The Queen's Lady (65 page)

With the knot of citizens on their heels they bolted down the dark side streets, hand in hand, toward the sally port.

They ran past small fires still flickering in former Catholic houses, and past Angels scurrying like rats over rubble-heaps. They were almost at the sally port—it was just around the next corner—when they came up to a burning shop front, and suddenly its whole facade came crashing down in their path. Honor snatched Pieter back, away from the flaming debris. She looked behind them. The voices of the citizens and the glow of their torches above the rooftops were getting closer.

She turned back to gauge the best way around the fiery obstacle. The facade had fallen out into the street, but between the burning building and the burning debris there was a path that was clear. She thought they could get through it. She glanced inside and it registered in her mind that the place was a bookseller’s shop—or had been; it had been stripped of books. In its front room the flames that were creeping forward along the walls were eating empty bookcases and barren lecterns. Then, at the wall before her, something caught her eye. Her heart thudded heavily once, and then it seemed to stop.

An empty bookcase had been partly pulled out and stood at an angle to the wall. Behind it, gouged into the masonry, a niche held several sagging shelves. They were crammed haphazardly with books, and on the top shelf was a book that Honor had never expected to see again. It stood facing her. Its cover had been ripped away, perhaps in some violence before the owner managed to heap his treasure into this hiding place, and on the exposed title page, winking at her through the firelight, was Holbein’s bright blue speedwell. It stood there, only paces away from her.

Unthinking, she stepped forward to reach for it. Pain seared her wrist. She lurched back, beating the sparks on her sleeve against her body. Flames were now sweeping up the sides of the bookcase, cutting her off from the books behind. On the lower shelves of the niche some volumes were already blackening and smoking. One burst alight. She knew that within minutes the whole cache would be on fire. It was madness to risk herself for this book. Madness even to consider it. And impossible not to.

“Pieter!” she shouted. “Run! Get to the sally port, and get out!”

Obeying, he tore along the path, but once past the fire he stopped and turned. “You must come too!” he cried.

There’s no time, Honor thought. The citizens were coming . . . she had to get out with Pieter. Yet . . . if she acted quickly . . .

She snatched up the hem of her skirt, and with her teeth ripped off a strip and wrapped it several times around her hand. She was coughing in the black smoke boiling around her. The heat was intense. She thrust her hand into the flames and grabbed the bookcase and pulled. It toppled. She pawed at the fire in the wall. Smoking books tumbled down around her. She caught the one she wanted in her arms and stepped back, slapping sparks from its cover, and hugged it like a rescued child. She turned and dodged the blaze along the path and grabbed Pieter’s arm. As the fire billowed forward in a sudden sheet behind her, she and Pieter jumped away and raced around the corner.

“There it is!” cried Pieter, pointing.

The sally-port lay dead ahead.

He spurted forward to open it. Honor staggered on, her strength suddenly spent, her body heavy with its inner burden. The door swung open and she saw the black, yawning square of night beyond. She stepped outside. She was conscious of the ringing blackness of the starless sky. And then, of stumbling endlessly over a pitted moonscape. The rain finally fell. Within an hour they were drenched. But Pieter knew the way to the river bank path that would take them to St. Stephen’s-in-the-Woods.

Honor let herself be led.

She awoke because of the singing.

Still half asleep, she was aware that she was nestled in straw in a warm corner of the monks’ cow byre. Daylight sifted in through cracks in the wattle-and-daub walls. A light rain whispered on the thatch roof. She closed her eyes and stretched, and the straw released a fragrance of summer meadows. A memory drifted back of the straw in Mrs. Sydenham’s attic where she and Thornleigh had last lain together, and an ache to lie again in his embrace, engulfed by the warmth and strength of his body, flooded through her. The shock of reality stabbed—never would she see him again!—and she was overwhelmed with misery.

Then the baby in her belly kicked. She realized she was ravenous.

Around the corner of the cow-stall the singing continued. It was Pieter’s solo, sweet, soprano voice blithely caroling a
Kyrie Eleison
. Sharp scrapes of his knife whittling a stick accompanied the tune and kept strict tempo. “
Father, have mercy upon us
. . .”

Honor smiled. The plan had worked. They had met no soldiers, and the monks at the small monastery had been glad to take them in, though, as the Abbot had apologized, their guest house had recently burned, and women, of course, were not allowed in the infirmary. Honor hadn’t cared. The Abbot had handed them dry clothing, the byre was warm and snug, and she and Pieter had slid into sleep the moment their weary bodies had collapsed into the straw.

Yes, she smiled to herself: together, she and Pieter had done it.

“The book,” she cried, remembering, and sat bolt upright. She pawed the straw, searching for it. It wasn’t there. Had she only dreamed she had found it?

Pieter came skidding around the corner. He tossed aside his knife and stick. “I have it, my lady!” He pulled the book out of his shirt and thrust it at her. “See? I kept it safe for you. And I have these for you, too.” From his pockets he fished out two small red apples and an egg-sized mound of soft white cheese wrapped in a cabbage leaf.

Honor’s eyes darted with longing between the food and the book. Hunger and curiosity battled inside her. Hunger won. She laid the book in her lap and gobbled the cheese, then an apple. Pieter knelt beside her, his face bright.

“The storm is over, my lady,” he said, looking at the roof. “It’s only a sprinkle now. And Brother Karl is just harnessing his cart to go to Hagen. He says we may go with him, if we will. Shall we?”

By the time they met Brother Karl outside, the rain had completely stopped. Honor thanked the blushing young friar for his offer of transportation. She and Pieter climbed into the back of the cart among a dozen hat-sized rounds of goat cheese tucked into straw. The cart joggled out of the monastery gates and into the dripping woods, and Pieter curled beside Honor and began to doze. Honor watched the monk’s back until it jostled along with the easy rhythm of the horse’s chinging harness.

Then, with excitement fluttering in her breast, she took up the book. There was no doubt about it: whether it was the original or a copy she did not know, but it was certainly the same book the dying foreigner had thrust into her hands—the hands of a lost, illiterate child—that May Day night seventeen years before. Above Holbein’s blue speedwell were the black printed shapes of words that had stared back at her, obstinately hiding their meaning. Now, they proclaimed themselves in bold Latin:

A Treatise on the Immortality of the Soul

By Giulio della Montagna

Doctor of Philosophy

University of Bologna

It was not a long essay. Within an hour she had read it all. Its thesis was simple but—although couched in calm, philosophical logic—wildly heretical. Mankind would do well, this della Montagna was suggesting, to abandon the fairy tale of life after death.

Honor’s hand rested gently on the final page. Her heart was racing. Immortality a fairy tale? Something simply made up to placate the human heart, like Pieter’s fantasies of saint’s bones and miracles? Yes, she thought, immortality is something people desperately want to be true. And, yes, the desire for something to be real does not make it real.

Her mind leaped ahead, charged with the energy of discovery. If immortality was a dream fabricated by man, then, she asked herself, might it be possible that all the other so-called laws of religion were mere fabrications as well? For belief in immortality was the foundation of religion, whether the believer was Catholic or Protestant, or even a Turk. And if that foundation was no more than a mirage—a wish, a hope—then the whole creaking edifice must come crumbling down.

Suddenly, nothing seemed so clear to her, so utterly knowable, than that the childish craving to live eternally in heaven had led mankind to live inside a web of lies on earth.

She
knew
this. She felt that she had always known it.

Had she known it as long ago as the day of Ralph’s death? She had blamed an uncaring God and could not pray, but she had realized even then—had she not?—that it was men, not God, who demanded the killing. And when she was so desolate in Münster, her grief and guilt weighing her down so that she had fallen to her knees beside Pieter, ready to pray, at that moment, yes, she had come face-to-face with the truth that she alone could act in her life—could work with or work against the lives around her—and that God, whatever God was, had no part to play. But had she known the
whole
truth that night? The extraordinary, dizzying truth that della Montagna’s essay was leading her to see?

Her past beliefs were breaking apart and dispersing like the spores of torn puffballs on the wind; they now seemed just as insubstantial. And as new thoughts tugged the dead roots of superstition and dogma from her mind, clearing space, she saw that she knew the whole truth now. All the fairy-tales—immortality of the soul, heaven and hell, Satan and sin—God himself?—all stood naked and quaking, unmasked as the paltry human fears and desires they had always been. They were fables of reward and punishment to make children obey; to make adults into children.

The realization was exhilarating. It was liberation.

The cart broke out of the woods into sunshine, and Honor let her head fall back, eyes closed, and felt the sun’s warmth kiss her eyelids and cheeks. Slowly, a laugh began to bubble up from deep inside her, for the irony was sweet. For seventeen years she had wondered what strange and powerful mystery lay inside the lost little book, but now that she had found the book she saw that she had already discovered its mystery—discovered it all by herself the night she had kneeled in the deanery chapel beside Pieter: life is all.

She turned the final page to close the book and exposed the inside of the back cover. Running diagonally, and marred with several ink blots, were three scrawled lines of text that her child’s eyes had comprehended only as three unraveling strings.

I write in haste. They have broken into the house. If any should find this work of mine, I beg you, deliver it to the one who has inspired so much in so many. To Erasmus of Rotterdam.

Her fingertips touched the lines in wonder. So the dying foreigner had been the book’s author, della Montagna himself! Of course! Now she recalled his words, so strange sounding at the time: “
I wrote it . . . for you!
” Finally, she understood why he had been able to smile at her that May Day night, though he was dying. It was because he could die in peace, undisturbed by the terrors of a manmade God. Hours later her father had died, too, but deranged with fear at the Church’s curse of eternal torment in hell. If only her father could have seen that it was all just words!

The sharp new relief into which those two May Day deaths were now re-cast suddenly overwhelmed her. Understanding took hold of her brain and shook it, like a great spring wind bearing down on a tree to shake loose last year’s clutch of shriveled leaves until only the branches remain, clean, stark, ready to bud out into new life. It was a gift of far greater value than della Montagna could ever have imagined he was handing to a child.

Or had he?

“I wrote it . . . for you
.”

The young monk driving the cart looked over his shoulder at Honor and said shyly, “Hagen is some forty miles off. I hope the journey will not tire the lady?”

“Not at all, Brother,” Honor assured him. “A good time for contemplation. And,” she added quietly, “it seems it is only the beginning of our journey.”

The odd vibrancy in her voice made Pieter turn his head. He flopped onto his back, slapping bits of straw from his bright hair. “A journey?” he asked. “Where are we going, my lady?”

She had not known until a moment ago. She looked out at the grain fields basking in sunshine all around them. They seemed to push the cart onward with their radiance. “We’re going to see a priest,” she said, smiling with delight at the paradox. “The wisest priest of all. Desiderius Erasmus.”

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