The Queen's Lady Read online

Her teeth were chattering in the cold. “I’ve seen enough,” she said. She turned and left Margery ogling the carnival below.

  When she entered the Queen’s suite, free of her bundles and looking forward to settling before the warmth of the brazier, she found a half dozen girls gathered there, her fellow ladies-in-waiting. They were whispering in agitation. Several looked quite frightened. One quickly told Honor of the crisis. The Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey himself, had just left in a great show of anger, she said. He had barged in and arrested the Queen’s young secretary, Walter. “For spying on the King!” the girl breathed in horror. Wolsey’s men, she said, had just taken Walter away. “Her Grace,” another girl added with a nervous nod at the Queen’s private chamber, “is quite beside herself.”

  A third girl was at the sideboard pouring wine to take to the Queen. Her hands were trembling. Honor came to a swift decision. Quickly she went to the sideboard. “Let me, Beth,” she said. Beth relinquished the goblet, clearly relieved at the opportunity to steer clear of the storm.

  Honor knocked gently on the Queen’s door and opened it. The Queen’s private chamber was empty. Honor stepped in and looked toward the far set of doors that stood open to the bedchamber.

  There, Queen Catherine was on her knees in prayer before her prie-dieu. Its magnificent ivory carving glowed from the light of a rim of votive candles arching over the supplicant.

  Honor went back and closed the door. Silently, she moved to a paper-strewn table near the bedchamber door and set the goblet down. But she did not leave.

  Catherine’s head turned slightly, sharply, as though in annoyance at Honor’s continued presence, although her lips kept moving in her murmured prayer. Still, Honor did not go.

  Catherine completed her orisons, crossed herself, and stood. Honor’s resolve surged at the sight of the Queen’s face. Strain had etched tiny lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth, and the votive candles’ light glinted over the threads of gray in her light brown hair. Her squat figure appeared dowdy-looking despite her sumptuous purple brocade gown and costly amethysts. But there was a dignity and strength of will in her carriage, and in her calm eyes, that made Honor feel proud.

  Catherine walked out of the bedchamber and glanced at the wine goblet. “Thank you,” she said wearily, her thoughts elsewhere. “You may go.” She closed her prayer missal and moved toward the fire that crackled in the hearth.

  “Pray, give me leave to stay, my lady,” Honor said. “I wish to help you.”

  From the corner of the hearth Catherine glanced over her shoulder at Honor. The smallest smile of indulgence came to her lips, colorless despite the fire’s orange glow. “Help me?” she said softly, almost to herself. She looked back at the flames. “It’s poor Walter who needs help now. And that I have just left in the merciful hands of God.” A slight Spanish accent still clung to her speech, even after twenty-seven years in England; when she was fatigued it became pronounced.

  “But that’s just it,” Honor blurted. “I know about Walter. That he carried your letters out.”

  Catherine’s head turned slightly, again with that small, sharp movement of annoyance. “You mean, you know that the Cardinal claims it.”

  Honor took a deep breath. She would say what she had come to say. “More than that. I know Walter took your letters to Dr. de Athequa, who took them to Ambassador Mendoza. I know that this is how you correspond with the Emperor.” She moved to the other corner of the hearth to be nearer the Queen. “My lady,” she entreated, “let me take Walter’s place. Let me help you!”

  Catherine turned to her with an expression that was both surprised and wary. Honor watched the fire’s shadows play unkindly over a face whose cares, like weights, had begun to sag the flesh. The Queen was forty-two, six years older than the King. She no longer danced, and rarely rode, and her waist had thickened from repeated pregnancies—six children born, five of them buried. It was a decade since her womb had quickened, and the only living child she had been able to give the husband she adored was a girl, not the male heir he craved.

  Pity squeezed Honor’s heart. How the Queen must have suffered through these past months. “The King’s great matter,” that’s what everyone called it. Such a pompous phrase, Honor thought with scorn. What was so grand, she wanted to know, about a man in middle years infatuated to the point of irrationality? But the besotted King had actually asked the Pope to annul his marriage. Now, the Queen—everyone—was waiting for the decision from Rome.

  Honor knew that if the Pope were to grant the King his wish the consequences for the Queen could be terrible: imprisonment in a convent, the bastardization of their twelve-year-old daughter, the Princess Mary—even, perhaps, the Queen’s murder finessed by some overzealous minion of Wolsey.

  And it had all begun, Honor realized with some wonder, while she was living at Chelsea, playing at archery and musing over Plato, blithely ignorant of the dark currents swirling at court and in Rome. After eighteen years with Catherine of Aragon as his wife, King Henry had privately commanded Cardinal Wolsey to dissolve the marriage. Wolsey had special authority, being a papal legate, and the King had apparently assumed that the Pope’s agreement would be automatic; annulments of royal marriages were not uncommon.

  The King had grounds, strange and shaky though they seemed to Honor. The marriage was the King’s first, but it was the Queen’s second, and that was the crux of his argument. When the King had married her Catherine had been the widow of his brother, Arthur. Scripture technically forbade matrimony with a brother’s wife, so it had been necessary, all those years ago, to secure from the former Pope a dispensation to allow the union. Therefore, when the King decided he wanted his freedom, Cardinal Wolsey had called a secret tribunal and pronounced judgment that the Queen’s second marriage—outlawed, after all, by scripture—had never been legal; that the King was, in the eyes of God, a bachelor. But then, before anyone—even the Queen—had been told the tribunal’s extraordinary verdict, the unthinkable had happened in Rome. The Emperor Charles’s mutinous troops had sacked the city, inflicting a massacre that had shaken Europe to its core. And Charles—Holy Roman Emperor of the vast German lands, ruler of Flanders, King of Spain, lord of the limitless New World—was Queen Catherine’s nephew.

  Overnight, King Henry’s dream of a quick divorce had evaporated, for as soon as the Queen was told of his decision to cast her aside she dispatched an appeal to the Pope, a man now wholly under the domination of her invincible nephew. The English King’s private matrimonial case had suddenly exploded into an international crisis. The dithering Pope, badgered by the King’s envoys one day and threatened by the Emperor’s the next, wrung his hands, it was said, and wept like a woman before all of them—and stalled. For nine months the King and Queen had remained at this impasse.

  And Cardinal Wolsey’s impatience with the Queen had grown thin. Everyone knew he chafed at what he saw as her intransigence against the King’s wishes. Worse, he feared military intervention by the Emperor’s forces. So he kept the Queen a virtual prisoner in her own palace. He maintained informants in her household, read every letter he could lay hands on that went from her desk, and refused to let her see the Emperor’s ambassador in private. Nevertheless, Honor knew that the Queen had managed to eke out a fragile line of communication using her secretary, Walter, her confessor, Dr. de Athequa, and Ambassador Mendoza to get her letters across to Charles in Spain. But now, Wolsey had discovered at least one link of that lifeline, and had broken it.

  “Please, allow me, my lady,” Honor urged. “I can do everything Walter did. I can write your letters. You know my Latin is as good as his. And I could deliver them, too.”

  Catherine’s wary expression had not changed. “Would you? Why?”

  Honor hesitated, but only to search for the most concise words. She said simply, “You have been wronged.”

  Catherine’s breath flew out of her as if she had been physically struck by the justice of the statement. “God knows!” she cried. Impulsi
vely, she reached for Honor’s hand in a gesture as filled with passion as her previous motions had been with caution. “I knew you were one to be trusted!” Quickly, she controlled herself. “But, my dear, there are grave risks. I am not at all sure it is right to ask such dangerous things of you.”

  “You are asking nothing, Your Grace. I am offering. And as for risk,” she shrugged, “I have tasted of that before now.”

  Catherine’s grasp on Honor’s hand tightened. “Oh, I will thank Our Lord for sending you to me.”

  Honor’s smile contained a glint of playfulness. “Do not forget to thank Sir Thomas, too, my lady, for my Latin. Had he not transformed the barbarian in me, I would be no good to you at all.”

  She was glad to see the warm smile that the Queen returned. “Indeed,” Catherine replied with feeling. “A prayer will go, as well, for More, my dear friend.” Her manner quickly sobered. “Can you begin at once, my dear?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good. It is imperative that I tell Charles to send me lawyers. Ones experienced in dealing with the Roman court. The Cardinal has cowed the English advocates. I must have men from Charles’s Flemish provinces, immune to Wolsey’s threats. And I must have them now.”

  Honor quickly sat and took up pen and paper. She wrote at length, following the Queen’s Latin dictation. With the plea to the Emperor completed, Honor folded the letter. “And now, my lady,” she said, “where shall I find Dr. de Athequa?”

  Catherine frowned. With a sudden movement she came to the table, took up the letter, and held it to her bosom. “No. I have changed my mind. You shall not endanger yourself for me. I’ll find another way.”

  Honor bit her lip. She was not afraid; was ready to take the risk. But she knew, too, that she had no business contradicting a Queen. “How, my lady?” she asked gently. “There is no other way.”

  “One must be found. The Cardinal may have already squeezed poor Walter for de Athequa’s name. I will not cast you, too, into such perilous seas.”

  Honor sat silent a moment. Suddenly, she brightened. “The masque,” she said.

  “Masque?”

  “Tonight. At my lord Cardinal’s. He is hosting a masque for the King and the Lady, and…” She saw the Queen flinch, and stopped. “The Lady” was the title that everyone at court, whatever their allegiance, applied to Anne Boleyn.

  “Pardon, Your Grace,” Honor went on, hating to give the Queen pain. “But you see, as Sir Thomas is invited to the masque, I am too. And Ambassador Mendoza is sure to be among the guests. I can take the letter directly to him. It will be so easy. No need to go through Dr. de Athequa at all.”

  Catherine appeared hopeful, but unconvinced.

  “I promise,” Honor smiled, “I shall take every care.”

  Catherine looked for a long moment into Honor’s eyes. Then, with a small, grave nod, she gave her consent. She touched Honor’s cheek with a gesture of motherly affection. “Every care,” she said earnestly. “I’ll have no ill befall you.” Her warm smile broke through. “Else, how shall I answer to Sir Thomas?”

  A hundred candles blazed in Cardinal Wolsey’s great hall at Hampton Court. Wall-sized Flemish tapestries—miracles of artistry in gold, ruby, and sky blue threads—shimmered with larger-than-life-size scenes of the Virtues and the Vices. Many of the latter were being enacted with relish among the gaudily dressed crowd of ladies and gentlemen. Their laughing voices and the scuffle of their dancing feet all but drowned out the lusty efforts of thirty musicians in the minstrels’ gallery. The pungency of spiced wine and roasted meats on side tables mingled in the air with sweet herbs crushed underfoot, and with perfumed sweat. The King had disappeared soon after the dancing had begun. So had the Lady. But the revelers carried on.

  Honor skirted the perimeter of dancers and moved toward the doors. She tried to keep her walk unhurried, tried not to show her excitement. She passed several groups, and could hardly believe that no one noticed her heightened color. Matrons gossiped and munched beside the food-laden tables. Gentlemen gambled noisily over dice in an alcove. Girls cooed around one of their number who had partnered a duke’s son. In the distance, gray-haired statesmen conferring under the gallery surrounded the corpulent figure of Wolsey swathed in his red cardinal’s robes. Honor’s hands felt clammy as she thought of Wolsey, but she walked on. No one stopped her as she left the hall.

  She was responding to the signal Ambassador Mendoza had given her. Upon her arrival an hour ago she had gone to him, and they had arranged the signal in a swift, whispered exchange. When he gave it, he told her, she was to wait a quarter hour, then meet him outside in the garden. So she had waited—had watched the dancers complete a galliard; had rejected two offers to dance; had been jostled by an angry gambler loudly searching for a man who owed him money. The wait had seemed endless.

  The hardest trial had been keeping her secret from Sir Thomas. Seeing her, he had detached himself from the circle of statesmen around Wolsey, and, smiling, had come to speak to her. She knew that, councilor and friend to the King though he was, Sir Thomas sympathized with the Queen, and she could barely contain herself as he commented on the gathering and quipped about the young coxcombs. Her mission for the Queen had almost bubbled out of her.

  Now, past all of these distractions, she made her way outside to the knot garden that overlooked the river.

  Under moonlight, a dusting of undisturbed snow glinted over the frozen garden. The chill air bit Honor’s throat as she hurried with quick breaths along a gravel walk. She hugged herself against the cold—she had left her cloak inside, for donning it might have aroused suspicion. She made for a latticed structure at the end of the walk. It was a kind of bower, three-sided, and covered over with cut holly boughs. A month before, Wolsey had ordered it erected for his comfort during a day of Christmas festivities when a choir of children sang for him and his household.

  Honor saw a movement beside the bower—the swirl of a long robe—and recognized the shadowed silhouette of the Imperial ambassador. She reached the spot, and saw that he was shivering: he, too, had foreseen the imprudence of wearing his cloak. Don Inigo de Mendoza was a wiry, middle-aged Spaniard of high family and haughty disposition, and Honor could not suppress a smile at the sight of the proud gentleman clutching his robe’s collar to his chin, shoulders hunched, teeth chattering.

  “Ah! Mistress Larke,” he whispered, taking her elbow, plainly anxious to get on with their business. Together, they stepped into the bower. Honor passed him the Queen’s letter. She said, “Her Grace needs this in the Emperor’s hands immediately.” Mendoza nodded, then quickly left the bower. His footsteps crunched on the icy path, then faded to nothing. The mission had been accomplished in a moment.

  Honor felt cheated: what an anticlimactic end to her hours of trepidation! She smiled at her own disappointment. What, after all, had she expected? That Cardinal Wolsey himself would spring up out of a garden urn? Shake snow off his great bulk and command her arrest? No. All was quiet. From windows in the hall, music reached her in faint pulses. She looked down at the River Thames. Lanterns bobbed among the clutter of ferries and barges tethered to the pier where bundled-up boatmen waited to carry guests back to the city. From the pier, blazing torches lined the way up to the palace terrace. No band of guards was marching toward her to take her off to prison. She shrugged with a smile.

  She was freezing. She took a step to leave the bower. A man’s voice startled her.

  “A dangerous business, mistress.”

  Honor halted. The voice had come from inside the bower. She turned. A man was sitting on a bench tucked into the corner. He sat sideways, his feet on the bench, his knees drawn up under a heavy cloak. His face was completely in shadow under the holly boughs.

  Honor took a wary step back. She and Mendoza had said little in their meeting, but it was enough.

  “Yes,” the man said quietly. “I heard.” Three words only, but their sum was an unmistakable threat.

  Honor swallowed. In the
confined space she smelled brandy from his breath. She noticed a leather bottle lying on the bench beside him. Perhaps, she thought, he was nothing more than a drunkard, come out here to drink alone. Could she turn his intimidation around, use it against him? “What are you doing in the Cardinal’s garden?” she asked sternly.

  He gave a sharp nod toward the palace and snorted. “Avoiding a jackass inside. Claims I owe him dice money. And he’s been known to rely on his sword to settle accounts.” He chuckled. “No gentleman, I fear.”

  He had not moved. Lounging against the bower wall, he seemed to Honor harmless enough. “Good night, sir,” she said firmly. She moved to go.

  His sword scraped from its scabbard. The blade shot across the bower opening, blocking Honor’s escape. She gasped.

  “Oh, don’t go yet, Mistress Larke,” he said calmly.

  “How do you know my name?” she asked, unnerved.

  “Your tryst partner greeted you by it. As I said, I do have ears.” In a sudden, clean movement, he swung his legs to the ground without lowering the sword. He looked up at her, his face now lit by a shaft of moonlight. Honor recognized him. This was the man who had almost lost his hand to the butcher’s cleaver. The one Anne Boleyn had rescued. Thornleigh. And if he was Anne’s confederate, Honor realized, his interest lay in discrediting the Queen. To Wolsey.

  “You should also know,” she said, pretending bravado, “that I am the ward of Sir Thomas More. He’s just inside, sir, and he will not appreciate me being harassed in this fashion.”

  Thornleigh let out a short, mocking whistle. “You frighten me, mistress. Two adversaries inside. I may have to stay out here all night. So do take pity. Your company would be such a comfort while I’m marooned here. We could keep one another warm. You’re shivering.”

  She saw that he was toying with her. Well, if that was all he intended, perhaps a little more bravado could get her out of this. She hugged herself and answered with disdain. “Thank you, no. Now, let me pass.”