The Queen's Lady. Barbara Kyle

into this house several years ago, illiterate, ill-used, and with no more understanding of God’s workings in this world or His glories in the next than has that poor, dumb creature there.” He nodded at a pet monkey curled in sleep on the window ledge. “Indeed far less, I should say, for the monkey lives contented with its natural cycle of feeding and sleep and does not go in fear of my boot at its ribs. Whereas this girl, after five years under a brutal lord, arrived at my door unsure if there was any contentment at all for the wretched in a wicked world.”

      Honor blushed under the scrutiny of the two men and bent lower over her writing.

      “Yet with education, sir,” More summed up proudly, “this same girl now goes blithely to her bed, ears ringing with the conjugation of Latin verbs and the voice of Plato, and happy in the assurance that her life and mind, enriched by duty and service to God, will not be despised by Him at the final hour. And when she wakes up to our cook’s burnt toast she can cut it into a right-angle triangle knowing that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the square of the other two sides.” He smiled at Honor. “Even her Greek improves.”

      “Greek!” the Vicar exclaimed. Honor understood his shock. Many in the theology-dominated educational institutions like Oxford considered Greek studies to be dangerously close to paganism.

      The Vicar pulled himself together. “Well, girl, you were lucky Sir Thomas found you,” he grunted. “I hope you are grateful.”

      “He did not find me, sir. I found him.”

      She had the satisfaction of seeing the Vicar’s eyes widen at her impertinent remark.

      More strangled a laugh, then hastened to say with sober concern, “Pardon, sir, the fault is mine if the child speaks out of turn. I fear that, through contact with me, she has absorbed an annoying tendency of the lawyer’s mind—the sometimes overscrupulous passion to have every fact correct.” He cleared his throat and tugged at his robe with judgelike decorum, but finally was unable to hide his amusement. “Truth is, though, she’s right. She came knocking at my gate because, as she made quite clear to me, I was the only lawyer whose name she knew!” He laughed.

      The Vicar frowned.

      It was obvious that Honor’s presence would be an irritant to the meeting.

      “Child,” More said gravely, “wait for me in the New Building. I have some business for you there.”

      He turned his head to her and flashed a conspiratorial wink, and she rose and passed through the room with a controlled smile that she was sure even the Vicar could interpret as one of filial obedience.

      In the dappled sunshine of the orchard she sang to herself under the fragrant vault of pear-tree boughs, then crossed the lawn that separated the large house and its gardens from the small New Building. Heat cradled the drowsing estate. The only sounds that drifted on the still air were the buzzing of bees and the faint tolling of the bell from the nearby parish church. Down at the foot of the rolling lawns the ribbon of the River Thames snapped stars of sunlight off its silver surface.

      Reaching the New Building she stepped under the small porch gable, lifted the latch, and let herself in. She loved this place, for it reflected the quintessential Thomas More. It contained only three rooms: his library, a gallery for meditation, and a small, austere chapel. It was his habit to come here with his lantern at three in the morning for several hours of study and prayer before the household and the work-a-day world awoke.

      She let the door swing shut and stood for a moment breathing in the cool, wood-paneled peace of the library. The furnishings were spartan. In front of the single window stood an oak desk and a plain, hard-backed chair. There was a small hearth. Cocooning the room, the walls were lined with bookshelves crammed with books.

      Whenever she stood here, surrounded by books, memories tumbled back of the foreigner’s strange gift on that May Day night ten years before—the little volume she and Ralph had opened together under the kitchen lantern to find the speedwell winking back at them. She had never seen the book again. At her abduction, Tyrell had turned her father’s townhouse into a tenement, and all its contents had been bundled up and sold for quick cash. Where, she often wondered, had the foreigner’s book gone? She had never forgotten its haunting, proud little flower, nor the unsettling serenity of the man’s dying smile. And the more education she acquired, thanks to Sir Thomas’s liberal instruction, the more her curiosity grew to know what had been written in that book. But, though she was always on the lookout for a copy of it, she feared that after so many years the search was hopeless.

      She stepped up to More’s desk. With eyes closed, she ran her finger reverentially over its beeswaxed surface. “Gratias,” she whispered, and touched her finger to her heart. It was a private ritual she had performed over a hundred times, though she was careful never to let Sir Thomas see her do it. He would have been dismayed—would have called her prayer blasphemous. And so it was, she knew, for it was not to God she gave her thanks, but to Sir Thomas himself.

      She walked slowly alongside a bookshelf and bumped the knuckle of her finger lovingly over the spines. This was Sir Thomas’s private world, and in it she felt close to him. So close that she blushed to remember how, when she was younger, she would sometimes let her mind wander into forbidden tracks. She used to imagine herself beside him, as his wife. She had sensed as soon as she came into the family that there was no bond of love between Sir Thomas and the blunt-faced Lady Alice who was, after all, seven years older than him; his four grown children were the issue of his first marriage. Lady Alice seemed to Honor to be more housekeeper than wife. What if, she used to ask herself, Lady Alice were to die, as Sir Thomas’s first wife had? It was not uncommon for gentlemen to marry their wards, and she could bring to her husband a sizable fortune in her father’s scattered estates.

      She gazed out the window, shaking her head in embarrassment at the recollection of such juvenile fantasies. The world looked quite different to her now. For one thing those estates, she had learned, had been in sad condition when she became Sir Thomas’s ward. Tyrell had ravaged the land. He had sold acres of timber to a smelting interest that had razed the forests. He had stripped the mines of their treasure, then issued fraudulent—and worthless—mining licenses. Using violence and threats, he had extorted crippling rents from most of the tenant farmers, and thrown many others off their holdings to make room for destructive herds of sheep. Sir Thomas, as the administrator of her property now, was attempting, with her father’s stewards, to repair the damage.

      He had explained all this to her, and a great deal more. When, as a child, she had been married to Hugh Tyrell, she had only dimly understood her legal situation, though at twelve she had realized that if the marriage were consummated her property would go out of her hands. Much later, Sir Thomas had explained to her the nub of it.

      An unmarried woman did not own property, though she could become the channel through which her father’s property passed to her husband. Given this situation, Sir Thomas pointed out, abduction of heiresses was not an uncommon occurrence. There was even legislation, “Against the Taking Away of Women,” but it was difficult to enforce, he said, and the attraction of an heiress’s lands seized through an enforced marriage often seemed worth the risk to an unscrupulous man like Tyrell.

      But Father Bastwick, too, Sir Thomas told her, had taken a huge risk in masterminding her abduction. He and Tyrell had cheated the King out of revenue in his Court of Wards, one of the most lucrative royal ministries. All orphans with significant property became, by feudal prerogative, wards of the King, who then sold the wardships. Gentlemen had to pay handsomely for the custody of wealthy wards, male and female. Indeed, since a guardian was entitled to pocket all the rents and revenues of the ward’s estates until the young person’s marriage, the bidding often was fiercely competitive.

      But Bastwick had wielded forgery and fraud to help Tyrell snatch Honor’s wardship and pay nothing for it. As Tyrell’s payment, Bastwick had been well on his way to an archdeacon’s post when Honor escaped with Ralph to London, found Sir Thomas, and brought her abductors to trial in Cardinal Wolsey’s Court of Star Chamber.

      Overnight Honor’s world had changed. Wolsey awarded the custody of her and her property to More.