“What is this?” he asks.
“Tom Darcy gave it to me; he had it made when he went on crusade. It’s the badge of the defender of the Church against heresy. He had one made for our family.”
“Darcy is with us,” Montague confirms. “He spoke against the divorce at the last Parliament.”
“He was there long before us.”
“And we have brought someone to see you,” Geoffrey says eagerly.
“If you wish,” Montague says more cautiously. “She’s a very holy woman, and she says some extraordinary things.”
“Who?” I ask. “Who have you brought?”
“Elizabeth Barton,” Geoffrey says quietly. “The nun that they call the Holy Maid of Kent.”
“Lady Mother, I think you should meet her,” Montague says, forestalling my refusal. “The king himself has met her, William Warham the archbishop, may he rest in peace, brought her to him. The king listened to her, spoke with her. There is no reason that you should not see her.”
“She preaches that Princess Mary will take the throne,” Geoffrey says. “And other predictions that she has made have come true, just as she said they would. She has a gift.”
“Our cousin Henry Courtenay has met her, and his wife, Gertrude, prayed with her,” Montague tells me.
“Where is she now?” I ask.
“She’s staying at Syon Abbey,” Geoffrey says. “She preaches to the Carthusian Brothers, she has visions and understands more than a simple country girl could possible know. But right now, she’s in your chapel. She wants to speak with you.”
I glance at Montague. He nods reassuringly. “She’s not under suspicion,” he says. “She’s spoken to everyone at court.”
I rise from my chair and lead the way through the hall and out to my private chapel at the side of the building. The candles are lit on the altar, as always. One candle burns brightly in a glass of red Venice crystal before the memorial stone for my husband. The scent of the church, a hint of incense, a dry smell like leaves, the wisp of smoke from the candles, comforts me. The triptych above the altar gleams with gold leaf, and the Christ child smiles down on me as I quietly enter the warm darkness, drop a curtsey, and touch my forehead with holy water in the sign of the cross. A slim figure rises up from her seat at the side of the room, nods her head to the altar as if acknowledging a friend, and then turns and curtseys to me.
“I am glad to meet, your ladyship, for you are doing God’s work, guarding the heir to England who will be queen,” she says simply with a soft country accent.
“I am guardian to the Princess Mary,” I say carefully.
She steps towards me into the candlelight. She is dressed in the robes of the Benedictine Order, an undyed wool gown of soft cream tied at the waist with a soft leather belt. A scapular of plain gray wool over the robe falls to the ground at front and back, and her hair is completely covered by a wimple and veil that shade her tanned face and her brown, honest eyes. She looks like an ordinary country girl, not like a prophetess.
“I am commanded by the Mother of Heaven to tell you that Princess Mary will come to her throne. No matter what happens, you must assure her that this will come to pass.”
“How do you know this?”
She smiles as if she knows that I have dozens of young women who look just like her working for me on the land, in the dairies or in the laundries of my many houses.
“I was an ordinary girl,” she says. “Just as I appear to you. An ordinary girl like Martha in the sacred story. But God in His wisdom called on me. I fell into a deep sleep and spoke of things that I couldn’t remember when I woke. One time I was speaking in tongues for nine days, without food or drink, like one asleep but awake in heaven.”
“Then I could hear my voice and understand what I was saying, and knew it to be true. My master took me to the priest and he called great men to see me. They examined me, my master and my priest, and the Archbishop Warham, and they proved that I was speaking the word of God. God commands me to speak with many great men and women, and nobody has disproved me, and everything that I have said has always come true.”
“Tell her ladyship about your predictions,” Geoffrey urges.
She smiles at him, and I see why people are following her in their thousands, why people listen to her. She has a smile of sweetness, but immense confidence. To see that smile is to believe her.
“I told Cardinal Wolsey to his face that if he helped the king to leave his wife, if he supported the king’s proposal to marry Mistress Anne Boleyn, then he would be completely destroyed and die ill and alone.”
Geoffrey nods. “And it happened.”
“Alas for the cardinal, it did come to pass. He should have told the king he must cleave to his wife. I warned Archbishop Warham that if he did not speak out for the queen and her daughter the princess he would die ill and alone, and poor man, poor sinner, he too has gone from us, just as I foresaw. I warned Lord Thomas More that he must take his courage and speak to the king, tell him that he must live with his wife the queen and put his daughter the princess on the throne. I warned Thomas More what would happen if he did not speak out, and that has yet to come.” She looks quite stricken.
“Why, what will happen to Thomas More?” I ask very quietly.
She looks at me and her brown eyes are dark with sorrow as if sentence has been passed. “God save his soul,” she says. “I will pray for him too. Poor man, poor sinner. And I spoke to your son Reginald, and told him that if he was brave, braver than anyone else has been, his courage would be rewarded and he would come to be where he was born to be.”
I take her arm and lead her away from my two sons. “And where is that?” I whisper.
“He will rise through the Church and they will call him Pope. He will be the next Holy Father and he will see Princess Mary on the throne of England and the true religion as the only religion of England once again.”
I can’t deny it, this is what I have thought and prayed for. “Do you know this for a certainty?”
She meets my eyes with such a steady confidence that I have to believe her. “I’ve been honored with visions. God has honored me with sight of the future. I swear to you that I have seen all this come to pass.”
I cannot help but believe her. “And how shall the princess come to her own?”
“With your help,” she says quietly. “You were appointed by the king himself to guard and support her. You must do that. Never leave her. You must prepare her to take the throne, for, believe me, if the king does not return to his wife, he will not reign for long.”
“I can’t hear such things,” I say flatly.
“I am not telling them to you,” she says. “I am speaking the words of my vision, and you can listen or not as you wish. God has told me to speak, aloud; that is enough for me.”
She pauses. “I say nothing to you that I have not said to the king himself,” she reminds me. “They took me to him so that he might know what my visions were. He argued with me, he told me that I was wrong; but he did not order me to be silent. I shall speak, and whoever wants to learn may listen. Those who want to stay in the darkness, worming through the earth like the Moldwarp, can do so. God told me, and I told the king that if he leaves his wife, the queen, and pretends to marry any woman, then he will not live not one day, no, not one hour after his false wedding.”
She nods at my aghast face. “I said those words to the king himself, and he thanked me for my advice and sent me home. I am allowed to speak such things, for they are the words of God.”
“But the king is not turned from his path,” I point out. “He may have listened, but he did not come back to us.”
She shrugs. “He must do as he thinks fit. But I have warned him of the consequences. The day will come, and when that day comes, you must be ready, the princess must be ready, and if her throne is not offered to her, then she will have to take it.” Her eyelids flutter, and for a moment I can see only the whites of her eyes as if she is about to faint. “She will have to ride her horse at the head of her men, she will have to fortify her house. She will come into London on a white horse and the people will cheer her.” She blinks, and her face loses its entranced dreamy look. “And your son”—she nods her head to Montague, waiting at the back of the chapel—“he will be at her side.”