The Queen's Lady (63 page)

She laughed. She knew it was wrong, but the image of her and this extraordinary boy mumbling for a miracle over a rotting piece of meat on a bone was too much, and she laughed. And at that moment, she felt a flutter in her belly. Then a tight tug. It was so unexpected, so strange a sensation—like a heavy wave of water lapping on itself deep within her—that she gasped. The baby had quickened. There was a life inside her. For the first time she understood it, really understood it, in her very blood: a life!

She sat back on her heels. “I’m going to have a baby,” she exclaimed.

“Now?” Pieter asked.

He was gazing at her mouth as if he expected a small, bald head to slither out. It made her laugh again.

Again, she felt the flutter inside. Another laugh escaped her, so wonderful was the sensation.

She was suddenly, overwhelmingly, aware. Aware that a moment before she had let a fanciful child talk her into kneeling to beg help from a piece of hammered gold. Aware that they had been doing it because they were powerless. Aware most of all that, somehow, she must find power—real power—and she must find it within herself. Nothing else, no one else, could protect this life that she was carrying. Richard’s child.

God could not help her. Only she could help herself. Only she could act, and to act she had to think. And all these religious motions—begging exemption from punishment, beseeching reward, carefully cultivating the delusion of being in God’s care—all of these were just impediments to clear thinking.

Clear thinking, she told herself. That’s what was required now.

Her eyes locked onto the image of torture on the cross. Now that she felt life stir inside her, the image suddenly disgusted her. Its message was of sin and punishment and, above all, of death. This was the icon of a cult of death. But life must be her concern now—her own life, Pieter’s life, the life of her baby. Wrong she may have been about many things, and terrible had been the consequences of her folly, but, thinking clearly, she knew there had been much right on her side, too. The missions—the rescue of over two dozen people—that had been right. And there was still some good she could do, and must do.

From an open window at the end of the corridor she heard the smash of glass from the square, then a peal of wild laughter. She placed her hand on her belly and made a silent vow. As she had once rescued lives from the fury of the Catholic state, now she promised that, whatever it required from her, her child would not be born in this Protestant hell.

In Amsterdam, Leonard Legge kindly thanked the Dutch housewife for her time, touched his hat to her, and stepped away from her threshold. As soon as the woman had closed the door, Legge dropped his smile and spat on the ground. “Bugger all foreigners,” he growled. He wondered if the stupid woman had even understood his questions.

He’d asked the questions so many times, they now seemed meaningless even to him. “Had the lady or gentleman seen an Englishwoman named Mistress Thornleigh in these parts? Did the lady or gentleman have any information of any person who had seen such a woman?”

Legge glanced down the street. A half-block away, on the far side of the street, his master stood asking the same questions of a tousle-haired housemaid. Legge saw the maid shake her head. No luck there either, it seemed. As usual. Legge wondered how long his master would continue this useless search. Last month, they had knocked on half the doors of Antwerp. And now, thanks to the hazy recollection of a half-drunk Antwerp sailor, they were disturbing the fat housewives of Amsterdam. It seemed to Legge that they might as well be searching for a special grain of sand upon the seashore.

Legge watched his master turn away from the house—with every rebuff his shoulders seemed to slump a fraction more—and trudge on to the next door. He was exhausted, that was plain. And the Lord knew he was not yet fully recovered to health. After Legge had fished him out of the Thames and carried him to his home, Legge and his wife had been sure the man would die of his arrow wounds. But he had not died. He’d lost an eye, and hadn’t been able to stand for some weeks, but he had clung to life. Just as Legge, very much in need of a new master, had clung to the chance to leave England for a while in this man’s service.

Legge sighed at the futility of it all as he knocked on the next door. An old man answered and scowled at the strange face. Legge launched again into his round of questions in execrable Dutch. The old man shook his head irritably and made to shut the door.

Then a woman, younger and far more curious, came to the man’s side. Legge repeated his questions. Oh yes, the woman said brightly, wiping her hands on her apron. A young Englishwoman had come to her neighbors, the Deurvorsts. Eagerly, she pointed next door.

Legge, energized by the discovery, begged her to wait. He ran the half block to fetch his master. Together, they hurried back to speak to the woman. She repeated what she had told Legge.

Richard Thornleigh’s one good eye opened wide with hope. He thanked the woman, and started to run to the house next door. But the woman called after him, “She’s not there now, sir. Gracious, no. She went with the Deurvorsts when they left Amsterdam. Oh, two months ago at least. And where they went, only the good Lord knows.”

33

H
onor and Pieter continued to live as outcasts in the ruined deanery, but Honor set her mind to finding a way to escape. She made cautious, regular excursions to reconnoiter the city wall. If she and Pieter were to get out, the wall would be their first obstacle. All the gates were barricaded, and the Elders’ lieutenants constantly patrolled the perimeter for signs of treachery within, lest some Judas throw open a gate to the enemy. Meanwhile, outside the walls, the Prince-Bishop’s troops were camped, ready to murder any Münsterite who dared emerge. That, Honor knew, would be their second obstacle.

On one such outing she discovered a sally port near the western gate. She found that this small door, obscured by the piled rubble of the barricades, had been left unbarred. Apparently, it hadn’t been thought necessary; Münsterites had not exactly been rushing out to meet the enemy’s fire. This, she thought, might be the door to freedom.

She also befriended the scout who had escorted the Deurvorst’s wagon into the city that first day. He lived far from the cathedral and knew nothing of her changed, outcast state. In the long, still afternoons, she chatted with him at his post below the eastern gate. Once, though he was not supposed to, he took her up on the wall for a look out at the Prince-Bishop’s troops camped in the distance. During these encounters she casually probed him for information about the movements of the soldiers who patrolled the wall. Somehow, she hoped, if given enough information, she could devise a plan of escape.

The parched July weeks crept by.

Usually, Honor and Pieter spent the cool of the day in the deanery, for no citizens went out among the derelict cathedral buildings. When night fell, the two of them would slip out into the market square. There, they joined the dogs and the few other shadows—other “heathen,” Honor surmised—who emerged from God-knew-where to scavenge in the mounds of refuse left after the communal meals. Water, at least, was not a problem. There was a well in the cathedral precincts.

When they did venture out in the day, Honor found she could pass without notice if she moved quickly and was alone. Pieter had to be more careful. Honor had cut his long curls, then had successfully begged a rag picker for some not-too-tattered breeches and shirt to replace the small cassock. Pieter looked like a boy now, but it was not enough; his golden hair, green eyes and sweet face were too well known by too many of the citizens. But since he was better at scavenging—nimbler with his hands, and faster on his feet—he often took the chance of going to find food. At such times, he always brought home more than Honor did, though usually his return route involved some imaginative detours through the side streets to shake off an irate citizen or two before he could double back to the cathedral close.

But even the communal cooking pots were daily rendering less and less. Choked by the ring of enemy troops, Münster was beginning to feel hunger. Some of the city’s dogs and cats were going into the huge kettles now. “Well,” Honor had muttered as she and Pieter sat on the bed one night reluctantly examining a suspicious-looking bone, hungry though they were, “at least when we forage now there’ll be less competition from dogs.” Pieter had laughed. But the situation had not seemed funny to Honor the next day when, watching from the bedchamber window, she saw a crowd assemble in the square and heard a preacher shout out the penalty for hoarding food: execution.

One morning she heard a noise downstairs. She tiptoed to the landing, but saw no one below. She climbed down the ladder and went to the front door. On the threshold lay a small bundle, an embroidered linen kerchief knotted around some lumps. She unfastened the cloth and found a stick of cured sausage the length of her forearm, a fist-sized chunk of cheese, and a half a loaf of rye bread.

“It’s a miracle,” Pieter said, his mouth watering at the treasure trove. “God sent it.”

Honor looked down the path. The squat figure of a woman was hurrying away between the trees. “No,” she said, with a small smile. “Frau Deurvorst brought it.”

“Yes,” Pieter agreed, and added triumphantly, “but who sent
her
?”

Honor laughed. “Little theologian.”

She put away half of the cured sausage. The rest of the food she and Pieter gobbled then and there.

After that, things got slowly worse.

One evening after a day when the city had seemed strangely quiet, Honor was stooping to pick up crusts under a table in the square when she heard two other scavengers, an old couple, whispering. It seemed that the night before, the Prophet Matthias had beheld a sign of crossed swords in the evening sky. Fired with holy zeal he had ridden out with a small band to smite the enemy. He had failed. The Prince-Bishop’s troops were now displaying his severed head on a pike below the walls. Honor imagined the head, shriveled and crusted with flies after a day in the baking July sun.

Leaderless, the city seemed to shrink into a stupor of fear. People whispered in shuttered houses. Münster was waiting—for deliverance or destruction. Finally, the nervous preachers called an assembly. Citizens shuffled into the square, like frightened cattle, Honor thought, watching from the deanery window.

There was a shout. Matthias’s disciple, the handsome, yellow-haired young man, strode out of the palace dressed in billowing blue silks. Since the day she had arrived with the Deurvorsts, Honor had discovered who he was: Jan Bockelson, a twenty-four-year-old actor-poet from Leyden. His smile was radiant as he stood on the palace steps and addressed the people. He declared that he was taking up the Prophet’s mantle. From henceforward, he said, he would guide the Elect. Relief rippled through the crowd. Calm was restored. Women fell to their knees, sighing.

Jan of Leyden threw his arms wide, rings sparkling, and issued a proclamation. In view of the excessive number of single women in the city, he said, and in light of the Elders’ detestation of fornication, the Elect were commanded from that day forward to take several wives each.

“Adultery?” someone in the crowd gasped.

“By no means,” Jan of Leyden said with a laugh. “Polygamy.”

There were murmurs of disbelief. A man giggled.

Jan smiled. “We will follow the example set by the Old Testament patriarchs, by Abraham, by Isaac, and by Jacob. In this way we will stamp out harlotry and increase the Elect.”

There was a heavy silence. Someone cried, “Sin!”

Jan of Leyden’s sunny smile hardened to a diamond brilliance. “It is the will of the Lord that the Elect shall multiply as the sands of the sea. All who refuse shall incur the wrath of God, which will sweep them from the earth!” He turned on his heel and disappeared inside the palace.

For days, preachers in pulpits throughout the city expounded the new Edict. Every woman, they declared, must marry one of the Elect. Adulterers would be executed. Any woman with two husbands would be beheaded. Jan of Leyden himself immediately married the beautiful young widow of the Prophet, and ten other women.