The Miracle at St. Bruno's

I began to enjoy our chats. She had so much advice to offer and I knew that it was good. The midwife who had attended her she fancied was the best in the neighborhood and she was going to insist that she attended me when my time came.

She made little garments for my baby when I knew she would rather have been stitching for her adored twins.

I took to visiting her often for we had become not so much mother and daughter but two women discussing the subject nearest to our hearts. She confided to me that she hoped to have more children but even if she did not she considered herself singularly blessed to have had her two little boys and both healthy.

One day though a tinge of alarm touched me.

I was in her sewing room when beneath the material on which she was working I discovered a book. It was so unlike my mother to read anything that I was surprised and even more so when I picked it up. I opened it and glanced through it and as I did so I felt my heart begin to beat very quickly. There clearly enough were set out the arguments and the tenets of the new religion. I hastily shut the book as my mother approached but I could not forget it.

At length I said: "Mother, what is this book you are reading?" Oh," she said with a grimace, "it is very dull, but I am struggling through it to please your stepfather.”

"He wishes you to read it?”

"He insists.”

"Mother, I do not think you should leave such a book where any might pick it up.”

"Why should I not? It is but a book.”

"It is what it contains. It is a plea for the reformed religion.”

"Oh, is it?" she said.

"To please me be more careful.”

She patted my hand. "You are just like your father," she said. "You are one to make something from nothing. Now look at this. Already Master Paul is growing out of it.

The rate that child grows astonishes me!”

I was thinking: So Simon Caseman is dabbling with the reformed religion!

I thought of the Abbey where a community life alarmingly similar to the old was gradually, perhaps subtly, but certainly being built up.

It occurred to me then that Simon Caseman, for harboring such a book in his house, and Bruno, for installing monks in his newly acquired Abbey, could both be deemed traitors.

A short while ago I would have gone home and argued the matter with Bruno. I might even have gone so far as to caution Simon Caseman, but strangely enough the matters seemed of secondary importance for I had just begun to feel the movement of my child and I forgot all else.

I was like my mother, shut into a little world in which the miracle of creation absorbed me.

Perhaps all pregnant women are so.

Christmas was almost upon us and I had decorated Honey's little room with holly and ivy and told her the Christmas story.

In those December days preceding Christmas there had been a great deal of talk about the King's matter. Even my mother mentioned it. There was great sympathy for the Queen who it was said was in a state of hysteria and had been ever since her accusation.

Many believed that this was an implication of her guilt.

"And if she had taken a lover, poor soul," I said to my mother as we sat over our sewing, "is that so very wrong?”

"Outside the bonds of matrimony!" cried my mother, aghast.

"She believed herself married to Dereham.”

"Then she deserves death for marrying the King.”

"Life is cruel for a woman," I said.

My mother pursed her lips virtuously. "Not if she is a dutiful wife.”

"Poor little Katharine Howard! She is so young to die.”

But my mother was not really moved by the young girl's fate. It occurred to me that in a world where death came frequently the value of life was not really great.

It was just before Christmas that Francis Dereham and Thomas Culpepper were executed.

Culpepper was beheaded but Dereham, because he was not of noble birth, suffered the barbarous hanging and quartering, the traitor's death.

I thought of them all that day-poor young men, whose crime had been to love the Queen.

At that time we thought these deaths would be enough and that the King so loved Katharine Howard that we were sure he would pardon her. Alas it was not to be so. The Queen had too many enemies. As a Howard she was a Catholic and many of the King's ministers did not wish to see a Catholic influence on the King.

Her fate was sealed when the King's ministers, before he could prevent them, circulated the story of her misconduct abroad and after this the King's own honor being involved he could scarcely with dignity take her back.

François Premier sent condolences. He was shocked by the "great displeasures, troubles and inquietations which his good brother had recently had by the naughty demeanor of her, lately reputed for Queen.”

Distressed, wounded and humiliated (this last a state calculated to arouse his anger against the cause of it) the King did not intervene to save Katharine and on a bleak February day the King's fifth wife walked out to Tower Hill where but six years before her cousin Anne Boleyn had met a similar fate.