people’s houses. Now, it was here, in hers.

On the pillow, her father’s face was a stranger’s face. His fair hair was dark with sweat. Red blotches mottled his cheeks. His eyes, which she had seen shed tears only when he laughed too hard, were seeping a milky discharge. He was moaning softly.

A priest she had never seen before stood by the bed. It was clear he was a muscular young man, but his broad back was to her and she could not see his face. On the table beside him a single candle guttered, and its light glinted in a crescent along the top of his bald crown, shaved to create his priest’s tonsure. Below it, a fringe of black hair hung raggedly over his ears. The hem of his threadbare black cassock was crusted with mud. His scuffed boots had dropped clumps of horse dung onto the floor rushes.

“Who is he?” Ralph whispered to Margaret.

“Name’s Father Bastwick,” she whispered back. “The priest’s new curate at Nettlecombe. Dog-poor, as you can see. He just rode in, out of the night,” she said, wringing her hands. “He’s been badgering the master for the corpse present.”

Honor understood the fear in Margaret’s voice. When Honor’s mother had died ten months before at their manor of Nettlecombe in Somerset, the old parish priest had requested the embroidered coffin cloth for his mortuary fee—the “corpse present”—as was his right. Unreasonable in grief, her father had refused. The priest denounced him from the pulpit. Her father had remained stubborn, and the feud had festered all these months.

The young priest at the bedside suddenly said angrily, “By all the laws of custom and decree, you owe this debt to Holy Church.”

Honor’s fingers tightened into a ball inside Ralph’s hand.

Larke’s gaze wandered, unfocused. “Father,” he said through labored breaths, “never mind . . . all that. I ask you only . . . hear my confession. Prepare me . . . to meet my God.”

“I marvel at your blasphemous intransigence, man,” the priest replied. “The amount is a trifle to you. The sapphire ring you wear would more than suffice. Pay the mortuary now. It is a surety against absolution of your sins.”

“Never!” Larke cried with sudden violence. “No more grasping priests. You’re vultures, all. Get out!” Sapped by his outburst, his head lolled on the sweat-stained pillow.

“Never?” Bastwick’s voice was steel. “Never, Master Larke, is a very long time.”

He snatched up the candle with a vehemence that made the flame shrink and twist as if in terror. He strode to the middle of the room and raised the candle high in his outstretched arm. He plucked the silver crucifix from his chest. Drawing its chain over his head, he thrust it up also so that his arms formed a V above his head. The servants sucked in horrified breath. They recognized the stance for excommunication.

“By the authority of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost,” Bastwick intoned, “and of our Lady St. Mary, God’s Mother in heaven, and of all the other virgins, and St. Michael and all the angels, and St. Peter and all the apostles, and St. Stephen and all the martyrs, and of all the holy saints of heaven, we accurse thee.”

The servants dropped to their knees, crossing themselves.

“We ban and depart thee from all good deeds and prayers of Holy Church, and of all these saints, and damn thee unto the pain of hell.”

“No!” Larke bolted upright.

“We curse thee by the authority of the court of Rome, within and without, sleeping or walking, going or sitting, standing or riding, lying above earth or under earth, speaking and crying and drinking, in wood, in water, in field, in town.”

“No!” Larke was thrashing his way out of the sheets. He thudded onto the floor. He crawled towards Bastwick, whimpering. Honor lurched to go to him, but Ralph held her back. She thought his grip would crush her hand.

The V of Bastwick’s outstretched arms glinted at either end with flame and silver. “Accurse him Father and Son and Holy Ghost. Accurse him, angels and archangels and all the nine orders of heaven. Accurse him, patriarchs and prophets and apostles and all God’s holy disciples, and all holy innocents, martyrs, confessors, virgins, monks, canons, and priests. Let him have no mass or matins, nor none other good prayers that be done in Holy Church.”

Grunting across the floor, Larke reached Bastwick’s feet. “No! I beg you . . .” Sobs choked him.

“Let the pains of hell be his mead with Judas that betrayed our Lord Jesus Christ. And let him be cast forever out of the book of life.” Bastwick threw down the candle, extinguishing it, and spat on the ground beside Larke to complete the anathema. “Fiat. Fiat. Amen.”

Larke moaned and clawed at the hem of the priest’s cassock. Honor could not bear it. She broke free and ran to her father’s bowed back and threw herself on it, her arms around his neck.

Larke’s head snapped up. “The demons!” he screamed, delirious. “The demons are on me!” He clawed at the weight on his back to rid himself of the devils, and threw Honor to the floor. Gasping, she caught his eyes—yellow, bloodshot, wild with terror—and she saw he did not know her. He let out a harrowing yelp and grappled Bastwick’s legs, weeping. His weeping turned to convulsive choking. He gasped. Breath would not come. His fingers clawed at his throat. Blood engorged his face. His mouth opened and closed in wordless horror. His fingers petrified into a sudden rigor and he fell to the floor, dead.

Bastwick looked down at the body. He bent over and lifted the lifeless hand. He pried off the sapphire ring, then said to the dead man, as if sealing a bargain agreeable to both parties, “This jewel, as I told you, will suffice.” He closed his fist around the ring, turned, and walked toward the door.

Margaret ran forward and snatched up Honor and clutched her to her bosom. “Blessed Jesu, little mistress, what’s to become of you now?”

Bastwick whirled around. “Who’s this child?” he demanded.

“The master’s only babe, Father,” Margaret wailed. “And what’s to become of her now?”

Bastwick did not answer. But he fixed his stare on Honor as if discovering a thing he had been searching for. She stared back, straight into the brilliant, black eyes that bored into hers.

Jerome Bastwick studied the sapphire ring on his finger and shut out the morning tavern voices around him. Outside the tavern, the city streets were uncharacteristically quiet; the night’s rioting had been quelled by the Earl of Surrey who had marched troops into the city in the early hours. But Bastwick did not concern himself with the lull outside nor the voices inside that murmured over the night’s events. He was absorbed by the ring. He twisted it on his finger, entranced by its beauty as pale sunlight from the window struck various hues of purple fire over the jewel’s facets.

A yapping whippet bitch scrabbled past him. Bastwick lifted his head to reality: to the half-dozen men in the loft cursing over a cockfight; to the reek of the floor rushes, spongily matted with ale dregs and spittle, and rank with decaying fish and dog urine; to the scratch of fingernails against stubble coming from his broken-toothed companion across the table. Over the breakfast remains of beef and bread, Sir Guy Tyrell was considering the bargain Bastwick had just proposed. A dangerous bargain, but one that held sweet promise for them both.

“You’re sure there’s no boy?” Tyrell asked skeptically. Using the tip of the dagger that served as his eating knife, he picked a fragment of beef from between his chipped, yellow teeth. “No heir to spring up later and mar all?”

Bastwick shook his head confidently. “I assure you, the girl is sole heiress.”

“And you really can hoodwink those poxy clerks at the Court of Wards? Confound ’em with papers in your Latin mumbo jumbo? The stewards too? It’s a risk . . .” Tyrell broke off, his face darkening with mistrust over this area of expertise so far beyond his illiterate understanding. He lowered his voice, but his whisper was spiked with a threat. “Remember, priest, it’s cheating the King you’re talking of.”

“
We
are talking of,” Bastwick corrected him steadily.

The admonition brought bright red smudges of anger high on Tyrell’s cheeks. “Aye,” he snarled, “I mark my own hazard right clearly in this business. I mark which one of us will swing from the King’s gibbet if we’re found out. Not you. They can’t hang a precious priest, can they?” With a sudden motion of menace he lifted his dagger and pressed its tip to the hollow of Bastwick’s throat. Bastwick held his breath.

“But I swear to you now, man,” Tyrell said, “blab of this to anyone, ever, and before I hang I’ll have you praying and whimpering for such a tidy end.”

Bastwick remained calm. He had known the cash-starved Tyrell for barely twenty-four hours; the day before, they had struck up a conversation in a Westminster corridor as each waited with the milling gentlemen who came daily to pick up any crumb of patronage that fell from the table of Cardinal Wolsey. Both had left empty-handed, and they parted. But though the acquaintance was slight, Bastwick prided himself on his swift judgment of men. And when the scheme came to him, he was certain this chance of quick cash—the revenues of an heiress’s estates, to which a guardian was entitled—was one Tyrell could not resist.

“You say true, sir, about the risk—
my
risk—in managing the clerks, and the estate stewards,” Bastwick said sternly. “You cannot do without me.”

Tyrell’s eyes hardened. He held the blade rigid at Bastwick’s throat.

Bastwick did not flinch. His eyes locked with Tyrell’s. “Therefore, my lord,” he went on, “you must guarantee me the benefice.”

Tyrell held the right to appoint a priest to a benefice in the west country parish where he was lord. The thought of it made Bastwick’s heart race with joy despite Tyrell’s dagger. His own benefice! With fat tithes, and rents from the glebe lands he would control! It was far beyond anything he could hope for from the miserly vicar of Nettlecombe. The old vicar lived high and dined with the Bishop, while he, Bastwick, scraped by on a pittance as his curate. He deserved better. He silently cursed his peasant background for keeping him in such servility. Still, he reminded himself, the abbot who had seen promise enough in him to educate him had schooled him well in what was possible: the Church was the one institution that cared more for a man’s ability than his blood. Had not the great Cardinal Wolsey himself risen from his father’s base butcher’s shop? The cardinal—so rich, they said, he had fragrant imported herbs strewn over his palace floors twice a day. The cardinal—Chancellor of the realm, the second most powerful man in England, right hand to the King.

“Alright, priest,” Tyrell growled, drawing back his dagger and sheathing it. “Profit’s good. And we share the risk. We are agreed.”

Bastwick relaxed. He noticed again the light dancing over the jewel on his finger. Yes, he thought jubilantly, a man of ability needs only the will to plant his foot firmly on the steps that will lead him up to glory.