The Queen's Lady (7 page)

“Stop!” More cried. “Villain!”

The man spun around in surprise. His knife glinted in the sun.

More scrambled down the slope, his robe flapping, his feet awkwardly thumping and slipping on the lush grass. He was running too fast and he lost his footing and skidded, then thudded onto his rear end. Following, Honor sailed past him, even more awkward in her long skirts. She windmilled down the hill out of control and crashed into the arms of the would-be assassin who dropped his knife under the force of the impact. The two stumbled back together as if locked in some heathen dance step. They finally came to a halt at the lip of the riverbank.

There was a moment of stunned silence. The maid wobbled to her feet and shyly looked at More still sitting at the base of the hillside. “Pardon, Your Worship,” she stuttered, her hands patting at the cap that covered her ears. “A knot in my cap string. This gentleman offered to cut it for me.”

More stared, uncomprehending. The girl cupped her hand beside her mouth and whispered loudly, “A foreigner, Your Worship. He speaks no English.”

The man stepped around Honor and came shakily toward More, his hands uplifted like an apprehended criminal. He was young and of a stocky peasant build, with a moon face and wide, slate blue eyes. In serviceable Latin he made a nervous explanation. “I am an artist, sir. I was moved to sketch this young woman. I suggested she remove her cap. It was only the strings I wanted to cut.”

“An artist?” More asked feebly.

“Hans Holbein is my name. A citizen of Basle. I come to you on the recommendation of our mutual friend, Erasmus.”

A smile cracked across More’s face. He slapped his green-stained hands together and bits of grass flew from his fingertips. “Master Holbein, on my backside I welcome you to England. Care for some burned roast beef?”

In the great hall, More leaned back pensively in his chair at the head of the main table. What he was hearing amused him, yet troubled him at the same time: his twenty-year-old daughter, Cecily, was reading aloud a letter Erasmus had sent with the young artist. It was clear to More that his extended family felt none of his own ambiguity. He could see they were all entertained by Erasmus’s news. They sat beside him and at two long lower tables: his wife, his father, his son with his fiancée, his three daughters and their husbands, a clutch of grandchildren, assorted music masters, tutors and clerks. The kitchen maids had cleared away the first courses—the capon with apricots, the salvaged roast beef, the braised leeks—and everyone was listening to Erasmus’s letter, their spoons clacking over bowls of excellent strawberry pudding from Lady Alice’s kitchen. The renowned Dutch scholar had written to More:

“The arts are freezing here, so I have encouraged Holbein to come to you in England to pick up a few coins.”

There was a murmur of approval and all heads turned to the red-faced artist. All except Alice, as usual, More noted; everyone except her and the very young children understood the Latin letter. His wife had rejected his every attempt to teach her to read, even in English. Cecily continued reading:

“As the firestorm rages here over Luther, I am condemned by both sides for my refusal to join either. I am told that a follower of Luther in Constance, a fellow who was once my student, has hung my portrait near the door merely to spit at it as often as he passes. My lot has become like St. Cassianus who was stabbed to death by his pupils with pencils.”

Many at the table laughed. Sir Thomas More did not. How, he wondered, could Erasmus make jests about a man as dangerous as Luther? Disturbed, he fingered the rim of his goblet of watered wine as Cecily read on. The letter ranged over several more items of news in Basle. Then:

“Please convey my thanks to young Mistress Larke for the enjoyment her thoughtful essay on St. Augustine’s
City of God
has given me. Or better yet, tell her that I will write my appreciation to her personally as soon as time permits.”

More glanced at Honor with a proud smile, as did the rest of the family. Following the young artist, it was Honor’s turn to blush.

Servants cleared the dishes and Honor and Cecily began a lute duet. Watching Honor, More remembered the letter inside his robe. He beckoned Matthew over and told him to ask Mistress Larke to come out to his library when she was finished playing. He excused himself from the table.

He passed through the sultry orchard, deep in thought. Though he walked slowly, the heat was oppressive, and sweat prickled his skin by the time he reached the New Building. The sweat made the coarse fibers of the hair shirt he always wore under his linen scratch even more uncomfortably than usual. Good, he thought with a chuckle at himself: a perfect, penitential complement to that second helping of beef.

The library was pleasantly cool. He laid the Queen’s note on his desk and shifted a letter that was already lying there so that the two papers were lined up side by side. He regarded them for a moment, then turned to the window and looked out at the woods beyond the pond. What to do? To which request should he agree?

Which was best for the girl?

A smile crept to his lips as he recalled his laughter with her over the foolish Vicar. But the smile quickly faded. How the world has changed, he thought, since I wrote
Utopia
. When it was published no one had even heard of Martin Luther. Yet the very next year Luther nailed his wretched theses to the door of Wittenburg Church, and nothing had been the same since. That same year, Sulieman the Turk marshaled his dreadful army, too. And now? The pestilence of Luther’s malice infects all Europe. The Turk has smashed the Hungarian army and casts his hungry eye westward on us. And in Rome . . .

Dear God, Rome
. . .

Everywhere, Christendom quakes and crumbles. Can the old bonds hold? Everything has degenerated. Even here. The King and Queen, who used to live together in such handfast companionship and never stooped to wrangle . . .

He did not let himself finish the thought. It did no good to stray down that path. Besides, he reassured himself, that particular crisis will be resolved once the King comes to his senses over the Boleyn girl, which must be soon.

He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. He was tired, needed rest. It seemed he had not slept soundly since the news had reached England two weeks before of the catastrophe in Rome. So appalling. The civilized world had been stunned by it.

In May the Holy Roman Emperor Charles’s troops, warring with France for years over pieces of the Italian peninsula, had fought their way to Rome. They were a mixed brew of Spanish, Italian, and German mercenaries. Unpaid for months and hungry for spoils, they mutinied. They burst the city walls and brought Rome to its knees with a reign of terror never before seen in Christendom. A third of the population was massacred. Cardinals were prodded through the streets and butchered. Nuns, auctioned to soldiers, were raped on their altars. The aisles of the Vatican were used as stables, and the precious manuscripts of its libraries shredded for horses’ bedding. Pope Clement, with the jewels of his papal tiara sewn into the hem of his gown, fled the Vatican along a corridor connecting it to the Castel Sant’ Angelo. While soldiers looted the Church’s palaces, and stacked corpses rotted by the river, the Pope huddled in the Castel under siege. Finally, with Rome in ruins, the Emperor allowed the Pope to escape north of the city to Orvieto.

More shook his head, still hardly able to believe the enormity of the disaster.

There was a soft knock at the door. He turned to see his ward step into the room. He shook off his gloomy thoughts. “I have received a rather surprising communication from the Queen,” he said as pleasantly as he could manage.

Honor stood waiting, and More saw by the slight wrinkling of her forehead that she could not imagine how the Queen’s message could concern her.

He sat down at his desk. “It seems you have made a most favorable impression on Her Grace. Tell me, child, what passed between you and the Queen at Bridewell?”

He was referring to the glittering public ceremony some time before to which all the nobility of England had been summoned. The King had there enlarged his six-year-old illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy, with the titles of Duke of Richmond and Somerset. It had been an extraordinary, symbolic declaration by the King, acknowledging, in the absence of a legitimate son, Fitzroy’s right to some rank as a claimant to the throne. Sir Thomas, attending with all of his family, had read out the boy’s new patents of nobility.

“Her Grace was ill with a headache, sir,” Honor answered. “The day was very hot. She became so indisposed she had to leave the hall. I’m sure you remember, for everyone was most concerned.”

More remembered it well. The Queen had stood stoically by her husband’s side while he made a mistress’s bastard eligible to inherit the throne. Not only was it an insult to the Queen, it also threw the claim of their daughter, the Princess Mary, into jeopardy. Watching his ward’s open-faced reply, More wondered how much Honor had really seen that day. Had she understood anything of the humiliation the good Queen must have been suffering?

“Her Grace asked me to accompany her to her private chamber,” Honor continued. “Perhaps it was only because I was near at hand. Though I did notice that Mistress Boleyn was nearer.”

Did she really know nothing of the Boleyn girl’s infamy? More was touched by the innocence of the statement. Gratified, too, for it was further vindication of his judgment to settle his family in Chelsea: city gossip was just far enough removed.

“In any case,” Honor went on, “Her Grace asked only me. My heart ached to see her in such distress, and I offered to read to her. I read from Louis Vives and it seemed to calm her.” Quickly, she added, as though to deny too much credit, “The chamber was cool and dark, sir, both good medicine, I do not doubt. Her Grace was wondrous kind to me.”

More could not suppress a jolt of pride. Most of the Queen’s ladies were vain, ignorant flirts. In fine weather they rode out hunting and hawking with their courtier admirers, and when it rained they turned to cards, cat’s cradle, and gossip. Though they were all from prominent families, they had been sent to court only to make profitable marriages, and few of them were even literate, let alone able to soothe the nerves of this accomplished Queen by reading to her in learned Latin.

“Child,” he said suddenly, “what say you to matrimony?”

Her mouth fell open. “Leave here? Leave
you
?” she blurted. A blush swept over her face and she looked down.

More was surprised. Had she really not thought about marriage yet? A girl so lovely, so aware? Perhaps not; the stricken look on her face told him that her heart was here, at Chelsea. He realized that it pleased him inordinately. The realization was unsettling.

With her head still lowered, Honor asked quietly, “Is it that fat doctor?”

More had to cover a smile with his hand. At Lent, a doctor friend of his father’s, a portly widower, had come to court the girl. More had been passing the open solar door and overheard them talking. She was deftly cooling the doctor’s ardor in a most original fashion—by grilling him rather mercilessly on the works of St. Jerome and St. Thomas Aquinas. The poor man fled without even staying to supper.

“No,” More answered, amused. “The doctor has retreated from the field. But another hopeful has stepped into the breach.” He waited for some response, but she stood stubbornly silent. “Are you not even curious to know who it is?”

“No,” she said morosely. “But if my marriage is your desire, sir, my pleasure is naturally to obey you.”

He frowned. “This is no answer, child. I will not sell you like a chattel to the highest bidder. But here,” he said, poking at the letter on the desk beside the Queen’s message, “here is Sir John Bremelcum writing to open a dialogue with me about you and young Geoffrey. You got along well with the lad when he was here at Christmas, despite his coughs and chills. Good family. And he’s doing brilliantly at Cambridge. He’ll make a first-rate lawyer one day.”

He watched her for a promising sign, but she offered none.

Indeed, her obstinate expression suggested the opposite. More sighed heavily. He rose from his chair, turned his back to her, and gazed out the window. “I would like to have seen you safely and honorably married. The world is becoming a dangerous place.” He added quietly, “Sometimes, I fear we may be standing on the brink of the very end.” He could hear his own uneasiness hover in the stillness of the book-lined sanctuary.

He turned abruptly, suddenly all business. “Her Grace has need of new ladies-in-waiting. Two places have fallen vacant. She has asked that you fill one of them.”

Honor’s eyes grew large.

More frowned and added hastily, “I scruple to send a tender mind to court. Much vice breeds there. The Queen herself is the most virtuous of women—else nothing could make me even consider it—still, there is much vice. Had I given my word on you already to Sir John Bremelcum I would not hesitate to send my regrets to the Queen, for she well knows my promise is a thing I would not break, not for a world of court gold. Yet it is not so. There has been no such agreement with Sir John . . .”

His voice trailed. He had held off asking her inclination outright, hoping that, given a moment to consider, she might yet decline of her own free will. But he could put it off no longer. “What say you, child, to the Queen’s request?”

She was staring at him, hope glowing on her face. “Are you giving me leave to choose for myself, sir?”

He hesitated, then answered, “Of course.”

Suddenly, all her reticence was swept away by a huge, bright smile. More felt a pang of loss. How instantly the siren song of the court had severed her heartstrings from Chelsea—from him! And yet, her eyes were shining so clearly, so openly devoid of guile, that for a moment he could actually believe that she was making the right choice.

His eyes trailed down to the low-cut bodice of her gown. He noticed, for the first time, the coral and pearls of his gift glistening against the skin above her full, lifted breasts. And she had changed her dress since the morning, had she not? Yes, she had put on a silk one of a gleaming coral color. She must have picked it out especially, for he saw that it perfectly matched the necklace. Saw, too, that it gave fire to her lustrous dark hair and eyes.