The Heretic’s Wife (51 page)

The shocking news that John had gone to England without her, back into the mouth of danger without even consulting her, made Kate angry. Then it terrified her. When he returned a week before Christmas looking so ragged and unkempt she hardly recognized him, he hugged her so joyfully, she wondered if he was oblivious to the abandonment she’d felt, the terror he’d put her through.

“There are more of the great unwashed masses than there are of prosperous men, my love,” he’d said. “The trick is to blend in among them without looking like a vagrant. Just your everyday yeoman laborer here,” he said, “anxious to get home to his wonderful wife,” and he kissed her. He smelled of the road, but his lips tasted honey sweet.

“I even counterfeited a license to show that I am in the employ of one Sir Sidney Stottlemeyer,” he said when they separated. He reached into his leather pack and handed her the document so that she could appreciate his joke. “A beadle outside of Westminster actually said he knew the man, even though I just made up the name. ‘Great gray-haired worthy knight,’ I said, ‘with a mole right at the tip of his nose.’ ‘Yes, yes, I remember him well. Give him my regards,’ the poor fool said.”

She examined the official-looking document he’d forged in his fine hand, wondering at her husband’s courage and resourcefulness. “Why did you need to show a license? We were never asked for such a document. I don’t recall our apprentice carrying one.”

The smile vanished and a look that said as much of anger as she ever saw on her husband’s face took its place. “That’s the beneficent Chancellor More’s doing. He’s pushed a law through Parliament stating that any healthy person found outside his native parish without a license to beg or proof of employment shall be stripped naked, tied to a cart tail, and whipped publicly through the streets until his body is bloody.”

Kate had a sudden vision of her brother’s back with its striped scars, followed by a vision of Margaret Roper defending the charity of her noble father. The old familiar anger welled up inside her.

But anger could not long survive John’s innate good nature. He laughed as though it were all some great game and not a matter of life and death, as he pulled off the stained jerkin and sliced open the lining with a knife. Letters, dozens of them, came pouring out. “Each one is stuffed with money,” he announced proudly, “and words of encouragement and great affection for our cause.” His eyes were bright with excitement.

He’d come back alone, he said, not waiting to travel under Barnes’s safe-conduct because he wanted to deliver the letters—and to see his beautiful wife, of course. He’d not been able to see the king, he said, but it would probably have done no good anyway. As chancellor, More was hellbent on burning every reformer in Christendom. When John started naming names of Bible sellers, Bible buyers, and Bible readers who had been interrogated by Sir Thomas More and Bishop Stokesley, her heart nearly froze with fear.

“Do you remember hearing us talk about a man named Christoffel van Ruremund?”

Kate shook her head.

“He is . . . he was . . .” John said, “a Dutchman running pirated unbound copies of William’s New Testament into England. He wasn’t one of us, but he didn’t have to be. As long as William gets the Word out, he doesn’t care who gets the profit.”

“You said ‘was’?”

“More caught him. Shut him up in the Tower. He died there after one of the chancellor’s ‘interrogations.’ ”

Her breath caught in her throat. “How did you hear that?”

“There’s an inn down by London Bridge, the Sign of the Bottle, where the Bible men meet. I don’t know if you knew about it. Your brother probably did. They told me about Christoffel and a few of their other customers. The innkeeper’s wife warned me that the place was being watched by More’s spies.” He paused and took her by the shoulders, hugged her to him. “Don’t ever talk to strangers about what we do here, Kate. Even the women you meet with. Sometimes I wish you would just be content to—”

“You know I wouldn’t,” she said before he could give voice to the protest she did not want to hear—especially now when he’d taken such a risk and not even consulted her first. “You’re the one who takes chances. You’re the
glib one, preaching to every John and Tom that will listen to you, running off into the dragon’s lair.”

“It’s just that the fewer who know us, know what we do . . . well, suppose this Christoffel broke under interrogation—lesser men have.”

She thought of her brother, who had broken under the same wrath, and the shame and the horror she’d felt for his suffering.

“If he knew where we were . . .”

Tears stung her eyes at the thought of losing both her brother and her husband to Thomas More’s frenzied hatred. “Promise me you’ll never do that again,” she said. “Please.”

He pulled her to him, kissed the top of her head. “I went down to Paternoster Row. I saw your print shop.”

She looked up at him, genuinely interested, though she knew his ploy. He was trying to divert her. He had not promised. But she determined that if he went again, he would not go alone.

“It still has a sign,
GOUGH’S BOOK AND PRINT SHOP
. A bit rusted and in need of paint.”

“Was anybody occupying it?”

“No. It had boards across the windows and doors. And a faded notice that said it had been sealed up because of the plague, with a crude drawing that was supposed to warn away those who can’t read—that’s what kept the vagrants out, I suppose. The notice bore Lord Walsh’s seal. I recopied it and put a new date on it.”

“But you didn’t go inside.” She had a sudden wash of longing to see the little shop and climb the stairs to her old room beneath the eaves.

“Of course I went inside. That’s where I stayed while I was in London. I pried a board loose and went in through the window fronting the alley.” He grinned at her. “I slept in your little bed, though it would have suited two better.”

“How long were you there? Where else did you go?”

“I didn’t stay in London long, just long enough to find out what I needed to know.”

“And what was that?”

“That if the Boleyn woman ever opened Henry’s mind as we thought, that window has closed. Last April he called together some of the clergy and they even discussed licensing an English Bible. Some, according to my sources at the inn I was telling you about, actually had the courage to argue for it, but More won the day. As long as More is chancellor, there will be no
legal Bible,” he said soberly. “And yet, the Bibles are everywhere, from Gravesend to Bristol, from the noblest castle to the meanest hovel. One day, not soon, but one day—it is a freedom the people mean to have.”

“But how can they have it if the king doesn’t allow it?”

“They have shown they are willing to risk everything for it. What can a pope, a king, or even an emperor do in the face of that? When the numbers become too large, they cannot but give in. Else there will be nobody left in England to pay the taxes and fund Henry’s wars.”

He sat down on their bed and pulled off his boots. “It’s good to be home,” he said, lying spread-eagled across the bed. “You haven’t told me about your trip?”

But he had already closed his eyes.

“I met a lot of Catherine’s friends. They were really—I’ll tell you about it later,” she said. “When you are not so weary.”

By virtue of his role as chancellor, Sir Thomas More was the only layman present at the Convocation of Clergy summoned by the king and since the purpose for the convocation ostensibly concerned the treasury, it was his reluctant duty to read the proclamation. They were all there: Archbishop Warham of Canterbury, Tunstall, the new Bishop of Durham, and Stokes-ley, his London replacement, along with a host of bishops, abbots, and priors, many of whom Thomas could call by name.

With a rustle of silk and a whispering of fine black wool, they took their places in the hall at Westminster, nodding heads covered with purple and black coifs and tippets lined with ermine, tight mouths murmuring behind ringed fingers. The atmosphere in the hall was heavy with their dignity and laden with the odor of rich perfumes, but it reminded Thomas of the air just before a storm. Wolsey’s arrest had been for them the sound of thunder on the horizon.

They were waiting to see if the storm cloud had dissipated, and they had every right to believe that it was so. The cardinal, in spite of his arrest for conspiring with the pope against the king, had been laid out, upon his timely death a few short weeks ago, with the full dignity of his profession: miter, crosier, ring, pallium, and vestments. He had lain in state for all to see, his bier well lit by wax tapers while canons sang dirges. Though it was noised among the clergy that the king’s whore had given a New Year’s masque at court to honor “The Going to Hell of Cardinal Wolsey,” still the fact that he
had been buried with a cardinal’s honor showed that the king was still in the pope’s thrall.

It was Thomas’s unfortunate task this day to disabuse them of that notion.

He stood at the front of the hall and waited as the murmurs ceased and all eyes turned toward him, then he announced with that efficiency for which he was known, that he was here to represent the Crown. A few murmured their displeasure that His Majesty chose not to honor them with his presence when they had traveled so far along winter-ravaged roads at his request. It was not a good omen and they knew it.

He picked up the papers from the table in front of him and, clearing his throat of the clot of resistance to his task, began to read the charges. Every eye was trained on him: every ear strained for every word. Thomas did not lift his voice. He never lifted his voice. It had long been his observation that the helpless shouted. Thomas had no need to shout.

Without emotion and in an even tone that did not suggest how much he abhorred the reading, he delivered the king’s declaration. It charged that the pope’s nitpicking delays concerning the king’s marriage had raided the treasury of £100,000, and restitution would be exacted from these assembled English representatives of the Holy Roman Catholic Church. Every priest and prelate who had abetted the late cardinal’s praemunire was likewise culpable to the cardinal’s treason and therewith subject to imprisonment in the Tower and confiscation of property.

A collective intake of breath, an exchange of anxious glances, even a few utterances of outrage, but no one gave direct challenge. Cowards all, Thomas thought as he resumed the reading. Had he worn the miter and not the chain of office—toward which his father and his fleshly nature had driven him—he would not have remained silent in the face of such an outrage as did Archbishop Warham. There was none among them, save perhaps Bishop Fisher of Rochester, who had the backbone to stand firm. But even he remained silent in the face of such blackmail.

Thomas continued. If they should in their wisdom pay the sum of £100,000 to the treasury, then no further investigation or charges would be forthcoming. The Crown would be satisfied.

Thomas was not surprised to learn two days later that they had agreed to pay the king’s extortion. Nor was he surprised when two weeks later Henry VIII, King of England, stood in front of Parliament and demanded he be recognized as the sole protector and supreme head of the English Church
and clergy. This time Bishop Fisher of Rochester argued mightily. Thomas, feeling the weight of the great chain of office burning him like a brand, remained silent.
Qui tacet consentire videtur.
Thus with his silence Thomas gave consent to the destruction of his church in England.

That night he spent prostrate on his chapel floor at Chelsea with the blood from the welts on his back congealing, self-inflicted wounds to placate a disappointed Christ. But tomorrow, he would be strong. He would renew his efforts to seek out the real enemies to his church, those who sought the destruction of the Holy See. He would do that for the Christ he’d disappointed. As long as he lived—if he lived—he would hunt them down. Hunt them at home. Hunt them abroad. Thomas More, priest, would offer up the heretics as his atonement. The smell of the smoke would waft all the way to heaven.