The Tapestry (29 page)

She came forward a few more steps, and raised an object, swiftly, before darting all the way to my side. A long silver knife quivered at my throat.

“Make a sound and I’ll kill you,” she said, but her voice had changed. It was stronger, and much lower. Her eyes were no longer bandaged; they glittered deep within her hood.

My throat burned where the knife pierced. With her left hand, she seized my arm and began to pull me closer to the cabin entrance, to the place where the man at the wheel couldn’t see. This was no blind, old woman, but a strong and determined assassin.

“When attacked, don’t submit.” I remembered Jacquard’s teaching as if he were whispering in my ear. “Your assailant is counting on you to go limp from shock and fear. Do the opposite.”

She’s pulling me to a place where she can kill me unseen.

That realization shot through me, and with it, the determination to use one of Jacquard’s exercises to save my life.

My left hand was not my lead, but I used it to stick two of my fingers into the woman’s eyes as hard as I could. I felt bone and something wet.

“Joanna!” someone shouted behind me. It was Geoffrey. But my focus was on getting away from Mistress Collins, who had let go of my arm, howling in pain and slashing the knife in the air in desperate arcs but not stabbing me because I had scrambled away from her.

“What’s happening down there?” called out the man on the deck above.

My attacker clutched her knife, cupping the left eye, which seemed to be causing most of the pain.

“Get behind me, Joanna,” ordered Geoffrey, and I did so, as he pulled out his own knife and pointed it at my attacker. “You. Come with me—now. We’re going to see the captain.”

She didn’t move toward Geoffrey. Instead she pulled down her hood and lowered her hand from her eye.

“Mother Mary,” I gasped.

This was no woman. I looked on the cropped brown hair of a man of medium height and slender build. A thin line of blood trickled from the eye I wounded.

His mouth quivered in the bright moonlight and, turning to me, he said, “Welcome to the Palace of Whitehall, Mistress Stafford.”

I flinched as if he struck me. I knew that voice and, staring at him, I knew the man. He was the page who escorted me that first day at Whitehall. No beard now—but it was him.

He tossed his knife away, groped for the top of the railing, pulled himself up, and paused for a second, straddling it in that long gray cloak of a blind woman. A truly bizarre sight.

“Christ’s blood!” Geoffrey grunted, springing forward, hands outstretched. But he wasn’t fast enough. With one final determined heave, the man jumped overboard and disappeared into the dark sea.

31

G
eoffrey didn’t seem angry with me on the ship. No time for it. There was the shock of what happened and then questions to be answered. The ship’s captain turned out to be terrified of scandal and determined to keep it from the passengers that a man, dressed as a blind old woman, tried to stab a passenger. “No one will ever book passage on a ship of mine again,” he said, wiping his face.

The captain later knocked on the door of the women’s cabin and told the German women that Mistress Collins had fallen ill and was removed for the night. The next morning, her condition was publicly changed to fatal. Everyone was told Mistress Collins had died in the night and been buried at sea, as regulations required. Mother Lowe and the others expressed the customary amount of regret for a woman they had known, slightly, for two days.

The captain put more effort into concocting a story to explain the disappearing passenger than looking into the crime itself: “A madman—how else can anyone explain such actions?” he said, throwing up his hands.

Geoffrey withdrew into silence, for he knew, as well as I did, that the man who threw himself off the boat was not mad. Quite the opposite. The planning, the cunning, the ability to anticipate and improvise—these were all indications of sanity and intelligence. Geoffrey asked me if he was the same man who attacked me on my first day at Whitehall, and I said yes. This attack was even more audacious than the others, and revealed, as Geoffrey had pointed out before, the
presence of resources. Of men. It was not a single person; far from it.

It’s only a matter of time before they succeed.
That is what ran through my mind that sleepless night, lying rigid and terrified in the cabin, made slightly more spacious by the absence of “Mistress Collins,” now floating lifeless in the sea.

I felt profound gratitude for the presence of Mother Lowe and the three other Germans. If it weren’t for them, I would have been alone with my killer that first night, a prospect that was unbearable. To have gone to sleep, unknowing, beside that vicious predator? It made my breath catch in my lungs. And yet he was just a tool. Who was behind this, who would pursue me so relentlessly? Bishop Gardiner had placed a stowaway on board the last time, to watch me. But not to kill me.

It was close to dawn when the realization crept over me that there was something about the character of this attack that seemed familiar. I’d also felt that in the litter being conveyed to Dartford but attributed the sensation to fever. I knew that a disguise of an old blind woman had been used before in some way that I’d not personally witnessed but knew of nonetheless. With a shudder, I remembered: At Dartford Priory, when I was a novice, I’d heard that after the infamous Sack of Rome in 1527, the pope escaped from the Castel Sant’Angelo by use of disguise. One day Pope Clement VII walked out of the castle, in the clothes of a peddler, some say. But others say he was dressed as an old blind woman.

As the water lapped against the side, and the oblivious women snored in the darkness of our swaying cabin, I tried to put a name to this hunt for my life. There was something significant about the choice of disguise of a desperate pope, but I couldn’t, try as I might, push my way through to a conclusion. I would bring this nagging sense of familiarity to Geoffrey. Together we could find answers.

That day, the third day, our ship reached Antwerp, one of at least fifty to arrive during the daylight hours. I tried to force myself to act in a normal fashion. I did not want Master Holbein, or anyone else, to know what happened.

As we walked through the city, it seemed even more prosperous than when I’d seen it a year before—the flat, tidy streets teemed with hundreds of smiling, laughing tradespeople. Nothing impeded the flow of goods to the center of commerce for all of northern Europe.

Master Holbein knew of a respectable inn, favored by many English wool merchants, that let rooms for a short time. The plan was to rest overnight and then continue on to Brussels, a three-day ride on horseback. Geoffrey made sure the lock on my door was a good one.

Exhaustion captured me, and I slept deeply the first night in Antwerp. I knew nothing until I heard a pounding on the door. I opened my eyes to full daylight.

“Joanna, dress yourself,” Geoffrey shouted on the other side of the door. “Joanna—hurry!”

In a panic, I threw on a bodice and kirtle and unlocked the door. Geoffrey pushed it open with the palm of his hand, and stormed inside my room, his face twisted with fury.

“Do you know what this is?” he asked, shoving a small vial in my face. It contained a deep red powder.

“No,” I said. “Why are you upset?”

“This was in the box of the man who tried to kill you, along with a change of clothes, rope, a map of Antwerp and a sizable amount of money. I took the vial to an apothecary and he analyzed it. This is poison, Joanna. Slow-acting poison that is of the highest quality in Christendom—or the worst quality, depending on how you look at it. I had to buy the apothecary’s silence. I think he wanted to send for the magistrate after looking at this, he was so alarmed. He might still do so.”

I struggled to take it in. “So I was to be poisoned, rather than stabbed and thrown overboard?”

“Well, that would have been the most intelligent way, should your assassin wish to evade suspicion. But once the other women were put in your cabin and he lost direct contact to you, he had to improvise.”

“That’s why he decided to stab me.”

“Yes, and then no doubt throw you overboard. He had to silence
you first so you wouldn’t scream and then hope no one heard the splash.”

Frightened, I tried to back away. But Geoffrey wouldn’t allow it. He seized me by the shoulders, and shook me.

“What do you know—what do you know?” he demanded.

“Know what?” I shouted.

“Don’t parry with me, Joanna. You know something so dangerous—or you’ve betrayed someone so powerful— that there’s a plot to kill you the likes of which I have never seen before, never heard of before in my nine years as a constable. But you won’t tell me what you’ve done. I have to try to protect you without full knowledge. It’s like fighting with both arms tied behind my back. And what an opponent! The person behind it all is so formidable that an operative would throw himself into the sea rather than risk betraying him.”

I twisted out of his grip. How could I tell Geoffrey all that I knew, of the truth about the prophecy, the plan to kill Henry VIII that I was at the heart of? Or the more recent treasonous plot to destroy Cromwell, using the dark arts of magic? Such knowledge would put him at risk as much as me—more so, if he went to the English authorities, as I feared he would feel compelled to do.

“Who trained you?” he said, his voice as hard as steel.

How did he know about Jacquard Rolin?

“Train me to do what?” I threw back at him.

“To stick your fingers in a man’s eyes. It’s not what you learned in the priory, is it, Joanna? And when I first knew you—and I saw you in some terrible spots, too—you never defended yourself in such a way. But something happened to you after Edmund left England. Who did you spend time with? And why?”

Geoffrey was closer to the truth than he’d ever come before. For a few wild seconds, I wanted to tell him everything. I wanted to share with him the frustrating feeling two nights past that I knew the person who wanted me dead. But was that the right thing to do for him? I was so distressed, tears smarted.

“I’ve opened myself to you—I’ve trusted you with my open heart, not just on the ship when I spoke of my covenant, but before that, several times,” he said, anguished. “But not you. You have never put your trust in me, Joanna.”

Now the tears poured from my eyes.

“I do trust you,” I said.

Geoffrey laughed at me.

“Why don’t you leave me to my fate then, Geoffrey?” I asked, a sob catching my voice.

“It is
tempting
,” he roared. “But you won’t have it that easy, Joanna. You’re coming with me to Salzburg.”

Wiping my eyes, I said, “No, I will stay in Brussels while you travel.”

“You’d be dead in a month,” he said. “As soon as word got back to England that the attempt failed, another plot would form, and without me in Brussels or any friend, they’d have a clear path.”

“Then I will book passage to London. I’ll return to Dartford alone. I’ve always been safe there.”

“True. Though
why
you are safe there has kept me awake many a night, baffled. But you are part of the royal household now, Joanna. How could you possibly defy the commands of the king if he summoned you to court?”

I didn’t have an answer for that.

“No, the only place that I am sure is safe for you is the wilds of Europe, which happens to be exactly where I am headed.”

I gathered myself. “Very well, Geoffrey,” I said, seeing no choice.

He turned and left, just as angry as when he arrived.

Incredibly, the day worsened. Master Holbein came to my room in the afternoon, with a grim Geoffrey in tow, to tell me the alarming news he’d picked up in Antwerp.

“The drought and terrible heat that struck England—it is much, much worse here,” Holbein lamented. “No one can remember such heat. Harvests are ruined; the grapes on the vines are dead. The poorest people are expected to starve this winter in the Netherlands, Ger
many, France, Italy, the Swiss confederation, everywhere. There will be pestilence, they say. The Rhine is so low that boats cannot travel safely on it. They have closed the gates to Venice and other cities in Italy, so that strangers cannot enter and rob them of stored food. You can expect that to crop up everywhere in the next few months.”

“What worse time could there be to travel?” Geoffrey muttered.

“
Mein Gott
, it could not possibly be worse,” said Holbein. “But I must reach Basel, my wife and my children need me desperately. Geoffrey, be ready to deposit Mistress Joanna in Brussels and leave with me as swiftly as possible.”

When Geoffrey informed him that after a week or so in Brussels, I would be coming with them to Salzburg, he could not believe it, and tried his best to dissuade me.

“Mistress Joanna, it is a trip of some rigor when conditions are normal—and they are not normal,” said Holbein. “You simply cannot go to Salzburg.”

Geoffrey and I were unable to calm Holbein’s fears, and in the end, after a long and emotional discussion, Master Hans Holbein left Antwerp alone. He was in a panic over fear for his family’s lives—no doubt underscored by guilt over not seeing them for eight long years—and, despite his fondness for us, would not be delayed.

The morning he left us, Holbein delivered final words of warning. “Please, please be careful. The English are not hated in the German lands but I doubt they are loved either, because of King Henry. The Catholic princes despise Henry the Eighth because the pope excommunicated him. But much of the German lands are Lutheran, and they don’t trust him, either, because England does not enact true reform. There are more than two hundred German states, and each one follows their own idea of religion.”

I said, shaking my head, “I cannot understand it. The Emperor Charles is the most powerful ruler on earth and yet more than half of Germany, the heart of his empire, refuses to follow him in religion. He is the leader of all Catholics but he does nothing about it.
In England, the smallest infractions in faith are punished.” I shuddered as I thought of those six men, strapped to hurdles and dragged through London on their way to a terrible death.

“You do not understand the German mind because you know so little of the German history,” said Holbein. “The emperor does not command the princes, as Henry the Eighth does his subjects. Emperor Charles convenes them, again and again, to conferences we call Diets, so that he can rule by persuasion. I think that after this long and difficult journey, you shall understand us much, much more. Ah, I shall think of you and the good constable every day, and though I am not much of a praying man, I shall pray for you.”

Master Holbein enveloped me in a crushing hug and whispered, “Mistress Joanna, please keep your heart open to the possibility of transformation. Promise me?”

I did, still uncertain what he meant. It was hard to say good-bye to my friend Hans Holbein, particularly since I wondered if I would ever see him again. I’d agreed to go with Geoffrey Scovill to faraway Salzburg—what else could I do?—but there were moments, more and more of them, when I feared we hurtled down a path from which there could be no return.

At first there were few signs of trouble. The road leading out of Antwerp was lined with attractive villages. We reached Brussels early one afternoon, and paused to admire the large city, enclosed by a long wall of brick and tower. “We can only spend a few days here, Joanna,” said Geoffrey. “It’s almost September, and Holbein is right. As people begin to run out of food across the countryside, it’s only going to become more difficult and dangerous to travel.”

But a short stay was not possible. I was expected to reside in the establishment paid for by the English crown. For years Master Moinck lived there. Now it was mine to occupy, and waiting for me were notices of two appointments I was expected to keep. In a week’s time, I was supposed to meet with the head of the largest workshops in Brussels. And in three weeks’ time, I must report to Coudenberg Palace to be presented to Queen Mary of Hungary, Regent of the Netherlands.