The Queen's Lady. Barbara Kyle

manifestation of her grief shocked her, too. She had expected to feel grief as dullness, a dull ache. But instead, every sense throbbed with an acute awareness of life, of life’s textures, of the vivid, simple joys that Ralph would never know again. The scent of new-mown hay. Crickets. The impossible yellow of sunflowers. Girl’s laughter. Salt on the tongue. Every day, in mind and body, she was excruciatingly awake, tender as a bruise. If only she could feel dullness.

      But that was not all. At night came something worse. At night, when Ralph’s crusted face loomed, anger came. How could a just God inflict such horrors of body and soul on a man so good, so purely Christian, as Ralph Pepperton? The question had festered inside her into an indictment against God. And against His priest, Bastwick, for engineering the death.

      Instead of prayers, her lips now formed a twofold vow, repeated every day. First, she vowed that she would never forget what Ralph had suffered. In her heart she whispered a solemn promise to him. “Every time I see a flame, I’ll see your face, and remember.” Then, she would pledge her oath that, somehow, she would discover how Ralph’s murderer had worked his evil, and she would expose him. She was certain that if she scratched beneath the surface of Bastwick’s new respectability she would uncover some criminal action. How else could he have risen from near ruin after her trial to a position of authority under the Bishop of London? How else could he have snared Ralph? She knew very little about Lutheranism or its adherents, but she did know Ralph. No contact with heretic sects, however pernicious, could have corrupted him into a bad man.

      And she knew Bastwick. She recalled how, at Tyrell Court, his hunger for advancement was voracious. When he wasn’t toadying to Lady Philippa, he was hounding Tyrell for another benefice with tithes and glebe lands, or insinuating himself into the affairs of the neighbor Abbot, helping to collect the Abbey’s bridge tolls and court fines in order to connect with the Abbot’s powerful Church connections in Exeter. Honor had come to understand what drove Bastwick. One day she had overheard an argument between him and Tyrell. Tyrell shouted that Bastwick’s father had been a villein—a peasant bondsman—and Bastwick had stormed out without denying it. She realized then. It was dread of the poverty out of which he had crawled toward the Church that had been the crucible of his character. Now, even after the crushing setback she had inflicted on him at the Star Chamber trial, he had obviously clawed his way back up, all the way into the Bishop of London’s staff.

      But she had never doubted his will to revenge himself on her for that setback. And she realized now, with a bitterness she could almost taste, that Ralph’s death neatly satisfied Bastwick’s twin desires. What better way to rise even further in the Bishop’s estimation than by delivering heretics to the stake? And what better way to slake his hatred of her than by burning someone she loved?

      The bell chimed again. Honor glanced at the house. Though she could not face the family prayers, it seemed too rude to rush away without saying good-bye to Lady Alice. “I’ll come in for a bit, Cecily,” she said, and they walked up to the house, arm in arm.

      Once inside, though, she could hardly refuse a goblet of wine from Margaret’s husband, Will, or ignore their young son’s eagerness to display to her his collection of chestnuts and pine cones. So it was almost an hour later, with Lady Alice insisting she carry a dish of baked apples back for the Queen, and the rest of the household drifting into the hall to eat, that she kissed Cecily good-bye and stepped out the front door to go down to the waiting barge.

      Twilight was settling, cool and quiet. Above her, a scattering of only the boldest silver stars pulsed. With the warm dish cradled in her arm, she was almost at the gate that led to the lawn and the river when the solemn drone of Margaret’s reading caught her through an open window of the hall: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen…”

      She felt the hairs lift at the nape of her neck. She quickened her footsteps. But the words of St. Paul pursued her, insubstantial yet persistent, like the cloud of gnats darting around her ears. She hurried on until the sound of scripture died away behind her.

      But as she crossed the lawn and came to the stairs that led down to the pier, other voices reached her, men’s voices drifting up from the barge. She stopped, held in check by their tone, low and private, as though they dealt in secrets. There were two forms, mere silhouettes against the dying light on the river.

      “Heretics. A filthy clutch of ’em,” the boatman said. He was lounging in the middle of the barge, gnawing at a leg of the leftover Michaelmas goose that Matthew had brought him from the house. Matthew was squatting on the pier, listening. “Oh, my ears are always open, lad,” the boatman added.

      “And who’s this merchant they suspect?” Matthew asked, excited.

      “Sydenham? A skinner, so I hear. I warrant he’s spent too much time peddling hides in the stinkpot heretic cities across the Narrow Sea.”

      “Tomorrow? That’s when the raid’s to be?”

      “Aye. After curfew. Midnight, mayhap. Leastways, that’s what I heard the Bishop’s man to say.” The boatman’s lips slurped along a greasy tendon. “And you can see the cunning in it. If this Sydenham has called a gathering, and if the Bishop’s man hopes to catch ’em all together, best to give ’em time to get their heathen antics underway.”

      There was a thrill of fear in the young man’s next question. “And will they burn?”

      The boatman belched philosophically. “Well, the devils’re crafty, ’specially your foreigner heretics. They may forswear, and only suffer penance ’round St. Paul’s. But, aye, if their prating be heretical, they’ll burn. And if you ask me…”

      “Boatman!”

      At Honor’s voice, Matthew sprang up and the boatman tossed his goose bone overboard.

      “Matthew, go inside,” she said. There was no mistaking her tone. Matthew touched his cap to her and was gone.

      The boatman plied his oars and they glided downstream under the river of brightening stars. Honor sat rigid in the stern. The humped, black waves beat the hull in a chaotic rhythm, as if the thudding of her heart against her ribs was rendered audible, for the men’s whispering had brought all the horror of Ralph’s torture swarming back. She saw it again—Ralph writhing under his chain, and Bastwick smirking his twisted revenge. And, suddenly, she saw, like a ghost standing between them, a hunched man, shackled, waiting to be burned. A stranger named Sydenham.

      Sweat scalded her palms under the bandages, scorching like the live sparks of coals. In a wave of revulsion she ripped the linen from her hands. The strips fluttered away behind the boat in pale streamers. She leaned over the side and plunged her hands into the cold water. And in that instant of relief, a relief that never shed its balm on Ralph, who writhed and burned forever in her nightmares, Honor knew what she must do. There was a warning she had to deliver.

      8

      The Conscience of the Queen

      Honor’s pen scratched over a sheet of parchment on the desk in Queen Catherine’s suite at Bridewell palace. It was almost ten, and the Queen had been dictating letters to her for two hours. There was a pause in the stream of Latin dictation, and Honor glanced at the rain-streaked window beside the desk. If the Queen does not release me soon, she thought, I’ll be too late to warn Sydenham. She had decided, after leaving Chelsea, that sending the merchant a message that could be traced back to her would be too dangerous. She must go herself. But the Queen had kept her all day by her side, first sorting a new shipment of books, then sewing and reading to keep her company, and finally dictating letters. There had been no chance to get away.

      She watched the torch flames in the courtyard below as they buckled in the wind-swept rain. Beyond, the gray river heaved. She was under no illusions; it was a hazardous business she was about to undertake. She had discovered that Humphrey Sydenham lived on Coleman Street, but nothing more about him. But she knew, as everyone knew, that cornered heretics could be dangerous men. Many were criminals, outcasts: militant Lutherans, seditious Lollards, hysterical Anabaptists. And the thought of Bastwick finding her among them in the raid…