The Tapestry: A Novel

by Nancy Bilyeau

  Here and there, the royal gardeners knelt before the soil with tools meant for tilling. All was being made ready for the flowers and herbs. Catherine nudged me and said, “Look, Joanna, a girl is employed. How interesting.”

  Sure enough, a girl who looked to be not older than fifteen years of age knelt at the end of a line of men, busy tugging at a burst of light green.

  “Do you enjoy your labors?” Catherine asked her.

  The girl peered at the men of the line. But they did not appear to care whether she spoke to us.

  “I do, mistress, I do—to be allowed into the gardens of Whitehall, ’tis a dream,” she said.

  “And what flower do you plant?” said Catherine, still interested.

  The girl shook her head violently. “I don’t plant, oh no. Would not be fitting for me to touch the primroses. I’m a weeder, mistress.”

  Catherine begged her to explain. Sidling closer to us, the girl whispered, “None of the men will stoop to pulling at the weeds, so they employ women like me, with small hands that have some strength.” She proudly held up her toughened hands, stained with soil.

  “I have small hands, too!” exclaimed Catherine, and she held one up, palm to palm, with the girl’s. Indeed, they were of the exact same size. “Perhaps I could be a weeder,” she said, laughing.

  I glanced at the girl, worried that Catherine, dressed in fine clothes, offended her. But one look at my friend and anyone could tell she was the opposite of malicious. The girl laughed with her, until a stern look from the head gardener sent her back onto her knees, pulling at an errant plant.

  We continued our stroll. But as we paused by the barren flower beds, I noticed Catherine shivering.

  “You’ve not dressed warmly enough for this outing,” I pointed out. “I’ve seen enough of the garden. Let’s return.”

  “I’m not cold,” Catherine insisted, although her long velvet sleeves jangled up and down as she rubbed her arms.

  Only a moment later, the reason became clear for Catherine’s patronage of the garden. First the sound of leather boots on stone and then two men appeared from behind a tall hedge: Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, and the Duke of Norfolk.

  I turned to Catherine. “Why did you deceive me?” I asked, hurt.

  “I didn’t,” she said, but Catherine Howard was always a poor liar. Her cheeks reddened, a telltale sign.

  Bishop Gardiner called out, “I am glad to come upon you here, Mistress Stafford. I would converse with you on a matter of some importance, if you would be so good as to join me on the path.”

  He beckoned toward a large raised sundial in the center of the garden. His tone was all politeness now, but his request carried the whiff of command. And I could not refuse him. No matter what had transpired between us, he was still a bishop and I was still a novice who had been trained to obey the leaders of the church.

  We walked side by side, but he did not speak again for a time. Glancing back, I saw the Duke of Norfolk talking intently to Catherine. Perhaps he was telling her of the outrage perpetrated on the tombs of the Howards.

  The bishop finally broke the silence with a question: “Have you been given any indication of why His Majesty has asked you to dine with him?”

  “None,” I said.

  “He called you ‘kinswoman’ in Westminster Hall, but King Henry has never been fond of the Stafford family,” mused the bishop. “He detests all monks and nuns and friars. Yet he must know that you were pledged to the Dominican Order for more than a year. He may well remember that you were ordered to the Tower of London because of interfering with the course of justice in your cousin’s burning.”

  I should have been braced for it. Hadn’t I learned, time and again, that the Bishop of Winchester had a talent for censure mixed with praise, for keeping his opponents forever off balance? But the callousness with which he spoke of Margaret’s terrible death nonetheless brought hot tears to my eyes, and angry words to my lips.

  “Perhaps the king plans to exact some punishment of me today, saving you the time and effort of devising your next plot,” I said.

  The bishop stopped short to stare at me. “Do you honestly feel that I mean you harm?” he asked. “Yes, I disowned you yesterday at Westminster Hall in front of Cromwell, but you could scarcely expect otherwise. I was the one who saw you released from the Tower of London three years ago, who protected and watched over you ever since, even though you’ve refused to serve me again. But no matter what you say or do, you will always be my Sister Joanna.”

  I was astounded to hear his side of our long and tormented association. There seemed no possible response, so I began to walk toward the sundial again and he matched my steps.

  Gardiner went on, “I hope that you do not speak to His Majesty as you do to me, in which case you may very well provoke his anger, something which you must take all possible steps to avoid.”

  “I don’t want to make him angry,” I said honestly.

  The bishop tapped his long, bony fingers together, a gesture I knew meant he was working out some problem in his agile lawyer brain. “King Henry never does anything without having a secret purpose to it and usually two purposes ahead,” he said. “But what his purpose is in drawing you closer, I simply cannot fathom.”

  We reached the fountain, encircled by brown hedges beginning to bud. It was empty of water, not even a silt-thickened puddle at the bottom. It had been a dry spring. I glanced back, but the Duke of Norfolk and his niece had disappeared.

  The bishop resumed his musings. “This must have something to do with his relations with Queen Anne. We’d thought him quite disaffected from her, but Cromwell’s being made Earl of Essex, and now this formal dinner with her, they bode ill for our cause.”

  “I don’t understand what Cromwell has to do with the marriage,” I said.

  “Don’t you? This marriage, this alliance with the Protestant powers of Germany, was all Cromwell’s doing. How could he have predicted that the king would take such a dislike to Anne of Cleves the first moment he laid eyes on her?”

  I turned away from Gardiner. They all thought it a whim, a vagary of human desire, which made King Henry recoil from his fourth wife. But I knew the true reason why the marriage failed at the start. The king blamed Anne of Cleves for his being unable to perform as a husband. He would never know he was poisoned when he sipped from the chalice.

  Gardiner said, “We have done all we can to make sure the king continues to detest her. And soon he may not need her. The king only married her because France and Spain had made a treaty and threatened invasion. But now that treaty is broken; our kingdom doesn’t need Cleves any longer to survive. And if she falls, she takes Cromwell with her.”

  I felt chilled to the marrow, remembering the hopeful young countenance of the princess in the boat that crossed the channel, bringing her to her new home.

  Gardiner frowned as he studied me. My emotions, the mixture of guilt and pity for Anne of Cleves, must have shown. “Do you not still support the True Faith, Joanna?” he asked.

  “With my life, Bishop,” I said.

  Gardiner, still frowning, reached out and snapped an errant brown branch from the side of the hedge. But he did not toss it aside.

  “Do you know a Doctor Robert Barnes?” he asked, now pulling a green bud off the branch so that no new life remained.

  I shook my head, wary of this new direction.

  “Ah, if only you would trouble yourself to follow the affairs of the kingdom, Joanna, you would be truly formidable. But that is something you don’t do. A part of you always craves the cloister, to hide from the ugliness of the world. It’s understandable; yes, it’s understandable. But the time for hiding is over.” Still gripping the branch, he peered across the garden, at the glowing walls of Whitehall Palace.

  “Doctor Barnes began as an Augustinian friar, at my very own Cambridge Univer
sity. But he ran afoul of the Cardinal Wolsey and was seriously questioned. I spoke for him then. I defended him and said he was worthy and capable of reform. But as soon as he was able, Doctor Barnes made a mockery of us all. He left England, journeyed to Germany, and became a faithful friend to Martin Luther. His views were so extreme that since Doctor Barnes’s return, a passionate and committed Lutheran, King Henry had him imprisoned not once, but twice. Even apart from his heresies, he was a rash and intemperate person. Yet this very same man preached the Easter sermon at Saint Paul’s this year, going out of his way to personally denigrate me. He was made to apologize by the king himself for it, and then he insulted me a second time. You may well wonder: How is that possible? I am the Bishop of Winchester.”

  Throughout Bishop Gardiner’s strange rant about the heretical Doctor Barnes, I’d watched those large white hands running up and down the branch, tearing at bits of bark. With every few words, a piece of bark would fly from the branch and drift to the ground. To claw at it so must have caused him pain, but he showed no sign.

  “Bishop, forgive me, I don’t understand these matters,” I said. And I didn’t. The rapidly changing fortunes of those surrounding the king and Cromwell left me bewildered.

  “Doctor Barnes had protection—he possessed a second good friend besides Martin Luther, and that person is Thomas Cromwell, our newly elevated Earl of Essex,” Gardiner said, near to choking on his bitterness. “When I criticized Barnes’s heretical statements last year, Cromwell used it as a way to persuade the king to ban me from the Privy Council. Then at Easter, it was Cromwell who instructed his puppet to mock me before the entire court.”

  Suddenly, violently, Gardiner broke his branch into pieces, heedless that a flurry of splintered bark now clung to the bottom of his white robes.

  His eyebrows furrowed, he said, “Do you relish being called Papist, Joanna? Of living in fear that the king will take those final steps toward abominable heresy, and knowing that when he does, your soul will be lost forever?”

  “No,” I said, anguished. “No.”

  He reached out and laid both his hands on my shoulders. He had touched me in this manner before—it meant the moment had come to pray. I closed my eyes, my fingers leaping to the chain around my neck holding the crucifix.

  But then the bishop pressed down, with those same hands that had clawed a branch to pieces. He would have me kneel before him. His grip was so strong that I had no choice but to buckle. The ground felt cold and hard beneath the thin fabric of my borrowed dress.

  “I pray to God that no harm in word or deed befalls you, Joanna Stafford,” he said. “For I fear that much hangs in the balance on what occurs today.”

  11

  It was not Master Thomas Culpepper but a royal page who escorted me to dinner with the king and queen. I recognized him from the inspection parade, for he was the fairest of the pages and perhaps the youngest, fourteen at most. He had not seen me, masked and hiding in the shadows. His gaze was nothing but respectful. Blank.

  Wearing the finest of the dresses His Majesty had pressed on me, I followed the page to the vast hall I’d passed through when I first arrived in Whitehall. At that time it had been filled with gentlemen I did not know. I realized now that the ministers and high noblemen were already in place in Westminster, and now, since they never wanted to be too far from the orbit of King Henry, they gathered in this hall.

  I soon perceived that there were two groups of equal size. The Bishop of Winchester stood with the Duke of Norfolk on one side of the long room, surrounded by lords, gentlemen, and clerks sympathetic to their position. I could feel Gardiner’s stare on me from far away. He did not turn as I walked the length of the room; his head never shifted. But those eyes tracked my procession. Closer to the archway that the blond page led me toward was Cromwell’s party. He, too, was flanked by supporters; I recognized Sir Thomas Wriothesley and Richard Rich.

  Conversations faltered across the hall as men caught sight of me. Sir Walter Hungerford’s curious questioning was but a harbinger of what was to come. I could no longer attribute the staring to interest in Thomas Culpepper or Catherine Howard. I was becoming notorious.

  As I neared the chief minister’s party, I kept my eyes on the bobbing red doublet directly in front of me. I did not want to risk any sort of confrontation with Thomas Cromwell. The words I’d exchanged with Bishop Gardiner in the garden had unnerved me enough. Even a few words of forced greeting—or a bow—from his rival, Cromwell, could destroy my fragile courage.

  A stream of workers carrying trays and boxes and bottles blocked our path to the stairs. Feeling the eyes of a roomful of ruthless men on me, I turned, desperate, to face the wall. I would have to make a show of examining whatever was displayed there.

  Two large and lavish tapestries covered this wall, with a small painting in between that I now scrutinized. Its first point of distinction was that it was not a portrait. Almost every painting in the palace was of a member of the Tudor family, or of Henry VI, the saintly Lancaster king the Tudors venerated. But this was a painting of a group of people, none of them known to me. They clustered before a castle. One man looked to be royal, wearing fine robes and a crown, accompanied by courtiers. Two people struggled to reach this ruler: a woman and a child in rags, pleading. He seemed oblivious to them.

  But that was not the most disquieting thing about the painting. It was that a final figure hovered above the destitute woman and child. Not a person. A smiling skeleton, reaching with bony fingers for the arm of the wealthy ruler.

  Why would such a painting be displayed in Whitehall?

  When we were finally able to pass through that archway and ascend a winding staircase, even as I entered the privy chamber of the queen of England, I was haunted by that question.

  This was the most lavish of all the rooms I had seen so far. The wall tapestries were woven with gold-edged thread. Plates and goblets sparkled on a long, thick table at which we would presumably eat. Scented rushes covered the floor; above, a carved and painted ceiling loomed.

  But what struck me most of all was the near-blinding brilliance of the room. The queen’s privy chamber was located in the middle of the second floor of the palace—there were no windows. Nonetheless, it was brighter than if windows stretched ceiling to floor in the midday sun. Yellow flames leaped in a large fireplace; a fully lit silver chandelier hovered; candles soared everywhere, from table to sideboard.

  The page bowed and departed. He had completed his assigned task. The only persons in the queen’s privy chamber were a dozen men hurriedly preparing the table or replacing the cushions on the chairs.

  No one spoke to me—no one seemed to notice my existence—and I felt incredibly awkward as I stood in the corner, alone. Not for the first time I worried about what I would say to the king. Because he’d had the head of my family, the Duke of Buckingham, executed, the Staffords were sure to be a sensitive subject. And Gardiner was right: my having served as a novice in a priory could not possibly please him, either.

  I don’t know how many minutes I waited—it might have been very few—when a woman slipped through a door on the other side of the room. As she walked toward me, a sour taste filled my mouth. For it was Lady Jane Rochford, the widow of George Boleyn. If this was the kind of company I would soon be keeping, then the skeleton of the painting was most definitely an omen.

  “You are looking very well, Mistress Stafford,” she said, and smiled. Just as when I first met her, that broad smile triggered in me a strong desire to run in the other direction. “I am sorry no one was here to greet you. I’ve only just been made aware of your presence.”

  I murmured a greeting, fighting down my instinct to recoil.

  “I am appointed one of the queen’s principal ladies-in-waiting, did you know that?” she asked, preening. “I remember when I met you, it was at Gertrude’s London home and we were all wondering who would be queen an
d who among us would be chosen to serve her. And now”—her smile deepened—“here we are.”

  How tasteless she was to bring up Gertrude Courtenay here, moments away from the arrival of King Henry, when it was the king who ordered the arrest of the Courtenays for treason, and Gertrude and her son still languished in the Tower of London. She went on to tell me who the other ladies and maids of the queen were. I recognized none of their names but Catherine’s.

  “And how do you like Whitehall—is it not beautiful?” she asked. Without waiting for an answer, she said, “I was with them the first day they walked through this palace, when they took possession from Cardinal Wolsey.”

  I did not know what she meant by they. Something in her watchful expression told me that Lady Rochford longed for me to ask, and, not knowing what else to talk about, I asked whom she referred to.

  “The king—and Anne,” she said, her voice lowering to conspiratorial. “My sister-in-law. They toured Whitehall before they were married. The king was so in love with her then. This was her favorite palace, and everything you see here, the furnishings and the paintings, even which plants would be grown in the garden, was her choice. Her taste. When she was queen, there was a portrait of her in every one of the grandest rooms. All destroyed. Every image of Anne Boleyn was burned at the order of the king.”

  The Boleyns were the very last people I would ever wish to discuss, and so I was flooded with relief to see the arrival of the new Queen Anne—the fourth of his consorts— followed by a group of ladies. Lady Rochford threw her shoulders back and took her place in the queen’s train.

  I made my deepest curtsy, one that would have made my mother proud.

  “You are welcome to court, Mistress Joanna,” said Queen Anne, with a dignified tilt of the head. Her accent was thick, her words halting. But I was impressed that after four months, she spoke En­glish this well. On the boat from Calais to Dover, she had possessed not a single word.