The Queen's Lady. Barbara Kyle

here!” He walked out and closed the door on her. His footfalls sounded down the corridor.

      Honor threw off her hood and looked around. The room was paneled in fashionable linenfold-carved oak. Expensive silver plate gleamed in cupboards. The chairs were soft with velvet cushions. This was not at all what she had expected. She had steeled herself for a bleak, ascetic compound with a ring of zealots chanting in religious fervor. This room exuded nothing but domestic comfort.

      She paced. Where was Sydenham? It was almost midnight. The Queen had kept her so long, there was no time left. If she waited any longer she would be in danger herself. She snatched up a candle and hurried to the door.

      The corridor was empty. She started in the direction she had heard the man’s footsteps take. She passed along a room-length of paneled hallway and came to a closed door. The latch lifted easily. Beyond the door, almost immediately, was an unlit flight of descending stone stairs. The hem of her sodden cloak slapped over the steps as she went down. The walls, too, were stone. The air was dank. A cloying smell—unpleasantly familiar, though she could not identify it—curled in her nostrils.

      At the bottom the floor was beaten earth. A low, barrel-vaulted stone passageway hulked around her candle. She walked on. The passage led to another flight of steps, these ones going up. She heard voices, very faint, and she halted. The voices quieted. She climbed the stairs. At the top stood an arched, wooden door. She swept her candle over it and noticed a small opening at a man’s eye level. It was a chink of less than a square inch, gouged out of the solid wood, a squint-hole for monitoring the identity of the person seeking entry.

      She snuffed her candle and set it down. In the darkness she went up on her toes and pressed her eye to the hole. Her breath caught in her throat. She was looking into a huge warehouse, and near the rear wall thirty-five, perhaps forty people stood inside a ring of hand-held torches. Their faces were lifted towards a man who stood on the lip of a loft, his head raised and eyes closed as if in silent prayer. Honor felt the hairs at the back of her neck rise. This was a huge coven of heretics.

      She was shocked to see so many women. Children, too. A couple of boys were rolling chestnuts on the dirt floor under a torch hitched to one of the loft-bearing posts. Stacks of animal hides were ranged along the windowless walls, and in the middle of the warehouse were three huge, round wooden vats, the kind she had seen used in ale brewing. Beside the loft on the far wall was a closed door as wide as a cart. She realized the warehouse must sprawl all the way back to the next street.

      The man in the loft snapped from his trance and began to prowl along the edge. He was in his early twenties, Honor guessed, slight, and very fair. His white-blond hair, shaved in a monk’s tonsure, stood out in short spikes over his ears, looking indeed like the thorns of Christ’s crown that the tonsure was made to symbolize. Yet he wore no priest’s cassock or friar’s robe, only a laborer’s faded tunic over sagging hose. He stopped and stared at the faces below him. The fervor in his eyes blazed all the way to the squint-hole at the back of the warehouse.

      He slapped his hand on his chest. “Love of God!” he cried. “That is what should fill our hearts.” He thrust out his other hand, palm up like a beggar. “Lust for gold! That is what drives our priests.” Honor was struck by the vibrancy of his voice. It was a voice made for rallying men.

      “The Church hoards one third of the landed wealth of this sovereign realm, my friends. Our rich Bishops send carts of gold to Rome, English gold from the sweat of English brows. They leech it from us in rents and tithes to finance the bawdy banquets and lascivious pleasures of the princes of the Church, and their wicked wars.” He shook his head, then smiled grimly. “Glad I am of the spirituality’s oath of celibacy, for if the Abbot of Glastonbury were to wed the Abbess of Shrewsbury, their heir would inherit more land than the demesne of the King.”

      There was soft laughter from the listeners. “If the priests have no heirs, Brother Frish,” a man called up, “it’s not for lack of fornicating.”

      Brother Frish laughed along with his audience. Then, suddenly, his arms shot up. “I say the priests are worse than Judas. He sold almighty God for thirty shillings but the priests will sell God for half a penny. They barter off their sacred wares like pork hocks at a fair-stall. They sell the seven sacraments, they sell dispensations,”—he held out his palm again like a collection plate and slammed his fist onto it with every transaction—“the chanting of masses, prayers. And all this on top of their endless tithes and fines, fees and mortuaries…”

      Honor shivered at this last word. For a moment she was a child again watching Bastwick wrench the sapphire from her father’s dead hand, the curse of excommunication still ringing. All for a mortuary.

      She shook her head to clear it of such visions of the past—and of her unease at going among these criminals. I must finish this, she told herself. Get inside, find Sydenham, and then get out again before it’s too late. I’ve come this far. I’ll see it through.

      She lifted the latch and opened the door. A draught of stale air rolled over her. She trembled, for the warehouse stank of an odor that somehow dredged up the horror of Smithfield. A cold hand grabbed her wrist. It was the orange-haired young man. He hauled her into the warehouse and hustled her along the wall among the stacked hides.

      “I told you to wait,” he whispered fiercely. He glanced nervously at the gathering, but the preacher talked on and the crowd listened, apparently unaware of the intrusion.

      “I tell you, I’ve got to see Master Sydenham,” Honor whispered, equally insistent.

      “Quiet!” He tightened his grip on her wrist until it was painful.

      “But this cannot wait!”

      He jerked a knife from his belt and held it at her rib. “You’ll wait until the sermon’s done, and you’ll be quiet.”

      Heart pounding, she stood still, a hostage witness to the heretical sermon.

      “And let us not forget indulgences,” Frish cried cynically. “The priests will sell indulgence letters for fornication, for the breaking of vows, for shunning confession, for ignoring fasts, and, of course, for rescuing souls from purgatory. Purgatory,” he repeated with a sneer. “This dread place exists, the Church teaches, for the cleansing of sinful man’s soul after death, but the Church will gladly give you remission of years of your soul’s agony there—for a price. Now, tell me this. If the Pope has the power to deliver a soul out of purgatory, why then can he not deliver it without money? And if he can deliver one soul, then why does he not deliver a thousand? Why not all? Let loose all the poor, tortured souls, and thus destroy purgatory.” His fist punched the air. “I say the Pope is a tyrant if he keeps souls within purgatory’s prison until men give him money!”

      He wiped his brow with his sleeve, and then eased himself down onto the edge of the loft so that his legs dangled. His voice became gentle and warm. “Good friends,” he said with a smile, “I am here to tell you that the Pope has no power to loose souls from purgatory because there is no purgatory. I am here to tell you that there are no priests, only God. That the painted images of saints the poor ignorant folk pray to for intercession in their worldly woes are only sticks and stones—and man must pray to God alone. That all the spells a priest may mumble over a piece of bread to conjure it into the body of our Lord cannot make it anything other than bread, for I have read in scripture that God made man, but nowhere have I read that man can make God.”

      Honor’s mouth fell open at this litany of heresies, especially the last one. The miracle of transubstantiation—the bread of the Mass transformed into the living body of Christ—was the cornerstone of Catholic faith. Yet this preacher’s words were full-blooded with conviction. His passion, so fearless, so generous, stunned her. It was as if, while she slept, someone had dashed her face with ice water.

      Frish’s voice rose again and his face was bright. “I come before you this night to bring you good news, my friends. We can cast off the chains of bondage to Rome. I have done it. I have been freed. How?” He reached over to a barrel beside him and lifted a black book that lay on top. He held it high. “With this. The word of Our Lord, Our Savior. His blessed