The Queen's Lady (61 page)

Hermann Deurvorst’s face drained to the color of the dust.

32

T
he Festival of Victory lasted for three days.

The market square was the nerve center of the red-eyed, delirious city. By day, under banners that proclaimed THE COMING OF THE LORD IS NIGH thousands ate at communal tables, and in the open air the preachers conducted mass baptisms, the blessed symbol of personal freedom. Several young people killed themselves immediately after the rite, inflamed by the ancient teaching that promised everlasting glory to those in a state of innocence following holy immersion. By night, the square flickered with the watch fires of the freelances who had deserted from the Prince-Bishop’s troops.

All day, Honor wandered the streets. Isolation was unbearable, for every thought of Thornleigh brought waves of grief that made her almost physically sick. So she plodded through the city to numb herself, dazed by the shocking sights. When evening finally stalked in from the plain, exhaustion would force her back to the cathedral, a stone hulk stripped of its treasures. Months before, the citizens had pried open its tombs in the nave. They had shattered the stained glass windows, smeared the wall paintings with lime, shoveled dung into the font. Honor would pick her way through the smoky cooking fires of the camped refugees to get to the niche the Deurvorsts had settled into, a small chapel in the north transept. The chapel was the tomb of a crusader Baron, and his sleeping marble effigy took up most of the space. There, Honor would eat a little bread and cheese, sip some water, then fall into a black and dreamless sleep.

In her sorties she saw ransacked Catholic houses and the shells of looted churches. Church towers had been broken down and turned into platforms for ordnance. Church bells and the coating of steeples had been melted down for bullets. Priceless carved altars and ancient tombstones had been rammed up against the bolted city gates.

Packs of grubby boys—the people sneeringly called them Angels—roamed from dawn to dusk, foraging. One evening Honor saw the Deurvorst’s wagon overturned in an alley. The chairs had been pilfered, the clock was gone, and Angels scrabbled over the box like mice, scuffling through the broken remnants of Alma’s pots and ladles. Another morning, stopping by a waste lot embroidered with wildflowers, she noticed a couple of Angels trying to trap a cat behind a privy, and her eye was caught by a richly painted church panel depicting the Virgin. She recognized the style of the magnificent work as Hans Holbein’s. The painting had been propped up as a makeshift wall for the privy.

Honor noticed that the homespun clothing on many of the people she passed was oddly adorned—velvet sleeves on a woman collecting dung in the square, a feathered silk cap on a grimy water-carrier—and she gradually realized they were wearing the abandoned goods of long-fled Catholic burghers. And there was a strangely disproportionate number of women. The young scout, meeting her one day by the well, had explained—for Honor understood more German than she could speak—that most of the Catholic citizens had left the city early in the revolution and had left their households in the care of wives or daughters until they could return. But six months later they had not returned, and women now outnumbered men three to one. He also told her how the Elders had set a day the previous February for the banishment of all the remaining unbelievers—all those who had refused to be re-baptized. Hundreds had been forced out of the gates into the driving sleet of a vicious winter night. Those who had not perished in the cold were massacred the next day by the Prince-Bishop’s knights. After that, no one had dared to leave the city.

Into these troubling surroundings Honor and the Deurvorsts settled as well as they could.

About two weeks after their arrival, Honor was carrying water back to the cathedral late in the afternoon. She trudged with her bucket past the citizens who were setting supper on the communal tables, and had reached the lane that ran down the side of the cathedral when she heard angry shouts. She looked over her shoulder. A couple of women were beating a little girl away from a supper table in the square. One woman threw a clump of manure at the child. The child broke into a run. Several women chased her. The girl sprinted down the cathedral lane, her long golden hair flying as a half-dozen women pursued her, hurling stones at her back. The girl ducked into a chapel porch. The women stopped in a cluster, still jeering and pelting the open porch door with stones. Honor could not understand the volley of German words, but the abusive nature of them was clear enough. Then, having vented their anger, the women turned back to the square. They stomped past Honor, still muttering their indignation. Curious, she set down her bucket and started down the lane.

She looked into the porch. In a dark corner the girl, perhaps seven or eight years old, Honor guessed, sat on the floor hugging her drawn-up legs with her head lowered between her arms. Poking from her tattered dress, her legs and arms gleamed white and thin, like peeled sticks.

Honor wondered what the child had done to provoke such fury from the women. She held out her hand. “Are you hurt?” she asked.

The child’s head snapped up. With a snarl she lunged for Honor and bit her hand. Honor jumped back. The child, too, retreated as quickly as she had sprung, and cowered in the corner again. They stared at one another. Honor was more astonished than hurt; the bite had been no more than a nip, and the teeth had not broken the skin. But what kind of terror could have prompted such an attack?

Huge green eyes took up half the child’s grime-streaked face, and her hair, falling in long, golden curls, was spiked with dried leaves and twigs. Despite the dirt, Honor was struck by the child’s beauty. She moved a step closer. The child flinched and cowered further into the corner.

A man was lounging at the inner door, cleaning his teeth with a toothpick, and he leaned around and stuck his head into the porch. “Don’t worry, sister,” he chuckled, “that one’s got no real bite left.”

“Who is she?” Honor asked, staring at the lovely face.

“She! Ha! Well you might say so. That’s a God-boy. A little priest tart. Left behind when his keepers were sent packing. At first he tried to run with the Angels, but they kicked him off.” He mouthed the toothpick to one side and grinned. “He’s a filthy little turd, but he won’t hurt you.”

Honor now understood why the women had chased the child from the communal tables. The righteous citizens, she knew, would not tolerate such refuse of the priests near them. She crouched before the boy—she saw now that the “dress” he wore was actually a small cassock that he had outgrown—and held out her hand again, cautiously, as she would to a wounded dog that might bite again. “Don’t be afraid,” she said in her halting German. The man at the door snorted his disapproval and pushed off, back into the cathedral.

Honor waited for some response from the boy. Suspicion glinted in his enormous eyes. His fists were balled. His teeth were chattering. She wondered how to convince him of her goodwill. If the priests had kept him, she reasoned, he may have known no other life than the cathedral. She decided to try another tack. In Latin she asked, “Are you hungry?”

The boy’s mouth dropped open in amazement. His eyes grew even larger.

Again in Latin, she asked, “How many days since you’ve eaten?”

“I . . . don’t know. I ate some carrots . . . one day.” The soft voice was unsteady, but the Latin was flawless.

Something in Honor’s breast swelled at this small victory. “Come,” she said, gently taking his hand. “My friends have bread and soup for you.”

Alma and Hermann were resting in the chapel after their day’s labor. They sat on the floor with their backs against the marble tomb as Hermann read aloud in Dutch from his Bible. They smiled at Honor as she came in. She walked by them softly so as not to disturb Hermann’s reading which he kept up even as he and Alma glanced with curiosity at the boy.

Honor could see, beneath their kind smiles, the exhaustion in both their faces. The past weeks had been a trial for the Deurvorsts. Hermann spent his days sweating in the municipal cloth works, while Alma often stood for a whole morning among the milling petitioners in the palace antechambers, waiting to request a house from the Elders who ruled the city. When she was not there she and Honor sewed for hours in the chapel; the Elders’ wives paid well for their fine embroidery, and the payment, in the form of cheese or eggs, or even salt, was a welcome addition to the communally doled-out fatty pork, bread and cabbage.

The boy had crouched near a corner of the chapel. He shot occasional glances out at the camped refugees in the nave, but he was intently watching Honor as she cut a slice of creamy yellow cheese and laid it on a thick slab of rye bread. His whole body trembled at the pungent smells. She offered it to him with a smile, and he grabbed it with both hands and brought it to his open mouth. Then his eyes darted to her with a shy look, as if he knew he was guilty of bad manners. With a gesture of restraint that touched her heart, he lowered the food, made a quick sign of the cross, and murmured a Latin prayer of thanks.

Hermann abruptly stopped his Bible reading. “What’s he doing?”

“Something he hasn’t done for days,” Honor said with a smile. “Eating.” She was glad Hermann’s English was as good as it was. It was exhausting trying to keep up with the couples’ Dutch and the Münsterites’ German.

“No, I mean what’s that papist mumbo-jumbo?” Hermann said. “Tell him to stop it!”

The boy, not understanding the English words, finished his prayer in a rush to get to the food. He rapidly crossed himself again.

“Stop that!” Hermann shouted. He thudded shut the Bible. His body had tensed and his face was red. Alma, too, was scowling at the boy.

The boy chomped down on the bread and cheese. Without chewing he gulped the mouthful, then tore off another.

“God-cursed little bugger,” a voice murmured in German. Honor saw that it was the man with the toothpick again. He was leaning against the chapel arch. “Priest’s bum-boy,” he explained to Hermann, with a nod toward the child, and made an obscene gesture with his finger at his backside.

“Mind your own business,” Honor snapped.

But Hermann and Alma leapt up as if they had been told a rabid animal was loose. “Get him out!” Hermann cried.

Honor was stunned by his reaction. “But, Herr Deurvorst, he’s starving. And we have plenty.”

“I won’t have such filth here!”

“What are you talking about?”

“He’s a sinner!”

“He’s a child.”

“He has not repented!”

“What has he to repent?”

“Abominable sodomy! Get him out! Only the pure, the Elect, may remain in the new Jerusalem.” He kicked the boy’s small foot as if it were a snake slinking toward him. The boy hunkered further into the corner.

Honor was appalled. “Herr Deurvorst, what are you doing? Anabaptists have always stood against violence.”

“Primitive Anabaptists. Now, I know that to smite the heathen is no crime. Only the sinless shall remain.”

“The sinless? Good God, in the victory celebrations I saw them hunt whores into alleys and strangle them.”

“It was necessary. Through re-baptism and submission to the Elders, the Elect can do no sin.”

“Submission to priests was what you were
escaping
!”

“The Elect only
seem
to rule. They are vessels for God’s will. Priests are usurpers of the Word.” He held up his Bible. “All that is necessary for salvation is the Word.”

Honor heard an echo of Sir Thomas’s equally passionate declaration: “All that is necessary for salvation is the
Church
.”

“The usurpers of the Word are out
there
,” she cried, pointing in the direction of the square. “They’ve shut down the institutions of law and medicine as blasphemous. Denounced mathematics as a black art. Forbidden all books except the Bible.”

She was shouting now, in English, and Hermann, in his anger, began to shout back in Dutch. The boy, gulping mouthfuls and watching the argument with huge, frightened eyes, was muttering a Latin prayer. Some refugees from the nave had begun to gather behind the man with the toothpick, and he was answering their questions in German. No one was listening to anyone. It was all confusion.