The Tapestry: A Novel

by Nancy Bilyeau

  “Calm yourself, sir,” I snapped, but that only seemed to agitate him further. Heads swiveled to see what the fuss was about.

  “Can I be of assistance?” said Master Holbein. Sir Walter turned, slowly, to examine him. His eyes, which were bloodshot, took a moment to focus on my companion.

  “Master painter,” he finally said, “you are also a propitious sight, for you embody the wisdom of Germany.”

  Stepping even closer, Holbein said, his strong hand clamping round Sir Walter’s wrist, “Desist, sir. This is not the time or place to speak of Martin Luther.”

  To my further amazement, Sir Walter Hungerford threw back his head and laughed—a horrible laugh, hysterical, piercing. More curious heads turned. We were becoming of greater interest than the jousters on their fine horses.

  “That is not the man whose wisdom I follow, oh, you are mistaken,” said Sir Walter. “I revere other Germans—such as the genius Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa.” He burst out laughing again, a diseased howl.

  “Hungerford!”

  It was the Earl of Surrey, on his horse. He had reached the closest point to us, and must have heard the disturbance. He guided his mount to the perimeter of the running course, holding the reins tight. The earl looked furious. Not only that—I could see, from the purplish-yellow bruise covering his forehead, that Surrey had already suffered some sort of blow.

  Behind him, Thomas Culpepper nudged his horse to get closer without breaking the line of procession.

  “Go home, man,” shouted Surrey. “For the love of Christ and the Virgin, go home.”

  With a final howl of amusement, Sir Walter stumbled back, and then, pushing and shoving the spectators out of his path, he charged away from the tiltyard. “That man was drunk,” commented one spectator, and a titter of laughter went round the mob.

  Surrey and Culpepper rejoined the line of challengers and rode on, followed by more knights. The bizarre behavior of Hungerford was forgotten in the reflection of men wearing such glittering armor.

  But not by me or by Hans Holbein, who was more upset than I had ever seen. He muttered to himself in German, pulling on his beard. After a moment at least of this, he said to me, “That man, that Hungerford, I’m not sure that he was drunk. That was not his malady. Why did he seek you out, Mistress Joanna? Do you know the man he spoke of?

  I shook my head. “I’ve never heard the name before. It is German, isn’t it?”

  “It is. And even though speaking too favorably of Martin Luther can get you burned in half of Europe, I would rather discuss Luther any hour of the day with you than Agrippa, for he is twice as dangerous.”

  “More dangerous than Luther? That is not possible.”

  The horns blew again, the crowd cheered, and the challengers and defenders circled back to their tents. The promenade was at an end; the first challenger would soon tilt against a defender.

  “Who is this man Agrippa?” I pressed.

  “Not here,” said Holbein. “Not now.”

  I could hear the voices in the bishop’s garden park: It must be May Day. It must be May Day. It must be May Day. At a crowded tournament such as this, what could Surrey, Culpepper, and Hungerford possibly plan to do? I glanced at the royal gallery. King Henry beckoned to Thomas Cromwell, and the chief minister leaned over to better hear what his monarch said. Anne of Cleves pointed at something on the tiltyard, her smile even brighter, for each of the challengers and defenders had saluted the queen of England. The Duke of Norfolk leaned against a wooden pillar, nodding at the Bishop of Winchester. The nobles and ladies who ranged across the galley looked expectant, haughty, supercilious. A few even appeared bored.

  Yet every instinct I had, every feeling of unease and observance of ill omen, screamed that this was a day of some planned action. I struggled to remember precisely what Surrey had said at the bishop’s banquet: There is another way to put an end to Cromwell, though it be anything but honorable. I can say not a word to you about it. Only that, someday, when all has changed, I hope to redeem myself in your eyes, Joanna. Three of them formed a covenant, but I sensed that Sir Walter Hungerford was the architect of the plan. Surrey said it was “anything but honorable,” and among the first words Hungerford had ever said to me were “But what if I have no honor?” It must be a dark plan indeed. I studied the chief minister from my place below the royal gallery. Cromwell looked perfectly calm and secure, still in conversation with King Henry. No man could be safer from harm.

  “Master Holbein, I’ve never begged you for anything—I’m not a woman disposed to beg—but please tell me why Sir Walter thinks this Agrippa wise,” I said.

  He seemed about to answer me when a herald shouted, “For England!” The crowd roared its loudest yet. On the course, two men, their heads now concealed in helmets, galloped toward each other from opposite ends of the course, lances quivering.

  They charged closer . . . closer. The spectators tensed.

  There was an ear-splitting clap, like thunder—one of the men fell from his horse, struck down by the force of his opponent’s lance. This pitched the crowd into a frenzy of excitement, an emotion I did not share. And neither, I detected, did Master Holbein.

  I gripped his arm and repeated, “Tell me.”

  Holbein pulled me close, as if we were father and daughter or even man and wife. I could smell the sweet wine on his breath, feel the scratch of his wiry beard. But I was so desperate to learn the truth that I clung to him tightly. Holbein whispered in my ear: “Agrippa is a scholar and a physician who has written certain books that are most dangerous.”

  My entire body, head to toe, froze in the noonday heat. “What are the books about?” I managed to ask.

  “Agrippa wrote of the magical world, Mistress Joanna. How to interpret and harness its powers. His most famous work is De Occulta Philosophia Libri Tres.”

  De Occulta. The occult.

  Trembling with nausea, I said, “So Agrippa is a necromancer.”

  “No, Joanna. He is of a much higher order. He is a magus. A high priest of magic and sorcery.”

  The crowd around us cheered again, for the fallen man had been pulled to his feet and was waving. Abashed but alive. The man who vanquished him tore off his golden helmet so that we could see him and know him: Sir Thomas Seymour.

  Holbein gently released me. He made a show of joining in the applause for the vainglorious Seymour. But I could not make a sound or clap my hands. Nothing—for I was staggered by this discovery. My cousin the Earl of Surrey and my friend Thomas Culpepper had made a covenant with Sir Walter Hungerford and it was guided by a master of the occult.

  As workers prepared the tiltyard for the second pairing, I turned to Holbein once more.

  “What do you know of today—of May Day?” I asked.

  He looked down at me, puzzled. “It’s the day that the king often chooses to begin such festivities,” said the painter. “Everyone knows it’s for making merry. It’s the same in Germany. The peasants love it more than any other day.”

  “Why does everyone love it so?”

  “Why, it is a holiday for welcoming the spring, celebrating the power of the fertile earth. You call it May Day. We call it Walpurgisnacht or Hexennacht.”

  Struggling to keep my voice calm, I said, “Is that a form of the word hex?”

  Squinting at the jousting field, Holbein said, “Yes. It is to do with witches and their spells and hexes. I’m not sure, but I believe, in the time before Jesus Christ, there were ceremonies in the forest for making spells. But that’s long past—” He stopped short, and whirled to scrutinize me. “You don’t believe that man, Hungerford, meant Hexennacht when he spoke of his journey?”

  I lamented Master Holbein’s quickness of mind. I could say nothing; I’d promised silence to Culpepper.

  “Sir Walter may not be drunk, but his babblings are nonsense worthy of the tavern,” I said, a
iming for the sort of arch tone of voice I often heard around me in court.

  “Are you sure he is harmless?” Holbein persisted. “He was intent on you, Mistress Joanna.”

  “I met him briefly through my cousin the Earl of Surrey, who does not always choose his companions with temperance and wisdom,” I replied.

  “True enough,” grunted Holbein, and, to my relief, turned to look at the action on the tiltyard.

  The next challenger thundered down the field, and as Holbein’s head tracked his approach, I backed away, as carefully as I could. Everyone’s being transfixed by the athletes of the field made it easy to snake my way through the crowd. Once I made it to the field, I held up my skirts to hurry as fast as I could, drawing curious glances as I went.

  There was no way of knowing which tent contained Thomas Culpepper, so I had to ask questions, and of a lot of people. No one could help. The fourth man I asked, standing outside a white tent, leered at me. “You wantin’ to wish him luck as only a pretty lady can?” he demanded.

  “Never mind that,” I said. There was no time to pay back his offensiveness with any sort of retort or just punishment. “Just tell me where Master Culpepper can be found.”

  The man gestured toward an entranceway flap.

  The light filtered strangely through the material of this soaring, windowless tent. The sun bore down with such strength that it created a golden-grayish tint. About a dozen men occupied this tent, each of them attended by a page or servant. There were other servants, too, serving goblets of wine and trays of food. A trio of musicians played a jaunty melody. The tent resembled a party except that not a single woman attended. This changed when I stood, breathless, inside the hanging flap of a door.

  A blond knight having his armored sleeves adjusted called out, “My lady, your presence is irregular. Does an errand compel you?”

  “I seek Master Culpepper,” I replied.

  The tent instantly surged with men’s laughter, and not the nicest sort of laughter.

  “Why is this not a surprise?” said the blond knight. He lifted his goblet high, as if toasting, and then took a drink.

  Although no one had denied his presence, I could not see Culpepper among the men for a moment. He’d walked toward me along the perimeter of the tent, saying nothing until he was right in front of me. No one else could see his expression but myself, which was fortunate. His face was pale, his eyes fiery with anger.

  “If you’ve come to give me a favor, you’re too late, mistress,” Culpepper called out, loud enough for everyone to hear. “Lady Lisle insisted I ride as her champion. And I agreed. We all know there’s no female as grateful to a young man as an old man’s darling.”

  The others in the tent laughed even louder. Such a comment must be meant to mislead his companions as to the true nature of our friendship. Still, I hadn’t thought Thomas Culpepper capable of saying such a coarse thing.

  To the disappointed jeers of his fellow jousters, Culpepper pulled me outside of the tent, his armor banging against my arm. We went to a place where no one could listen.

  “What are you doing here?” he hissed.

  “When Sir Walter Hungerford spoke to me today, I put it together,” I said. “I know that you plan to seek out someone to perform some sort of occult rite, something to do with Thomas Cromwell. Please, please, you must not proceed. I cannot say why or how, but I know something of that world, and . . .”

  The words died in my throat. In the sunlight, Culpepper looked worse than I’d ever seen: deep gray shadows under his eyes, complexion like white chalk, lines in his forehead where they’d never existed before. He had not slept a moment last night—and not only that. I thought of the German words Holbein had used: Walpurgisnacht and Hexennacht. I knew that the German language was not so different from English. Nacht must mean “night.” The performing of hexes and spells did not happen the evening of May Day but the night before.

  “It’s already happened,” I whispered. “I’m too late.”

  “What’s done is done, and I have no regrets,” Thomas said roughly. “You should never have come here. I tell you to say nothing, to forget what you have heard and may think you know, but you won’t listen to me, Joanna. You keep asking questions, demanding answers. You pay me no heed whatsoever, do you? No wonder men attack you.”

  I stumbled back a step, shocked by his cruel words. I knew I’d made Thomas Culpepper most angry, and that rash things could be said in anger. In a moment, he would apologize, and I would be able to really talk to him about what happened last night.

  But Thomas said, with great articulation, as if I were slow of mind, “I won’t speak of what happened—not ever. Nor in future will I speak to you of anything beyond what my duties as a gentleman of the privy chamber compel.”

  “Master Culpepper, I only—”

  “No. Say nothing more. Just leave me be.”

  With that, he stomped away, his armor clanking as he reentered the tent.

  It took me a moment to gather myself, but after I did, I knew there was nothing left to do but rejoin Master Holbein at the tiltyard, making some excuse for my absence. I did not walk nearly as fast. My throat burned and salty tears pricked the corners of my eyes.

  I paused at the top of a shallow hill. From here I could look down on the scene: the next armored challenger preparing his horse at the end of the tiltyard, the hundreds of people drunk with spectacle, the king and queen flanked by their courtiers surveying it all. Behind them rose the massive buildings of the Palace of Whitehall. The gray-blue Thames glittered beyond.

  “What has happened to me?” I said out loud. In a short time I’d become so immersed in the court that its intrigues, both romantic and political, consumed me. In my house in Dartford, in those quiet moments before Gregory tapped on the door to deliver the royal summons, could I have foreseen such a transformation? From this perspective, looking down, I tried to imagine that I knew nothing of the people milling about below. I broke free of them; my life was simple, honest.

  “Are you unwell, Juana?”

  I shook myself from my reverie at the sound of my Spanish name, used at the end of a sentence spoken in French. It could only be Ambassador Eustace Chapuys, and here he was, his wariness mingling with curiosity as he surveyed me from a short distance.

  “I am quite well, Ambassador,” I said with a quick curtsy.

  “No, I believe you’ve lost your color,” he said. “I was on my way to convey the emperor’s good wishes to a Spanish knight who answered England’s challenge, when I observed you, looking somewhat unsteady and talking to no one. I thought perhaps you withdrew from the joust to recover from some woman’s ailment. But to move about the tournament grounds alone like this, with no companion or servant . . .” He looked to the right and left, driving home his point. “Some might consider it unwise.”

  I took one step down from the hillock, then another, to draw closer to the imperial ambassador.

  “And some might consider it an opportunity, wouldn’t you agree?” I asked.

  Chapuys cocked his head while he examined me. The crowd roared over some feat performed. I fought to keep any hint of fear from showing. This was my moment to throw down the gauntlet, to challenge him to admit to any role he had in the attack on me in the palace. It was a more dangerous challenge than anything attempted on the tiltyard below.

  The ambassador finally said, “If you think yourself in danger, it could never be from me.”

  “No?”

  “The Emperor Charles himself has commanded it—no harm shall come to Joanna Stafford at our hands.” Chapuys’s mouth quivered, and I sensed regret, whether over revealing the commands of the emperor or not being able to order my assassination, I couldn’t decipher.

  Then he was gone, walking quickly toward the tents.

  Was it relief that seized me?—I did not know. Waves of some sort of emotion ri
ppled through me as I trembled in the bright Westminster field. I had faced down Eustace Chapuys at last, and he denied being the one to plot against me here in the palace. Perhaps my legs shook because of the knowledge that the most important ruler in all of Christendom knew of my existence—and had decided to allow it to continue.

  I forced myself forward, to return to the sidelines of the joust. I did not realize how light-headed I was, perhaps from going without food or water in the heat, or from the emotion of these encounters. I had only managed a half dozen steps when I stumbled. My ankle turned on a knot of ground, tangling me up in my skirts, and the next thing I knew, I sprawled facedown in the grass. Greatly embarrassed, I sat up, trying to straighten my crooked headdress before rising.

  A smooth hand in a fringed sleeve appeared before my eyes. I peered up, but the sun was in my eyes and it took a few seconds of blinking before I could focus on the person’s face. When I realized who it was, I recoiled, falling back on the palms of my hands.

  Señor Pedro Hantaras chuckled. “May I not offer you assistance, mistress?”

  “No.” I realized it was ridiculous to refuse him. But I could not help it. The most trusted operative of Ambassador Chapuys, Señor Hantaras had, in a partnership with Jacquard Rolin, trained me for my role in their conspiracy. He was well versed in spying, in codes and falsifying letters. And he knew every trick of doing harm, be it with poison or knife or rope. When I turned against the group of them and refused to kill the king, Señor Hantaras knocked me unconscious, drugged me, and would have gone further if I hadn’t escaped from him in Rochester.

  His brown eyes gleamed as he said, “Then you shall have to be more careful.” He backed away, his legs carefully scissoring on the ground, as if I were royalty that he could not turn his back on. But there was mockery in his face and something else, too. Something twisted and hateful. This should not surprise me. I had made a fool of him by escaping and stabbed his mistress in the leg to do it. These things did not make for friendship.

  Then Señor Hantaras turned his back on me and moved along, in the same direction as Chapuys. He was never at Chapuys’s side at public functions— but never far away.