The Queen's Lady (20 page)

Honor suffered a moment of alarm. Would Sydenham, under examination, implicate her? The thought was quickly subdued by a pang of shame; she knew enough of men to recognize one who could be trusted. About Sydenham’s own safety she was not concerned: the soft-hearted, portly merchant was not the stuff of martyrs. He would abjure, and hurry home.

She went to the window and looked out again. A chill fingered its way up her backbone: Bastwick had entered the courtyard. She knew that he worked in the Bishop’s palace, but it was a large and crowded place and she had not really expected to see him. She watched him as he approached the litter with a large velvet cushion and offered it to Cardinal Campeggio, presumably for his gouty foot. The Cardinal reached out to accept the gift. Bastwick remained by his side, smiling and engaging him in conversation. Honor’s eyes narrowed. Why this ingratiating behavior? It reminded her of the way he used to minister to Lady Philippa. What web was he weaving now?

She heard a door close and turned. The two priests had finally left the library. “Now, Master DeVille,” she said urgently. She hurried to a chair by his side and sat. “Tell me. What have you been able to discover?”

He glanced around to make sure they were alone. “Nothing,” he said. “Sorry.”

For a moment, she did not understand. “Nothing?”

“Nothing of what you were after. There is no entry, no mention whatever, of a Ralph Pepperton in the Bishop’s records for September.”

“But how can that be?” Could Bastwick have tampered with the records? she wondered. It was an action he might take if he had overstepped his power in persecuting Ralph. And he had committed forgery at least once before, in the documents concerning her wardship. “But did you check the date? What entry was made for the burnings at Smithfield on September twenty-second?”

DeVille was casually examining the lines on his palm. “You did not request that information. Only that I search for the name of Pepperton.”

Honor bit back her anger. She dug for a coin in the purse at her waist and snapped it onto his palm. “I’m requesting it now. Find out.”

The clatter of hooves from below brought her back to the window. Cardinal Campeggio’s entourage was beginning to move out. And Bastwick, now mounted, was sticking close to the litter. But why was he going with the Cardinal when his post was here with the Bishop? Had his ministrations and flatteries brought such quick results? Had the Cardinal invited him along? “And what about Father Bastwick?” she asked DeVille, still looking out. “I hope my request was sufficiently clear on that score?”

“Quite clear,” he replied pleasantly. “And in that I have had more success. Though, of course,” he added with a sheepish smile, “since Pepperton’s name does not appear . . .”

“You found no link between him and Bastwick,” she finished for him, irritated. She would have to wait for days, maybe weeks, until he could look again into the records. “Well, what
have
you found out?”

DeVille leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms, ready to make his report. “Bastwick’s a nobody. And seems to have come from nowhere. Though the deacon told me he’d seen Bastwick several years ago loitering in St. Paul’s—begging gentlemen, apparently, for employment in their chapels.”

Naturally, Honor thought. After the disgrace of his trial six years ago and his months in the Bishop’s prison, Bastwick would have found it almost impossible to secure a benefice. But she did not say this to DeVille. She had told him nothing of her own connection with Bastwick.

“Eventually,” DeVille went on, “he was hired as a miserable chantry priest in a hamlet in Norfolk. Hardly enough in that post to keep body and soul together. Then he became an apparitor in the Archdeacon’s court, and finally an apparitor in Bishop Nix’s court at Norwich.”

It was a common enough pattern, Honor thought. Poor priests without benefices often took places in the Church courts which employed a host of petty officials. These courts dealt in moral delinquency, contested marriages, tithe disputes, and, of course, heresy. They were numerous, efficient, and constantly in session, and though most men and women in England would never see the inside of a civil courtroom, almost everyone at some time came into contact with the Church courts. Because the overwhelming number of cases dealt with sexual misconduct, people called them “bawdy courts,” and they despised the apparitors, the officious inspectors whose job it was to watch the parish for lechery, adultery, and blasphemy.

“Eventually, Bishop Nix made Father Bastwick a proctor,” DeVille said with a sneer.

“But he has no legal training,” Honor protested.

“The rules are slack. A priest need only swear that he has read canon and civil law for three years. So, Father Bastwick arrived back in London last year with the high recommendation of Bishop Nix. Since then he has served Bishop Tunstall’s Chancellor as a proctor. And in the past few days I’ve seen evidence that he’s weaseling his way into Cardinal Campeggio’s train. He’ll probably end up a bishop one day,” he sniffed. “Imagine. An utter nobody.”

Honor watched Bastwick riding beside the Cardinal as the entourage wended through the churchyard, passing the cemetery cloister and the charnel chapel on the way to Cheapside.

DeVille, having finished with his report, fitted on his spectacles to begin cataloging a fresh stack of books. “I’ll give Bastwick this much, however,” he said. “He is energetic, and his keenness in rooting out corruption is remarkable.”

“Remarkable,” Honor agreed quietly, and took her leave.

At Chelsea, Honor could not sleep. It was the day after her disappointing interview with Percy DeVille. The day had been oppressively hot, a freak of late October, as if the desperate summer in one final, deranged assault had hurled all its resources at the desolation of oncoming winter. The night was sweltering, the room suffocating. She writhed on her narrow bed as on the rack.

She had come that afternoon to join the More household for the baptism of Cecily’s new baby, another son. At evening prayers in the family chapel she had knelt with Sir Thomas and the others only by forcing her knees to bend, and had mumbled her prayers up to a God she feared was deaf. And now, as she tossed on her bed in a bleary semiconsciousness, her mind was riven by the twin specters that visited her nightly: Ralph’s scorched body heaving against his chains and Bastwick’s face, cold with vengeance.

She sat up. Her linen chemise was clammy with sweat. Enough, she thought. She threw her legs over the edge of the bed, whirled a light cloak around her shoulders, and padded softly down the stairs and out of the slumbering house.

The moon was full. On the lawn, the grass was already studded with pearls of dew that slid deliciously over her bare toes. She drank in the night air, pungent with the smells of damp earth. She looked down the slope. In the distance, moonlight glinted off the window of the New Building. The pond dreamed beneath the oak trees and beckoned her with stars of moonlight dancing on its placid surface.

She went down, settled on the pond bank, and dipped her foot in the water. The cold sent a shudder of delight through her, forcing her muscles to tense, then relax. Yielding to another impulse, she stood and let the cloak drop from her shoulders and waded out until the water was waist high. She stretched forth her arms and bent her body and gave herself to the pond like a bird trusting to the air.

Her chemise, buoyant with trapped air, billowed around her neck leaving her naked below the surface, and she laughed out loud at her own undignified state. She floated on her stomach and pulled away the water in long, languid strokes and let its velvet coolness tingle every inch of skin. This water-world was overwhelmingly physical. It prodded out the brambles of the nightmare stinging her mind and pushed them gently away like branches borne in the current of a stream. The relief was sweet. This was baptism, indeed! How odd it was, she thought, lulled in this calm pool, to recall the intensity of the afternoon’s rite over Cecily’s baby.

Family and friends had crammed around the baptismal font in the stifling parish church, everyone tightly buttoned and bound and encased in their finery. First, the priest had exorcised the devils from the child, and then, intoning the Latin prayers, immersed him. When he lifted the baby again, the little body was board-stiff, fists balled, eyes big as coins. The parents had fussed to calm him from the terror they thought he felt at this near-drowning. The others had crossed themselves with relief at the escape his soul had made, for had the baby perished before baptism his soul would have tumbled into limbo where he would be perpetually denied the sight of God—and even, some theologians said, suffer the torments of the damned.

Honor smoothed back her water-thick hair and wondered at the freight of fears and hopes a baptism was made to carry, through custom immemorial. Rebirth from the sink of original sin, salvation from the jaws of hell, entry into life eternal: so much was bound up in such a simple act. Yet she had marked the baby’s face. It seemed to her his muscles had tensed not from fear—what did a newborn know of fear until it was
taught
to fear?—but rather from the thrill of sweat-sticky skin plunged into cold water, just as her own body had reacted moments ago. But in the baptistery, where the newborn creature was thrilling to the sensations of life, the adults had seen only death. They saw a battle for an invisible soul, and they gave their thanks to the victorious priest, and to God.

Honor flipped onto her back. The billowing shift was becoming a burden. She kicked her way to the shore, stood, and wrenched the sopping linen over her head. She heaved it towards the bank where it splatted onto the grass beside a thicket of bushes.

Now, she was completely free. On her back she glided out and sculled to the middle of the pond. Her hair floated over her neck, and she saw her breasts rise above the surface. They reflected the white light of the moon like polished, wet marble, black-tipped with ebony.

Looking at her own nakedness, she wondered what it would be like to marry—to lie with a man. At the thought, Richard Thornleigh surged, unbidden, into her mind. Or rather, into her body, as though his kiss of months ago—his embrace—had left its imprint in her very muscles. It was not the first time his image had returned uninvited. Whenever it did—when she daydreamed, or at night—the remembered heat of that kiss would overwhelm her, like an ambush. And always, her body responded the same way. Like now. The tug in her nipples, the melting warmth in her groin.

Abruptly, she splashed to a halt and treaded water. She ducked her face into the chill water and vigorously shook her head to clear it. A drunken swaggerer, that’s all he was. And married, too. Good Lord, the last man she wanted to think about was Richard Thornleigh.

She waded back toward the bank, and stood in the thigh-deep water. She lifted a yellow oak leaf from the surface and sent it adrift again, like a tiny boat, with a flick of her finger. Richard Thornleigh, indeed, she scoffed to herself. A man of straw compared to Sir Thomas. Although she could now laugh at her earlier uncharitable fantasies about Lady Alice’s demise, Sir Thomas nevertheless remained her ideal. What other man could match him? Oh, several had presented themselves since she had gone to court. There was always a young gallant or two anxious for her favors. But their incessant prattle of hunting and hawking, of who was in and who was out, had soon made her yawn. In any case, she was in no hurry to marry; she enjoyed serving the Queen.

There was a rustling on the grass. Honor turned her head. There, on the bank, was Sir Thomas. She lifted her hands to her navel, unaware, in her shock, that they offered no covering.

More froze on his way to the New Building and stared at the statue in the pond. Waterdrops bejeweled her body, gleamed in her hair, and trickled from her elbow. They slid over her moonlit breasts and dripped from her pointing nipples, like crystal drops of milk. They caressed the curve of her belly and settled on the triangle of curling hair that glistened like the dewed, night-black grass beneath his feet. Her eyes were round as a doe’s hunted into the bracken, and the tips of her teeth sparkled behind lips that formed an “O” of surprise.

She splashed out of the water toward him, arms outstretched for her cloak by the bushes. It lay on the ground to his right, several feet behind him. She sprang up the slippery bank, and he turned as she passed him. She swooped for the cloak, unconsciously offering him her buttocks, as smooth and cool as a marble Madonna’s breast, and almost close enough to lay a hand on.

She whirled around and fiercely clutched the cloak to her front, but the fabric was a stubborn, twisted bundle that would untangle itself no further than to barely cover her nakedness. She wrestled with it until one hand was splayed between her breasts, the cloth just covering them, while the other hand wrenched a corner of it down to shield herself below the belly. Her breathing was quick and shallow.

More tore his gaze away. He looked up with sightless eyes at the moon in the half-naked branches, his mind still fastened to her body.

She stammered, “The night is hot. I could not sleep.”

“Myself as well,” he said, still looking up—away from the rounded flair of her hips that swelled around that desperate patch of cloak. “I am on my way to prayer.” He stepped past her stiffly, his face averted, then paused. “Go into the house, child. Cover yourself. And go in.”

He strode away with great control. She watched his dark figure become fainter in the gloom, then heard his footsteps increasing in speed, like a man who waits until he is unseen before hurrying away from danger.

The next morning, under a cold, leaden sky, Honor stood inside the walled kitchen garden. Lady Alice was on her knees beside her, ferociously plucking out dead foliage among her neat rows of herbs. The last of the summer lay suddenly spent, dying in flower and leaf and departing bird, but despite the abrupt autumn chill Lady Alice’s herb garden remained robust.

“Her Grace is fond of my sweet marjoram, so mind you cut plenty for her,” Lady Alice commanded with gruff pride, and piled the tarragon she had cut into the basket on Honor’s arm.