The Heretic’s Wife (53 page)

“But it was spattered so—”

“You understand the ritual of the mortification of the flesh. We’ve talked about this before. You know why I do it,” he said, scolding in the same tone he’d used when as a child she’d been negligent in translating her Virgil.

Verily they had discussed it. And she did understand, but not really. The Church had condemned the practice of self-flagellation, though some of the monks still practiced it in secret. When she’d first asked him why he did it in face of the Church’s teachings against it, he explained that it was a sound doctrine and that the Church had come out against only the public display of the practice. Monks and priests had been parading through towns, whipping up the crowds as they whipped themselves. They created spectacle—spectacle that attracted criticism. Some of the flagellants were even selling their own bloody garments to superstitious peasants as miracle cloths.

Her father had laughed when he said that, and added he hoped she didn’t have intentions of selling bloody pieces of his shirt. He wanted to keep his devotion private. That’s why he didn’t use the Chelsea laundress. Margaret had not minded. She’d been laundering his bloodstained shirts for years. But never had they been so bloody. This was no token ritual.

“Why would you ask such a question, Margaret? If it’s all my blood? Have you been listening to devilish rumors?”

“I just worry about you. As the blood on your shirts increases . . . your joy seems to be seeping out.”

He smiled weakly. A smile that if it was meant to reassure fell short. “There will be time for joy later. When the hard work of the Church is done.”

“The Church! You are chancellor, Father, not archbishop.”

“Don’t be impertinent to your father, Margaret. It is a sin. But my duties as chancellor are not unlike the duties of archbishop. The state cannot exist without the Church. What is good for the Church is likewise good for the Crown.” His voice dropped off here, as though he was distracted by some unpleasant thought.

“I’m sorry. I did not mean any disrespect. It’s just that there are rumors . . . that perhaps you are . . . too zealous in holy matters. More zealous than the law allows.”

His voice hardened. “You would presume to instruct me in the law, daughter? I have taught you more law than manners, apparently.”

She felt her skin grow hot beneath his withering glance. They were suddenly not father and daughter but adversaries. His eyes were cold, his voice controlled, completely devoid of that warmth and merriment she usually saw when they were together. It occurred to her, but only briefly, to think how she would hate to face such a prosecutor.

“Of course I would not . . . it’s just that . . . William says—”

“Ah, William says.” The look he gave her was so fierce it almost took her breath away. “What else does son-in-law Roper say? The man whose false theology I have allowed to infect my own household simply out of love for my daughter—tell me, daughter, what else does William say? How ill does he repay me?”

Meg clutched the bloody shirts to her bosom, unaware that one had left a stain upon the pale blue silk of her bodice, unaware of anything except the shame and remorse she felt for causing her father pain.

“Nothing, Father. William has nothing but the highest praise for you. He is very proud of you, as are we all.”

He paused and looked out the window of his study where the season’s first snowfall was beginning to cover the ugly, scarred earth of a killer frost.

“Winter is come again,” he said as though that fact surprised him.

“Aye, Father. It is,” she said, relieved that the subject was ended. Nothing had changed; she had not persuaded him, but she had kept her promise.

“You will need a new cloak,” he said. “The chancellor’s daughters should be arrayed as befits their station.”

“You are very generous,” she said, thinking, how could the rumors be anything but false? He was a loving father and a just man. Was not his tolerance of William’s reform tendencies proof of that tolerance?

“Would you allow me to put a soothing ointment on your back?”

He laughed at that. “Well, that would somewhat undercut the act of atonement, wouldn’t it?” It was good to hear his laughter. She was trying to remember the last time she’d heard him laugh, when they were interrupted by the porter’s sudden appearance at the door.

“Your guest has arrived, Sir Thomas,” he said.

“I’ll be right there.” Thomas answered, leaping up from his chair. She watched in amazement as he hurried after the porter with all the energy of a youth.

Barrister James Bainham proved not to be easily persuaded. Kate watched the stunned expressions on the faces of the translators as the merchant informers told how he had been subjected to More’s tree of troth, then racked until his body was crippled and ruined, and yet he had not recanted. But the news that his new wife had been thrown into the Fleet for not producing the Tyndale books when their house was searched, accomplished what his physical torture could not. He abjured.

Kate remembered her brother, how he had recanted for the sake of his wife and child.
Would John do as much for me?
she wondered.
Would I want him to?
The merchants and translators and some of the refugees—the few who could be trusted—were holding weekly prayer meetings now for the sufferers back in England. Praying that she would never be faced with such a choice, Kate thanked God that John was not in England.

[A]ll the griefs, which the temporal (secular) men were grieved with should be put in writing and delivered to the king.

—P
ARLIAMENT
, J
AN. 1532, CONCERNING
COMPLAINTS AGAINST THE CLERGY, WHICH
RESULTED IN LEGISLATION THAT LIMITED
THE POWER OF THE CLERGY AND LED TO
M
ORE’S RESIGNATION

B
y March, Kate was sure that she was pregnant. The first morning she was sick, she laid it to the venison she’d had the night before—she’d thought she’d detected a gamey smell beneath the heavy spices the cook sometimes used to salvage what was marginally salvageable. John had left their warm bed in the emerging dawn to go down to the scriptorium, as they jokingly called the cluttered section of the hall that Mistress Poyntz tried to hide behind a screen. Kate was struggling to lace her bodice when without warning the nausea overwhelmed her. Before she could grab the chamber pot from beneath the bed, she splattered the offending venison onto the rush-strewn floorboards. She lay back on the bed until the nausea passed, then cleaned up the mess and went downstairs to see if John needed her.

For the next few days she was able to stomach only stale crackers and weak cider. John had at first made a little joke about her sudden fondness for communion wafers, and then he’d started to worry. Kate ameliorated his
concern by telling him that married life was making her plump, and so she thought that if she ate less, she might not lose her figure. Whereupon he’d slipped his arm around her waist and told her he’d love her if she grew as fat as the baker’s wife.

By the time the thawing earth had birthed the first snowdrop, Kate no longer blamed the venison. At first she dared not hope and didn’t share her good news with anyone, not even the women in her study group—but more than once, John had come upon her daydreaming and commented that she seemed far away. “Just thinking how lucky I am to have such a talented husband,” she would say, or, “I’m dreaming of the coming spring.” This seemed to satisfy John, who would go back to writing his own work.

He’d been working on the polemic for days, whenever he was not reading copy for Tyndale or translating passages. In it he argued that the doctrine of Purgatory was a recent construct of the Church, with no basis in Scripture, and that the bread and wine of the Eucharist were merely symbolic of the body of Christ. Kate understood the argument against Purgatory; it was the scaffolding on which the sale of indulgences was based, the means by which the common people were exploited and enslaved by a corrupt Church hierarchy. She didn’t, however, understand her husband’s insistence on spending so much time on the symbolism of the Eucharist. Even the Bible men, or “new men” as some called them, could not agree on the doctrine of transubstantiation. What did it matter if the participant thought the wine really turned into blood, as long as he thought he was taking into his body the spirit of Christ in an act of obedience? But John was utterly devoted to developing the fullest argument possible against the Real Presence of Christ’s body and blood in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. He already had enough to fill two volumes, and he was still writing.

The masculine environment of the merchant boardinghouse was not a proper home for a new baby, she decided one day as the translators argued good-naturedly. The child needed a proper home. How to tell John? Unlike her, he loved the environment of the English House. But then he’d been trained at Cambridge and Oxford. The close living of the dormitory brotherhood suited him. Indeed, she feared that the news of the coming child might not be wholly welcomed by its theologian-turned-husband-about-to-turn-father. With the passing months, he’d seemed more relieved than bothered by their childlessness, laying it to God’s will each time she brought it up. Well, now that this child was an accomplished fact, and one he’d taken an active role in accomplishing, she would just remind him that this was also God’s will.

By May, she was certain enough that she began to clumsily stitch crib clothes, and confided in Mistress Poyntz, beseeching her to purchase suitable fabrics. When Mistress Poyntz returned from the market, she summoned Kate to her room and laid the soft linen for swaddling cloths out on the bed.

“I couldn’t resist this,” Mistress Poyntz said, and it was almost as if she read Kate’s mind. “No, you will not pay for this. This is a gift.”

Kate fingered the silk and lace of a tiny little bonnet with disbelief. It had been three months—two weeks past the time when she had lost the other child. It was going to happen; they were going to have a child. The tears welled in her eyes and spilled over, running down her cheek. She sniffed and brushed them away.

“You have to tell him, you know,” Mistress Poyntz said, reaching for her hand.

“I know,” Kate said between sniffs. “I was just waiting until—”

“Until you were sure you wouldn’t lose this one. But you can’t really ever be sure of that, my dear, not until you are holding the child, and he is tugging at your nipple like a hungry little savage.”

“I’ll tell him,” Kate said. “When the time is right, I’ll tell him.”

It was the last straw, Sir Thomas thought, as he strode from Parliament House down to the Westminster Stairs to hail his boatman. The session had ended and he had lost. Cromwell and the king had won it all. Parliament had made Henry the sole power in England, stripping the bishops of everything—even the power to arrest heretics. That, too, now rested with the king. If Chancellor More wanted someone arrested for heresy, he must go through Cromwell and not Bishop Stokesley. Hah! That was a fool’s errand.

A commission was to be formed of half lay men and half clerics who would decide all Church matters, including cases of heresy. With Cromwell’s Lutheran sympathies and the Boleyn woman pushing the king for leniency, there was little likelihood of maintaining recent progress. Thomas More’s campaign for the protection of the one true Church had stumbled badly.