The Butcher's Daughter

by Victoria Glendinning

  I think that she cannot not have lived much longer, although I never heard any report of her death and do not know where she is buried. That is shameful, shameful. I pray for her soul.

  London, for me, spells Thomas Wyatt, my love, my Tom, the son of the poet-statesman whom Sir Thomas Arundell told us about in the days when I knew nothing and no one.

  I heard the poet’s son spoken of long before I met him. It was shortly after a visit to Hay Hill from someone from my Shaftesbury past, and from Anne’s. When I came into the room that particular evening to make myself pleasant and to see to the needs of the customers, a gentleman at Master Piers Perceval’s crowded table was playing country airs on a lute. He was long-haired, in a green suit with a lace collar. My heart jumped. It was Father Robert Parker.

  I squeezed myself in on the bench at his side. For once I did not have to say my name. He put down his instrument, refilled his wine cup and mine, picked up a bottle, and we removed ourselves to one of the small tables. He sat with his hands supporting his face, and we talked. He looked older, naturally. But he was still a lithe and lovely man. He was the same and not the same. He told me he had, as he planned, taken a position in Salisbury Cathedral but had not stayed.

  ‘Once a priest, always a priest,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, but …’

  He was now, he said, a companion to gentlemen and ladies who required just that – a companion.

  ‘The upper classes must have people always around them, as if they feared they might cease to exist if their every moment were not witnessed by admiring inferiors. The inferiors must not be too inferior or their witness and their admiration would not be worth having.’

  We laughed together over the wine. I recognised the truth of what he said.

  So Robert provides music, Latin tuition for children, and his social presence when needed, in return for hospitality in great houses for a month or two in the country in the summer and in London in the winter. I have no doubt he provides more intimate services too, to gentlemen or to ladies or both, but he did not say and I did not enquire. Sometimes he is required to say a Mass in a private chapel, though private Masses are strictly speaking disallowed now.

  ‘For the moment, I am living with the Percevals. Lady Agnes Perceval has time on her hands and likes to have conversation and company.’

  ‘Is that kind of life enough for you?’ I asked. ‘Will it do?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘The alternatives are drearier.’

  ‘Are there butterflies?’

  ‘Sometimes there are.’

  We were wonderfully comfortable together because we remembered the same things – and because of our once-only coupling, if he recalled that. He was self-absorbed and probably always had been. He asked me nothing about myself, nor why I was where I was. I wanted to tell him about my visit to Dame Elizabeth Zouche, and about Dorothy Clausey and her new life, but there was no opportunity. He told me that he had seen Eleanor Wilmer.

  ‘How? Where?’

  ‘Late one night, outside the Cock in Fleet Street. I had been drinking with Master Perceval. There she was. She must have seen me going in.’

  ‘She always wanted you, do you remember? Maybe she had been following you?’

  ‘How would I know? She accosted me, I thought she was a whore. All she wanted was to know where you were.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘I told her what I knew which was not much.’

  Then they were peremptorily calling him back to the big table, wanting more music. He jumped to his feet, kissed my hand and left me.

  I was glad to have met him again. I tried to put the Eleanor story out of my mind. Poor dear dreadful Eleanor.

  Anne remained in her parlour for most of that evening, but she emerged to greet Master Perceval before he and his party left and I noted that she exchanged friendly words with Robert Parker. Even if he had not recognised her, he would have known from Piers Perceval precisely who ‘Mistress Arundell’ was. I did not at the time realise how dangerous this could be for Anne.

  The gentlemen who frequented Hay Hill talked about money, horses, women, land and property, faction, party and politics – not necessarily in that order. They brought in printed papers to share and discuss, and those with friends at Court pulled from their pockets private letters and read them aloud. Those in high positions were more circumspect, and every word that dropped from their narrow lips was received with the attention that one might accord to Holy Gospel.

  The floor was scattered, after the pre-dawn departures, with discarded papers. Anne and I both had a curiosity about the affairs of the great world and it was good for business if we were sufficiently well-informed to engage intelligently with the customers. That much was expected of ‘Mistress Arundell’ and of myself. So we knew immediately of the death of young King Edward. Some, not the ones with inside knowledge, swore he had been poisoned. More likely, it was a disease of the lungs. He was only fifteen.

  The great question was: Who will succeed Edward? Rightfully, his elder half-sister, the Princess Mary. But she is half-Spanish and a Catholic, ‘the Pope’s pawn’, as Master Perceval said. Edward had named as his successor the young Lady Jane Grey, some sort of a cousin and newly married to a son of his Chief Minister, the Duke of Northumberland.

  ‘Brazen coercion of the poor dying lad on the part of the noble Duke,’ according to Master Perceval. ‘There will be trouble. Bloodshed. You mark my words.’

  There was silence at the table.

  The talk picked up. That was when I first heard the name of Sir Thomas Wyatt spoken at Hay Hill. He was said to be raising a militia in Kent. But in whose interest? The Princess Mary’s, or the Lady Jane’s?

  ‘Sir Thomas Wyatt is dead,’ I said.

  A dozen pairs of eyes turned towards me, swivelling and bloodshot on account of much drink taken.

  ‘No, no, you silly little woman. This is the son.’

  Keep up, Agnes. The slurred voices multiplied, vying in counterpoint to know better than the next man.

  Young Thomas Wyatt was unpredictable, irresponsible. He was arrested for drunken street rioting and served time in the Tower. As a mere boy he was a regular at this very house when it belonged to the previous Mistress Arundell, and she spoke up for him at his trial. He was a good lad, she told the court. He was led astray.

  ‘Pity that poor little wife of his, down in the country. The only talents Tom Wyatt has are for begetting children and soldiering.’

  He hardly minded whom he fought for. He was with an English regiment serving the King of Spain, though he disliked the Spanish. He went with a volunteer brigade to France. He was commander of the fortress in Boulogne in the cause of England and was knighted for his services.

  ‘A poor follower but a good leader. A soldier to the soles of his boots, he can’t handle peace. He’s bound to make some rogue intervention now, God knows on which side. He needs watching.’

  ‘But keep your distance, Mistress Agnes,’ said Master Perceval. ‘Thomas Wyatt is bad news.’

  And he winked, and refilled my wine cup.

  No wonder I was curious.

  I first saw him when he came in with a band of armed followers. Anne did not allow pikes and muskets in her house. They were carried out to the barn. He ordered wine and took command of a long table.

  I was serving that evening, hot and bothered. I was sweating, and my thin gown was clinging to me. I was barely respectable. I was fetching food and drink for the visitors from the kitchen, a perfect Martha.

  He smiled but his eyes raked the room warily. His dark hair was cut short. He was clean-shaven. He wore a black tunic with no collar or lace, from which his neck rose like a the trunk of a tree, sun-browned and muscular. When I brought more bottles to his table he held a candle up to my face and turned his back on the company.

  ‘You are no London-born woman.’

  ‘How would you know?’

  ‘Your skin is fresh. You h
ave not grown sallow and you are clean.’ He held the candle closer, lowering it to shed light on my body.

  ‘You are not a maid. You are a woman. Where are you from?’

  ‘I was born in Bruton, but am come lately from Sherborne.’

  ‘My father is buried at Sherborne.’

  ‘I know, sir, I saw his coffin taken into the Abbey for the funeral Mass.’

  ‘I was there. We should have met then.’

  ‘I hardly think so, sir. I was one of a crowd.’

  ‘You are a country mouse.’

  ‘I am no mouse.’

  ‘What is your name?’

  So I told him. Yet again, yet again, I said my name.

  ‘I am Agnes Peppin.’

  I folded my arms across my breasts to deflect his gaze and told him how Mistress Arundell and I had been in Shaftesbury Abbey together. He laughed at that, throwing his head back, exposing that long strong throat. He asked me to sit with him, gesturing to his companions to make room.

  He said his father wrote a ballad about the country mouse and the town mouse.

  ‘He made me and my sister learn it by heart, as children, on one of his rare visits to us at Allington.’

  I wanted to know about Allington but he did not tell me, not then.

  The country mouse, he said, who knows well how to feed and look after herself in her native fields, goes to the city to be with her sister, ‘to live a lady while her life doth last’.

  ‘It is an old fable. The point was that men “seek the best and find the worst by error as they stray”, by abandoning everything they know and understand.’

  ‘My mother would agree with that.’

  ‘Agnes – you did say Agnes? – I do not need to know about your mother right now, please listen. When the awful cat appears from beneath a stool, and think how terrible a cat must look to a mouse, with its “two steaming eyes in a round head with sharp ears” in my father’s poem, the town mouse runs away fast and knows just where to hide. The country mouse has no notion of what to do. She just wishes she were at home. She makes for the door, slips, and is caught by the cat.’

  ‘Did the cat kill the country mouse?’

  ‘The poem does not say. I think Mistress Arundell is your town-mouse sister. She will always be able to look after herself. And maybe, maybe, I might look after you. For a little while, anyway. To speak honestly, I can barely look after myself.’

  ‘I know one of your father’s verses. I have a copy of it. In my chamber upstairs. The one that begins, “They flee from me that one time did me seek”.’

  His eyes widened. He was amazed.

  ‘How is that possible? Shall we go and look at it? Shall we go upstairs?’

  I told him how I came to have it, and he was amazed again, and we went upstairs, and so it began.

  I am wearing the cloak as I write. It was the first thing he gave to me. He had it made up by the seamstress who makes clothes for his lady wife and his little daughters. It is shabby now, the rich blue colour faded and stained, the fur rubbed away to pale skin at the edge of the hood. I cannot throw it out. I should like to be buried in it.

  When he first brought it up to me in my chamber in the Hay Hill house, and unwrapped it by the light of the candle, he seemed as excited as a child.

  ‘Feel the softness of the wool. And what a colour! This cloth comes from Spain.’

  He picked at the hem, breaking a few stitches, to show me the layer of fine whitish wool beneath the grey fur lining.

  ‘It is warm enough for you to wear outside in the cold weather and light enough for you to wear indoors too.’

  We turned it over and over, stroking its rich softness and each other’s hands.

  I put the cloak on and paraded about my chamber, scarcely more than seven steps one way and seven steps the other, looking at him over my shoulder. Then he took it from me and put it aside, and laid me on the bed. That was the night that he raised his head and looked up into my eyes and said:

  ‘Pleasure! Pleasure! Pleasure!’

  In that husky love-laden voice of his.

  Later he gave me five shifts, cut from linen so fine that to wear one felt like having warm air between my skin and my outer garments. Those shifts have long gone. As the stuff of each one deteriorated beyond mending, I tore it into strips and used it to wipe up household messes. When they were soiled beyond further use I threw the strips on the fire.

  In the times that we had together we talked and talked, leaning out of my unshuttered window, our elbows pressed together on the sill, looking out into the night.

  He talked about Thomas Cromwell, now a black legend, whom I thought was the King’s Chief Minister. That was not all he was, said Thomas. He held multiple offices. I don’t now remember them all, but he was an adviser to the great Cardinal. And then Lord Privy Seal, Master of the Rolls, Principal Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer …

  ‘Only three months before his arrest the King made him Earl of Essex and Great Lord Chamberlain. He could not have risen higher nor fallen further or more rapidly.’

  ‘So why did he fall?’

  Thomas shrugged. ‘It is in the past now. He had enemies. The Duke of Norfolk, and then the fiasco of the marriage to the German. They say the King came to regret Cromwell’s disgrace and execution. My father was there on that day, not to crow but out of respect. They were both risk-takers. Me too.’

  The little tailor who came to Sherborne had got it mostly right.

  I ventured to say, ‘I have heard that Cromwell addressed personal words to certain friends from the scaffold.’

  ‘You have heard much, and correctly. My father was one of those to whom he spoke. I do not know what Cromwell said to him, but they tell me that my father wept.’

  He talked to me about his family, which he said was full of irregularities – like all families in my experience, as I pertly said to him.

  Yet his life was so different from mine that it seems a miracle that we could know and love each other. There is the old castle in Kent, at Allington. Tom was born there, as was his father. Allington was, he said, ‘a beautiful, intractable, terrible old place’.

  ‘The summer before he died my father put in a long gallery, new panelling, a new kitchen, fireplaces. Everything that is modish, he just had to be part of the great rebuilding.’

  This was not for his wife’s benefit. Thomas’s parents separated early. Thomas and his sister rarely saw their father, who accused the mother of adultery – with King Henry, no less:

  ‘The King certainly had a soft spot for her.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘My mother has always been looked after. Not by my father, he gave her not a penny, but by her brother. And others. She has remarried, and well.’

  When Tom told me his father grew up as a child with Anne Boleyn and her brother George, because they were cousins and because Allington was close to the Boleyns’ place, I ceased my questions and interruptions. No more pert comments from me. I know that Peppins and Wyatts are the same in the sight of God, but nevertheless … The King and Anne Boleyn came to dinner at Allington. Thomas’s Aunt Margaret was one of Anne Boleyn’s ladies, and accompanied her to the scaffold.

  What is more, my Thomas saw the late King Henry naked.

  That is because when he was fifteen he spent time at Court as an Esquire to the Body. The Body in question was the King’s.

  ‘I was a wild boy and my father arranged it, because he was anxious about me. In some ways he was a good father. He wrote me long letters about how to conduct myself, who was important and who was not, and how the Court worked. I cannot for the life of me say where those letters are now.’

  There were, he said, half a dozen Esquires to the Body, well-born youths like himself who, for a few weeks at a time, in turn, helped the King to put on his underclothes in the morning and to take them off at night. Other young men helped him off and on with his outer garments. The topmost office was that of the Groom of the Stool who oversaw Hi
s Majesty’s excremental functions and the washing of his body, behind closed doors.

  ‘I have dealt with a lot of excrement in my time and no one ever suggested it was the topmost office.’

  ‘Ah, but a King’s excrement is divine.’ He laughed. ‘A King is never alone and never does anything for or by himself. That is what it is to be a King. Or a Queen.’

  I could not restrain myself.

  ‘What in God’s name was all this like?’

  The King was not then, Thomas said, as fleshy as he later became. He was a fine man.

  ‘He liked to have a musician playing an instrument in his chamber. He liked to sing. He quizzed me about which Court ladies I fancied. And sometimes he was in a black humour. He could not bear to be contradicted.’

  What else?

  ‘His face was ruddy but his skin under his garments was chalky white. His body hair was sandy-coloured. He had a strong personal odour. His private closet stank like a badger’s sett.’

  At home at Allington there was in his boyhood often no mother, and a mostly absent father, but there was always Elizabeth Darrell.

  ‘My father loved many women, but Elizabeth Darrell saw them all off. She gave birth to three sons at Allington and the two elder ones bore the Wyatt name. The youngest was known as Darrell. Lovely boys, as dear to me as full brothers, and maybe one or two of them are my father’s.’

  He looked at me sideways. I held my tongue. He proceeded.

  His father’s mistress was eight years older than Thomas. She and he liked one another too well.

  ‘At the time when I was coming and going from Court, she took me into her bed. It is possible that my two youngest half-brothers are my own sons. No one ever referred to this, it was not spoken of. But I am sure it is why my father made me marry once I was sixteen.’

  ‘How could your father make you marry?’

  ‘He was a hard man. Not what you imagine a poet or statesman to be like. He was violent, he had killed a man. He was not someone who could be crossed. He over-persuaded me, shall we say, into marrying. He himself had married at seventeen. What could I do? Though she was, she is, very sweet. My Jane. Would you like to hazard a guess at how many children I have sired with her?’