The Chalice (53 page)

I made my way to the stairs. I didn’t dare run up the steps. But, clutching the cloak’s top buttons, I moved as swiftly as a lady possibly could.

On the third floor was a long gallery with windows on one side. There were about thirty people clustered in small groups. They were all looking at two people in the middle of the gallery. One was tall and obese—the king. The other was short and female. But she was not Anne of Cleves.

The other woman was Catherine Howard. She was holding up an object to His Majesty: an elegant silver chalice with a jeweled base.

I darted to the left, toward the windows. Heads turned. I had no choice but to abandon the stately movements of a lady. The king had taken the chalice from Catherine. I had to move fast—as fast as a hawk to its prey.

I raced past the Duke of Suffolk and then Thomas Seymour. I was fifteen feet away . . . then ten . . .

The king lifted the chalice to his lips and tilted it back to drink. He had just begun to swallow when I called out, “Your Majesty, stop!”

Everyone in the gallery stared at me, stunned. Catherine Howard gaped in disbelief.

Henry VIII lowered the chalice to look at me. “Yes?” he said, in his high-pitched voice.

“I’m your cousin Joanna Stafford,” I said. “I have not been to court in a very long time.”

A puzzled, verging on annoyed, expression came over him. “What of it?” he asked.

“May I take the chalice now?” I said, with a smile that no doubt carried the glow of the tincture. “I’ve had the honor of meeting and attending on Anne of Cleves. I wanted to assure you that she is a noble young woman, and I think you will find her most seemly. You must not delay any longer. There will be plenty of wine to partake of in her company.”

The king held the chalice in his hand as he stared at me.

I could hear the courtiers’ shocked whispers. To throw myself in the king’s path, to try to take wine from him, was unprecedented.

The seconds crawled by as the king continued to examine me with those narrow, cold blue eyes, sunk deep in his fleshy face.

The king held out the chalice and I seized it with my right hand. As my fingers curled around its smooth rim, a roaring filled my head. It was as if a wind rose, but it was inside only me, and it carried a cacophony of sounds: Sister Elizabeth Barton’s cries of pain, the conjuring chant of Orobas, and the wailing words of Nostredame.

My hand trembled, and the chalice began to slip. I seized the other side of the rim with my left hand. I rooted my feet in the floor so I would not collapse. The unearthly sounds slowly faded.

The king noticed nothing, for he had turned away, lumbering toward the door at the far end of the gallery, which led to the apartment containing Anne of Cleves.

A man posted at the door bowed. Just as he reached the doorway, the king faltered. He reached out to touch the side of the door.

Holding the chalice, I began to tremble.

But then the door was opened and he strode through it, followed by five of his attending gentlemen. The door shut behind them. No one in this room could hear what happened.

“Joanna, what are you doing here?” asked Catherine Howard. “I’m happy to see you, of course, but you’re not on the list of ladies of the queen. I am—I’m a maid of honor. I officially began serving her in Canterbury.”

“I’m happy for you, Catherine,” I said. “May I ask, where did you get this chalice?” I held it up to her—it was most certainly fit for royalty to drink from. Our Lord Jesus Christ drank from a vessel made of silver at the Last Supper—the Council of Ten’s choice to fashion this instrument of death in the same precious metal was blasphemous indeed.

Catherine beamed with pleasure. “It was a gift from Queen
Mary of Hungary to the Howard family, Joanna. A very nice Spanish gentleman gave it to my uncle the duke, but said that the queen regent specifically requested that it be used to serve the king of England wine
before
he marries. They said it is a wedding custom of the Low Countries. The Spanish gentleman asked me to be the one to give the king wine! What an honor. Just now, he told me that the king was coming to see my mistress the queen incognito and this was a perfect opportunity, because he’d be thirsty from the ride.” Catherine looked up and down the gallery. “I don’t see him anymore. He was here before. Well, it’s very exciting—only you kept him from drinking most of it. Look.” She pointed at the red liquid swirling in the chalice I still gripped so tightly.

“Let me take it to be cleaned,” I said. “I will get it back to you afterward.”

“But, Joanna,” she said stubbornly, “why wouldn’t you let the king drink his wine?”

“Let me tell you something, Mistress Catherine Howard, and I won’t want you to forget it,” I said. “You can’t trust the Spanish.”

With that, I turned and made my way out of the gallery. Still holding the chalice, I found a place near a window on the second floor, and waited. Nearly twenty minutes later, the king came storming down the stairs. The whole palace was in an uproar.

“He doesn’t like her,” I heard over and over again. “He doesn’t like her.”

I was again with Catherine Brandon when her husband rushed to her side. “I’ve never seen him take such a dislike to a woman—and she’s to be his wife,” he murmured. “It’s as if he’s sickened by her. His mood is most foul. This is a disaster.”

The king then summoned Brandon, the Seymours, the Earl of Southampton, and several other nobles and gentlemen to a room on the first floor of the Bishop’s Palace. There was some sort of furious meeting within, and then the king burst out of the room, red-faced, and limped to his horse.

I watched him ride away—angry and full of wretched humors, but alive.

I returned Catherine Brandon’s cloak to her, and bade farewell to Catherine Howard. She was so agog over the disaster of the king and queen’s first meeting that she’d forgotten my strangeness over the chalice.

But one person hadn’t forgotten. And after the havoc died down, I sought out Señor Hantaras, who stood outside the Bishop’s Palace, in the shadow of the bear-baiting pit.

His eyes burned as I walked to him, the chalice extended. Just before I reached him, I finally poured the poisoned wine into the ground. The bear howled on the other side of the fence as I did so.

“Unless you want members of the Howard household to drop into their graves, I suggest you take this,” I said. “Do you have another one, to substitute and return to the Howards?”

“Of course I do,” he said.

“Is your mistress dead?” I asked.

“The wound was not that deep,” he said, not sounding overly concerned about the injury. “She will recover.”

I said, “This was my destiny and I fulfilled it. Michel de Nostredame confirmed it. The king was not to be killed. This poison concocted by the Council of Ten is the sort that, in a small dose, turns a man impotent and full of mad humors. That is what the king consumed. There will be no second son. And someday, when the king is dead and Prince Edward is dead, the Lady Mary will be queen and the true faith will be restored. That is what we all desired, correct? That is what I was recruited and trained to bring about?”

He said nothing.

“So tell Ambassador Chapuys . . . it’s over,” I said, and I turned away.

I left the bear pit and the Bishop’s Palace, to find Watling Street, the one, I knew, that would finally take me home.

E
arly on, one of the tasks accomplished by the builders of the king’s new manor house of Dartford was the moving of graves. It was a delicate matter. Prioresses, nuns, and friars were commonly buried where they lived. But it would not do to demolish a building and raise a new one on top of the coffins of the faithful. It could bring bad luck to the king.

The new cemetery for the religious was on the far side of the road from the priory. So the dead looked upon the long stone wall, and the grove of trees, but were not forced to know of the grand new building. This was where Prioress Elizabeth Croessner, who welcomed me to Dartford, rested, and tapestry mistress Sister Helen and the brilliant Brother Richard, and dozens of others. My father, Sir Richard Stafford, lay there; he had died at the priory, reaching Dartford in his last weeks. I’d wanted my father near me forever.

This cemetery was also where Geoffrey Scovill chose to bury his wife and daughter.

I went there the first day I returned to town. My house was strangely unchanged. I’d thought in Gravesend that I would never be the same person after what awaited me on the island I loved. But I found my surroundings neither comforting nor alien when I came back to the house on the High Street. It had
been paid for the entire time I was away. Jacquard Rolin insisted we pay the house’s rent six months ahead before we left; he used to say we must have several paths open to us always.

Should I send for Arthur, persuade my cousin Henry to allow me to raise him as I’d promised my father? I wasn’t sure that I was a fit person to care for a child any longer. I had persevered in Rochester, I found strength to carry out the deed I was convinced was right and just. But all my terrible mistakes along the way, the lives ruined and lost, made me go cold with shame.

What was to be my future? I took a seat at my loom and stared at the finished tapestry. A powerful green-and-violet bird rose from the brilliant flames of its nest, on the verge of rebirth.

A knock at the door sounded. I almost didn’t answer it. I did not feel ready to speak to anyone.

It was Agatha Gwinn, my onetime novice mistress. She’d heard at Holy Trinity Church that someone saw me step inside my house.

“Wherever have you been?” she exclaimed.

“Traveling,” I said.

“Oh, is it to do with Edmund—is he coming home?” she asked. “We miss him greatly in Dartford.”

“I don’t know where he is,” I said, bowing my head.

Agatha told me that Oliver Gwinn, with the aid of Master Hancock, had petitioned and finally received permission to remain married to her, even though she had once been a nun.

“I’m happy for you,” I said.

There was another knock at the door. I was to have no peace.

But this time it was a royal page. He said, “Her Majesty Queen Anne sends me from London to acquire the tapestry of Mistress Joanna Stafford.”

“She wants my tapestry?” I asked, stunned.

The page nodded. “She intends to give it as a wedding
present to the king. She instructed me through the interpreters to tell you that you can name your price—within reason.”

“What a great honor,” Agatha cried. “For your very first tapestry to go to the king himself? You will have a sea of commissions after this.”

“Yes,” I said, and dipped my head lower to hide the tears shivering in my eyes. I saw again the sweet, trusting face of Anne of Cleves, on the ship from Calais. So determined to be a good wife and queen. I had destroyed any chance of a happy marriage for her.

“It needs finishing,” I said finally. “Not all the details of the phoenix are what they should be.”

After I’d made arrangements to send the finished tapestry, I said good-bye to Agatha and walked up the High Street to the main road. It didn’t take all that long to reach the cemetery.

The markers for Beatrice Scovill and her child were on the far side, next to an oak tree. Although the ground was hard and icy, I knelt to say my prayers.

A man’s voice said, “I didn’t know you’d returned.”

I looked up at Geoffrey Scovill. His blue eyes were dull and shadowed. A few white hairs sprouted among the brown, and he was just thirty years old this year.

“I am sorry, I can’t even find the words for how sorry I am,” I said.

“I’m lost, Joanna,” he said. “I’m so lost.”

I caught my breath. “I know what it’s like to be lost,” I said.

“I don’t know how to live with it—the regret,” he said thickly. “I never gave her the love that she had a right to.”

“You were a good husband, I know that,” I said quickly.

He shuddered. “No,” he said. “I was forever thinking of
you
. No one can understand. It was like a fever, these last two years of my life. I tried, but I could never get free of you until now, Joanna. I couldn’t see what God gave me, a beautiful and giving woman who cared for me more than any other person ever has, or ever will.”

I wept to hear this.

“I’ve suffered, too, Geoffrey,” I said, choking.

“I know that.”

Geoffrey had a book in his hand. He nodded, seeing that I noticed.

“It’s the Bible of William Tyndale,” he said. “You won’t understand, Joanna, how could you? But it is the only thing that gives me a moment of solace.”

I took a deep breath. “If it helps you, then I am glad of it.”

I clutched my hands and resumed my prayers. After a moment or so, there was a soft thud. I looked down. Geoffrey had tossed the small bag on the ground next to me, the one that contained the opal he said was called Black Fire.

“God’s truth is, I would give anything in the world if I could have Beatrice back for just a few moments.” His voice broke. “I want to tell her how sorry I am.”

I shut my eyes. I prayed, over and over, for peace for Beatrice, for some measure of serenity for Geoffrey. He didn’t say anything more. I heard the sound of his shoes crunching on the ground as he moved around the tombstones, and then all that was left was the wind again, in the trees.

Something stirred on my head and both my arms. My eyes flew open. Snow had begun to fall. My knees and fingers ached from the cold. I struggled to my feet.

I looked over at the spot on the ground where he’d tossed the bag. It was not there. I searched for a few minutes. Geoffrey must have taken it away with him.

There was no other person here. The shadows of the desiccated trees stretched toward me. All else that remained were the souls of those who had gently passed through Purgatory and now resided with Christ and the Virgin in the Kingdom of Heaven.

The snow had stopped falling when I completed my prayers. It was still and dim in the graveyard, with twilight approaching. I forced myself to walk quickly back to town, so that movement would send warmth back into my flesh.