The Queen's Lady. Barbara Kyle

with the Emperor.” She moved to the other corner of the hearth to be nearer the Queen. “My lady,” she entreated, “let me take Walter’s place. Let me help you!”

      Catherine turned to her with an expression that was both surprised and wary. Honor watched the fire’s shadows play unkindly over a face whose cares, like weights, had begun to sag the flesh. The Queen was forty-two, six years older than the King. She no longer danced, and rarely rode, and her waist had thickened from repeated pregnancies—six children born, five of them buried. It was a decade since her womb had quickened, and the only living child she had been able to give the husband she adored was a girl, not the male heir he craved.

      Pity squeezed Honor’s heart. How the Queen must have suffered through these past months. “The King’s great matter,” that’s what everyone called it. Such a pompous phrase, Honor thought with scorn. What was so grand, she wanted to know, about a man in middle years infatuated to the point of irrationality? But the besotted King had actually asked the Pope to annul his marriage. Now, the Queen—everyone—was waiting for the decision from Rome.

      Honor knew that if the Pope were to grant the King his wish the consequences for the Queen could be terrible: imprisonment in a convent, the bastardization of their twelve-year-old daughter, the Princess Mary—even, perhaps, the Queen’s murder finessed by some overzealous minion of Wolsey.

      And it had all begun, Honor realized with some wonder, while she was living at Chelsea, playing at archery and musing over Plato, blithely ignorant of the dark currents swirling at court and in Rome. After eighteen years with Catherine of Aragon as his wife, King Henry had privately commanded Cardinal Wolsey to dissolve the marriage. Wolsey had special authority, being a papal legate, and the King had apparently assumed that the Pope’s agreement would be automatic; annulments of royal marriages were not uncommon.

      The King had grounds, strange and shaky though they seemed to Honor. The marriage was the King’s first, but it was the Queen’s second, and that was the crux of his argument. When the King had married her Catherine had been the widow of his brother, Arthur. Scripture technically forbade matrimony with a brother’s wife, so it had been necessary, all those years ago, to secure from the former Pope a dispensation to allow the union. Therefore, when the King decided he wanted his freedom, Cardinal Wolsey had called a secret tribunal and pronounced judgment that the Queen’s second marriage—outlawed, after all, by scripture—had never been legal; that the King was, in the eyes of God, a bachelor. But then, before anyone—even the Queen—had been told the tribunal’s extraordinary verdict, the unthinkable had happened in Rome. The Emperor Charles’s mutinous troops had sacked the city, inflicting a massacre that had shaken Europe to its core. And Charles—Holy Roman Emperor of the vast German lands, ruler of Flanders, King of Spain, lord of the limitless New World—was Queen Catherine’s nephew.

      Overnight, King Henry’s dream of a quick divorce had evaporated, for as soon as the Queen was told of his decision to cast her aside she dispatched an appeal to the Pope, a man now wholly under the domination of her invincible nephew. The English King’s private matrimonial case had suddenly exploded into an international crisis. The dithering Pope, badgered by the King’s envoys one day and threatened by the Emperor’s the next, wrung his hands, it was said, and wept like a woman before all of them—and stalled. For nine months the King and Queen had remained at this impasse.

      And Cardinal Wolsey’s impatience with the Queen had grown thin. Everyone knew he chafed at what he saw as her intransigence against the King’s wishes. Worse, he feared military intervention by the Emperor’s forces. So he kept the Queen a virtual prisoner in her own palace. He maintained informants in her household, read every letter he could lay hands on that went from her desk, and refused to let her see the Emperor’s ambassador in private. Nevertheless, Honor knew that the Queen had managed to eke out a fragile line of communication using her secretary, Walter, her confessor, Dr. de Athequa, and Ambassador Mendoza to get her letters across to Charles in Spain. But now, Wolsey had discovered at least one link of that lifeline, and had broken it.

      “Please, allow me, my lady,” Honor urged. “I can do everything Walter did. I can write your letters. You know my Latin is as good as his. And I could deliver them, too.”

      Catherine’s wary expression had not changed. “Would you? Why?”

      Honor hesitated, but only to search for the most concise words. She said simply, “You have been wronged.”

      Catherine’s breath flew out of her as if she had been physically struck by the justice of the statement. “God knows!” she cried. Impulsively, she reached for Honor’s hand in a gesture as filled with passion as her previous motions had been with caution. “I knew you were one to be trusted!” Quickly, she controlled herself. “But, my dear, there are grave risks. I am not at all sure it is right to ask such dangerous things of you.”

      “You are asking nothing, Your Grace. I am offering. And as for risk,” she shrugged, “I have tasted of that before now.”

      Catherine’s grasp on Honor’s hand tightened. “Oh, I will thank Our Lord for sending you to me.”

      Honor’s smile contained a glint of playfulness. “Do not forget to thank Sir Thomas, too, my lady, for my Latin. Had he not transformed the barbarian in me, I would be no good to you at all.”

      She was glad to see the warm smile that the Queen returned. “Indeed,” Catherine replied with feeling. “A prayer will go, as well, for More, my dear friend.” Her manner quickly sobered. “Can you begin at once, my dear?”

      “Of course.”

      “Good. It is imperative that I tell Charles to send me lawyers. Ones experienced in dealing with the Roman court. The Cardinal has cowed the English advocates. I must have men from Charles’s Flemish provinces, immune to Wolsey’s threats. And I must have them now.”

      Honor quickly sat and took up pen and paper. She wrote at length, following the Queen’s Latin dictation. With the plea to the Emperor completed, Honor folded the letter. “And now, my lady,” she said, “where shall I find Dr. de Athequa?”

      Catherine frowned. With a sudden movement she came to the table, took up the letter, and held it to her bosom. “No. I have changed my mind. You shall not endanger yourself for me. I’ll find another way.”

      Honor bit her lip. She was not afraid; was ready to take the risk. But she knew, too, that she had no business contradicting a Queen. “How, my lady?” she asked gently. “There is no other way.”

      “One must be found. The Cardinal may have already squeezed poor Walter for de Athequa’s name. I will not cast you, too, into such perilous seas.”

      Honor sat silent a moment. Suddenly, she brightened. “The masque,” she said.

      “Masque?”

      “Tonight. At my lord Cardinal’s. He is hosting a masque for the King and the Lady, and…” She saw the Queen flinch, and stopped. “The Lady” was the title that everyone at court, whatever their allegiance, applied to Anne Boleyn.

      “Pardon, Your Grace,” Honor went on, hating to give the Queen pain. “But you see, as Sir Thomas is invited to the masque, I am too. And Ambassador Mendoza is sure to be among the guests. I can take the letter directly to him. It will be so easy. No need to go through Dr. de Athequa at all.”

      Catherine appeared hopeful, but unconvinced.

      “I promise,” Honor smiled, “I shall take every care.”

      Catherine looked for a long moment into Honor’s eyes. Then, with a small, grave nod, she gave her consent. She touched Honor’s cheek with a gesture of motherly affection. “Every care,” she said earnestly. “I’ll have no ill befall you.” Her warm smile broke through. “Else, how shall I answer to Sir Thomas?”

      A hundred candles blazed in Cardinal Wolsey’s great hall at Hampton Court. Wall-sized Flemish tapestries—miracles of artistry in gold, ruby, and sky blue threads—shimmered with larger-than-life-size scenes of the Virtues and the Vices. Many of the latter