The Queen's Lady Read online

  And get away herself. With Hugh dead her usefulness here was spent. Most likely Tyrell would cast her out alone and friendless into the world.

  When she was certain the house slept she threw on a cape. She tiptoed to Hugh’s chamber and went in. Hugh lay on the bed fully dressed, looking as though he had fallen into a drunken sleep at the end of a night’s carousing. Honor reached out to the waist of his doublet. Deftly, she untied the strings of his purse and stashed the money into her pocket. Then, tugging on her hood against the drizzle, she slipped out into the night.

  She heard Ralph’s faint, tuneless whistle coming from the pillory beyond the orchard. She hurried past the shadowy fruit trees. She found Ralph by the garden wall. He stood beside the pillory post, his head and hands poking through the wooden framework’s holes. He was whistling to block out the pain. His right ear was nailed to the wood.

  For a moment Honor thought she would be sick. Then she scrambled to him. His eyes widened as he saw her. “Ralph,” she said, “we’re running away.” She slid back the bolt on the framework and lifted the top board, freeing his hands.

  “Right,” he said grimly. Preparing himself, he sucked in a deep breath. Honor watched as he tore his ear from the nail.

  They stole the big sorrel gelding that had carried them here five years before. With Ralph in front and Honor behind, the horse took them into the wooded track that led eastward away from Tyrell Court. As the night black boughs dripped rain on them, Honor glanced behind. No one was following them. We’re going to make it, she told herself over and over, feigning more courage than she felt. They would get back to London. And once in London, she knew where she would seek justice.

  Ralph shuddered silently, weak from his ordeal. Honor saw that his makeshift bandage—a strip she had torn from her cloak—was soaked with blood over the mangled ear. She did not know what to do to help him. She held tightly to his waist and pressed her cheek against his back, hoping to pass strength to him through her embrace.

  And then she turned her eyes to the dark path ahead.

  Part Two

  Faith

  July 1527–April 1529

  3

  Chelsea in Summer

  Thwack! The arrow pierced the target and set the two shafts already embedded there a-quivering.

  “Delta!” Honor shouted, jubilant.

  “And after two epsilons,” her guardian nodded. “Not bad. Care to try for an alpha before dinner?”

  Honor held up her palm against the July sun and studied the target. Its concentric circles were boldly daubed with red letters of the Greek alphabet. She quickly fitted another arrow into her bow and fixed in her sights the alpha in the bull’s-eye. “Homer, be with me,” she murmured in invocation, and let the arrow fly.

  It struck. “Alpha!” she cried in delight.

  “Homer,” he assured her, smiling sagely, “is always with us.”

  She laughed and eagerly reached for another arrow, but her guardian had already started toward the target to collect the shafts. “That’s enough. Attempts to improve on perfection can only drive us mad,” he called merrily over his shoulder. Halfway there he bent to pick up a stray arrow.

  Honor slung her bow over her back and smiled. Her guardian was almost fifty and had never been a sportsman, and it was with a charming awkwardness that he wrestled the arrow from its tangle of low grass, his knee-length brown robe slipping askew on his shoulder. “You can’t fool me,” she called to his back. “You’re just hungry. You smell Lady Alice’s roasting beef.”

  His head jerked in a sudden laugh, and he cast his hands upward in a gesture of surrender and declared, “Another bull’s-eye!”

  She grinned. It was sweet to make Sir Thomas More laugh.

  A young male servant popped over the brow of the low hill between the archery lawn and the house. “Pardon, Sir Thomas,” he called as he began down towards them. “A visitor to see you.”

  More frowned. Honor could see he had forgotten the appointment. “The Vicar of Croydon, sir,” she reminded him. “He wrote you. You agreed to see him today.”

  The lapse, she knew, was understandable; Sir Thomas managed a staggering workload. Over the last ten years he had held posts as Undertreasurer of the Exchequer, Speaker of the House of Commons and, most prestigiously, for three years, King Henry’s sole private secretary—all while sitting on the King’s Council too. For this outstanding service the King had knighted him. Sir Thomas had also found time to build up a literary reputation, one that even the King deferred to. Honor had been in awe when, soon after she had come into Sir Thomas’s custody, the royal barge had docked at Chelsea, and from a window she had watched the tall, golden-haired King strolling the grounds with his arm around Sir Thomas’s shoulder. He had come to give Sir Thomas the honor of writing an important public response to a tract by the wild German heretic, Luther. Besides his continuing duties on the Royal Council, Sir Thomas also heard the complaints of poor suitors in the Court of Requests and was a respected judge in Chancellor Wolsey’s court of Star Chamber. But Honor knew that Sir Thomas relished all this labor, lightened as it was by his friendship with both King Henry and Queen Catherine. He often shared a private supper before the palace fires with one or both of them.

  She also knew, however, that he cherished his rare, quiet days at Chelsea. And today he had only been home for a matter of hours.

  The servant reached Sir Thomas and handed him a letter fastened, Honor noticed, with the Queen’s seal. “This came for you as well, sir.”

  More broke the seal and quickly scanned the note. Honor saw his brow crease, and his eyes flick to her face for a moment. Thoughtfully, he refolded the paper and put it inside his robe. “One thing at a time,” he said. He looked at the servant and sighed with resignation. “Show the Vicar into the solar, Matthew. We’re coming directly.”

  Matthew started to go, then called back as an afterthought, “Oh, and Lady Alice says dinner will be late. Maud has burned the beef.”

  More groaned. Honor laughed and took his arm to go in.

  The Vicar pivoted in the oriel window as Honor and More entered. He was a stooped but wiry man in his sixties, floured with dust from the road. He bowed and wrung his hands with such suppressed excitement that it seemed to Honor as though he were winding up some inner spring. More strode forward to greet him and the Vicar pressed his eyes shut as if blinded by the sun.

  “I’ll tell my pupils of this for years to come, Sir Thomas,” he wheezed, blinking. “The day I spoke with the author of Utopia.”

  More smiled, the gracious host, and offered a chair. The Vicar, never taking his eyes from More, groped for the seat.

  More indicated Honor. “My ward, Mistress Larke, will join us if you have no objection, sir.”

  Honor bobbed a curtsy, then sat quietly at a far table to continue transcribing a list of petitioners to the Court of Requests.

  “My secretary is ill with a flux,” More went on, moving behind his cluttered desk. “Mistress Larke is assisting me in his absence.” He laughed. “We two do our best, but still the claims of debts and the indictments and petitions seem to breed overnight like mushrooms.”

  The Vicar did not smile. He was regarding Honor with an expression of discomfort. “Most unusual,” he muttered.

  “My ward, sir, like my daughters, is an able scholar,” More assured him. “They have always pursued their studies on an equal footing with my son.”

  The Vicar looked astonished.

  More smiled. “Good learning, I’m sure you agree, leads to piety.”

  “Doubtless, Sir Thomas. But, in the case of women…” His face hinted at grave doubt indeed.

  “The maxim is especially true in the case of women,” More replied in good humor. Honor smiled over her writing; she knew this subject was one of his favorites. “For as women are by nature impure,” he went on, “so learning cleanses them and sets them on the road to pious living.”

  The Vicar fell stonily silent, apparently unconvinced
by this revolutionary manifesto.

  “Honor Larke is an excellent case in point,” More continued enthusiastically. “She came into this house several years ago, illiterate, ill-used, and with no more understanding of God’s workings in this world or His glories in the next than has that poor, dumb creature there.” He nodded at a pet monkey curled in sleep on the window ledge. “Indeed far less, I should say, for the monkey lives contented with its natural cycle of feeding and sleep and does not go in fear of my boot at its ribs. Whereas this girl, after five years under a brutal lord, arrived at my door unsure if there was any contentment at all for the wretched in a wicked world.”

  Honor blushed under the scrutiny of the two men and bent lower over her writing.

  “Yet with education, sir,” More summed up proudly, “this same girl now goes blithely to her bed, ears ringing with the conjugation of Latin verbs and the voice of Plato, and happy in the assurance that her life and mind, enriched by duty and service to God, will not be despised by Him at the final hour. And when she wakes up to our cook’s burnt toast she can cut it into a right-angle triangle knowing that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the square of the other two sides.” He smiled at Honor. “Even her Greek improves.”

  “Greek!” the Vicar exclaimed. Honor understood his shock. Many in the theology-dominated educational institutions like Oxford considered Greek studies to be dangerously close to paganism.

  The Vicar pulled himself together. “Well, girl, you were lucky Sir Thomas found you,” he grunted. “I hope you are grateful.”

  “He did not find me, sir. I found him.”

  She had the satisfaction of seeing the Vicar’s eyes widen at her impertinent remark.

  More strangled a laugh, then hastened to say with sober concern, “Pardon, sir, the fault is mine if the child speaks out of turn. I fear that, through contact with me, she has absorbed an annoying tendency of the lawyer’s mind—the sometimes overscrupulous passion to have every fact correct.” He cleared his throat and tugged at his robe with judgelike decorum, but finally was unable to hide his amusement. “Truth is, though, she’s right. She came knocking at my gate because, as she made quite clear to me, I was the only lawyer whose name she knew!” He laughed.

  The Vicar frowned.

  It was obvious that Honor’s presence would be an irritant to the meeting.

  “Child,” More said gravely, “wait for me in the New Building. I have some business for you there.”

  He turned his head to her and flashed a conspiratorial wink, and she rose and passed through the room with a controlled smile that she was sure even the Vicar could interpret as one of filial obedience.

  In the dappled sunshine of the orchard she sang to herself under the fragrant vault of pear-tree boughs, then crossed the lawn that separated the large house and its gardens from the small New Building. Heat cradled the drowsing estate. The only sounds that drifted on the still air were the buzzing of bees and the faint tolling of the bell from the nearby parish church. Down at the foot of the rolling lawns the ribbon of the River Thames snapped stars of sunlight off its silver surface.

  Reaching the New Building she stepped under the small porch gable, lifted the latch, and let herself in. She loved this place, for it reflected the quintessential Thomas More. It contained only three rooms: his library, a gallery for meditation, and a small, austere chapel. It was his habit to come here with his lantern at three in the morning for several hours of study and prayer before the household and the work-a-day world awoke.

  She let the door swing shut and stood for a moment breathing in the cool, wood-paneled peace of the library. The furnishings were spartan. In front of the single window stood an oak desk and a plain, hard-backed chair. There was a small hearth. Cocooning the room, the walls were lined with bookshelves crammed with books.

  Whenever she stood here, surrounded by books, memories tumbled back of the foreigner’s strange gift on that May Day night ten years before—the little volume she and Ralph had opened together under the kitchen lantern to find the speedwell winking back at them. She had never seen the book again. At her abduction, Tyrell had turned her father’s townhouse into a tenement, and all its contents had been bundled up and sold for quick cash. Where, she often wondered, had the foreigner’s book gone? She had never forgotten its haunting, proud little flower, nor the unsettling serenity of the man’s dying smile. And the more education she acquired, thanks to Sir Thomas’s liberal instruction, the more her curiosity grew to know what had been written in that book. But, though she was always on the lookout for a copy of it, she feared that after so many years the search was hopeless.

  She stepped up to More’s desk. With eyes closed, she ran her finger reverentially over its beeswaxed surface. “Gratias,” she whispered, and touched her finger to her heart. It was a private ritual she had performed over a hundred times, though she was careful never to let Sir Thomas see her do it. He would have been dismayed—would have called her prayer blasphemous. And so it was, she knew, for it was not to God she gave her thanks, but to Sir Thomas himself.

  She walked slowly alongside a bookshelf and bumped the knuckle of her finger lovingly over the spines. This was Sir Thomas’s private world, and in it she felt close to him. So close that she blushed to remember how, when she was younger, she would sometimes let her mind wander into forbidden tracks. She used to imagine herself beside him, as his wife. She had sensed as soon as she came into the family that there was no bond of love between Sir Thomas and the blunt-faced Lady Alice who was, after all, seven years older than him; his four grown children were the issue of his first marriage. Lady Alice seemed to Honor to be more housekeeper than wife. What if, she used to ask herself, Lady Alice were to die, as Sir Thomas’s first wife had? It was not uncommon for gentlemen to marry their wards, and she could bring to her husband a sizable fortune in her father’s scattered estates.

  She gazed out the window, shaking her head in embarrassment at the recollection of such juvenile fantasies. The world looked quite different to her now. For one thing those estates, she had learned, had been in sad condition when she became Sir Thomas’s ward. Tyrell had ravaged the land. He had sold acres of timber to a smelting interest that had razed the forests. He had stripped the mines of their treasure, then issued fraudulent—and worthless—mining licenses. Using violence and threats, he had extorted crippling rents from most of the tenant farmers, and thrown many others off their holdings to make room for destructive herds of sheep. Sir Thomas, as the administrator of her property now, was attempting, with her father’s stewards, to repair the damage.

  He had explained all this to her, and a great deal more. When, as a child, she had been married to Hugh Tyrell, she had only dimly understood her legal situation, though at twelve she had realized that if the marriage were consummated her property would go out of her hands. Much later, Sir Thomas had explained to her the nub of it.

  An unmarried woman did not own property, though she could become the channel through which her father’s property passed to her husband. Given this situation, Sir Thomas pointed out, abduction of heiresses was not an uncommon occurrence. There was even legislation, “Against the Taking Away of Women,” but it was difficult to enforce, he said, and the attraction of an heiress’s lands seized through an enforced marriage often seemed worth the risk to an unscrupulous man like Tyrell.

  But Father Bastwick, too, Sir Thomas told her, had taken a huge risk in masterminding her abduction. He and Tyrell had cheated the King out of revenue in his Court of Wards, one of the most lucrative royal ministries. All orphans with significant property became, by feudal prerogative, wards of the King, who then sold the wardships. Gentlemen had to pay handsomely for the custody of wealthy wards, male and female. Indeed, since a guardian was entitled to pocket all the rents and revenues of the ward’s estates until the young person’s marriage, the bidding often was fiercely competitive.

  But Bastwick had wielded forgery and fraud to help Tyrell snatch Honor�
��s wardship and pay nothing for it. As Tyrell’s payment, Bastwick had been well on his way to an archdeacon’s post when Honor escaped with Ralph to London, found Sir Thomas, and brought her abductors to trial in Cardinal Wolsey’s Court of Star Chamber.

  Overnight Honor’s world had changed. Wolsey awarded the custody of her and her property to More. Sir Guy Tyrell was sent to the Fleet prison. Bastwick, though immune from civil justice because of his clerical status, was nevertheless sent to a cell in the Bishop’s prison for a period, his dreams of advancement in the Church shattered.

  Honor had rejoiced that day in court, seeing Bastwick humbled. And yet, the image of his face at the trial still had the power to make her shiver. She did not think she would ever forget Bastwick’s look of cold fury when More delivered his damning oration against him.

  “Pity the Church,” More had said under the court’s star-spangled ceiling as he pointed to Bastwick. “Longing only to cure men’s souls, she sometimes suffers disease herself in corrupt priests such as this.”

  Honor had caught the glint of pure hatred in Bastwick’s black, hooded eyes—hatred for Sir Thomas and, especially, hatred for her.

  The verdict was handed down, and Sir Thomas went victoriously to the bar to settle the custody. But as the clerks and officials rose and began to mill about, Honor saw Bastwick moving towards her. She could barely swallow, so parched was her throat, but she held her ground. Bastwick stopped in front of her. His body was completely still, his emotion controlled, but the muscles around his eyes twitched, betraying him. “You will live to regret this day,” he said. The threat was no more than a whisper, but its malice seared her ears.

  But Bastwick was wrong. She regretted nothing. Certainly not the news a year later that Tyrell had died in prison. Nor the fact that Bastwick had vanished from her life. Ever since the day of judgment she had been happy.