The Heretic’s Wife Read Online Free Page A

back stairs of the print shop to her bedchamber. She heard a shout, and then muffled voices. She recognized John’s well-modulated tones. Gathering her composure, she descended the stairs and entered the stationer’s shop just in time to see the beadle and two soldiers leading her brother away.

TWO

More is a man of an angel’s wit and singular learning . . . For where is the man of that gentleness, lowliness, and affability? And, as time requireth, a man of marvelous mirth and pastime, and sometimes of as sad gravity. A man for all seasons.
    —R OBERT W HITTINTON IN
P RAISE OF S IR T HOMAS M ORE, 1520
    F riday was Sir Thomas More’s favorite day. On Fridays, after the daily mass, after the Te Deum, after the last chanted psalm, he did not don his striped robes and go to Lincoln’s Inn to lecture in the law or even to Black Friars where as Speaker of the Commons he would plead for parliamentary funding of the king’s French enterprise. Dressed in the scarlet hood and cloak of the powerful Mercer’s Guild, he did not take the short walk to the guildhall in Ironmonger Lane to report on his latest negotiations with the Hanseatic League. Nor did he adorn himself with the golden Tudor livery chain and sail his private barge down the river to Westminster to attend the king’s council. He did not even go to Oxford, where he served as steward, to pass judgment on the miscreant scholars there.
    Fridays belonged to him.
    After Sir Thomas had dismissed his family from the obligatory mass to their individual and sometimes raucous pursuits, he would remain alone inthe chapel, prostrated before the Holy Rood. Only after his limbs were stiff with fatigue, and his thoughts as tangled as the knots on the little corded whip, would he take out his flagellum and begin to lay on his stripes.
    The first hit over his left shoulder was for his patron and sometime friend. Wolsey—Wolsey with his cardinal’s hat. These first stripes, Sir Thomas laid on more in anger than in repentance, just to catch the rhythm, to crack open the doorway to the ecstasy of pain. Wolsey! A cardinal! With a secret marriage. A cardinal with both the power of the clergy and a wife.
    Then three more stripes for his lawyer father, John More. His father who must be pleased. His father who must be praised. His father who must be obeyed.
    Then a shift over the right shoulder, angrier still, his rage still hurling outward. Rage for Luther and his
furfuris,
the ape of a translator William Tyndale.
Merda, stercus, lutum.
Shit. Dung. Filth. Dangerous, villainous heretics! Breathing heavily now. One who took a whoring nun to wife and one who lived like a monk, even as he dared praise marriage for the clergy.
    Then a deep inhalation and two more strokes. Left. Right. This time in penance for his own sin, payment for his own pleasure. One for his dead wife, his young and docile Jane. He had enjoyed her overmuch. Inhale. For his lust of her, he’d abandoned his little cell in the Charterhouse, his Carthusian monk’s cell. Exhale. And another for his second wife. Dame Alice—her tongue, scourge enough for any man. Her will as powerful.
    Left, right. One to pay for his son. Two. Three. To pay for Alice’s daughter. Jane’s daughters.
    The burn began in his shoulder and spread between his shoulder blades, little tongues of flame licking at skin already raw from his hair shirt.
    Two more stripes for Meg, the daughter he loved best. Once over the left shoulder. Once over the right.
    Ten. Eleven. Twelve . . . one laid on for each of his grandchildren, until his flesh quivered with repentance, until he’d paid for all his pleasure, both innocent and carnal. Thirteen. Fourteen. Until his body and his mind were as exhausted as when he’d first lain with a woman. This traitor to his vocation. This sinner, too carnal to live celibate and too lawful to live a lie. As Wolsey did, Wolsey who wore a cardinal’s robe.
    Only when his flagellation was ended, his sinner’s soul