The Queen's Lady by Barbara Kyle Page B

cleared the dishes and Honor and Cecily began a lute duet. Watching Honor, More remembered the letter inside his robe. He beckoned Matthew over and told him to ask Mistress Larke to come out to his library when she was finished playing. He excused himself from the table.
    He passed through the sultry orchard, deep in thought. Though he walked slowly, the heat was oppressive, and sweat prickled his skin by the time he reached the New Building. The sweat made the coarse fibers of the hair shirt he always wore under his linen scratch even more uncomfortably than usual. Good, he thought with a chuckle at himself: a perfect, penitential complement to that second helping of beef.
    The library was pleasantly cool. He laid the Queen’s note on his desk and shifted a letter that was already lying there so that the two papers were lined up side by side. He regarded them for a moment, then turned to the window and looked out at the woods beyond the pond. What to do? To which request should he agree?
    Which was best for the girl?
    A smile crept to his lips as he recalled his laughter with her over the foolish Vicar. But the smile quickly faded. How the world has changed, he thought, since I wrote Utopia . When it was published no one had even heard of Martin Luther. Yet the very next year Luther nailed his wretched theses to the door of Wittenburg Church, and nothing had been the same since. That same year, Sulieman the Turk marshaled his dreadful army, too. And now? The pestilence of Luther’s malice infects all Europe. The Turk has smashed the Hungarian army and casts his hungry eye westward on us. And in Rome . . .
    Dear God, Rome . . .
    Everywhere, Christendom quakes and crumbles. Can the old bonds hold? Everything has degenerated. Even here. The King and Queen, who used to live together in such handfast companionship and never stooped to wrangle . . .
    He did not let himself finish the thought. It did no good to stray down that path. Besides, he reassured himself, that particular crisis will be resolved once the King comes to his senses over the Boleyn girl, which must be soon.
    He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. He was tired, needed rest. It seemed he had not slept soundly since the news had reached England two weeks before of the catastrophe in Rome. So appalling. The civilized world had been stunned by it.
    In May the Holy Roman Emperor Charles’s troops, warring with France for years over pieces of the Italian peninsula, had fought their way to Rome. They were a mixed brew of Spanish, Italian, and German mercenaries. Unpaid for months and hungry for spoils, they mutinied. They burst the city walls and brought Rome to its knees with a reign of terror never before seen in Christendom. A third of the population was massacred. Cardinals were prodded through the streets and butchered. Nuns, auctioned to soldiers, were raped on their altars. The aisles of the Vatican were used as stables, and the precious manuscripts of its libraries shredded for horses’ bedding. Pope Clement, with the jewels of his papal tiara sewn into the hem of his gown, fled the Vatican along a corridor connecting it to the Castel Sant’ Angelo. While soldiers looted the Church’s palaces, and stacked corpses rotted by the river, the Pope huddled in the Castel under siege. Finally, with Rome in ruins, the Emperor allowed the Pope to escape north of the city to Orvieto.
    More shook his head, still hardly able to believe the enormity of the disaster.
    There was a soft knock at the door. He turned to see his ward step into the room. He shook off his gloomy thoughts. “I have received a rather surprising communication from the Queen,” he said as pleasantly as he could manage.
    Honor stood waiting, and More saw by the slight wrinkling of her forehead that she could not imagine how the Queen’s message could concern her.
    He sat down at his desk. “It seems you have made a most favorable impression on Her Grace. Tell me, child, what passed between you and