The Queen's Lady (5 page)

Bastwick came from the house, pushing his way past the servants. The men kicking Ralph stopped and looked at the priest. Bastwick held up his hands, demanding order. He called for a couple of men to carry Hugh’s body up to his bedchamber. He commanded several of the women to tend to Lady Philippa. The rest of the servants he ordered back inside, all except the two men guarding Ralph. Bastwick glared down at Ralph with a look so full of fury that Honor wondered if Bastwick himself would deliver a fatal kick. But he remained calm. “Clap the murderer in the pillory,” he said.

The men dragged Ralph away. Everyone dispersed from the courtyard, Lady Philippa flailing her arms from inside the retreating knot of women and moaning, “Father, Father!” Bastwick strode after her to comfort her.

Honor was left alone. Everyone had forgotten her.

Hours later, she sat stiffly on the edge of her bed. For some time she had listened to the household uproar around her—men and women rushing up and down stairs with potions to calm Lady Philippa, with reports on carrying out Bastwick’s instructions at the pillory, with cuffs and curses for the children who came to peep at the dead young lord. Then the clamor had dwindled, as if from exhaustion, and finally the house had quieted to silence.

Honor tried to ignore the pain of her bruised body, tried to ignore the humiliating blood on the inside of her thigh, still sticky with semen. She needed all her concentration to think about Ralph. Come morning, she knew, they would hang him. The King’s law of arrest and trial did not penetrate this remote west country. She had often seen Tyrell hanging his own peasants whenever he saw fit. She knew she had to get Ralph away from here.

And get away herself. With Hugh dead her usefulness here was spent. Most likely Tyrell would cast her out alone and friendless into the world.

When she was certain the house slept she threw on a cape. She tiptoed to Hugh’s chamber and went in. Hugh lay on the bed fully dressed, looking as though he had fallen into a drunken sleep at the end of a night’s carousing. Honor reached out to the waist of his doublet. Deftly, she untied the strings of his purse and stashed the money into her pocket. Then, tugging on her hood against the drizzle, she slipped out into the night.

She heard Ralph’s faint, tuneless whistle coming from the pillory beyond the orchard. She hurried past the shadowy fruit trees. She found Ralph by the garden wall. He stood beside the pillory post, his head and hands poking through the wooden framework’s holes. He was whistling to block out the pain. His right ear was nailed to the wood.

For a moment Honor thought she would be sick. Then she scrambled to him. His eyes widened as he saw her. “Ralph,” she said, “we’re running away.” She slid back the bolt on the framework and lifted the top board, freeing his hands.

“Right,” he said grimly. Preparing himself, he sucked in a deep breath. Honor watched as he tore his ear from the nail.

They stole the big sorrel gelding that had carried them here five years before. With Ralph in front and Honor behind, the horse took them into the wooded track that led eastward away from Tyrell Court. As the night black boughs dripped rain on them, Honor glanced behind. No one was following them. We’re going to make it, she told herself over and over, feigning more courage than she felt. They would get back to London. And once in London, she knew where she would seek justice.

Ralph shuddered silently, weak from his ordeal. Honor saw that his makeshift bandage—a strip she had torn from her cloak—was soaked with blood over the mangled ear. She did not know what to do to help him. She held tightly to his waist and pressed her cheek against his back, hoping to pass strength to him through her embrace.

And then she turned her eyes to the dark path ahead.

3

T
hwack! The arrow pierced the target and set the two shafts already embedded there a-quivering.

“Delta!” Honor shouted, jubilant.

“And after two epsilons,” her guardian nodded. “Not bad. Care to try for an alpha before dinner?”

Honor held up her palm against the July sun and studied the target. Its concentric circles were boldly daubed with red letters of the Greek alphabet. She quickly fitted another arrow into her bow and fixed in her sights the
alpha
in the bull’s-eye. “Homer, be with me,” she murmured in invocation, and let the arrow fly.

It struck. “Alpha!” she cried in delight.

“Homer,” he assured her, smiling sagely, “is always with us.”

She laughed and eagerly reached for another arrow, but her guardian had already started toward the target to collect the shafts. “That’s enough. Attempts to improve on perfection can only drive us mad,” he called merrily over his shoulder. Halfway there he bent to pick up a stray arrow.

Honor slung her bow over her back and smiled. Her guardian was almost fifty and had never been a sportsman, and it was with a charming awkwardness that he wrestled the arrow from its tangle of low grass, his knee-length brown robe slipping askew on his shoulder. “You can’t fool me,” she called to his back. “You’re just hungry. You smell Lady Alice’s roasting beef.”

His head jerked in a sudden laugh, and he cast his hands upward in a gesture of surrender and declared, “Another bull’s-eye!”

She grinned. It was sweet to make Sir Thomas More laugh.

A young male servant popped over the brow of the low hill between the archery lawn and the house. “Pardon, Sir Thomas,” he called as he began down towards them. “A visitor to see you.”

More frowned. Honor could see he had forgotten the appointment. “The Vicar of Croydon, sir,” she reminded him. “He wrote you. You agreed to see him today.”

The lapse, she knew, was understandable; Sir Thomas managed a staggering workload. Over the last ten years he had held posts as Undertreasurer of the Exchequer, Speaker of the House of Commons and, most prestigiously, for three years, King Henry’s sole private secretary—all while sitting on the King’s Council too. For this outstanding service the King had knighted him. Sir Thomas had also found time to build up a literary reputation, one that even the King deferred to. Honor had been in awe when, soon after she had come into Sir Thomas’s custody, the royal barge had docked at Chelsea, and from a window she had watched the tall, golden-haired King strolling the grounds with his arm around Sir Thomas’s shoulder. He had come to give Sir Thomas the honor of writing an important public response to a tract by the wild German heretic, Luther. Besides his continuing duties on the Royal Council, Sir Thomas also heard the complaints of poor suitors in the Court of Requests and was a respected judge in Chancellor Wolsey’s court of Star Chamber. But Honor knew that Sir Thomas relished all this labor, lightened as it was by his friendship with both King Henry and Queen Catherine. He often shared a private supper before the palace fires with one or both of them.

She also knew, however, that he cherished his rare, quiet days at Chelsea. And today he had only been home for a matter of hours.

The servant reached Sir Thomas and handed him a letter fastened, Honor noticed, with the Queen’s seal. “This came for you as well, sir.”

More broke the seal and quickly scanned the note. Honor saw his brow crease, and his eyes flick to her face for a moment. Thoughtfully, he refolded the paper and put it inside his robe. “One thing at a time,” he said. He looked at the servant and sighed with resignation. “Show the Vicar into the solar, Matthew. We’re coming directly.”

Matthew started to go, then called back as an afterthought, “Oh, and Lady Alice says dinner will be late. Maud has burned the beef.”

More groaned. Honor laughed and took his arm to go in.

The Vicar pivoted in the oriel window as Honor and More entered. He was a stooped but wiry man in his sixties, floured with dust from the road. He bowed and wrung his hands with such suppressed excitement that it seemed to Honor as though he were winding up some inner spring. More strode forward to greet him and the Vicar pressed his eyes shut as if blinded by the sun.

“I’ll tell my pupils of this for years to come, Sir Thomas,” he wheezed, blinking. “The day I spoke with the author of
Utopia
.”

More smiled, the gracious host, and offered a chair. The Vicar, never taking his eyes from More, groped for the seat.

More indicated Honor. “My ward, Mistress Larke, will join us if you have no objection, sir.”

Honor bobbed a curtsy, then sat quietly at a far table to continue transcribing a list of petitioners to the Court of Requests.

“My secretary is ill with a flux,” More went on, moving behind his cluttered desk. “Mistress Larke is assisting me in his absence.” He laughed. “We two do our best, but still the claims of debts and the indictments and petitions seem to breed overnight like mushrooms.”

The Vicar did not smile. He was regarding Honor with an expression of discomfort. “Most unusual,” he muttered.

“My ward, sir, like my daughters, is an able scholar,” More assured him. “They have always pursued their studies on an equal footing with my son.”

The Vicar looked astonished.

More smiled. “Good learning, I’m sure you agree, leads to piety.”

“Doubtless, Sir Thomas. But, in the case of
women
. . .” His face hinted at grave doubt indeed.

“The maxim is especially true in the case of women,” More replied in good humor. Honor smiled over her writing; she knew this subject was one of his favorites. “For as women are by nature impure,” he went on, “so learning cleanses them and sets them on the road to pious living.”

The Vicar fell stonily silent, apparently unconvinced by this revolutionary manifesto.

“Honor Larke is an excellent case in point,” More continued enthusiastically. “She came into this house several years ago, illiterate, ill-used, and with no more understanding of God’s workings in this world or His glories in the next than has that poor, dumb creature there.” He nodded at a pet monkey curled in sleep on the window ledge. “Indeed far less, I should say, for the monkey lives contented with its natural cycle of feeding and sleep and does not go in fear of my boot at its ribs. Whereas this girl, after five years under a brutal lord, arrived at my door unsure if there was any contentment at all for the wretched in a wicked world.”

Honor blushed under the scrutiny of the two men and bent lower over her writing.

“Yet with education, sir,” More summed up proudly, “this same girl now goes blithely to her bed, ears ringing with the conjugation of Latin verbs and the voice of Plato, and happy in the assurance that her life and mind, enriched by duty and service to God, will not be despised by Him at the final hour. And when she wakes up to our cook’s burnt toast she can cut it into a right-angle triangle knowing that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the square of the other two sides.” He smiled at Honor. “Even her Greek improves.”

“Greek!” the Vicar exclaimed. Honor understood his shock. Many in the theology-dominated educational institutions like Oxford considered Greek studies to be dangerously close to paganism.

The Vicar pulled himself together. “Well, girl, you were lucky Sir Thomas found you,” he grunted. “I hope you are grateful.”

“He did not find me, sir. I found him.”

She had the satisfaction of seeing the Vicar’s eyes widen at her impertinent remark.

More strangled a laugh, then hastened to say with sober concern, “Pardon, sir, the fault is mine if the child speaks out of turn. I fear that, through contact with me, she has absorbed an annoying tendency of the lawyer’s mind—the sometimes overscrupulous passion to have every fact correct.” He cleared his throat and tugged at his robe with judgelike decorum, but finally was unable to hide his amusement. “Truth is, though, she’s right. She came knocking at my gate because, as she made quite clear to me, I was the only lawyer whose name she knew!” He laughed.

The Vicar frowned.

It was obvious that Honor’s presence would be an irritant to the meeting.

“Child,” More said gravely, “wait for me in the New Building. I have some business for you there.”