The Chalice

by Nancy Bilyeau

  I stared at him, unable to conceal my dismay.

  With a small, satisfied smile, the bishop signaled to the guard to let us in.

  Gertrude Courtenay sat in a chair by the fire, a book in her hand. The room contained many comforts. Her friends had contributed all the funds, since the Courtenay money and property had been seized many months ago.

  She wore a green dress and dainty slippers but no jewels. That would have been unseemly. Her face was more lined than when I’d last seen her—yet her brown eyes blazed with as much vigor as ever.

  “Joanna—you have no idea how I have missed you,” she said. Her sweet, melodic voice had not changed a whit.

  “I shall be back within the hour,” said Bishop Gardiner.

  “I thank you for this, Bishop,” said Gertrude. “I will never forget your efforts on my behalf.”

  “You know I will continue to do all I can—but you must be patient,” he said, and then gestured for me to join her in the cell. The door closed after me.

  “You look well, Joanna,” she said. “Come embrace me.”

  I hugged her frail, fierce body.

  I said, “I hear that you may be released from the Tower.”

  She stiffened. “But not my son,” she whispered. “He will not leave this place while the king lives.”

  Gertrude took a deep breath, forcing herself to be calm. We walked to the fire to sit down together. “I hear that the Cleves marriage was never consummated,” she murmured.

  “No,” I said. “Everyone knows the king took a strong dislike to her from the very beginning. They say that his councilors are seeking grounds for a divorce. She will not be mother to a son. He won’t have a second son by her.”

  We stared at each other. Then she touched her finger to her lips—we shouldn’t speak any more freely than this. In the Tower, it was always possible that people listened.

  “Tell me all the news,” she said lightly. I shared with her what gossip I had. Once I had avoided all news of London, of the world. But now I felt it best to be informed. She passed me some embroidery and we stitched together. We did not talk of loved ones who died—or loved ones who left. It was as if I was spending time with her in her receiving room in the Red Rose.

  It seemed like only moments later that the key stirred in the door—it was time for me to go.

  Bishop Gardiner loomed in the doorway to Gertrude’s cell.

  “Must she leave me?” asked Gertrude. She attempted to make the question light, but her voice trembled.

  I hugged her again. This time, she clung to me as if I alone had the strength to redeem her.

  “Do you regret it?” I whispered in her ear. This was what haunted me. Seeing all that she had lost—her husband’s life, her own freedom, her son’s future, her homes and fortune—and all that had been done to me, was she sorry she entered into conspiracy?

  “Never,” she said.

  With a last nod, I bade Gertrude Courtenay farewell. And within moments, I was on the green once more. The worst of the winter had passed. Lingering patches of snow looked sullen and beaten. A weak spring sun struggled through the clouds.

  The Bell Tower was not far. The place where I met Edmund.

  Yes, it was Gardiner who brought us together. Was it the bishop who forced us apart? Now Edmund was far, far away, whether still in the Black Forest of Germany, I had no idea. If only it were possible for me to learn where he was, to, as Geoffrey had put it, speak for just a few moments more.

  I had found the courage to ask Gertrude what I’d long burned to know. Now I could not restrain myself from confronting Gardiner.

  “Bishop,” I said, “did you personally write the article that forbids the religious from marrying with me in mind? Did you know that Edmund Sommerville and I pledged to marry?”

  He was silent for a moment, and then said, “I told you in Winchester House, Joanna, that His Majesty does not want those who’ve taken vows in a monastery or priory to ever marry. He is a king of great principle, you know.”

  He stopped walking and looked at me. A faint smile stretched across his face. “Did you really think that religious policy for the entire kingdom was written just to strike out at you? Revenge, perhaps, on my part, for your failure to secure the Athelstan crown—or perhaps for more recent flouting of my will?”

  I stared without flinching at the Bishop of Winchester, not answering. Finally, he gestured for me to resume walking. Jacquard Rolin, the Duke of Norfolk, even Ambassador Chapuys—they had threatened me, used me, and hounded me, never caring for my happiness or even my life. Yet Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, was still the most formidable man I had ever faced.

  “You have never been a consideration of such import,” the bishop said.

  When we reached the narrow walkway that bridged the moat, he continued, “Not everyone is meant to play a significant part in the affairs of the world, Joanna.”

  “I will remember that, Bishop,” I said.

  And as the late-winter sun burnished the river Thames, I followed Stephen Gardiner out of the Tower of London.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I wrote much of The Chalice in the Wertheim Study of the New York Public Library, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. I would have been lost without a place at the table and my own Shelf 92. Thank you, Jay Barksdale, for admitting me to the study. I watched autumn of 2010 turn to winter outside the study’s windows and then slowly warm to spring and finally to summer as I worked on my manuscript. When 2011 ended and I completed the first draft, those first snowflakes of the season fell in Bryant Park.

  There are some amazing people I turned to while researching the tense and troubled late 1530s of England. I am deeply grateful, once again, to Mike Still, assistant museum manager at Dartford Borough Museum in Kent; historian Hans van Felius, who helped me in particular in my research of the Low Countries; Emily Fildes, curatorial intern at the Tower of London; and, most profoundly, to Sister Mary Catharine Perry, OP, Dominican nuns, of the Monastery of Our Lady of the Rosary. Close to home, the Cloisters Museum and Gardens of the Metropolitan Museum of Art provided me with inspiration. The Cloisters is truly the gem of the city.

  I am grateful to my writing teachers, to Russell Rowland, for once again steering me in the right directions in his workshop; to Rosemarie Santini, Max Adams, and Greg Fallis, for the lessons in craft that are never far from my thoughts. These readers of the first draft were my vanguard: Harriet Sharrard, Rachel Andrews, Emilya Naymark, and Elena Fraboschi.

  This book would not have been possible without friends, employers, and colleagues. I thank Ellen Levine, editorial director of Hearst Magazines. Without her generous support, my books would not have been launched so well. I’m also grateful to Gary Marmorstein, Lorraine Glennon, Donna Bulseco, Megan Deem, Isabel Gonzalez-Whitaker, Nikki Ogunnaike, Daryl Chen, Tish Hamilton, Anthony DeCurtis, Evelyn Nunlee, Elaine Devlin Beigelman, Brec and Sandy Morgan, David and Ilissa Sternlicht, Bret Watson, Sean O’Neill, Bruce Fretts, Michele Koop, Kitty Bell Sibille, Dave Diamond, Doug Solter, David and Nikki Gardner, Olga Cheselka, and Maggie Murphy. A special thanks to Jason Binn’s fantastic team at DuJour magazine, led by Keith Pollock and Nicole Vecchiarelli.

  I must thank the online community that has been so essential from the beginning: the Yahoo Tudor group led by Lara Eakins; English Historical Fiction Authors, led by Debra Brown; On the Tudor Trail, led by Natalie Grueninger; the wonderful comrades in arms at Book Pregnant; and the incomparable bloggers who supported The Crown and The Chalice. Amy Bruno and MJ Rose, I hope you know how much I appreciate you. I delight in the new friends I discovered through the Historical Novel Society, Mystery Writers of America, and International Thriller Writers. And shout-outs to writer and filmmaker Christie LeBlance, who created the book trailers, and writer and producer Thelma Adams, who believed enough to option my first book.

  I was fortunate to work with a very talented and insightful team of editors on The Chalice. I am grateful to Heather Lazare, senior editor a
t Touchstone Books, Simon & Schuster; Genevieve Pegg, editorial director of Orion Publishing Group, and Eleanor Dryden, editor at Orion. I’m also grateful to Jessica Roth, senior publicist at Touchstone; Meredith Vilarello, marketing manager at Touchstone; Cherlynne Li, Touchstone’s art director; and Marie Florio, associate director of subsidiary rights at Simon & Schuster.

  I thank Heide Lange, my agent at Sanford J. Greenburger Associates, for her ceaseless support of my fiction, and her ace assistants, Rachael Dillon Fried and Stephanie Delman. Kate McLennan at Abner Stein has been my rock throughout; and I’m grateful to Hannigan Salky Getzler.

  And of course I could not be a novelist without the encouragement of my family: my husband and children; my mother and sister; my wonderful cousins, aunts, and uncles; and my sisters-in-law and nephews and other extended family. I hope you know how much I love you.

  Touchstone Reading Group Guide

  The Chalice

  By Nancy Bilyeau

  In 1538, as England is torn apart by violent power struggles between crown and cross, Joanna Stafford, a young novice whose monastic life has been dismantled, finds herself unwittingly drawn into a dark plot targeting King Henry VIII. With great reluctance, Joanna assumes her role in a prophecy foretold by three different seers, each providing another vital piece of this strange, otherworldly puzzle. Ultimately, she is swept up into an international intrigue against her King and country. Joanna realizes the life of Henry VIII, as well as the future of Christendom are in her hands, hands that must someday hold the chalice that lays at the center of these deadly foretellings.

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS for The Chalice

  1) What role does prophecy play in The Chalice? How does this idea of prophecy drive much of the book? What are your beliefs regarding seers and prophecies?

  2) Why do you think Bilyeau uses a young novice like Joanna Stafford to carry out such important historic weight as to save Henry VIII or destroy him?

  3) “Why must this burden fall upon me?” Joanna asks Edmund when they are in Blackfriars, and he answers, “It’s you. You are a woman unlike any other, Sister Joanna. I’ve tried to define this quality that sets you apart. I’ve never quite been able to.” Can you define it? How does Joanna’s character shape and affect the unfolding of the story? In what ways does Joanna’s character change over the course of the novel? In the end, how have the events of the novel changed her forever?

  4) Who directs Gertrude Courtenay to find Joanna? Were you surprised by this revelation? How are Joanna and Gertrude’s lives bound up, beyond the fact of their relatedness by marriage? How do their fates become so entwined? And how does it tie back to Katherine of Aragon? Discuss, as well, how Gertrude and Joanna’s lives are directly impacted by the Boleyn family.

  5) Joanna resists meeting the seers and hearing the prophecies, and yet Bilyeau writes, “We’d all been forced to abandon our dream. Yet now, because of what I’d revealed, a restoration was possible. Why didn’t I surge forward, snatching at my place in the prophecy, eager to bring back our way of life? But I couldn’t.” Why do you think she isn’t able to? What are the myriad ways in which Joanna resists her fate and why? Discuss the idea of free will versus fate, and fate versus destiny.

  6) Geoffrey Scovill appears in several places to warn Joanna or to help her or to persuade her to be with him. He claims he wants only her happiness, and yet when it is time for Joanna to marry Edmund, he prevents it. What was your reaction to his behavior at that moment? Sometimes Joanna wants Geoffrey near her, yet at other times she pushes him away. What is your impression of their relationship? When they meet again in the cemetery, Scovill regrets that he didn’t appreciate his wife, Beatrice, more before her death. What do you think Scovill has learned about love and life? What do you think the future holds for Geoffrey and Joanna’s relationship?

  7) When Joanna is alone in Blackfriars with Edmund Sommerville, Bilyeau writes, “I waited, with eyes shut. After I don’t know how long, his lips pressed against mine, but so gently I almost doubted it was happening. I had never felt a touch this tender. I ached for more from him.” How does Bilyeau handle the delicate issue of desire in a work about celibate religious men and women? How does Joanna deal with her own desire?

  8) Just as Gardiner once used Joanna’s father to get her to look for the Athelstan crown, now when Jacquard Rolin threatens Edmund’s life to force Joanna to complete the prophecy. When she complies, what does this say about Joanna’s character? Her sense of loyalty? How might you respond in a similar situation?

  9) When Joanna meets Ambassador Chapuys in Antwerp, she says, “I know that you and others look to me to put a stop to evil. But in so doing, I am creating evil . . . The man who spied for Gardiner in Hertfordshire and now Master Adams? God would not have it so – I know in my heart it’s not right.” What do you think about what Joanna says? How do you think Chapuys feels after she’s said this? Have you ever been confronted with such a dilemma in your life?

  10) “Was I indeed a fool not to see that this was the plan from the beginning – for me to kill the king of England?” Bilyeau writes. “I’d hoped, and perhaps it was grossly unrealistic, that in the end I would commit some act, such as the abortive attempt to rescue the body of Thomas Becket, that would turn the tide of history . . . But how wrong I was, how tragically wrong. This, then, was the prophecy that I’d been intertwined with since I was seventeen. To be a murderess.” Were you surprised by this revelation as well? Were you hoping for a different sort of prophecy as Joanna was? What might it have been?

  11) When Bishop Gardiner takes Joanna to see Gertrude in the Tower of London and Joanna asks her if she regrets she entered into conspiracy, given how much she has lost – her husband, her son, her homes and fortune – Gertrude hisses, “Never.” How do you feel about this? Do you find it hard to believe? What sort of a person is Gertrude? How would you feel in her situation?

  12) Joanna asks Bishop Gardiner if he has written the article that forbids religious people from marrying with her in mind, and he says, “Did you really think that religious policy for the entire kingdom was written just to strike out at you? Revenge, perhaps, revenge on my part for your failure to secure the Athelstan crown or perhaps for your recent flouting of my will?” Joanna says nothing, and then he finishes by saying, “You have never been a consideration of that import. Not everyone is meant to play a significant part in the affairs of the world, Joanna.” Do you believe him? Does Joanna? What do you think is the truth?

  13) In the beginning of The Chalice, John is a madman, running around Dartford spouting scripture about doom. In the end, he turns up at Joanna’s house in Dartford sane, well-dressed, and working as a wood collector. Do you think he is a symbol and/or metaphor for something in the novel? If so, discuss what it might be.

  ENHANCE YOUR BOOK CLUB:

  1) Read Nancy Bilyeau’s debut novel The Crown, which also features Joanna Stafford.

  2) If you are in New York City and interested in tapestries, you can visit The Cloisters; they showcase two sets of breathtaking tapestries known as the Unicorn tapestries and the Nine Heroes tapestries. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City is also a wonderful place to see medieval artifacts, paintings, tapestries, and clothing.

  3) If it is more historical information about this period you are after, there are two wonderful books by Alison Weir: Henry VIII: The King and His Court and Six Wives of Henry VIII.

  4) Enjoy these films about this period in history:

  Henry VIII: Mind of a Tyrant, is a wonderful 2009 TV documentary by historian David Starkey which follows Henry from his childhood to the end of his life.

  But if you’re in the mood for fiction films, try Anne of a Thousand Days and A Man for All Seasons and/or the Cate Blanchett Elizabeth films.

  QUESTIONS FOR THE AUTHOR:

  1) Both your first novel, The Crown, and The Chalice are set in 16th century England. Why have you chosen this particular time period? What resonance does it have for you?


  Before I had a protagonist or a single character, I had my chosen time period: the 16th century. I never get tired of reading about it or thinking about it. I guess I’ll be in trouble if I do. I am not sure why I am so captivated—it’s an intoxicating time, it’s the transition from Middle Ages to Early Modern England, with Shakespeare and Erasmus, those vivid Holbein portraits, the music, the fashion, everything.

  2) Explain how you decided to write another novel featuring Joanna Stafford after writing your debut The Crown. Are there any other adventures in Joanna’s future?

  From the first, I envisioned a series of books about Joanna. I love discovering a book series myself, to know that something I am enjoying so much will be followed by another story by the same author, featuring the same main characters. I want to give readers that feeling when they are reading The Crown and The Chalice. And yes, I have more ideas. I think as I go, I get bolder, too. The adventures will become more surprising.

  3) Of all the many facets of the reign of Henry VIII, you chose to focus on the dramatic religious changes. Why this particular aspect?

  The marriages and sex life of Henry VIII have been written about quite a bit. They are dramatic fodder for storylines, but ultimately the people who were primarily affected by the king’s many marriages were the wives, children, and extended family. The daily life of a typical English man or woman was not altered by whether Henry VIII was married to Catherine Howard or Catherine Parr. But the violent wrench from Catholic to Protestant affected the entire country in profound ways. Since I wanted to create fictional characters in a time of change, if not chaos, I chose the religious conflict as engine for my narrative. I sought to understand what it would be like to live through a forced reformation. Religious faith was central to your life in the 16th century, and there was little understanding of freedom of expression, of freedom of speech. You had to adhere to the will of the king, who most believed was anointed by God, or face pretty dire consequences.