The Queen's Lady (54 page)

She knew this was as good as the King’s word. Master Secretary Cromwell had made himself the most powerful man in the realm after the King. But the first bubble of her excitement had already burst, and she was now full of skepticism. She
would
show judgment! “So. Brought back to meet with the King. And all—do I understand you aright?—all for show?” she asked warily.

“I prefer to say, for the sake of persuasion.”

“Just who’s to be persuaded?”

“His Grace is anxious to seek out foreign approval for his marriage.”

Honor could not help thinking that foreign approval was the only approval the King was likely to get. The common people of England apparently thought of the new Queen as an upstart at best, a whore at worst. Honor had heard stories that everywhere, on Sundays, when priests asked for worshippers to join in a prayer for Queen Anne, people walked out of the churches en masse.

“The King,” Cromwell was saying, “wishes to forge new friendships, new alliances, with some of the more powerful German princes. The Protestant princes, that is. He hopes to find open minds amongst them, and feels that the English exiles could be the perfect link between him and them. Showing his goodwill to the exiles will prove his goodwill to those princes.”

“But why Frish? Tyndale is far better known.”

“Tyndale is a spiteful and hostile man. I doubt if he would budge to aid the King. But Frish might well be glad to come home.”

Honor was shaking her head. “I don’t like it. It’s only another political stratagem to you. But if anything were to go wrong it’s Frish who would pay the forfeit. And I shudder to think how.”

“I’m surprised you hesitate,” he said coolly. “I’m surprised you think so little of what the man himself would want. Ask him. A chance to turn the King of England Protestant? I warrant he’ll hop the first ship and be practicing his sermons on the cabin-boys, Bible in hand. It’s the chance he’s dreamed of.”

She knew he was right.

Cromwell leaned forward. “And you, Mistress Thornleigh, are the key. You are perhaps the only person Frish would trust to follow back to England. Also, you know where to find him quickly.”

She gave him a doubting smile. “And you cannot? Why, Master Secretary, I understand your network of agents is so thick, a man may not kick his neighbor’s cat without you know of it.”

“Spies?” He waved the suggestion away like a dish of too-rich sauce. “I find no need for such hole-in-corner antics. I simply keep in touch with a great many men in a great number of localities. Why pay spies when people will gladly whisper to you, of their own accord, what neighbor is kicking whom?”

Honor found little to placate her in Cromwell’s coldblooded view. She moved to the window and looked out. Oddly, his words had ignited a memory, a story Sir Thomas used to enjoy telling. There was once a man, Sir Thomas would say, who moved into a new village and wanted to know what his neighbors were like. In the middle of the night he pretended to beat his wife to see if they would come and reprove him. But though he loudly whipped a sheepskin while his wife, playing her part, wailed and screamed, no one came. And so the next morning the man and his wife left the village to seek a decent place to live.

How strange, she thought, to recall Sir Thomas’s gentle fable at this moment, and so fondly. Yet as she felt Cromwell’s penetrating stare on her back she was struck by the gulf between the two mens’ views of community. Sir Thomas’s ideal of conformity as the cement of a harmonious, ordered society was worlds apart from Cromwell’s stark understanding of human motives.

“I can offer you a large cash incentive,” Cromwell said.

She turned to him sharply. “If I do it, I’ll do it for the justice of it.”

“As you wish.”

The derision that tinged his smile chafed her, and she could not resist adding, “Though such
unsolicited
generosity would have been blessedly welcome once, when men were hunted by dogs.”

He dropped the smile. “Let us deal with the present, shall we? I have legislation pending in Parliament that is going to remap the face of the realm. I offer you a chance to make a small but vital contribution to that remapping. However, if you prefer to decline, to live in the past and sigh for what might have been, then I will take no more of your time.” He rose irritably and looked at her, waiting, as near to anger as she has ever seen him.

“Of course I’ll do it,” she said evenly, trying to push Thornleigh to the back of her mind. “I consider it a duty, and a privilege.” And a chance to see her work vindicated. To—how had Cromwell put it?—turn the King of England Protestant. This could shatter forever the very concept of “heresy.”

“Good,” Cromwell said pleasantly. His vexation instantly vanished and Honor had the uneasy feeling that he had never really doubted her consent.

He came around the desk to her. “I’d like you to leave immediately. Within a day or two, if you can.”

“That’s no problem.”

“Will your husband accompany you?”

“No.” She offered no explanation.

“Then you’ll need an escort. Shall I send a couple of my servants round to your lodging?”

“Thank you, but Sam Jinner’s here with me. I’ll take him, and one of our London apprentices.”

“Well, let me know if you need anything else. I’ll have the letters of safe-conduct sent to you right away. And now, you must excuse me. I’d ask you to stay to dine—Lord Lisle this morning sent me a haunch of venison—but I’ve already invited a few recalcitrant members of Parliament and I fear our discussions would be tedious to you.”

“Politics are making a courtier of you, Master Secretary. This dismissal is positively gallant.”

He shrugged, and she knew he had missed her jest.

She smiled. “Well then, I’ll leave you to your dreary stratagems.” She had heard the talk, even in Norfolk, about Cromwell’s heavy-handed tactics with Parliamentarians. He was badgering and bribing friendly members and threatening hostile ones, apparently taking no chances with the new slew of bills he had steered before the Commons. “But tell me,” she said as she gathered up her cloak. “This session of Parliament is dragging on so. When can we hope to see your great
pièce de résistance
?” Though the King had smashed the privileges of the bishops, he still had not taken the ultimate, revolutionary step of naming himself head of the Church.

For the first time in their conversation Cromwell’s eyes kindled, fired by the issue dearest to his heart. “You’ve heard of the King’s twelve great cannon?” he asked. “The Apostles, they’re called. Drawn by a dozen draft horses and able to blast a hole through fourteen feet of castle wall. Well, the bills now before Parliament, though only half as many, are my Apostles. With them, the castle of papal jurisdiction in England will finally be razed.”

He explained, counting the bills off on his fingers. The first five, which he called his bombardment, provided that all citations from Rome would be nullified; that the English clergy would give allegiance solely to the Crown; that revenues formerly paid to the Pope by English bishops on appointment to their sees would now be paid to the King; that the royal succession would be settled on the King’s male heirs by Queen Anne; and that it would no longer be heresy to deny the papal primacy.

“With this barrage,” he said, “we breach the walls. The sixth and final step, the taking of the castle keep—the
pièce de résistance
, as you call it—will be an Act to make the King Supreme Head of the Church in England. I hope to have it a
fait accompli
by Christmas.”

“You have labored mightily, sir.” She laughed. “I am exhausted hearing of it.”

He was not amused. “The molding of a new order, mistress, does require some sweat.”

She hardly knew herself why the victory seemed somewhat anticlimactic. It was a victory she had striven for, and yet her months of quiet at Great Ashwold—and, yes, of contentment—had given her an appreciation of the deep satisfactions of hearth and home. Cromwell’s single-mindedness now seemed faintly obsessive.

“And you are quite certain of the passage of these bills?” she asked.

“A few laggards here, a few snarling bulldogs there. We’ll round them up and bring them to heel.”

“I see. And what about Sir Thomas?”

Cromwell looked mildly surprised at the question.

“Though out of office,” Honor explained, “I know he has influence still. Do you ever see him?”

Cromwell grunted. “Sir Thomas is a stubborn man.”

“That he is,” she said with a smile, glad that she could do so now when thinking of her former guardian. This softening, she knew, she owed to Thornleigh. It was he who had swept her heart clean of rancor. But the thought of him now, of their quarrel, brought pain. Again, she forced his image away. She concentrated on Sir Thomas. “What’s the problem?”

“More still will not declare for the marriage.”

“But he does not actively oppose it, does he?”

“Not publicly. Not verbally. But he is loud with his pen. Every denunciation of heresy he writes—and he’s been writing a whirlwind—is a denunciation of the restructured English Church, and therefore of the King’s marriage. Oh, he’s careful never to mention the marriage, he’s too clever for that. Too much so for the King’s taste, I can tell you.”

“Well, you’re clever, too,” Honor said. “Why not match him? These new bills of yours—for example, this statute settling the royal succession on the new Queen’s issue—why not call in Sir Thomas and ask him to swear an oath to uphold it. He can hardly fail to agree once it’s the law of the land.”

Cromwell blinked at her.

Perhaps, she thought, he didn’t see the point. “It’s really very simple,” she said. “Sir Thomas has balked at attacks on the Church’s authority because the way was open to do so. But if Parliament passes the new statutes, and if you insist that as a loyal subject he conform, then that way is blocked. Sir Thomas reveres the law, especially when it is made with the communal voice of Parliament. The law, English law, is his lodestar.”

He continued to stare at her. “An oath?”

“Yes. Have him swear. Then you can send him home, declawed, harmless.”

A light broke over Cromwell’s frozen features. “My God, woman, what an idea. It
is
simple. How could I not have seen it?”

“You are too close to the problem, sir,” she said lightly. “I have a little distance now.” For Sir Thomas’s sake, she thought, pleased with herself, this solution was ideal. It would save him from Cromwell’s antagonism, from the King’s wrath, possibly from great harm. Yes, she told herself, there is satisfaction in
true
charity. And for that she knew she must give Thornleigh credit. Must give him credit for so much. Suddenly, the thought of not seeing him again—not loving him again, not sharing her life with him—brought a sickening wave of misery. But she shook it off. This mission must be done. It was right. And he would see that it was right!

At the door she turned. “Enjoy your venison, Master Secretary. If I make haste to Antwerp, perhaps the next haunch Lord Lisle sends you, you’ll serve to Brother Frish, for I undertake to have him on your doorstep within the month. Good day!”

28

T
he girl was a redhead, freckled, wide of hip, and seventeen. In a cramped withdrawing room at Windsor Palace she sauntered past a knot of idle courtiers and moved toward the King who sat ensconced in a window seat. Little red plums on the plate of partridge she was bringing him rolled like loose ship’s barrels above her swaying walk. A bleary-eyed gentleman stood saying something to the King, but the pounding of rain on the window, and the nearby plunk of lute-strings, tinny against the din of nature outside, combined to drown out his words. In any case, the King ignored him. With hands on his spread knees, he was watching the girl approach.

A plum teetered off the rim of her plate, rolled along the floor, and stopped between the King’s beefy legs. The girl went down on her knees to fetch it. She lifted the fruit between her plump thumb and forefinger and popped it between his puckered lips. He munched; she giggled.

Across the room Anne stood watching the girl. She shouldered her way past the guests and came before the King. The window behind him was opaque from the heat of pent-up bodies.