The Queen's Lady (71 page)

She lowered her eyes. “I remember.” She looked up again to find that his gaze at her now smoldered with suspicion.

“Constantly, you know, they send interrogators to me here,” he said. “Cromwell, Audeley, Thomas Boleyn. Master Richard Riche. Even,” his lip curled, “Father Bastwick.” He wielded Bastwick’s name suddenly, malevolently, like a knife, and Honor felt a moment of alarm; she had not known Bastwick was one of the commissioners in this case. “They come,” More went on, “and they all echo the same refrain. ‘Take the Oath and come out!’ ” His eyes bored into hers. “Have they now sent you?”

“No! How can you think it? I abhor what they have done to you.”

“Yet you demand what they demand.”

“For your own good.”

“Yet you demand what they demand.”

“For your own good.”

“So Cromwell tells me.”

“To ensure your safety.”

“And what of the safety of my soul? How can a lie ensure the safety of my soul?”

“It is no lie to take this oath. It is a miserable oath, a miserable piece of work.” She rose from the straw, indignant, her anger fueled by the dreadful knowledge that it was she who had suggested the idea to Cromwell—but not with such a penalty attached! “What kind of promise is it that must be wrenched from a man under fear of death? Which of the King’s subjects will be more loyal for having sworn it in the shadow of the ax? What kind of King would demand it under such conditions?”

“It is the law.”

“Very well, then,” she said, “let us speak of the law. The Oath asks for compliance with the law. And the law is a thing you have always cherished and obeyed. Obey this one!”

“It asks for something else
above
the law. Above God’s law. My conscience cannot go so far.”

“Yet your conscience would send your body to be destroyed?”

“My body is a poor thing. I marvel so many fight over it.”

“This is no jest, sir!” she flared. “You called the King kind in sparing Bishop Fisher the horrors of a traitor’s death, but his kindness may not extend to you.”

More shuddered. “I know,” he said, the light in his eyes withdrawing into the caverns of sockets. Honor saw terror thrashing there. “Father Bastwick often paints the picture for me . . . the agony of the Carthusian monks . . . slowly dismembered. He enjoys telling me of these things, and—” he looked straight at her—“and of other things even more dreadful.”

Again, Honor felt suspicion aimed at her in his stare. It startled and unnerved her.

“But I endure it,” More concluded. He stood and moved to the window, done with arguing.

But Honor could not give up so easily. “And what of your family? Have you no pity for them, living in penury, your property forfeited to the Crown? I have heard that Lady Alice is now selling her clothes to pay for your upkeep here, yet all of your family have taken the Oath.”

“I do not quarrel with anyone whose conscience leads them to do so. Mine will not.”

“But what of their safety? Your silence puts your family in danger, though I imagine they are as ignorant as everyone else what your real motives are.”

He whirled around on her. “My silence keeps them
out
of danger! Don’t you see? If they have sworn the Oath in genuine ignorance of its true meaning they can still be saved in heaven. But if I tell them why the Oath is damnable, why I refuse to swear it, then they are no longer saved by a clear conscience before God.”

“Damnable?” she asked quietly.

He stepped back. His face closed. “I have declared again and again: I will not take the Oath; I will not say why.” His shoulders heaved with a sigh of infinite weariness. “I do nobody harm. I say none harm. I think none harm, but wish everybody good. And if this is not enough to keep a man alive, in good faith, I long not to live.”

“If you are so anxious to die,” she said mercilessly, hoping to shock him to his senses, “then why this coy silence? Why not speak out against the statutes and have done?”

He gave her a mirthless smile. “Now you sound like my interrogators, indeed.” He looked out the window. “No. I have not been a man of such holy living as to be bold enough to offer myself to death, lest God, for my presumption, desert me.”

She watched him, overwhelmed with sadness. She had hoped that she could somehow charm him, or shock him, or beg him into relenting. But she saw that the hope had been a mirage. He had always lived by his principles; now, he was prepared to die by them. “You need not be coy to me about the reasons for your stand, and your silence,” she said, halfheartedly batting straw from her skirt. “I know them.”

Interest glinted in his eyes.

With some irritation, she intoned what she believed to be his reasoning: “If you do not believe the King to be Supreme head of the English Church—”

“And I do not
say
whether I do or no,” he quickly pointed out.

“Quite,” she agreed tightly. “But
if
you do not believe it, then by swearing you do believe it you perjure your immortal soul. However, if you declare your reasons for refusing to swear, you forfeit your life. And so you are threatened by a double-edged sword. It is a sword made sharper by the Church’s teaching that, since life is a gift from God, to forfeit it is a sin.”

His smile was small but proud. “I taught you well.”

Somewhere above them, an iron door clanged. “Yet, apparently,” More sighed, “the King will settle for nothing less than my total submission.”

“Your recantation,” she said softly.

He looked sidelong at her. She saw that her use of the word had prickled him. It sparked an idea. Could she
shame
him to his senses? “You have been just as merciless to other men,” she said harshly. “To so-called heretics.”

The accusation sizzled in the air between them.

“Admit it,” she said. “As Chancellor of England you forced men suspected of heresy to answer whether or not they believed the Pope was head of the Church, knowing they would violate their conscience if they said ‘yes’ and would be burned if they said ‘no’. Why should you balk at being forced to make the same impossible choice?”

“There is a difference. When I examined heretics, the law of every country in Christendom laid down that the Pope was head of the Church. The doctrine that the King is Supreme head of the English Church is accepted only here, and rejected in every other country in Christendom.”

“But you burned men for holding to their conscience! You argued that it was seditious for a Protestant to refuse to burn a Bible when commanded to do so by the King. But now, you refuse a command of loyalty from that same King.”

“Protestants?” He spat out the word. “You call these vermin ‘Protestants’?”

“They protest arbitrary authority. As you are doing. The oath you demanded of them, with all the deadly might of the Church behind you, was intolerable. Just as the King’s demand for this oath, with all the might of the state behind him, is intolerable.”

“The heretics condemned themselves with actions. I do nothing. I simply maintain silence.”

“You burned Ralph Pepperton for his silence!”

His face darkened. “That name again. Should I have guessed your true heart that day? The day we quarreled over Pepperton? You turned cold, and afterwards avoided me. Well, tell me now, what do you ‘protest’? Do you protest authority so much that you would snatch felons from the law? Carry them away in ships and deposit them abroad to infect the innocent people of other lands? Is that your protest?”

She stared, dumbfounded. Then, suddenly, she understood. “Bastwick told you this.”

“Then you do not deny it!” A thin cry came from his throat. “My God. Until this very moment I did not believe it. I thought Bastwick poured such poison in my ears only to wound me. To weaken me. And I resisted!” He held his head, appalled. “I was so sure he lied.” He staggered to the stool, clutched for it and thudded onto it. “This is a place for reckoning truth indeed! Honor Larke, the viper in my bosom. Honor Larke, the heretic!”

Honor’s heart seemed to stop. He knew everything! And, knowing it, he hated her. All bonds between them now were severed. The chasm that separated them roared with emptiness, as vast as any imagined pit in hell.

“I thought I had taught my children so carefully. You, who were so quick to learn—I thought I had taught you so well.” Blank-eyed, he swiveled on the stool so that his back was to her. “What a cesspool we have made of God’s creation!” he moaned.

He was talking to himself, to the walls, cutting her off completely. He lifted his eyes to a crucifix on the wall. “Lord, we defile Your blessed sacrifice. Everything we love on earth turns rank. In truth, I long to leave it!”

Honor tried to take a step toward him, but she could not move. It was as though she stood on the edge of the chasm, and on the far side he was wandering away from her, drifting off toward the mists of death, fading from her view. She burned to call him back. Could she make a bridge with words—the bright, strong words of her newfound understanding? Could she then grasp his hand and haul him back to her side, the side of life?

With a surge of anger at the delusions that stunned his mind, she wanted to shout across to him,
These are hallucinations. I have seen every kind of self-deception forged into every kind of faith in God. I have watched you all kill one another for faith, and I watch you now begging for death, begging at the feet of a man bleeding to death on a cross. Your religion is a cult of death!
She wanted to shout,
Why do you long to leave life for a mirage of heaven? Why, when we have wild musk roses, and swallows, and love between man and woman, and work, and learning, and watching children grow? Are these not heaven enough?’

But she said none of these things. Something held her back. She could neither speak nor move.

More, oblivious to her, heaved a shuddering sigh. “The light in the cathedral is a heavenly light. The gold of saints’ halos . . . ivory of their bones . . . red of their blood on the stones . . . stones where Saint Thomas was slain by his king.”

He was staring at the gray wall as if he saw such colors emblazoned there, and Honor realized he was lost in a time forty-five years ago, a time when he served as a page-boy in the house of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Days spent in the cathedral that enshrined the bones of Archbishop Thomas à Becket, murdered by a jealous king, and made a saint.

“I long for peace, Lord,” More murmured. “I long for sanctuary from the moil of men, the grasping for gold, the lusting, and the vile desires. Once, in the monastery, You gave me that sanctuary, Lord. I was not worthy then. But soon . . . soon, God willing, I will stand among the choiring of angels, and the blessed community of apostles and saints and martyrs that throng the skies . . .”

He rose, lost in his vision, his back still to her. He stretched his arms stiffly at his sides, palms up, so that with his body he formed an arrow, a man offering himself to his God, and intoned:

“Give me the grace, good Lord

To set the world at nought;

To set my mind fast upon thee,

And not to hang upon the blast of men’s mouths;

To be content to be solitary;

Not to long for worldly company . . .”

Now, Honor understood what held her back. Now she knew that, finally, she was looking at the real man. Not his thin shield of jests and wit. Not even the beaten armor of his hatred of heretics. But the man who stood naked in his faith. A man in whose huge imagination the heaven-scapes were so peopled with centuries of noble saints and martyrs that any human touch would shatter the magnificent dream.

“To know my own vileness and wretchedness,

To humble and meeken myself

under the mighty hand of God . . .”

And suddenly, she knew what she must do. He had chosen his destiny. Death was his choice. And she must let him die. Equally emphatic was an echo of the truth that had just burst upon her.
Heaven enough, right here on earth? Yes! I want the roses and the swallows. I want to go back to my child. I want to help her grow. What a shift is here! Sir Thomas must be allowed to die, and I can see again why I want to live!
Anger toward him drained out of her, and in its place flowed a sensation of pure love. He chanted on:

“To bear the cross with Christ;

To have the last thing in remembrance,

And to have ever before mine eye my death

that is ever at hand . . .”

Finally, Honor could move. She almost fell toward him. “Sir Thomas, you
did
teach me well. All the understanding in my heart is thanks to you, and all the tools to search for truth.”

She was standing before him, face-to-face, and the impulse of tenderness was so strong in her that she flung her arms around his neck. She held his body tightly against hers and kissed his cheek.

He shivered. In a sudden, violent motion like a spasm his hand plowed into her hair. The other hand swept down her back and groped at her buttock. His lips burned her forehead.

He pulled back. Fear blazed over his face. “Satan!” he cried. “I
knew
you would one day come to me in this guise! Come with soft words and soft flesh, tempting me to abandon God!”

He grabbed two handfuls of her hair and wrenched her head backwards. Honor gasped in pain. “Now I see you, what you are, woman! It is Satan who has tumbled you into heresy. Satan had taken your body as his host.” He shouted into her open mouth, “I know what you desire, devil! But my immortal soul you shall never seize!”

His hands ripped free of her hair and instantly manacled her wrists. He twisted her arms behind her, bending them and pinning them against her back with such a savage jolt that she cried out.

“How long have you inhabited this soft body, Satan?” he cried. “Have you been sucking this girl’s blood these many years, tempting me to wallow in the muck?” He crushed her to him, pressing her breasts hard against his chest. “Has that been your sport? Have you danced her into a travesty of Christian marriage with another devil, to delight in filthy fornication?” He breathed on her neck, “And has that devil-husband fed here, amongst these limbs?” His open mouth pressed her throat.