The Queen's Lady Read online

  “Oh, come, come,” he said pleasantly. “I’m agreeing to take on the heavy responsibility of your secret. Don’t you think you owe me something for that service?” He lowered his sword, leaving her way clear to go. “You don’t look stupid,” he added meaningfully, laying the sword on the bench. “And my price is very reasonable.”

  So, she thought, he was threatening to inform on her after all. She accepted defeat. “How much do you want?”

  Thornleigh scratched his chin thoughtfully. “Well, let’s see. Moncton in there claims twenty pounds…”

  “Twenty pounds!” she blurted. How could she ask Sir Thomas for even half that amount without arousing his suspicions? It was insufferable. She recalled Margery’s earlier comment, and snapped, “I understood that your wife pays your gambling debts.”

  His face hardened. But he went on as if she had not spoken. “…but Moncton’s a cheat, and I have no intention of satisfying him. So, all I’ll ask of you, dear lady, is one kiss.”

  She was astonished. It was an idiotic request. He held her position at court—her very life, perhaps—in his hands. He could ask for anything. “You’re brain-sick,” she said scornfully.

  “Only when I see a pretty face.”

  His amusement at her discomfort infuriated her. “And if I refuse?”

  He chuckled. “You are not in a strong bargaining position here, mistress.”

  It was true. She imagined the consequences if he reported her to Wolsey. Walter, she knew, was already locked away in a prison cell. Being tortured? She shivered, and from more than just the cold.

  He shrugged. “Only a kiss,” he repeated reasonably.

  She answered, as if uttering a curse, “Very well.” She drew herself up and clenched her jaw. Her folded arms tightened into rigid armor. The iced air pinched her nostrils. “Let’s get it over with.”

  He stood, and Honor’s lips parted in surprise; she had forgotten how tall he was. He stepped close to her. He took her face between his hands and lifted it to his. His lips touched hers. She tasted the sweet residue of brandy. She felt his hand slide to her throat, felt her own pulse beat against his warm palm. His other arm went lower and drew her to him, his cloak almost engulfing her. He held her gently, yet she felt immobilized by his strength. As her every muscle softened, her mouth opened under his. Her arms dropped to her sides. She felt the heat of his body, his hands on her as if he owned her. And she knew that, for this moment, he did.

  He drew his face away. She heard him laugh softly. “Open your eyes, mistress,” he said. “The bargain was for just one kiss, no more. Sorry.”

  Her eyes flew open.

  He chuckled. “You’ve never been kissed before, have you? But of course not. Not Sir Thomas More’s ward. Oh, yes, I’ve heard the tales. Sir Thomas the Pious. I understand the man keeps such a chaste household, he actually segregates his servants so that male and female do not fraternize. Is it true?”

  Honor wrenched herself from his arms. How dare this lecherous drunkard ridicule Sir Thomas! “This transaction is concluded, sir,” she spat. “I trust I have now bought your silence?”

  “Cheap, wasn’t it?” He laughed. “But, I must be content,” he said with mock resignation, “for the court, you know, is a buyer’s market.”

  “And your skill in bartering, small,” she retorted. “No wonder you need a rich wife.”

  His look at her darkened into one of scorn. “Well,” he said, looking at her mouth, “all of us around here must sell whatever we can.”

  The insult was too plain. She raised her hand to strike him. He caught her wrist, held it a moment, then dropped it. He flopped down nonchalantly onto the bench and took up the bottle. “Go back inside, mistress,” he said. “You’re cold.”

  Honor turned on her heel and left him.

  5

  Smithfield

  The small hunting party plodded over the drought-cracked road leading into London, and a parched breeze spiraled grit up into the eyes of Honor and Margery riding in the center. The two mounted gentlemen ahead of them were bickering over techniques of the day’s kill, comparing it with other hunts, while three servant boys lazily brought up the rear, leading a pony laden with strings of bloody grouse and a fallow deer buck.

  Honor peeled off a sweaty glove and picked the grit from her eye. Lord, she thought, how I hate hunting. The chase. The blood. The frenzy of the dogs—and the men—when they run down a wounded buck. Still, the wretched day has been worth it. I charmed all the information out of the Archbishop’s nephew I’m likely to get for the Queen.

  Margery glared ahead at the male conversation that excluded them, her eyes puffy in the heat. Honor offered her a look of sympathy. “Bridewell in twenty minutes,” she said and smiled, “and the Venetian Ambassador’s claret to cool us.” But Margery remained grumpily silent.

  The gentlemen’s chatter had degenerated into a quarrel over who would be invited to hunt with the King’s party the following week. Certainly not the Queen, Honor thought bitterly. The King only rode out now with Anne Boleyn; the Queen was not welcome. Worse, if the loose talk Honor had coaxed from Archbishop Warham’s nephew was correct, the Queen’s prospects appeared grim; in the divorce battle, the Church, it seemed, was going to abandon her. Honor could almost hear the cautious old politician, Warham, murmuring to bishops in his archiepiscopal palace: “Indignatio principis mors est.” The wrath of the King is death.

  But still no answer had come from Rome. Winter had melted into spring, spring had dragged into summer, summer was almost at an end, and all nerves at court were in a jangle. The King fumed. The Queen endured. But the Pope would not act.

  Honor stuffed her gloves into her pocket as the Jesus Bells of St. Paul’s Cathedral clanged. Today was the Feast of Saint Michael. A short distance ahead the walls of London rose, and the city skyline—a square-mile thicket of steeples—wavered in the heat. As usual, several church bells were clamoring at once. Strange, Honor thought, how their discord is so familiar it sounds like harmony.

  The party came up behind a cart piled with sides of beef, slowing their progress. Honor groaned with impatience. How she longed to be back in her room in a cool bath! The stacked carcasses shuddered over every pothole as if in some protracted death throe, and the carrion stink bled into the stench of the slaughterhouses and tanneries that were crowded, by law, outside the city walls. Their waste of entrails was daily slopped into the Fleet Ditch.

  The smell was nauseating. Honor had had enough. “Margery,” she said suddenly, “I’m off.”

  The other girl’s eyes widened. “What, alone?”

  But Honor was already trotting her mare towards an open lane. Laughing, she called over her shoulder, “See you back at Bridewell,” and cantered away, happy at last to be free of dead things and dull companions.

  The lane fed into the broad expanse of Smithfield fairground, and she reined the mare to a walk and threaded through the moving crowd. She was surprised at the number of people. She knew that horse markets were regularly held here—all ranks of people frequented its bawling grounds where packhorses and priests’ mules were traded alongside finely bred destriers and hunters—but the usual market day was Saturday, two days away.

  She squeezed around to the Augustinian priory church of St. Bartholomew the Great that fronted the square, and passed by as its bell peeled nones, the monks’ three o’clock service. Beside the church was an empty flight of stands for dignitaries. Several idlers were lounging in the shade beneath its plank seating. Honor envied them the cool spot they had found. Definitely, she thought, a bath, first thing.

  A gray-robed friar staggered out of the crowd straight toward her, his head bowed. Honor thought he must be drunk. As she jerked the reins to twist out of his way he collided with her horse’s shoulder. The horse shied and Honor murmured soothing words to gentle it. The friar stared up at her. His red eyes were blurred with tears. His hands flew to his face in a gesture of misery, and then he dashed away.

  There
was a shout. Honor looked to her right. A procession was winding toward her. Probably a funeral, she thought. Maybe the dead man is someone the sad friar was close to. She coaxed her horse to one side, hoping to skirt the square and leave, but the crowd was swelling rapidly and the press of bodies forced her to stop.

  A trio of mounted men-at-arms was followed by a workhorse dragging something, then by a half-dozen more men-at-arms on foot. The crowd had kicked up a lot of dust, and through this screen Honor could not make out what the horse had in tow. But as it neared her, the heads of two men became visible behind the horse’s rump. Although she could not yet see their bodies it was clear they were strapped to a hurdle, the tilted wooden grill that was scraping over the ground.

  This crowd hadn’t come for a horse fair. They’d come to watch a burning.

  “There he is!” someone said with a laugh. “Heywood the heretic.”

  People pushed to get closer, forcing Honor’s horse forward too. The hurdle was now passing directly in front of her, and she saw the face of the prisoner nearest her. He was young and slight, his hair shaved in a priest’s tonsure. He smiled winningly, like a child or a simpleton, at the people craning to see him. His arms were free above the ropes that bound him to the hurdle, and he offered the sign of the cross over and over.

  An old man fell to his knees in front of the procession, halting it. “Brother Heywood, God take you to His rest,” he croaked.

  Honor was eager to leave this place of execution. She was about to kick her mare’s flanks when her eyes were drawn to the other prisoner slumped on the far side of the hurdle. He was almost twice the size of the smiling friar. His face was turned away, and she could see only a mass of hair: a dirty blond tangle above and a full beard straggling below. Like the friar, he was barefoot and dressed only in shirt and hose. But unlike the friar he was smeared with the dried filth of long imprisonment, and the ropes around knees, waist and chest that strapped him to the wooden grill pinned his arms tightly to his sides.

  “Look what you’ll be missing, love,” a young woman said, laughing. She sprang from the crowd to kiss him. Her companions whistled at her prank. As her mouth covered the prisoner’s slack lips, her hand tousled his hair, revealing his cheek and ear. Or what was left of his ear. It had been mutilated, leaving a scarlet ruffle of cartilage.

  Horror chilled Honor’s scalp. Around the reins, her nails dug white crescents into her palms. “Ralph,” she breathed.

  The old man impeding the procession was dragged from the path. The horse and hurdle wallowed on. People rushed after it like gulls screeching in the wake of a ship.

  The execution cortege stopped in front of Saint Bartholomew’s Church. From inside came the dead chanting of monks.

  Maybe it’s not Ralph. Six years since I’ve seen him. An injured ear might be common. Among soldiers…or criminals…

  She tried to move her horse forward but the crowd made it impossible. She slid off the saddle and abandoned the animal and fought her way on—shoving aside a woman hawking stick crosses, worming past a man with a child on his shoulders—until she burst into the front rank of onlookers. There, no more than five horse lengths from her, the hurdle had stopped. Still tilted off the ground, the prisoners lay stretched on it like gutted fish splayed in the sun to dry.

  “Dear God,” she whispered in despair. For it was no soldier, no criminal. It was Ralph Pepperton. Haggard and filthy, his bearded face a lifetime older, but the same man who had ripped his own flesh from the nail of the pillory to run with her from Tyrell Court and see her safely to London.

  The last time she had spoken to him was just after the victorious trial that had made her Sir Thomas’s ward. After bringing Ralph the judgment, she had gone with him to a wharf on the river near London Bridge. It was sunset, and Ralph was tossing his satchels into a barge bound for Oxford. They stood together on the water steps, unable to say good-bye.

  “Oh stay, Ralph,” she pleaded. “The news from Tyrell Court may never reach here. And even if it does and they accuse you, Sir Thomas is a wonderful, fair man. I know he’ll forgive you. Come and meet him.”

  “Forgive murder?” Ralph shook his head with a smile. “If he does, he’s not the clever lawman I took him for. No, mistress. Though you and me know the how and why of it—an evil mishap—the law sees things different. And maybe that’s as it should be, for I swear I’d snap that lousel’s neck again for your sake.”

  He had held her nose between his knuckles as he used to do to make her laugh when she was a child, but as a woman of twelve she had thought it undignified to respond. He let go and chucked her under the chin, then climbed into the barge. As he turned back to her he fished an apple from his pocket, shoved the whole thing between his jaws, and comically bulged his eyes. It had made her giggle like a child after all. The barge had pulled away. Ralph had popped out the apple and waved good-bye, grinning under the golden sunset.

  Now, he lay lashed to the hurdle and his grin was the rictus of pain. His shirt, stripped off one shoulder, hung in shreds over his chest, now so lean that the white skin gleamed at the knobs of collarbone and rib. From plum-colored sockets he blinked at the people who jeered at him.

  “Ralph!” Honor cried, but his eyes flickered over her, not seeing her.

  She stared past him at the circular pit of sand. It was roped off and posted at intervals with guards. At the center, two ten-foot stakes stood ready. Heaped at the base of each stake was a three-foot pile of faggots and straw.

  Her mind groped for bearings. Some mistake…Some horrible mistake…

  There was a commotion beside the church. A group of dignitaries was mounting the stands. Fingers in the crowd pointed up at them: the velveted Lord Mayor and his aldermen; the Bishop of London’s Chancellor and his attendant clerics.

  The Mayor! He can stop this!

  She barged back through the packed ranks and struck out for the Mayor’s platform, treading on feet, deaf to people’s curses. She was almost at the stands when laughter erupted. Three clowns had dashed into the pit, cavorting like monkeys, tumbling near the stakes. People had clambered onto the roofs of nearby houses to watch. Some sat, some ate. Others leaned out of windows. A woman suckled a baby. Beneath the dignitaries’ stands a couple groped in the shadows, the woman fumbling at the strings of the man’s codpiece while he kneaded her breasts. In the pit the clowns simulated a fistfight and the crowd’s laughter crescendoed.

  Honor glanced back at the hurdle. The guards were slitting the prisoners’ bonds. The young friar sprang up instantly, erect, fresh-faced and smiling. Ralph slid down the hurdle on his back, dropped to his knees, then pitched forward. But when one hand groped in the sand to break his fall his back arched convulsively. Nausea curdled Honor’s stomach as she saw the source of his agony: he had been brought here with one shoulder wrenched from its socket.

  Guards flanked each prisoner and grappled their elbows. The friar walked tamely across the pit to the stake as if on his way to church. Ralph had to be hauled between the guards, his legs limp, his toes scraping a channel behind him in the sand. At the stake, they tied Ralph’s hands behind his back. They bound his ankles with twine. They passed a chain around his chest to anchor him to the stake. Both tethered men now faced the stands where the Bishop’s Chancellor was stepping down and striding out to deliver an address.

  Honor tore her gaze from Ralph. The entrance to the stands lay to her right. There was only one central aisle and only one soldier guarding it, leaning on his pike. She lunged and reached the first step. The pike shot across her path and her hips thudded against its shaft as it locked on the far railing.

  “Sorry, my lady. Only His Worship’s party allowed.”

  Honor stood back. The guard, she saw, was no older than herself. “I bring a message from the Queen,” she lied. “Let me pass.”

  The guard’s eyes dropped to her silk sleeve. The embroidered badge there—the pomegranate of Aragon entwined with the Tudor rose—was the Queen’s emblem. He gnawed his
lip, hesitating.

  “I beg you,” she whispered.

  At the desperation that flooded her face the guard relaxed. It was easy to deal with weakness. “Sorry, my lady. Orders.”

  Honor cast a look up to the Mayor on the middle bench surrounded by his aldermen. Recklessly, she shouted, “Your Worship!”

  But the Mayor was listening with a scowl to a man standing before him, a middle-aged soldier who was holding up two head-sized sacks tied together with a short length of rope.

  “With this gunpowder strung around the man’s neck,” the soldier was explaining, “the fire consumes him all the faster. I’ve seen it used in Lincoln, and I do recommend it.”

  “Why?” the Mayor asked. “We’ve never used gunpowder before. And what of the danger? The fire might spread. Up here.”

  “There is no danger, Your Worship. This only brings the man a quicker end. For mercy’s sake.”

  The Mayor’s concentration appeared to be wavering. His eyes flicked to a banner that drooped at the edge of the stands. Though gray clouds were beginning to roll in, the heat remained suffocating. A bead of sweat slid down his temple. “Mercy?” he asked vaguely.

  “Mercy,” a low voice interjected from the bench behind the Mayor, “is the prerogative of God.” The speaker lifted a hand to bat away a fly. On his finger a sapphire ring gleamed.

  The Mayor brightened. “There’s your answer, Lieutenant. We’re here to carry out the law. The rest, as Father Bastwick says, we leave to God.” His responsibility discharged, the Mayor turned away to chat with his aldermen. The Lieutenant bowed sadly and came down the steps. The guard lowered his pike to let him pass, then raised it to bar Honor again.

  Her vision had darkened. Every face faded except the face behind the Mayor. Every object blurred except the sapphire ring and the brilliant black eyes above it.

  He’s behind this. Evil surfacing again…like scum…blighting everything he touches.

  Fury overpowered her. Though the pike still barred her way, the guard had half turned to watch the Mayor. She lifted her foot and slammed it to the inside of his knee. His body buckled, his pike clattered to the ground.