The Heretic’s Wife (48 page)

“But the Greek letters that William translated the New Testament from, that’s an alphabet, right?
Alpha
for the letter
A
?”

“Hmm.” But he had just kept on writing without looking up. “There,” she said, pointing to a bit of Greek text among the papers scattered on the writing table. “That’s
beta,
right?”

He looked up then and kissed the hand pointing to the Greek text. “Are you thinking of teaching your young scholars Greek?” He laughed.

“I might,” she said, bristling a little. “Or maybe you could drop in some Friday and give us the benefit of your brilliance.”

“I just might,” he said. “But for now could you fetch your thirsty husband a cup of cider?”

She brought him the cider, thinking that at least he had stopped protesting her involvement with the Bible women. Of course, he didn’t really think of them as Bible women, she thought and felt a little guilty that she had deceived him. She didn’t talk much about the reading of the Scriptures, the serious discussions or the fervent prayers. Or how they held hands and sang their closing hymn. Instead, whenever he asked her how her meeting went, she distracted him with tales about the frivolous things they chattered about, the gossip they exchanged before their worship began: some witty remark that Hulda had made about the baker’s pious wife, or Caroline’s complaints about her husband’s wandering eyes. It was less than open disclosure. And she felt a little guilty about it. Sometimes. But not now. Not when he was asking her to fetch and carry for him. Not when he was humoring her like a child.

By All Saints’ Day, Kate had the English House accounts in good enough order to pass inspection at the Hansa Countinghouse, so Kate returned to punishing the ragged donkey-unicorn beast. But the thing had become an embarrassment. Even kindly Mistress Poyntz had suggested maybe she should start another, now that she had practiced so much on this one, but still Kate was determined to persevere—until the incident with the needle.

She was brushing her hair getting ready for bed and trying to count in her head the days from her last bleeding. She’d a letter from her brother John, just yesterday, informing her that their house was finished, he and Mary and little Pipkin were doing well. He had enough business as a scribe to keep them in the victuals they couldn’t raise, and she might be happy to know that he’d not abandoned the reform movement but had been inspired by her to start his own small yeoman Bible study. He was teaching the local populace to read and had set up a rudimentary printing press to print sheets of English Scripture as a text.

Then one more bit of happy news he’d added at the end, she was to be aunt again—along with a question, when was he to be uncle?

When indeed? It had been months since she’d lost the child. Why had she not conceived again? Since that time on the boat, it had certainly not been for lack of trying. The old midwife she’d consulted had said a woman was more fertile on certain days, but alas she could not remember which days she had said.
Stupid, Kate, stupid as a cow, You can’t remember something that important, and you think you could learn Greek.

John’s exclamation of pain interrupted both her self-recrimination and her hair brushing.

“By all the gods on Mount Olympus, Kate, are you trying to kill me?”

It was the closest she’d ever heard John come to swearing—at least in English. The brush clattered to the floor and Kate whirled around to determine the cause of his abrupt invocation of pagan gods.

He was pulling her needle out of the heel of his left hand—thank God and all the angels, it was not the one that held his pen.

“Let me see it.” And then upon close examination, “It’s only a pinprick,” she said, relieved. “It went in and came out clean, see,” she said, holding up the needle, “not even a smear of blood.”

“Well, it hurt like—”

“I’m sorry. It was careless of me to leave it in the chair,” she said in a tone that one would use to placate a pouting child, and she kissed the almost invisible wound.

But five minutes later he was still sucking on the tiny red spot where the needle went in as though it were a mortal wound. This from a man who’d endured the horror of the fish cellar prison for months and come back from the jaws of death, never saying a word about his pain or his fever or even the danger, and now carrying on about the prick of a needle! Nevertheless she clucked and fussed, washing it with a little vinegar and dabbing it with honey as her mother used to do her scrapes and cuts when she was a child.

When she had finished and apologized yet again, he’d held up the little tapestry that had been balled around the offending needle and glared at it. “What
is
this thing, anyway?”

“Thing? What do you mean,
thing
? Isn’t it clear? It’s a . . . a unicorn.”

“Oh. Well. Yes.” He squinted, turning it sideways. “I suppose, now that you tell me.”

“You know, John, not everybody in the world is as brilliant at everything they do as you are,” she said, trying to hide the hurt in sarcasm. “Some of us need a little practice to do even something as insignificant as a little needlework.”

Now it was his turn to apologize, which he did prettily enough, telling her with genuine surprise in his voice that she was a woman of many talents.

“Name one,” she’d said, fighting back tears that suddenly ambushed her. It was such a little thing. “I cannot spin or weave or play a musical instrument. I cannot sing. I cannot do any of the things the wife of a brilliant man should be expected to do. Just . . . name . . . one.”

“You can read and write and cipher,” he said, looking at her in puzzlement. “How many women can do that? You may not sew a fine stitch but you are the perfect wife for a scholar.” And he’d kissed her, lightly, affectionately, on the head, in the same manner in which she had kissed his wound.

But those are not womanly gifts, she’d wanted to say. Not womanly gifts at all. The womanly things she just couldn’t seem to get right—not even the most basic thing, such as motherhood—and she was not to be allowed, it seemed, to do the unwomanly things of real importance.

He stroked her hair gently, then she felt the weight of it lift from her neck as he kissed her neck, just a nibble at first, and the comforting kiss became something more, as his tongue began to explore her ear. He tossed the offending tapestry to the floor and then kicked it aside. “You are the perfect wife for this scholar,” he said, pulling her to him.

His hands—both his left and his right—seemed to have sustained no impairment in their function. She had just enough time to think, before her mind surrendered to her body’s more urgent needs, that it was gratifying to note, in this one area at least, her husband found her womanly function more than adequate.

The next day she confessed her failure again to the sketch of the ugly duchess. “It seems John is to be denied an accomplished wife,” she said in disgust as she picked the tapestry up from the floor and started to throw it away. Then she had a second thought. This creature, or this needlepoint picture of a creature, ugly, imperfect as it was, she had made with her own hands. It did not exist before she made it. The pucker in the flank wasn’t so bad, but the hole in the horn could not be fixed. Yet he had a beautiful eye, just a tiny spot of white silk floss in the blue of the eye, to catch the light. She’d been proud of that eye. There was a grief in just throwing it away. She smoothed out the tapestry and covered up the top part with the edge of her hand. There, that was not so bad. A few more stitches on the wide body to fill in
the skimpy parts—someday she might cut off the part with the horn. It didn’t have to be a unicorn. Maybe it just really wanted to be a horse.

“Kate Gough, you are as mad as the painter who sketched that other ugly portrait,” she muttered aloud.

But she could not bring herself to throw the embroidery away. She folded it up carefully and put it away until she could think more on its redemption.

The bells of St. Mary-le-Bow tolled mournfully as Sir Thomas walked behind the coffin of his father. It was a blessing that the burial ground of the church in St. Lawrence Jewry was close by the patriarchal home in Milk Street. It was a cold, gray day and Thomas was chilled both in body and in spirit and feared of giving out. He was not prepared for this day and felt oddly cut loose from his moorings, adrift on a choppy sea. In Sir John More’s eightieth winter his demise could hardly have been unexpected. But it was. Thomas had never imagined the world without his father in it.

The sad procession passed a few boyhood landmarks that prodded the heaviness around his heart into a hellish foreboding. How could this be? How could this lion of the King’s Bench, who had stood sentinel for all of Thomas’s life against the forces of disorder, this staunch defender of duty and discipline and law, be felled by a bout of indigestion? Where was the order in that? It was for Thomas as though his metaphor for God the Father was dissolving into vapor. The Father lived as long as the father lived.

He had walked down this very lane, past the church of St. Mary Magdalen, which now took up the mournful tolling with its one bell, so many years ago. It was an image buried deep in his memory, reborn as fresh as yesterday, his boy’s hand in his father’s larger one, on his way to be page in the household of John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor of England. As they walked his father had lectured him upon his duty. A grand opportunity for a boy, he’d said, to enter the service of the most influential man in England, admonishing Thomas to acquit himself well, not to embarrass his father, to do his duty, and one day he would be a great man too.

They’d passed the tall stone fountain in West Chepe. It had been a dismal, dreary day like this and like today there were few waiting at the fountains to fill their buckets with water from the Tybourne River. There had been a burning on Tybourne Hill, a Lollard heretic, his father had said, as Thomas wrinkled his nose at the lingering smell of smoke and seared flesh,
explaining that Lollardy was a form of anarchy, an evil bent on destroying the order of the world. It was the first time Thomas had ever heard the word.

As the procession turned up St. Lawrence Lane on its way to the church, they passed Blossoms Inn. A few curious travelers watched as the mournful procession passed. Thomas recognized only the innkeeper, who removed his hat and bowed his head. He and his father had stopped on that day so long ago and shared a cup as the father continued his instruction to the son. That was the day that Thomas first became aware that John More had his son’s future mapped out as carefully as he laid out a legal argument. A future which, he was later to be reminded, was to be bound up with law at Lincoln’s Inn and not theology at Oxford.

When Thomas thought he could not take another step—he had not slept or eaten in the three days it took his father to die, the very picture of the dutiful son keeping watch at his father’s deathbed—his daughter Margaret suddenly appeared at his side and offered him her arm. Together they completed the short journey that ended in the churchyard. There was not much ceremony, not the ceremony one would expect of a great man—his father had left instructions when he realized that he was dying. A requiem mass was celebrated by the parish priest, and thirteen mourners—thirteen as in the number of Christ’s Last Supper—gathered around the tomb. Thomas watched, almost numb with disbelief, as his father’s coffin was duly sprinkled with holy water and lowered into the stone tomb.