The Chalice (16 page)

“Conform?” she cried. “When our souls are in peril, you of all people counsel us to conform? Just weeks ago, the king took his latest step against the true faith, the most blasphemous of all. He sacked the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket in Canterbury. The jewels and precious objects were carted to the royal treasury. All that is left now are the holy bones of the saint himself.”

In a dozen steps, perhaps less, I could reach the door. Charles was just outside. Gertrude was strong, but if I could get around her and run for the door, she could not prevent me from escaping this room.

I began to move, but Gertrude thrust herself directly in front of me.

“If you don’t get out of my way, I will scream,” I said.

“No, you won’t,” she said. “There will be no message for Charles today. And not only that. Tomorrow night I am going back to see Orobas, and you will come with me. You must come of your own free will and unconstrained.”

It was a savage blow, to hear those words again. So the letter
did
concern me. I now saw that everything she said or did in this house was to drive me toward the next stage in the prophecy.

“I will never agree to that,” I said.

“Give us what we want, Joanna,” she said, her voice thick with desperation.

“Us?” I repeated. “Who told you to secure me from Dartford? Who tells you to take me to a seer now?’

Gertrude said, “I can never tell you that.”

Enraged, I said, “I will not go with you tomorrow or any other day, Gertrude. I shall send a message to the marquess and then leave this house.”

Her lower lip trembled. Red patches flared in her hollow cheeks. “Don’t you care what I tell my husband about you after you’ve gone?”

“No.”

“That his precious Joanna Stafford secretly met with Sister Elizabeth Barton, just as I did? That you are a liar and a traitor, too?”

I flinched from her ugly words but said, “Tell him anything you want.”

“Oh, I don’t believe that. There is one thing you don’t want Henry or anyone else to know, something that has nothing to do with prophecy.”

The door swung open and Constance reappeared. “Charles is most insistent, my lady. He said he must speak with Mistress Stafford.”

I moved toward Constance, and Charles waiting behind her, but Gertrude suddenly had me by the shoulders.

“And what if I tell others that you were once the whore of George Boleyn?” Gertrude whispered in my ear.

I could not find my voice, could not breathe.
This is what it is like,
I thought.
This is what it is like for the world to end.

Finally I managed three words: “Shut the door.”

Constance slipped back out. There was a muffled conversation and then the sound of footsteps walking away.

“You should sit down, Joanna,” said Gertrude. Her desperate tone was gone. She was all solicitude. “You are not well.”

I turned my back as I struggled to control myself. Finally I said, my voice hoarse: “Lady Rochford lied to you.”

“Oh, Joanna,” Gertrude said. “It is obvious that she told me the truth.”

Tears coursed down my cheeks. “I was sixteen years old.”

Gertrude shook her head. “If it’s any comfort to you, just before he was beheaded, Boleyn told the crowd he was a sinner
who deserved death. Perhaps he was thinking of you and all the other girls he hurt.”

I made fists and pressed them against my eyes, to stop the weeping. But it did not work. The tears seeped through my fingers. “Who else knows?” I said.

“No one,” said Gertrude. “And I will never tell a living soul, I swear to you before God—
if
you go with me tomorrow. The seer said he would not complete his prophecy without you being present. He stipulated that you must come of your own free will.”

For so long I had feared that the second prophet would divine my future and bring me closer to a terrifying destiny. Nearly as great was my fear that George Boleyn’s crime against me would be revealed. I did nothing to encourage him and struggled to get away from him when he trapped me in the curtained corner of his sister’s receiving room, but he was too strong. I knew that women were never believed. I’d always been afraid of how people would at once condemn me and my family if his attack on me were known. Now my fears had intertwined, and by doing so become so powerful that I was crushed to nothing.

I would do what Gertrude asked. She knew that. I could not live with the sordid truth being exposed.

Then a new fear took hold. “But how can you be sure of Jane Boleyn, that she has told no one else what her husband did to me?” I asked. “Or that she will remain silent in the future?”

Gertrude said nothing. I lowered my fists from my eyes and turned to face her. I expected to see a woman gloating. But it was the opposite. Hers was a visage of aged sorrow. The faint lines crisscrossing Gertrude’s face had deepened. In the last ten minutes, she had truly aged ten years.

“Tell me,” I said, louder. “Set my mind at rest that in return for going with you I shall never be shamed before the world. How can you be this sure of Lady Rochford’s silence?”

Gertrude sank into her chair. Her hands trembling in her lap, she said, “Because Jane Boleyn never told me anything. She is ignorant of his actions against you. I saw how you reacted to meeting the widow of George Boleyn—and the entire court knew of his nature, of his predilection for despoiling girls. I wagered that that was what happened to you. It was a gamble. And I won.”

T
he doors of the Red Rose were always locked after sundown. The servants finished their duties sometime after seven o’clock and found their beds by eight. But that night, after ten, there was a tapping at my door. It was James, dressed in a threadbare coat and breeches. Without a word, he held out his hand, palm up. I took it, though to do so made me shudder. He pulled me out of my room and into the darkness.

He used no candle to light our way. James was familiar with each turn of the corridor, every length of step, and he made his way forward, his left hand running along the wall. With his right he pulled me after him, but gently. I was not dragged through the house, as when I attempted to flee with Arthur. Tonight I was precious cargo.

Off the larder was a door to a back passageway connecting the Red Rose to the street. In moments we were on Suffolk Lane. I could smell the dank waters of the Thames as we made our way to the Courtenay stables.

“Don’t let her leave,” James told his twin once he’d deposited me inside, and then hurried back. Joseph grunted. He watched me, fingering a rope with both hands, as if he ached to tie me.

I ignored him as I waited. I listened to the horses chew and move in their stalls. And every moment I thought about what had obsessed me all day: Sister Elizabeth Barton. Could it be true, what Gertrude said? Had Sister Elizabeth falsely recanted the messages in her visions to put a halt to the interrogations and so prevent the king’s men from learning of me?

“You are the one who will come after . . .”

James led in Gertrude, herself dressed in humble bodice, kirtle, and cloak. Constance was nowhere to be seen. Four would ride out again, but this time I would complete the quartet.

We rode to the top of Suffolk Lane and turned onto a wider street, lined with two-story wood and plaster buildings. Not a single candle glowed within any of them. The curfew had been rung long ago; all decent folk were asleep. London days were shrill with noise—bells and shouting and laughter and screams—but the night was deathly still.

At a curve in the street, James suddenly leaped from his horse and whistled, in short, sharp bursts.

Two boys ran out of an alleyway. They carried something in a long bundle between them and offered it to James. An acrid smell filled the air, and then golden light soared. The boys brought torches for our journey.

More dark figures slipped out of the alleyway. They were men this time, six of them. One by one, the men grabbed the coins offered by James. The torchlight revealed the blunt clubs and sharpened sticks in their grip.

We formed a group, with Gertrude and I in the center, led by James and the torch carriers, and surrounded by hired ruffians. Joseph came last.

Gertrude spoke to me for the first time. “It takes more than two linkboys to see us through the parts of London we must travel tonight. These men are being paid more coins than they would otherwise see in a year to maintain us.”

After a moment I responded, “I pray to God they fail in their task so we never reach our destination.”

Gertrude nudged her horse to ride closer to me. She did not remove her hood; I could not see her face. But I heard every word. “Joanna, you are someone who has suffered more than most because of the policies of the king. Your uncle beheaded, your cousin horribly burned. Your family fortune robbed. And then, your priory, your home, destroyed. And yet you will do nothing—nothing—to fight back.”

Her defiant words bewildered me. “Fight back?” I repeated. The notion of it was bizarre. Henry VIII was served by men of utter ruthlessness. He had broken the church leadership; men of arms took orders only from him. His power held his subjects in fear.

I said, “The king is our anointed sovereign, we are bound by God to obey him as his subjects.”

“Are you certain of that?” Gertrude asked.

For the first time, I questioned the sanity of Gertrude Courtenay. “Henry the Eighth is the
king,”
I hissed.

“Perhaps not for much longer,” she retorted. “Pope Clement wrote a bull of excommunication two years ago. His Holiness made many efforts to bring England back into the fold, but with the latest abominations, the sacking of the holy shrines, he is now close to publishing it. Henry the Eighth will be excommunicated from the Catholic Church.”

Excommunicated.
The word made me tremble, as it would any Christian. Our family chaplain, to tame the unruly Stafford children, liked to wield the word like a weapon, drawing out each syllable. I could still hear his shrill voice all these years later: “To be ex-com-mun-i-cat-ed is to be banned from God’s grace; shunned, unable to take sacrament. The rite of bell, book, and candle would be summoned—the candle to be snuffed at the end because the offender is
removed from the light of God
.”

“How could a king rule after being excommunicated?” I muttered, more to myself than to Gertrude, but she took up my question with vigor.

“He couldn’t,” she said. “And it will be the
duty
of other Christian kings to depose him. We his subjects could not rally to the defense of King Henry. Not if we wished to remain faithful to the Holy Father.”

If this were true, it changed all. Yet could I put my trust in Gertrude’s account? After a moment, I said, “You haven’t been waiting for the pope to sanctify your actions up to now. What treason have you already committed against the king?”

Gertrude snorted. “No acts of treason. Although, yes, I have delivered the kingdom from a certain source of torment. I removed the Boleyns. You have me to thank for that bit of business.”

“
You
did that?” I was struck by how Gertrude used the word
remove
to describe the arrest, trial, and execution of Anne and George Boleyn.

“While many men of the court hated the Boleyns, they did little but complain. The Duke of Norfolk tossed a few bonny sluts at the king, to distract him and weaken Anne’s hold. But it didn’t work. I’ve watched King Henry all my life—I know his way with women. We had to find a woman who was the opposite of Anne Boleyn. I was the one who secured her. Jane Seymour had served Queen Katherine, she had been at the court for years. She was so unimpressive, no one had ever courted her. But Jane had one quality that was more important than any beauty or wit. And it is the same quality you singularly lack, Joanna. She was
ambitious
. She followed my instructions precisely in how to capture the love of the king.”

Amid my disgust at Gertrude’s pandering, I had to acknowledge the boldness of such a scheme—and its success. Yet I realized something. “You made her queen and annihilated the Boleyns, but to what end? The king has turned his back on
Rome. The monasteries still fell. Queen Jane did nothing to prevent it.”

“Queen Jane tried to save the monasteries, you have no notion of the risks taken,” she insisted. “If she’d lived, as the mother of the heir to the throne, she would have had great influence.”

“It is easy to say that now,” I retorted. “The truth can never be known.”

Before our quarrel escalated further, we were interrupted. A bearded man stood before the head linkboy, gripping a long staff with one hand.

“I am the nightwatch of the ward of Dowgate—declare your intent,” he growled.

James was the one who jumped off his horse to address the watch. They spoke for a moment; a small, bulging bag disappeared into the man’s frayed coat and we were waved on.

James hurried back to Gertrude. “The watch for the next ward will demand twice as much coin, my lady. But we must have his protection past the gaming houses. We dare not proceed without him.”

“So be it,” she said.

We rode down two more long, dark streets. At the second corner, James paused at a much narrower—but cobbled—lane that sloped down a hill. At the end of it, I saw flames flicker before a low building. I also heard men’s shouts—and, amazingly, the faint tinkle of music.

“We must tarry here, until the next night watch walks past, and then enlist him,” said James.

But Gertrude declared that our personal guard would more than suffice. James argued with her: “If a mob should assemble, I cannot best them with just a handful of men, and poor and hungry specimens at that.”

“Oh, there won’t be a mob—that is ludicrous,” she said. “We cannot cower here for hours, the appointed time will pass. We ride forward. Now.”

Shaking his head, James mounted his horse. A ripple of fear moved among the half dozen men who encircled us. But no one could dissuade the Marchioness of Exeter.

Down the lane we went in a single line, very slowly, the horses’ hoofs clattering on the uneven stones. For the first time I realized that the man who walked beside me was malformed, with one shoulder higher than the other. I said a quick prayer for him.