Queen's Lady, The

by Kyle, Barbara

  Honor glanced up the lane at the citizens milling in the square for supper. She couldn’t take the boy there. That crowd would be worse than the one in the cathedral.

  The boy was tugging her sleeve. “No, this way!” he said. She followed him, and they ran down the lane to the lime trees in the cathedral close where the bodies of the executed prisoners still hung in their chains around the tree trunks, putrefying.

  They ran past burned buildings—the canons’ college, the cloister, the library, the charnel house—all empty. The whole cathedral enclosure was as deserted as if plague had swept through it. The boy pulled her down a tree-lined path. They reached a two-story house and stopped in front of it. It was a good-sized stone structure, but it was blackened from fire, and appeared empty and gutted like all the rest. The boy looked around to make sure they had not been followed. “Come,” he said.

  Inside the ravaged main room Honor stood looking at the staircase. Or what was left of the staircase. It had a beginning—one charred step. And it had an end—two steps suspended from the upper floor. But it had no middle. Fire had obviously eaten it away, then had died before it had reached the second floor.

  A rope dangled from the railing of the landing. The boy grabbed hold and shimmied up. Honor watched his agility, fascinated; for the first time he really looked to her like a boy.

  He jumped onto the landing and stared down at her. Clearly, he expected her to climb the rope as well, but in her skirts, and pregnant, it was impossible. She shrugged her incompetence. He slipped down the rope again. “Wait,” he said, and disappeared around the corner. She heard a scraping and banging, and when he returned he was hauling a ladder. Together, they lifted it and leaned it against the landing. He scurried up, and she climbed after.

  He led her to the main bedchamber. She stood in the doorway, amazed. The room had been stripped of everything valuable except for one item: a huge, pillowy feather mattress in its carved four-poster frame. Its covers and hangings were gone. The room’s chairs, tables, bookcases, wall sconces—even the window shutters—had all been taken, but this small meadow of luxury remained. Perhaps the bed’s sheer size had discouraged the looters; perhaps the fire had forced them out before they could remove it or destroy it. In any case, it sat magnificent and solitary in the barren room.

  The boy smiled up at Honor. “You are welcome to my home, madam,” he said. The Latin was as elegant as an Abbot’s.

  Honor and the boy sat together cross-legged on the deanery’s big feather bed. They glanced out the naked window every now and then when a soldier’s shout or a laugh arose from Münster’s square. Night was skulking closer to the house like an undertaker summoned to a death. But Honor and the boy were absorbed in talk. He was telling her his story.

  His name was Pieter. He had been left as a foundling at the small monastery of St. Stephen’s-in-the-Woods about an hour’s walk along the riverbank from Münster, and had been raised there by the monks, which explained his fluent Latin. A year ago he had been brought to the cathedral to assist the Dean, a Father Mueller, whose house this was. Pieter had lived here, and Father Mueller had been teaching him—two hours every day, Pieter said proudly, “no matter how busy Father was.” Then, Pieter said, the barbarians had come. The priests had begun to leave. At Epiphany the last ones, including Father Mueller, had been chased out of the city gates with pitchforks. Pieter had hidden in a woodpile, and when the mob was through he moved into the floating second floor of the ruined deanery. He had been living on stores in the kitchen the citizens had not found, but lately the food had run out and now he snatched what he could from the square when the citizens weren’t looking. “They don’t scare me,” he said stoutly. “Father told me God will punish them.”

  Honor had no wish to press him about this Father Mueller, the man, she imagined, who had sodomized him. And so she said, as brightly as she could, “I’m grateful the monks taught you so well. It’s good to have someone to talk to. I know so little German.”

  Pieter grimaced. “The peasants’ tongue.”

  “Don’t you speak it?”

  He shook his head.

  “Not at all?”

  “Why should I? I’m not a peasant.”

  She almost laughed. He might as well have been holding his nose in the air.

  “When Father Mueller comes back and we finish my schooling he’s going to send me to the university in Cologne. He says I’m going to be a bishop.”

  She managed a small smile, then looked out the window where a quarter-moon was trying to shine above the glow of the watch fires in the square. She hadn’t the heart to tell this child that as long as the Anabaptist mob ruled here no priest was coming back. Nor did she want to face the fear that was creeping into the corners of her mind. “It’s late,” she said. “You should go to sleep.”

  Pieter stretched out his legs as if to lie down, then looked unsure. “You’ll stay, won’t you?”

  She nodded, smiling.

  “And may I sleep beside you?” he asked.

  “Of course. It’s your bed.”

  “No,” he said, looking a little guilty. “It’s Father’s.” He pointed to a corner. “I used to sleep over there. Except on Saturdays. On Saturdays I slept here.”

  “I see,” she murmured.

  Pieter lowered his head. “I hope he won’t be angry.”

  “Pieter,” Honor said softly, “you don’t need to fear him any more.”

  “Who?”

  “Father Mueller.”

  Pieter looked confused. “But I love Father Mueller,” he said simply. “I miss him. On Sunday mornings he always gave me candied apricots or sugared almonds. I like the apricots best. He told funny stories, too.” He looked at her again with the sheepish expression. “But I don’t think Father will mind that I’ve been using his bed while he’s away, do you? And, after all, you are a guest.”

  So that was all his guilty worry amounted to, Honor realized. He was only concerned about their using the priest’s bed. “I’m sure it’s alright,” she said.

  Reassured, Pieter lay down beside her. She continued to sit and look out the window, thinking.

  After a few moments Pieter asked cautiously, “My lady?”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you . . . are you like the other barbarians?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you a heretic?”

  She smiled down at him and stroked the golden curls. “I’m just a human creature, Pieter, as hungry and confused as you.”

  “Oh, I’m not so hungry now. Thank you for the bread and cheese. And you shouldn’t worry. God will fix everything soon.” He flipped over on his side to sleep. “I knew you couldn’t be one,” he murmured, satisfied. “None of the barbarians know Latin.”

  Honor rested her head on the wall. The room was dark, but the feeble moonlight cast a patina over the cobwebs in the corners and over the dust on the window sill. Mice scrabbled and squeaked behind the walls.

  She had to smile at the boy’s assuredness, at his happy delusions, but it was a smile heavy with uncertainty and self-doubt. She had been wrong about so much, and here, in this child whom she had cast as a victim, she saw that she had been wrong again. Pieter did not see himself as helpless and exploited. He recalled only good things about the priest who had kept him—the fondness, the teaching, the stories, the treats.

  Yet the child was living inside a bubble of dreams.

  Just like me, she thought bitterly.

  Never had she felt so alone, never so wretched. She had misread, misjudged everyone. Nothing was as it seemed. This starving, delicate-looking boy, it turned out, felt superior and invincible. Herr Deurvorst’s kindness was all veneer. She saw now that she had been wrong about everything and everyone—and from the very beginning. When Ralph had been burned she had been so sure it was Bastwick who had hounded him to the stake, then had discovered it was Sir Thomas. She had revered Sir Thomas, the witty scholar, the loving father, and had found that his heart was p
itted with hatred: the man of letters who burned books and men. She had betrayed the Queen in the hope that the King, with a new wife, would curb the Church’s abuses, and then found that the King had no such intention. She had been wrong to trust Cromwell’s assurances, and wrong, so very wrong—her greatest mistake—to carry Frish back to England, to his death. Even Richard, she told herself—and at the thought of him grief stabbed mercilessly—even there I deceived myself. Richard the selfish, unable to understand her important work, that was how she had thought of him for so long, and so obstinately. And she, tunneling ever deeper into her private spite against Sir Thomas, was unable to see the light of Richard’s love until he pulled her up and shook her eyes open. In the end, he risked everything for her. Because of her great mistake, he lost everything for her . . . died for her . . .

  She rocked her head from side to side, sickened by the horrible results of her blunders, wretched with the knowledge of her errors, her willful blindness. Even so, she thought as tears stung, all the dreadful loss might at least have meant something if it had brought about a shred of good. But it had not been so, for, worst of all, she knew now that she had been wrong to believe in the reformers. She had thought they were going to create a new world, but all they had created was a new Church. Here, it was as fear-wracked, as vicious, as brutally tribal as the old one. Good God, what was this hell she had landed in, where children were stoned in the name of Christ and left to starve?

  She felt her spirit spiraling down into hopelessness. Everything beloved lost; everything innocent despoiled. And was this hell-on-earth to be her punishment for her great offenses? Why not? she thought. For sheer, wicked wrong-headedness who deserved it more? And how masterfully ironic that she should be cast out as a heathen for consorting with a Catholic child!

  Despair was seeping like ice-water into her heart. She heard again in her mind Hermann Deurvorst’s words: Only the sinless shall remain. What was to become of this child? What was to become of her? Of her baby? Were they fated to perish here, throttled by the frenzy of a city, a world, gone mad? She slumped back against the wall, unable to prod her mind to action, unable to think of how she was going to survive against the mob of Münster. How long until she and Pieter were found and . . . exterminated?

  She whispered to the darkness, “I don’t know what to do . . .”

  “My lady?” Pieter murmured. He turned to her.

  Still speaking to the air she said, “I’m so afraid . . .”

  “I know what to do,” Pieter said. He jumped off the bed and pulled her by the hand. “I’ll show you. Then you’ll know, too.”

  He led her down the dark corridor to a door and opened it. In the blackness she could see nothing, but she sensed that the room was small; she smelled its stuffiness. Pieter let go her hand and hurried forward and scratched around. She saw the flare of a piece of tinder, Pieter’s hand cupped around it and glowing with its light. She looked up. They were standing in a chapel.

  All its treasures were gone. There was no altar, no carved saint, no crucifix, no chalice, no paten. But she knew, in her bones, that it had been a chapel, and when she looked at the wall above where the altar must have once stood, she noticed a lightened pattern on the stone in the form of a cross. A crucifix had hung there.

  Pieter was reaching into a shallow cupboard. He brought out a small, stubby votive candle which he lit with the tinder then placed on the floor. He reached in again and carefully lifted out a heavy, golden crucifix. He crouched down and placed the foot of the crucifix on the floor beside the candle, and let it tilt back so that the wrought golden Christ on the cross seemed to slump in agony against the wall. He stepped back beside Honor, crossed himself, and kneeled.

  “This is what to do, my lady,” he said, pressing his palms together and smiling up at her. “God will hear us.”

  The light of the small flame glimmered over the golden image of sacrifice, the sacred wellspring of Christianity. The tiny room glowed with the comforting light. “Will He?” she whispered.

  “I’ll pray for a miracle,” Pieter said. He stared intently at the cross, his green eyes gleaming. “And you,” he whispered to her, “you pray, too.”

  Is that the answer? she asked herself. Pray? Was that what she must do? She’d been wrong about everything else . . .

  She lowered herself and kneeled beside Pieter and folded her hands in supplication like his. She gazed at the golden cross, at the twisted body of the God, made man, who was dying, forever, to atone for the sins of humankind. She felt the hypnotic pull of its authority. Its power was mesmerizing. Old phrases of contrition and beseeching that had not passed her lips in years began to creep back into her mind and take hold. My sinful pride has led to abominable errors. There is no strength in me. Lord, have mercy upon me.

  “At St. Mauritz’s once,” Pieter whispered, “at Corpus Christi, I saw the priest lift out the blessed Saint’s bone from the reliquary. His leg bone. Some of the flesh was still on it.”

  Honor’s concentration was broken. She frowned at Pieter.

  “It’s true, my lady. I saw it! And that day a man with a withered foot who had not walked a step for ten years prayed over the Saint’s bone and then jumped from his cot and danced off down the nave. A miracle! And I heard that a dumb woman who prayed over the bone was later praying at a chapel crucifix and she saw the wounds of Our Lord bleeding afresh, and she touched the blood and put a drop on her tongue and suddenly she could speak. Another miracle! And we’ll get one as well if we just pray hard enough, my lady.” He closed his eyes, but then he, too, frowned. “Too bad we don’t have the blessed Saint Mauritz’s bone now,” he said. “That would bring us a miracle for sure.”

  She laughed. She knew it was wrong, but the image of her and this extraordinary boy mumbling for a miracle over a rotting piece of meat on a bone was too much, and she laughed. And at that moment, she felt a flutter in her belly. Then a tight tug. It was so unexpected, so strange a sensation—like a heavy wave of water lapping on itself deep within her—that she gasped. The baby had quickened. There was a life inside her. For the first time she understood it, really understood it, in her very blood: a life!

  She sat back on her heels. “I’m going to have a baby,” she exclaimed.

  “Now?” Pieter asked.

  He was gazing at her mouth as if he expected a small, bald head to slither out. It made her laugh again.

  Again, she felt the flutter inside. Another laugh escaped her, so wonderful was the sensation.

  She was suddenly, overwhelmingly, aware. Aware that a moment before she had let a fanciful child talk her into kneeling to beg help from a piece of hammered gold. Aware that they had been doing it because they were powerless. Aware most of all that, somehow, she must find power—real power—and she must find it within herself. Nothing else, no one else, could protect this life that she was carrying. Richard’s child.

  God could not help her. Only she could help herself. Only she could act, and to act she had to think. And all these religious motions—begging exemption from punishment, beseeching reward, carefully cultivating the delusion of being in God’s care—all of these were just impediments to clear thinking.

  Clear thinking, she told herself. That’s what was required now.

  Her eyes locked onto the image of torture on the cross. Now that she felt life stir inside her, the image suddenly disgusted her. Its message was of sin and punishment and, above all, of death. This was the icon of a cult of death. But life must be her concern now—her own life, Pieter’s life, the life of her baby. Wrong she may have been about many things, and terrible had been the consequences of her folly, but, thinking clearly, she knew there had been much right on her side, too. The missions—the rescue of over two dozen people—that had been right. And there was still some good she could do, and must do.

  From an open window at the end of the corridor she heard the smash of glass from the square, then a peal of wild laughter. She placed her hand on her belly and made a silent v
ow. As she had once rescued lives from the fury of the Catholic state, now she promised that, whatever it required from her, her child would not be born in this Protestant hell.

  In Amsterdam, Leonard Legge kindly thanked the Dutch housewife for her time, touched his hat to her, and stepped away from her threshold. As soon as the woman had closed the door, Legge dropped his smile and spat on the ground. “Bugger all foreigners,” he growled. He wondered if the stupid woman had even understood his questions.

  He’d asked the questions so many times, they now seemed meaningless even to him. “Had the lady or gentleman seen an Englishwoman named Mistress Thornleigh in these parts? Did the lady or gentleman have any information of any person who had seen such a woman?”

  Legge glanced down the street. A half-block away, on the far side of the street, his master stood asking the same questions of a tousle-haired housemaid. Legge saw the maid shake her head. No luck there either, it seemed. As usual. Legge wondered how long his master would continue this useless search. Last month, they had knocked on half the doors of Antwerp. And now, thanks to the hazy recollection of a half-drunk Antwerp sailor, they were disturbing the fat housewives of Amsterdam. It seemed to Legge that they might as well be searching for a special grain of sand upon the seashore.

  Legge watched his master turn away from the house—with every rebuff his shoulders seemed to slump a fraction more—and trudge on to the next door. He was exhausted, that was plain. And the Lord knew he was not yet fully recovered to health. After Legge had fished him out of the Thames and carried him to his home, Legge and his wife had been sure the man would die of his arrow wounds. But he had not died. He’d lost an eye, and hadn’t been able to stand for some weeks, but he had clung to life. Just as Legge, very much in need of a new master, had clung to the chance to leave England for a while in this man’s service.

  Legge sighed at the futility of it all as he knocked on the next door. An old man answered and scowled at the strange face. Legge launched again into his round of questions in execrable Dutch. The old man shook his head irritably and made to shut the door.