The Queen's Lady (17 page)

Catherine nodded.

“However, at Orvieto,” Mendoza continued, “His Holiness was desperate for help. I have been told he was camping under the dripping roof of the local bishop’s derelict palace, shedding tears like a woman at his fate. King Henry’s agents found him there. In his miserable condition he was looking anywhere for friends and money. And Wolsey was quick to supply him, you can be sure. Now that the Pope has returned to Rome, the King’s agents throng him daily with petitions, and they hardly bother to veil their insinuations that he owes his English benefactors that much at least. Madam, they are poisoning the Pope’s mind with tales of the Emperor’s treacherousness. They are telling him that your nephew’s ambition is to overrun all of Italy and swallow Rome whole. They sweeten these lies with offers to supply His Holiness with a handpicked English and French bodyguard to protect him against another assault. And now—”

“And now, Cardinal Campeggio is on his way,” Catherine said grimly.

Mendoza nodded. “The situation is most grave.”

Catherine began pacing again. Swiftly, she came to a decision. “Don Inigo, we must prepare our final defense. Immediately.” She looked at him, one eyebrow raised in skepticism. “Have you heard who the government will allow me as council?”

Mendoza hesitated as if unwilling to burden her with more bad news. He tried to sound hopeful. “I understand there is a distinguished array of lawyers . . . Archbishop Warham, Bishop Fisher of Rochester, Bishop Tunstall of London, Dr. Standish, Bishop Clerk—”

Catherine held up her hand. “Distinguished these men may be, Don Inigo, but you know, as everyone knows, that they owe their livelihoods to the government. My lords Warham and Tunstall are good men, but timid and fearful. And Standish and Clerk are soft clay in Wolsey’s hands. I know he has warned them all not to meddle against the King in this. Small comfort there.” A trace of hope fluttered in her eyes. “Except, perhaps, for Fisher.”

“The government, as you know, madam, will invoke Leviticus to show the marriage transgressed scriptural law. But we, too, have a good defense in scripture—in Deuteronomy. Besides our argument that the Pope did legally dispense with the injunction, we will rely heavily on the Deuteronomy passage. ‘When brethren dwell together, and one of them dieth without children, the wife of the deceased shall not marry to another—’ ”

“ ‘But his brother shall take her, and raise up seed for his brother,’ ” Catherine murmured, completing the scriptural quotation. She paused a moment and stared again at the fire. “No, Don Inigo.”

“Pardon, madam?”

She turned to him. “No. I will not put my faith solely in these legal and theological arguments. To me, the legality of the former Pope’s dispensation is irrelevant, for I mean to rest my defense on the truth.”

Mendoza looked perplexed. “The truth?”

“That I was never Arthur’s wife, except in name. That I came to my lord a virgin, and he knows it. When this is made clear, in public, I do not doubt that God will move my lord to awaken to his duty. And then this nightmare will be over.”

Even Honor was surprised. Her eyes and the Ambassador’s met as if to ask one another if the Queen herself would awaken before it was too late.

Mendoza cleared his throat. “Madam, may we speak privately?”

“Of course.” Catherine laid a gentle hand on Honor’s shoulder. “Leave us, sweetheart,” she said. She kissed Honor’s forehead as if she were a favorite daughter. “You will be longing for your bed after these weary hours of toiling at my papers.”

With relief, Honor curtsied and left the room. But after taking the letter to Dr. Vittoria, it was not to her bed she went, but out in the rain to Coleman Street.

9

H
onor banged her fist against the merchant’s door. Rain pummeled her head and shoulders and drenched her hooded cloak as she waited. A metal bolt scraped, the door swung open, and a young man stood before her. Behind his lantern, his narrow face glowed white against lank orange hair that hung to his shoulders.

“Master Humphrey Sydenham?” she asked.

He thrust the lantern out close to her face, examining her with fearful eyes. “No.”

“I must see him.” Her voice emerged with more strength than she felt. “His life is in danger.”

“What?” The man looked frightened. “What’s happened? Who are you?”

“I’ll tell only Master Sydenham that. Is he here or not?”

The man gnawed his lip, hesitating, then pulled her in and shut the door. “Follow me.”

He led her down a corridor and past a fine-looking great hall to a snug room bright with a fire and candles, though deserted. “Wait here,” he said. He turned to go.

“But it’s late and I—”

“Wait here!” He walked out and closed the door on her. His footfalls sounded down the corridor.

Honor threw off her hood and looked around. The room was paneled in fashionable linenfold-carved oak. Expensive silver plate gleamed in cupboards. The chairs were soft with velvet cushions. This was not at all what she had expected. She had steeled herself for a bleak, ascetic compound with a ring of zealots chanting in religious fervor. This room exuded nothing but domestic comfort.

She paced. Where was Sydenham? It was almost midnight. The Queen had kept her so long, there was no time left. If she waited any longer she would be in danger herself. She snatched up a candle and hurried to the door.

The corridor was empty. She started in the direction she had heard the man’s footsteps take. She passed along a room-length of paneled hallway and came to a closed door. The latch lifted easily. Beyond the door, almost immediately, was an unlit flight of descending stone stairs. The hem of her sodden cloak slapped over the steps as she went down. The walls, too, were stone. The air was dank. A cloying smell—unpleasantly familiar, though she could not identify it—curled in her nostrils.

At the bottom the floor was beaten earth. A low, barrel-vaulted stone passageway hulked around her candle. She walked on. The passage led to another flight of steps, these ones going up. She heard voices, very faint, and she halted. The voices quieted. She climbed the stairs. At the top stood an arched, wooden door. She swept her candle over it and noticed a small opening at a man’s eye level. It was a chink of less than a square inch, gouged out of the solid wood, a squint-hole for monitoring the identity of the person seeking entry.

She snuffed her candle and set it down. In the darkness she went up on her toes and pressed her eye to the hole. Her breath caught in her throat. She was looking into a huge warehouse, and near the rear wall thirty-five, perhaps forty people stood inside a ring of hand-held torches. Their faces were lifted towards a man who stood on the lip of a loft, his head raised and eyes closed as if in silent prayer. Honor felt the hairs at the back of her neck rise. This was a huge coven of heretics.

She was shocked to see so many women. Children, too. A couple of boys were rolling chestnuts on the dirt floor under a torch hitched to one of the loft-bearing posts. Stacks of animal hides were ranged along the windowless walls, and in the middle of the warehouse were three huge, round wooden vats, the kind she had seen used in ale brewing. Beside the loft on the far wall was a closed door as wide as a cart. She realized the warehouse must sprawl all the way back to the next street.

The man in the loft snapped from his trance and began to prowl along the edge. He was in his early twenties, Honor guessed, slight, and very fair. His white-blond hair, shaved in a monk’s tonsure, stood out in short spikes over his ears, looking indeed like the thorns of Christ’s crown that the tonsure was made to symbolize. Yet he wore no priest’s cassock or friar’s robe, only a laborer’s faded tunic over sagging hose. He stopped and stared at the faces below him. The fervor in his eyes blazed all the way to the squint-hole at the back of the warehouse.

He slapped his hand on his chest. “Love of God!” he cried. “That is what should fill our hearts.” He thrust out his other hand, palm up like a beggar. “Lust for gold! That is what drives our priests.” Honor was struck by the vibrancy of his voice. It was a voice made for rallying men.

“The Church hoards one third of the landed wealth of this sovereign realm, my friends. Our rich Bishops send carts of gold to Rome, English gold from the sweat of English brows. They leech it from us in rents and tithes to finance the bawdy banquets and lascivious pleasures of the princes of the Church, and their wicked wars.” He shook his head, then smiled grimly. “Glad I am of the spirituality’s oath of celibacy, for if the Abbot of Glastonbury were to wed the Abbess of Shrewsbury, their heir would inherit more land than the demesne of the King.”

There was soft laughter from the listeners. “If the priests have no heirs, Brother Frish,” a man called up, “it’s not for lack of fornicating.”

Brother Frish laughed along with his audience. Then, suddenly, his arms shot up. “I say the priests are worse than Judas. He sold almighty God for thirty shillings but the priests will sell God for half a penny. They barter off their sacred wares like pork hocks at a fair-stall. They sell the seven sacraments, they sell dispensations,”—he held out his palm again like a collection plate and slammed his fist onto it with every transaction—“the chanting of masses, prayers. And all this on top of their endless tithes and fines, fees and mortuaries . . .”

Honor shivered at this last word. For a moment she was a child again watching Bastwick wrench the sapphire from her father’s dead hand, the curse of excommunication still ringing. All for a mortuary.

She shook her head to clear it of such visions of the past—and of her unease at going among these criminals. I must finish this, she told herself. Get inside, find Sydenham, and then get out again before it’s too late. I’ve come this far. I’ll see it through.

She lifted the latch and opened the door. A draught of stale air rolled over her. She trembled, for the warehouse stank of an odor that somehow dredged up the horror of Smithfield. A cold hand grabbed her wrist. It was the orange-haired young man. He hauled her into the warehouse and hustled her along the wall among the stacked hides.

“I told you to wait,” he whispered fiercely. He glanced nervously at the gathering, but the preacher talked on and the crowd listened, apparently unaware of the intrusion.

“I tell you, I’ve got to see Master Sydenham,” Honor whispered, equally insistent.

“Quiet!” He tightened his grip on her wrist until it was painful.

“But this cannot wait!”

He jerked a knife from his belt and held it at her rib. “You’ll wait until the sermon’s done, and you’ll be quiet.”

Heart pounding, she stood still, a hostage witness to the heretical sermon.

“And let us not forget indulgences,” Frish cried cynically. “The priests will sell indulgence letters for fornication, for the breaking of vows, for shunning confession, for ignoring fasts, and, of course, for rescuing souls from purgatory. Purgatory,” he repeated with a sneer. “This dread place exists, the Church teaches, for the cleansing of sinful man’s soul after death, but the Church will gladly give you remission of years of your soul’s agony there—for a price. Now, tell me this. If the Pope has the power to deliver a soul out of purgatory, why then can he not deliver it without money? And if he can deliver one soul, then why does he not deliver a thousand? Why not all? Let loose all the poor, tortured souls, and thus
destroy
purgatory.” His fist punched the air. “I say the Pope is a tyrant if he keeps souls within purgatory’s prison until men give him money!”

He wiped his brow with his sleeve, and then eased himself down onto the edge of the loft so that his legs dangled. His voice became gentle and warm. “Good friends,” he said with a smile, “I am here to tell you that the Pope has no power to loose souls from purgatory because there
is
no purgatory. I am here to tell you that there are no priests, only God. That the painted images of saints the poor ignorant folk pray to for intercession in their worldly woes are only sticks and stones—and man must pray to God alone. That all the spells a priest may mumble over a piece of bread to conjure it into the body of our Lord cannot make it anything other than bread, for I have read in scripture that God made man, but nowhere have I read that man can make God.”