The Queen's Lady (67 page)

“And so,” Honor said thoughtfully, intent on the blossom, “we comfort ourselves with the fantasy of immortality.”

Erasmus’s eyes popped opened. He shifted on the bench. “You cite your Niccolo della Montagna. Again. Forgive me,” he grumbled, “I cannot share your enthusiasm for that man’s thesis.”

She tossed away the blossom. “You must at least admit that the journey his little volume made to find you was a brave one.”

“I admit no such thing,” he huffed. “Nor can I imagine why della Montagna was so eager, all those years ago, to gift me with such a strange treatise.”

“Because, sir,” she smiled, “you have been, and are, the beacon of goodwill to those who stalk the lonely frontiers of unconventionality. You champion mankind’s ability to reason.”

“Ah, the ancient battle: reason over faith,” Erasmus sighed, clearly exasperated. “As if God has not given us challenge enough just to live together in harmony. And look how miserably the whole world fails at it!”

Honor was silent for a moment. “Sir Thomas used to tell me that faith is stronger than reason. That since the Church has taught immortality of the soul for so many hundreds of years, and it is believed by so many millions of people, custom bestows truth on the belief, just as custom bestows truth in the law. He used to quote Aquinas’s dictum that the natural desire of everyone for immortality proves that the soul is immortal, just as the innate desire of a child to eat proves that there is food.”

“Codifying the unknown is a futile pursuit. I, for one, am fully occupied in trying to live
this
life as Christ bade us.”

“And I,” she said somberly, “am now a long way from Aquinas.”

Erasmus looked at her with concern. “My dear,” he said, “the immortality of the soul is God’s promise to us. The sweet certainty that, with His grace, we will one day dwell with Him.”

“Being certain of something does not make it true,” was her steady answer. “Take this Polish man who has written you with his extraordinary proofs that the earth revolves around the sun. Copernicus? Is that his name?”

“A mathematical theorem only.”

“But what if it is true? Then all those people who are
certain
that the sun revolves around the earth are wrong. Have been wrong for centuries. And we may have deluded ourselves about the life of the soul in just the same way. Della Montagna says that, like the mule who has all the instruments of generation but cannot attain it, man yearns for immortality but cannot attain it. Della Montagna says—”

“‘
Della Montagna says
’ . . . Are you a parrot?” he cried. “Can you not think for yourself?”

“Indeed I can, sir,” she said with quiet fierceness. “But to speak truly of where my thinking has brought me would be to grieve you more than I already have, and that I am loath to do.”

For a few moments they sat in strained silence.

“Where is that wretched woman with our wine?” Erasmus said testily.

“Sir,” Honor blurted, “consider this. If man has created the concept of immortality simply to ease his fears of death, then surely we must ask whether other beliefs are not mere fabrications as well. Whether the fables of Heaven and Hell have been plumped up by generations of churchmen and legislators merely to keep citizens on the straight path. Even whether—”

“No!” He threw up his hands and turned away. “Do not say it. Over that precipice I can never follow you.” He looked back at her, his face drawn as if with pity. “A godless universe? How can you bear to imagine it? How could we live on in such darkness? How find any structure for morality?”

“But should we allow fear to create untruths?”

“Some things are unknowable. They
must
be taken on faith.”

“What you call faith Epicurus calls conjecture. Man can only conjecture whatever does not appear, he says, and he warns that when man does so, thought moves into a sphere where error is possible.”

“Good heavens, child, Epicurus lived before God revealed the truth of Christianity!”

“But men continue to tear one another’s throats for conjecturing—and in the name of God.”

“I have always taught that it is madness to do so.”

“And I revere you for that. Yet you remain loyal to a Church that burns people for questioning. For tasting of the tree of knowledge.”

“For years I have begged the Church—popes and cardinals—to desist from such violence. Inquisitions and heresy-hunting are abominable to me.”

“But the Church teaches—”

“The Church, like every other institution, is flawed by the nature of human desires. By abuses and wicked practices. But these are not reflections of true Christian behavior. We must all advance in faith and love, and leave the unknowable to God.” He sighed heavily. “But my voice is drowned out in the cacophony of the age.”

She held her tongue, for she saw that she had distressed him. He was an old soldier in the battle against intolerance, one of the first, and armed only with his eloquence. When all around him howled down his pacifism as cowardice, or as a lack of Christian steadfastness, he remained the only leader unwilling to kill for his beliefs. Tolerance remained his obsession, and his despair.

“The hope,” Erasmus said with a strength of will that belied his weary face, “lies in all of us rejecting the
externalities
of religion. We must focus on its substance, on the desire for peace and brotherhood that is the truest imitation of Christ. No—” he shook his head—“I cannot repudiate a Church that has endured for fifteen hundred years, has brought the light of education and hope to millions, and still teaches at its core the blessed message of love for one another that Christ bequeathed us. The Church has been my mother, and until a better way is shown me, I will remain with Her.”

Honor was moved by his conviction, ashamed at having aggravated him. He was not the enemy. It was pettiness to harass him. She touched his arm, offering peace, and there was a twinkle in her eye. “You remain with her but will not accept elevation in her ranks?” Upon Pope Clement’s death eight months before, the new Pope Paul III had immediately offered Erasmus the red hat of a cardinal.

“No,” Erasmus smiled, relaxing, charmed by her finesse. “Not that. When God calls me from this raving world, I intend to die as I have lived. A free man.”

The garden gate clattered. Again the birds on the ground lifted and hovered. “Pears and wine!” Marthe called as if she were hawking her wares.

“Pears and wine,” Honor translated gently to Erasmus.

He made a vinegar face and muttered, “The latter, no doubt, abominably watered. It
was
a splendid Burgundy, sent me by the Bishop of Cracow. Thank the Lord there’s nothing she can do to destroy a pear.”

“Now, now,” Marthe cooed to the baby straddling her hip. “Enough of that, my pet. Not for you, my little darling.” She was waddling towards them with the dessert on a tray, and the baby was reaching across her ample bosom for the fruit. Marthe clattered the tray onto the table.

“There she is,” Erasmus cried, rising. “Little Isabel!” He bent like a doting grandfather to tickle the baby’s chin.

Marthe slapped his hand. “Don’t strangle the poor child!” She pivoted sharply to disengage him from the baby.

“Witch!” Erasmus sputtered. “You’ll snap her neck doing that!”

“Keep your claws off her!” Marthe warned.

“I’ll take her,” Honor said with a laugh. She held out her arms, and the other two capitulated to her superior claim. She took Isabel onto her knee, kissed the soft cheek, and smiled into the bright, round eyes—as speedwell-blue as Richard Thornleigh’s.

Marthe and Erasmus crowded in, prattling and cooing. The baby crowed with delight. Honor could not help laughing. “And to think, little one, that I worried you’d grow up without a family.”

“A child cannot have family enough,” Erasmus said definitively. “I never knew my own father. My poor parents—did I tell you? . . .”

Marthe groaned, sensing he was beginning a long-winded, incomprehensible story, and turned and waddled back to the house. Erasmus, triumphant, lifted the baby into his arms. “My poor parents,” he continued to Honor, “had desperately wanted to marry, but my mother’s family forced them apart as soon as her condition became apparent, and then spread the evil lie to my father that his beloved had died. In grief, he took priest’s vows.”

Honor had to smile. Erasmus had recited this romantic tale for so many years, he had convinced himself of its authenticity. But Johannes Froben had told her the facts. Erasmus, it seemed, had conveniently forgotten both that his father was already a priest when his parents had met, and that the couple’s long-standing relationship had also produced a brother for Erasmus—one three years his senior.

Erasmus plumped the baby back on Honor’s lap and sat with a deep, self-pitying sigh. “And I, orphaned, and dumped into a foul monastery.”

Honor wrapped her arms loosely around her daughter and nuzzled her neck. She brushed her lips absently over the silken head. Above the garden, the light was fading. “Monasteries,” she mused, her thoughts dragged again by the tide of memory. “You hated the experience, yet Sir Thomas always spoke fondly of his years with the Carthusian monks.”

“Ah, the Carthusians,” Erasmus murmured with a shiver. He and Honor exchanged glances. At the beginning of May, the latest report from England had deeply shaken them both. The four Carthusian monks who had also refused to take the Oath had been dragged out of the Tower on hurdles. At Tyburn, before a great crowd, they were butchered—first hanged until they choked, then cut down still living and, one by one in front of the others, castrated, disemboweled, and beheaded. The monks had been the only other men in England besides Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher who had refused the Oath. The barbarous method of their execution was the standard penalty for traitors.

The baby whimpered. Erasmus was pulling himself slowly to his feet. Lost in thought, he tugged his heavy robe about him as Honor loosened her bodice to feed the baby. “I wish,” Erasmus said, “that More had never meddled in this dangerous business. It is perilous striving with princes!” He sighed heavily. “I feel the chill. I shall go in.”

He heard the baby’s sucking and looked back at the contented child and mother. “Ah, the picture of peace,” he said, smiling fondly. “Yes, stay, my dear. Enjoy the last of the light. I want to check a reference in Cicero before I retire.” As he padded across the flagstones the birds fluttered up again in a mass and finally made their exodus over the garden wall.

For some time Honor remained in the garden. The baby lay dreaming in her arms, the rosebud mouth still sucking gently in sleep. The sky glowed darkly, as blue as a cave of sapphires, and it made black lace of the ivy that tendriled the tops of the walls.

No, she thought, Erasmus was wrong. She was not the picture of peace. Her thoughts did not bring peace. When she lay down, the finger of guilt that pressed on her forehead throughout the night would not bring peace. And her bold rhetoric to Erasmus? What good was all her fearless prattle about the universe when she could not even resolve the turmoil in her own breast? Confusion, anger, guilt. The King and Cromwell had lured Sir Thomas into their prison. But she had given them the key.

35

K
ing Henry stood with arms outstretched like a crucified man as the tailor’s apprentice tugged at the measuring tape around his waist. “What do you mean, adjustments?” Henry growled. He glared down, and the flesh of his neck folded upon itself. “You mean I am grown fat?”

The nervous master tailor snatched the tape from his apprentice. “Pardon, Your Majesty! My idiot boy here must have made an error.” He cuffed the apprentice on the back of the head, then personally measured the King. The tape read fifty-four inches: a mammoth gain since Christmas. Sweat erupted on the tailor’s forehead. Twenty years ago, when he had been an apprentice himself, the King’s waist had been a trim thirty-four inches. An inch for every year since! He swallowed and shot a grin up at the flabby royal jowls. “In any case, sire, what is an inch or two to your expert craftsmen? A mere nothing.” He shuffled backwards, flicking his hands at his two apprentices, the order to pack up. “I promise Your Majesty the new armor will look splendid.”