The Queen's Lady (52 page)

Once they had gone, Thornleigh still did not look at Honor. “How long away this time?” he said.

“Two weeks. Maybe three.”

“Or four. Or five.”

“No. I promise.”

“You promised once before.”

“You mean about seeing you off at Billingsgate? I told you what happened at the printer’s. I told you I was sorry.”

“I’m sorry too.” Finally, he looked at her. His eyes were hard and cold. “This isn’t working out very well, is it?”

Honor shivered. “What do you mean?”

“This marriage. If you can call it that. Maybe there’s another word for it. An ‘arrangement’?”

“Richard, don’t talk like—”

A ball of fire swamped her vision. A boy was dashing by with a torch. Its heat blasted the side of her face, and the wind-like rush of the flame roared by her ear. In a flash of horrified memory she saw again the executioner’s torch at Smithfield as it plunged into the faggots beneath Ralph. Her eyes followed the moving flame. The boy reached a man-sized mound of logs and sticks, and with a primitive yelp of joy he thrust in the torch. The fuel burst into flame. Honor went rigid, fists clenched, eyes wide.

Thornleigh was watching her. “What is it?” he asked. “What’s the matter?”

She stared at the blaze. Her breathing was shallow. “I can’t see him,” she whispered, frightened.

Thornleigh glanced at the bonfire. “See who?”

Her hands flew to her cheeks, and she cringed, shaking her head, still staring.

Alarmed, Thornleigh grabbed her wrists and jerked her around, away from the fire, to face him. “Tell me. What’s wrong?”

“I swore!” she cried. “Swore I’d never forget. Never look into a fire without seeing Ralph’s face. But . . . he’s not there anymore!”

“Good,” Thornleigh said steadily. “If he’s gone, let him go.”

“No!” She pulled out of his grasp and whirled around to look at the blaze. She beat her fists against her temples. “I promised to see him . . . always. To never forget his pain.”

“Stop this!” He caught her again, this time by the shoulders, and wrenched her back to him.

She struggled, trying to free herself. “You don’t understand!” she cried. “You’ve never understood. Or cared.”

He held her firmly. “I do understand. If you can’t see death in the flames anymore it’s time to look again at life.”

“What are you talking about? Can’t you understand?
I am sworn
. To keep faith. To—”

“You’ve kept faith enough to save a hundred blasted sinners. Whatever you owed, you owe no more.”

“I won’t abandon Ralph!”

“Ralph is
dead!”

She shook her head to shield herself from his words, and strained, though he still held her, to look over her shoulder at the bonfire. Tears welled in her eyes. “If I try . . . if I only look harder . . . I know I’ll see him.”

Thornleigh suddenly flung her around to face the fire. “Go on, then, look at it!” he said. He gripped her shoulders, hard. “What do you see? You belittle people for seeing devils on a slapped-up stage—you scorn them for willingly blinding themselves to what’s real—but you’re no better. You want to see ghosts. Well, look hard. What’s
really
there?”

A ragged circle of people had drifted in around the bonfire and stood, talking and drinking. The blaze crackled as someone tossed on a splintered board. Honor looked deep into the flames but, try as she might, she could not conjure up Ralph’s face. Instead, strangely, she heard his laughing voice, telling her, as he used to do when she was a child, that people set fires on Midsummer Eve to celebrate her birthday. Other words echoed—was it Ralph’s voice still?—“You owe no more!” She began to feel it might be true. Slowly, one by one, the chains that hung around her—chains of guilt, of sorrow, of regret—began to fall away. She felt oddly lightened. But then she hugged herself, suddenly afraid that without the familiar weight of the chains she would be adrift, and she searched the fire again. But there was no writhing specter. Only flames leaping on wood. Reality. Tears spilled onto her cheeks, the molten waste of her struggle.

She was trembling, and Thornleigh slackened his grip. “Look there,” he said gently, pointing. “Not death. Life.” He gave a soft laugh, and Honor saw why. At the side of the fire a mumbling old crone had lifted her skirt to warm her withered buttocks, as if it were a winter twilight and not a sultry summer eve. Across from the crone a young man was helping a buxom girl toss roasted chestnuts in a pan. The young man took the opportunity to brush his arm against the girl’s breast, and she shot an elbow into his ribs. Farther around the circle a boy, crouching with a stick, was singing to himself as he dreamily drew goslings in the ashes.

Honor felt a smile begin. Then she caught herself, and the smile vanished. She turned slowly back to Thornleigh, wiping her tears away with the back of her hand. He took her by her shoulders again, but gently this time. “You’re right, of course,” Honor said quietly, dully. “Now, let me go.”

But he did not. “Promise me you’ll put this obsession behind you?”

“I promise . . . to deal only in reality,” she said. “And one reality is that I am sworn. Let me go. I have important work to do. Tracts to write. Lies to set straight—”

“My God, listen to yourself! You mumble it like a catechism.”

“What do you know about it?” she flared.

“Everything. I once thrashed about in the same ditch of guilt. And I’d dug it for myself, just as you have done. I know what it’s like to have venom eating inside you.”

“Then let me be!”

“No. Listen to me. This anger is a poison only to yourself. It has no power to change what’s done. It can only corrode your own spirit.”

She opened her mouth to fling fighting words, but none would come. Her mind could not seem to grasp hold of any. “I . . . I must . . .”

“
Why
must you?”

She blinked, confused. It was difficult to remember why. “But . . .”

He tightened his grip. “Honor, you know what I say is true. Let this hatred go.”

“But how can I? As long as Sir Thomas hurls his poisoned arrows I must—”

“Oh, Christ, Sir Thomas!” Thornleigh groaned. “Always Sir Thomas.” He threw up his hands. “Usually a man’s rival is someone the lady
loves
, not hates!”

Honor felt slightly dizzy. The fire-sparked darkness seemed to be humming. “What do you mean?”

He shook his head at her as if at a stupid child. “I mean that I’ve been fighting Sir Thomas for you since the day you kicked that poker from my hands. The day you woke
me
up to life. Well, the time has come for you to choose between us. You can spend your life with me—a
real
life with me, mind—or you can run with your vendetta against More. One or the other. It can’t be both.”

She blinked at him, astonished. “An ultimatum?”

“God, Honor, what else can I do?” He spoke as though exasperated to the point of helplessness. “Look at me,” he said, thumping a palm on his chest. “What reality do you see
here?
What kind of man?”

She knew the answer in every fiber of her body. He was the standard against which she judged every other man and found all wanting.

Tenderly, he took her face between his hands. “If you see anything but a man who loves you,” he said, “who’s been waiting for you to work this fever of spite out of your blood, then you are blind indeed.”

He was staring into her eyes. His hands were hot on her face.

“Honor,” he groaned, “I can’t wait any longer. Choose. Which will it be?”

You, of course!
she wanted to cry. And yet, must she forsake the work that could bring about so much good?

“Do I have to ask you again to marry me,” Thornleigh asked. “To truly be my wife?”

His need was irresistible. Honor could find no breath to speak.

“In law, you know,” he said cautiously, “silence is construed as consent.” He bent and, tentatively, kissed her. Heat swept through her. He drew back his head. He was smiling.

Her mouth opened, hungry for the feel of him, the taste of him, again.

There was a jangle of tambourines and a skreeling of pipes as musicians and tumblers capered into the square, surrounding them.

“Honor,” Thornleigh whispered, but before he could say another word she thrust her fingers into the red-gold tangle of his hair and stopped his mouth with hers.

27

H
onor rested back in warm bathwater sprinkled with lavender buds, took in a long, deep breath of the lavender perfume, and smiled. Buttery March sunshine was beginning to stream through the oriel window in the bedchamber at Great Ashwold, but despite the sun’s radiance the early hour had called for more warmth, and behind the pool of her blue silk robe that she had dropped on the floorboards, the flames of a newly laid fire danced in the hearth, banishing the morning chill.

She reached out to a stool beside the tub for three unopened letters that lay beside the pouch of lavender. The letters, just delivered by Honor’s maid, made up a flurry of communication from the larger world outside Great Ashwold that Honor found most exciting.

But she was glad Thornleigh had not seen them delivered; he had left her sleeping, and by now he would be saddled up for the two hour ride into Norwich. Honor had instructed her maid to give her such letters only in private. She regretted the subterfuge with Thornleigh but felt justified in using it, for she had kept her promise to him—on the whole. Since Midsummer Eve, through a quiet autumn and winter, she had not seen London—had strayed no further than to accompany him now and then when business took him to Aylsham or Yarmouth, for he always asked her to join him.

And she had been happy. She was absorbed in learning the intricacies of the woolcloth business. She had forged a delightful friendship with young Adam. She was deeply in love with her husband. What more could she want?

She looked guiltily at the letters. No, she thought defensively, she would not give up the innocent stimulation of outside correspondence. Nor give up the writing she still managed to do, though she was no longer involved with any printing. The writing was only for herself now—a calmer, and at the same time more intensely focused channel for her ideas about the justice that still had not come to England’s Church courts, for the King, having got his new Queen, had done nothing to change the old laws. However, she indulged these private interests only when Thornleigh was away. Harmless though they were, they represented to him a preoccupation he insisted was dangerous for her. If he knew, he would chafe. They would quarrel. It was better this way.

She shuffled the letters, examining them. One, with a plain exterior, gave no hint about its author, but the two others Honor quickly recognized. There could not have been more contrast in the appearance of the pair. The first was a creased and battered brown paper, its brown blob of sealing wax cracked, and the ink of its outer direction smeared with grease; all were marks, she guessed, of the letter’s long and tortured journey to reach her. The second was crisp and white, fastidiously sealed with red wax into which an imprint—the head of the Roman god Terminus—stood out in sleek relief. But even before she saw this well-known device of the writer, Honor recognized the elegant handwriting on the outside as Erasmus’s.

She placed Erasmus’s letter and the unknown one back onto the stool and tore open the bedraggled, brown one. It was unsigned, but its first words confirmed her assumption: Brother Frish. As she unfolded the paper she heard a walking horse’s hooves clack over the cobbles in the courtyard. That would be Richard, on his way, she thought. She settled herself happily against the tub’s back, sending lavender buds swirling around her, and read.

Frish was full of excitement. He had married! He spoke tenderly of his German, country-bred wife, and scathingly of the celibacy the Church required of priests and monks—“a mockery of God’s love,” he wrote. He was finally a whole man, he said, using body and heart and mind as God had made them to be used, for he was certain that the love between man and woman was pleasant to God, “implanted in us by Him.”

Honor smiled, understanding. She looked out at the budding chestnut boughs, their ripe tips crowded against the second-story window pane as if nestling close for fellowship. How beautiful the world was this morning. In the distance beyond the chestnut tree and the courtyard wall, the last shreds of silvery mist were lifting from the woods, and the strengthening sun struck gold on her arm, reminding her of the first yellow celandines and marsh marigolds she and Adam had seen the day before blooming across the woodland floor. Yes, she thought, how beautiful the world, and how sweet and powerful Frish’s words. “A whole man,” he had written. His eloquence moved her this morning more than she could say, for she was almost sure that she was pregnant. She had kept the discovery to herself, not wanting to speak of it until she was quite certain. Now, holding the knowledge with the delight of holding a gift in readiness, she wondered: when would be the perfect time to tell Richard?