The Queen's Lady (70 page)

S
ummer thunder rumbled above the Tower of London. It was dusk. Honor walked behind a guard up to the portcullis of the Lion Tower, the first of the three gate towers that defended the entrance across the moat. Like an executioner’s drumroll, the thunder accompanied her all along the route into the ancient fortress. She passed over the moat bridge, her eyes fixed on the stone nest of fortifications that loomed ahead. Royal garrison and arsenal for four hundred and fifty years, the Tower’s layers of encompassing walls had been added by generations of medieval kings to protect their palace and armories, treasury and mint. Though surrendered more than once by the garrison in civil wars, the fortress had never been taken by force.

Rising at its center was the gleaming cube of the White Tower built by the Conqueror, its four, capped turrets flaring under flashes of dry lightning high in the iron clouds. The White Tower stood impregnable inside two square curtain walls, one wall enclosing the other, both muscled with towers. On the wharf the King’s ordnance bristled towards the river.

Once over the moat bridge Honor followed the guard through the Byward Tower in the first curtain wall. To her right, Traitor’s Gate yawned over the river. To her left, at the corner of the inner curtain wall, rose the Bell Tower. It was named for the bell on its round roof that had sounded curfew for over three hundred years. The Bell Tower contained only two chambers. The lower one was Sir Thomas More’s cell.

In the inner ward they entered the house of the Lieutenant, Sir Edmund Walsingham.

“Ten minutes, mistress,” Walsingham said, scraping his key into the iron-barred door of the Bell Tower. They stood at the end of a corridor in his residence. It was the only entrance to More’s cell.

“Ten minutes!” Honor protested. She pointed to the paper he held, which she had just given him. “But Sir William included no such order.” Sir William Kingston, Walsingham’s superior, was the Constable of the Tower and a long-time friend of both Sir Thomas More and Queen Catherine. Gambling on his loyalty to these old friendships, and that he would be ignorant of her criminal status in the eyes of the Church, Honor had visited Sir William’s London house that morning. The visit had been a huge risk, but as soon as Sir William received her, smiling, she knew she had guessed right: Bastwick’s vendetta against her was a personal one that had not involved officers of the state. Sir William had amiably asked what he could do for her. She had begged one interview with More.

Walsingham crushed the paper in his fist. “The Constable may have given you leave, mistress,” he said, “but Secretary Cromwell gives orders, too. And when Master Secretary is displeased he’s been known to stretch a man’s neck longer than is good for his health. Ten minutes.”

He swung open the iron door. Honor looked onto a spiral staircase. Lit by one narrow window slit higher up, the staircase appeared dim and cold in the sickly light of the approaching storm. Behind Honor, lightning streaked the corridor.

She stepped in. The door clanged. Walsingham’s retreating steps faded. Honor went down. The staircase coiled once into darkness. At the bottom, candlelight groped out across the stairwell. Honor’s stomach tightened with dread. Sir Thomas had been in prison for fourteen months. Would she come upon him in rags, slumped in a corner, babbling? She stepped off the last stair and stopped. More was standing in the center of a small room, straight and calm. His body blocked the single flame guttering on a table behind him. His face was in shadow, for he was looking directly at her.

“Is that . . . ?” He hesitated and peered through the gloom.

Honor stared back. He was very thin. Lank clumps of gray hair reached for his shoulders like blind men’s fingers. She had never seen his face anything but clean-shaven; now his beard, also gray, crept halfway down his chest. At the sides of the collar of his dusty gown the wirelike threads of his hair shirt needled out.

“It is!” More cried softly. A small laugh escaped him. “Had I known I need only be cast into prison to entice you to visit, child, I would have contrived to fall afoul of the law much sooner.”

Honor relaxed as two fears dissolved: his wits had not deserted him, and clearly he knew nothing of her former work. Either case would have made her mission here almost impossible.

“Come in, come in!” he said brightly.

Honor took a step into the stone cell. It stank of mousy straw, damp masonry, and urine. Two windows, long slits deep in the stone, allowed in the murky twilight. In front of the table, bare but for the candle, there was a stool and a chair. A straw pallet lay in one corner; in another, an empty grate.

“Please, sit,” More beckoned, indicating the chair. “My servant—you remember John a Wood?—is gone to buy an egg or two from the captain’s wife for our dinner. Several fine hens she keeps, though their eggs are somewhat tough.” He was dusting the chair for her with a fold of his gown. “But an egg’s an egg,” he laughed. “I survived far worse fare as an undergraduate at Oxford. Sit, please. I am so glad to see you, child! But how came you here? They allow me no visitors.”

His heartiness astonished her. Whatever she had expected, it was not this. He seemed contented, happy almost. “The Constable . . .” she stammered. “He remembered me from my days with Her Grace . . .”

“Ah, good old Sir William. Always a friend to the Queen.”

A shout from a ferry on the Thames, faint but sharp, penetrated the cell.

“Sir, I have only a few minutes with you, and—”

“Then you must use them to tell me how you are,” he said with pleasant authority. He perched on the stool and gestured again for her to take the chair. Stiffly, she sat. Their knees almost touched.

“Now,” he said as if her coming was as commonplace as the visits she used to make to Chelsea in the first year she lived with the Queen, “tell me all. You have a husband I have never seen.” He wagged a finger at her. “You should have broached to me your plans to marry, you know. But never mind that now.” He looked down suddenly, as if the recollection made him uncomfortable. “I actually sent a man to Norfolk at the time to make inquiries, for I was concerned about your welfare. But,” he shrugged philosophically, “I had just resigned from office and could ill afford such retainers. The man absconded from my service without giving his account.”

Honor felt a chill up her spine, for the man he had sent had probably been his bailiff, Holt. Holt was a man who would have uncovered information about her work if he had set to it; she was grateful now that he was also a man who would only serve a well-paying master.

“In any case,” More went on, “general reports satisfied me of this Richard Thornleigh’s worth. So, now, tell me of him. Does life in Norfolk suit you? And children? Has God blessed you yet with children? They brought me here over a year ago and I get no news, you know.”

At Thornleigh’s name Honor stifled the pang that leapt to her heart. “Sir, I have not come to . . . It is of
you
we must speak. Of how to get you away from this place.”

More folded his hands calmly in his lap. She saw that the nails were chipped and packed with dirt. “I understand the King already has some such plan for me. Though,” he chuckled, “the destination he has in mind would not be my first choice.” He looked up at the window. “But a man may lose his head and still come to no harm,” he said quietly. “The
final
destination, please God, will make up for all.”

He leaned to touch her hand. “No, don’t worry. This is not such a bad place. I am sure I am as near God in this cell as ever I was in my fine house. Nearer, maybe. And the regimen is not unpleasant. Rather like the time I spent in the Charter-house monastery. That is,” he sighed, “it was so until a few days ago when Master Riche fetched all my books and paper away. He came, like all the others, to try to pry from me . . . a thing I would not give. He failed. And so, like a peevish child he took away my books.”

“A thing you would not give?” Honor grasped at this opening. “Do you mean acceptance of the Oath?”

More took in a long breath and smiled, and Honor knew he would evade the question. “Do you know, before Master Riche came I wrote a book here. I called it,
A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation
. In scratching it out I thought how very much like a prison is this earthly life. Men are mistaken to presume that they wander free in the world. It is not so. God incarcerates us here on earth in a prison so subtly built that, although it lies open on every side without any wall in the world, and though we wander as far as we may within it, the way to get out we shall never find. And—is it not strange?—upon this prison men build another prison. They garnish it with gold. In it they buy and sell, brawl and chide, dice and gamble, and breed sin in its dark corners. And God is angry at us that we, amid all this folly, forget ourselves and our jail, even forget our chief jailer, God. But God does not forget us. He sees all the while the wicked rule we keep in prison. And so he sends the hangman Death to do his executions.”

“No, do not shudder, child. Prisoners like me are blessed, for we have the time to think of these follies, of the bondage of sin. Time to see that all our worldly goods are well lost—they were but added fetters. Time to prepare for true freedom in God’s eternity.” He added, very softly, “Bishop Fisher is with Him already.”

Honor looked down. The Bishop had been beheaded two days before. “Yes,” she said. “I arrived back the day they . . . the day he was executed.”

More nodded. “A most brave man. And the King, to do him justice, was kind to let him face the ax. No traitor’s death after all.”

“Kind?” she asked, incredulous. Even at the isolated inn where she had spent the night she had heard the reports. Fisher had been executed at nine in the morning and his headless body had been stripped and left naked to the flies on the scaffold until eight in the evening, then tumbled into a shallow grave at All Hallows Church, in Barking. His head had been parboiled and set on a pike on London Bridge. “If this King is kind, may we never see a tyrant.”

More’s eyes sparkled with amusement. “The last time I spoke with Bishop Fisher—it was the day we were interrogated by the commissioners at Lambeth—I passed him in the garden, and in the tension of the moment, for we both knew where that day’s decisions might lead us, I jested that I hoped we would meet again in heaven. And he observed that the way we had chosen was certainly straight and narrow enough to be the heavenly route!” He laughed.

Honor did not. She was losing patience with his composure, and his jesting. She went to a window and looked out over the city that was celebrating Midsummer Eve. Faint waves of raucous laughter from across the moat scaled the curtain walls. On the horizon, the small glows of bonfires looked puny under the vast, illuminating flashes of lightning. But still the rain held off. “Midsummer madness,” she murmured. She turned back sharply. “Sir Thomas, there is not much time left. I have come to—”

“That’s right,” he said pleasantly. “You said you’d arrived two days ago. From Norfolk was it?”

Exasperation flared in her. Why did he insist on this chatter? “No, sir. From Germany.”

“Germany?” His eyes narrowed as if he were bracing himself for unpleasant news. “You left England? Why?”

Honor dropped to her knees before him in the straw and took his hand. “There is no time to explain, sir. Let me say only that for almost a year I have been living in Freiburg as a guest of your old friend, Erasmus. His house is quiet and comfortable and full of your friends, and I have come to take you there.”

“Erasmus!” he whispered. She saw that she had surprised him, and there was a smile of relief in his voice. But she noticed, for the first time, the gray hollows of bone around his eyes, and the bloodshot whites within.

“Listen to me,” she urged. “They cannot condemn you without a trial. Bishop Fisher signed his own death warrant with his open declaration against the King, but against you they have no evidence. They must give you a trial, and when they do, take the Oath. Confound them all. Walk away from this wretched place a free man. Bring away your family and come to Freiburg!”

The corners of his mouth trembled. “No.” The single word rang with finality.

But Honor had seen the tremor that betrayed him, a crack in his pleasant mask of control. She seized on it. “Sir, you would be so happy with us in Freiburg. I have been helping Erasmus with his
Ecclesiastes
. A forest of a work he calls it, and so it is. Four volumes already. And many’s the time he’s wished aloud he had you close by to offer advice on its progress. His study looks out over a dreaming garden. It is just the place for you. You could write there to your heart’s content. Scholars visit us. Johannes Froben lives nearby, transforming manuscripts from Florence and Paris on his new press, and . . . and I have a daughter there. Her name is Isabel. Oh, sir, nothing would please me more than to see her grow and learn, as I did, under your tutelage.”

He was watching her with glistening eyes. Her heart beat faster; she knew she was winning him! “Erasmus speaks so fondly of the times you spent together,” she pressed on. “‘More’s Academy’ he always calls your home. And when he does, such happy memories stir in me. I think of the days when you and I talked of Pliny and Virgil under the oaks by your pond. I think of our stargazing nights, and of the laughter we shared over
Utopia
. Do you remember the foolish Vicar of Croydon, sir, who dreamed of voyaging there? I remember all of it. My life has run along a very different path since then, but I always—”

“Enough!” The command came from him in a strangled whisper. He pulled free his hand. “The King is more merciful than you. He does not stoop to torture.”

“The King is planning to kill you! I am trying to save you! Sir, take the Oath and come out. These quibbles of dogma, in both church and state, are not worth dying for. Take the Oath, and live.”

“‘Quibbles in dogma’?” Warily, he drew back his head. “So you phrased it once before. We were in the menagerie, do you remember? You questioned me about Pym. Pepperton, you called him. We quarreled.”