The Butcher's Daughter

by Victoria Glendinning

  ‘Jack is useless, Jack was not the answer. I know what you hold in your arms. I will denounce you to the First Minister and you will be terribly punished for what you are doing.’

  ‘And who pray is the First Minister now? Cromwell is long gone. You know nothing, you know no one.’

  ‘I shall go to the Palace of Westminster and find someone important and denounce you.’

  This was just the sort of know-all, know-nothing, idiotic altercation we used to have in Sherborne when we never had enough information between us. It was utterly ludicrous, with me standing in the river with my lover’s severed head in my arms. So ludicrous that I began to laugh. Thomas was right after all. Eleanor was comical.

  ‘Go away now, Eleanor, just go, go quietly, I want nothing to do with you, I have nothing to say to you.’

  ‘You have no choice. I know all about you. You are a traitor’s whore.’

  Eleanor began to stumble heavily down the slope towards the river. I turned and threw Thomas’s head as far as I could out into the stream, but could not stay to see whether it sank or whether it was carried away on the surface of the tide-waters. Because glancing back I saw Eleanor balancing between stones and mud, stretching out her arms to me. I waded back out of the river, stepped into Eleanor’s embrace, spun around, and pushed her with all my strength into the river.

  I heard her scream and I turned away, scrambling as fast as I could back up the slope towards the highway. There I ran and ran, hardly stopping until I reached the ascent of Hay Hill, where I crouched in a hedgerow, getting my breath. I staggered like an old woman back to Anne Cathcart’s house, where everyone was sleeping, up the ladder-stair, and collapsed on my mattress. In the morning, when they called out for me, I told them I was sick.

  People die all the time. It doesn’t matter. Men are killing men every day, every night, everywhere. Women, I think, kill not so much. Possibly I just imagine that I killed Eleanor.

  No, I did it. Thomas’s head, Eleanor’s body, carried away in the dark stream. Thomas’s head rolling along the bottom, dragged by the tide, until it became wedged in the timbers of some sunken hulk. Perhaps it rolled free, and was carried out to open sea. The salt water, and the creatures that live in salt water, will long ago have stripped it clean of flesh and hair. A white skull.

  And Eleanor – a dead rat.

  It’s possible that Eleanor did not drown. She could have dragged herself from the water somewhere downstream, or been rescued by a ferryman.

  All I can say is, I never ever saw Eleanor Wilmer again.

  I think she did drown. And no one on this earth, from that day to this, ever knew what happened to the head of Thomas Wyatt, and no one ever will unless they read the words that I have written.

  I think about him. Not a day passes without Thomas coming into my mind.

  I am fortunate. What we had was not for ever, but for me it was all-consuming. What Sister Isobel knew, and what I know, may seem as different and chalk and cheese. The Church would say so. I am not so certain. I was inadequate for the religious life, but any inkling I have of its holy mystery does not seem to me so different in kind from what I knew with Thomas.

  While Thomas and I were together, nothing I saw or felt, even when we were apart for days or weeks, was ordinary. The world was transformed. Never do I have to wonder what a great passion might be like, or wonder whether there is some marvellous secret pleasure that I have missed. I look at common couples on the streets and wonder if they too know. Appearance is no guide. The most beautiful and aristocratic men and women may never know.

  I call him my Thomas, my Tom. But he was never mine, nor any woman’s. On one of our last nights, my brain softened by love, I asked him whether I could not go to live quietly in some remote place, and he would come to me when he could, and we would make a good life together.

  It was a terrible mistake. How little I understood him. He uttered a groan like a roar and unpicked my arms from around his neck as if they were ropes. He sat up on the edge of the bed with his back to me. He shook with wordless male rage. He turned to me, he swore, he struck me across the face. I leapt from the bed and stood naked at the low hatch which leads to the stairs. I might have to run from this man.

  ‘I have a wife, Madam. I do not need a secondary one. Wife, wife, wife. That is a burden I do not want. I could never be with you in that way, in some quiet place. I am not as the common people are. Do you not know who I am? What do you think that I am?’

  ‘I belong to the common people and I want to be with you all the time.’

  ‘No one must be with anyone all the time. Have you understood nothing? What matters is what is happening in the country and at Court. My head is filled with the names and faces of men – who is for this and who for that, those whom I can trust and those who would be happy to see me dead.’

  ‘All of them known to you since childhood, I suppose,’ I said, ‘and most of them related to you one way or another.’

  ‘What has that to do with anything?’

  I asked this harsh stranger what it was that he most wanted.

  ‘Reputation. Riches. Victory in battle.’

  He was quiet for a moment and then said no, that was not all. Because all success, all wealth is provisional. Look at Cardinal Wolsey, he said, look at Sir Thomas More, look at Thomas Cromwell.

  ‘I will have my time in the sun before the dark comes down upon me. And I will be in the eye of the storm when that time comes. Nothing is for ever except my high name and my reputation.’

  I thought he would leave. But he turned towards me, weary, more like the Thomas that I knew.

  ‘I need women too – dear Agnes, I need you, perhaps more than ever. Just do not expect me to be other than I am. Do not seek to shackle me. It would be the end of us.’

  I wept. It was a weakness in me. I knew I was carrying his child and did not dare to tell him.

  This particular storm was over. For him, that is. He lay back on my bed and called me to him, and I went to him.

  I forgave but I did not forget. Thomas Wyatt was not without faults. I think they sprang from a vanity which the world might could call womanish. He was the hero of his own story. He had a habit which grated on me. In the midst of noisy companions, all of them unbuttoned by wine, when one of them praised him for some triumph he would affect not to have heard:

  ‘What was that you said?’

  Thomas heard perfectly well. He wanted the praise to be repeated, in such a way that everyone else paid attention and heard it too. Then he would smile and demur. It is only those whom we love that we observe so closely. The observation of frailties does not occlude love. I would like to have been able to reassure and to protect Thomas Wyatt. That was not what he wanted at all.

  *

  One summer morning, the year before, I tried to convey to Anne Cathcart the wonder of my secret life with Thomas. Seated at her ease in her parlour, wearing a green silk dress with pearls sewn on the bodice, she said:

  ‘Ah yes, yes indeed. Desire. Lust. Were it not for lust, I would not be where I am today. Were it not for lust, no children would be begotten. No one would think if it. Lust is nature’s way of ensuring a supply of new men.’

  ‘Have you read The Canterbury Tales?’ I asked her. ‘Do you know about the Wife of Bath?’

  Because Anne reminds me of the Wife of Bath, as did Lady Agnes Perceval, which in the circumstances is ironic.

  ‘I never heard of her. I do not always have my nose in a book.’

  In retrospect I wish I had asked Anne what nature had in mind when creating girl children, though I know what her answer would be. The purpose of females, if they are the daughters of the rich, is to be vehicles for the transfer of wealth from one man to another, and to breed. The commonality of women, that is. I have no doubt that Anne placed herself in a special category. I might have said that what Thomas and I had together was nothing to do with begetting children. It was about us, ourselves.

  She may be right about the h
idden purpose of lust. To me, my condition was the unintended consequence of love.

  10

  SEEING THE SEA

  I remained at Hay Hill into the late summer, by which time Queen Mary was married to Philip of Spain. She hardly knew him, neither spoke the other’s language, but it was said that she doted upon him. There were rumours that she had conceived. Her belly swelled up. But there was no baby in there. There is something altogether peculiar about this Queen Mary.

  I ceased to concern myself about these matters. When I sensed my own baby was soon to be born I went away from Hay Hill into proper London.

  I did not ask Anne for help or advice. I spoke with one of the serving women, Tabitha, who I knew had children of her own. It was a fortunate impulse. Tabitha has a sister who lives in the Borough.

  ‘Honor will surely take you in – she has lost her husband, she’ll be glad of the money.’

  Tabitha sent her a message to the Borough – that was Southwark. I would be treading where Thomas had trod and breathing the same air.

  The carrier put me down at Temple Bar, where Thomas had surrendered. I walked on eastwards up Ludgate Hill, through the gate which was closed to him, and past St Paul’s Cathedral. I took a wrong turning off Cheapside into a slum of alleys. People were swarming in and out filthy courts and yards, shouting and crying and fighting and selling and buying. Also pigs, fowls, packs of dogs and tribes of skinny cats. Sewage running in the gutter. It was a struggle just to move along. I kept bumping into people, I do not have the knack of weaving my way through a crowd as everyone else seemed able to do.

  No one of whom I asked directions knew anything, and they did not understand what I said. Many people in London were not born or raised here, it seems to me. I know there are mansions in London where great families live in comfort, but not in the parts through which I passed that day. A shack in clean country air among green trees would be preferable to me. But a London child would find only stagnation in the countryside. There is vitality in these teeming alleys.

  I came by a winding route to the river and to London Bridge, and stopped, seeing a chaos of traffic. Dozens of loaded carts and wagons were lined up, waiting, not daring to cross all together and at once. Just one or two wagons were on the bridge, moving slowly.

  I could see a gap in the rows of high tenements on the bridge, like missing teeth. That must be where the Queen’s men broke through it. There were tar-blackened heads stuck up on pikes at both ends of the bridge. Whose heads they were I do not know. I saw a man with a handcart coming towards me from the other side, but still I hesitated. He shouted out to me:

  ‘You can cross over. They have laid down timbers across the space. Go carefully.’

  I imagined waters swirling beneath unstable planks. I went down the steps on the near side of the bridge where a single ferryman was waiting, and had myself rowed over to the other side. In mid-stream, I looked back and saw the Tower. Ahead, on the Southwark shore, more carts and wagons were halted, as far back as the eye could see. The ferryman said:

  ‘It’s bad for business, this carry-on. This Queen, that Queen, who cares. Not me. There’s only the one bridge. Everyone’s losing time and time is money. More work for me and my mates, though.’

  And indeed the river was criss-crossed with loaded boats and barges. The tide was out. When I stepped out of the boat there were three little girls on the foreshore playing and singing:

  ‘London Bridge is falling down,

  Falling down, falling down,

  London Bridge is falling down,

  My Fair Lady.’

  Life is sweeter on the Southwark side. There are boatyards and vegetable gardens and a big busy market and, on Borough High Street, more inns and taverns than I ever saw in one place. Anne Cathcart might have done better to establish herself here, rather than out in the fields on Hay Hill. Tabitha’s sister Honor lives in a yard off the High Street. She showed me to a clean chamber up her stair – it was her son Daniel’s room, but he has grown up and gone – and we arranged terms. She earns her living by sewing up silk linings for coats. The pieces are cut out by the tailor, and Honor crosses the river and collects them from his workshop.

  ‘Is the tailor a very small man?’ I asked. ‘Does he have a taste for Court gossip?’

  ‘He is a normal-sized person. He is an Italian. We speak only about the work,’ replied Honor.

  Of course there must be scores and scores of tailors in the city. What a country mouse I still am.

  The coat-linings are lemon yellow, grey, lavender – all pale colours, and the silk is precious. Her hands must always be clean, and her floor too. Any smudge or stain ruins the work and she has to bear the cost.

  I told her about the little girls singing ‘London Bridge is falling down’.

  ‘It is very quick, surely, for such a song already to be known to children?’

  ‘No, no, it’s not about what happened now. We knew it when I was their age.’

  She hummed the melody, and it was the same. I suppose bridges have always collapsed or been broken, by floods and in wars.

  I didn’t ask her how it had been for her when the Borough was full of armed men and bombarded. I made myself useful. I helped her to sweep and dust and mop and wipe, and waited for the baby to be born.

  I walked out one fine day and saw, in another yard off the High Street, the Tabard Inn where Chaucer’s pilgrims met up at the start of their journey. I stood and gazed at its galleried façade, and watched women and men going in and out making a great din, and horsemen clattering through, and fowls scattering up screeching from the horses’ hoofs. I pictured the pilgrims assembling in the yard with their servants and their baggage, all ready for the long ride to Canterbury, which is in Kent. I thought of Finch and said a prayer for him.

  It was an easy birth. Honor was a kind nurse and helper. My daughter, whom I called Abigail, was healthy. Her name means, in Hebrew, ‘Joy of the Father’, as Dorothy Clausey of all people once told me. The choice of name was wishful thinking. Abigail had no father, only a mother to rely upon.

  I lay with Abigail in my arms in the bed. I cleaned and fed her whenever she woke, but mostly we both slept. I searched her little face for a likeness to her father, and fancied I found a resemblance. But she was who she was and she was perfect.

  I had four days of calm and hopefulness, resting and dreaming.

  *

  Abigail sickened, suddenly and overnight. She had difficulty breathing. She would not feed. She no longer cried. Over another four days she grew smaller and paler. I did not know what to do, there was nothing that I or Honor could do. She would not even take water from the tip of a spoon. It was like the time when Dorothy’s baby was in the same case. But little Esther had been neglected and chilled to the bone. Abigail was warm and swaddled and held close. It made no difference.

  She was so quiet and still that I could not tell the moment when her soul left her body. I baptised her with water from the ewer and made the sign of the Cross over her. Honor and I prayed over her little body as it became cold and then stiff. Honor would have given me an offcut from the coat linings, but I wrapped her in the piece of silk embroidered with gold birds which Sister Mary Amor bequeathed to me. I kissed her hands and face over and over again and laid her in a box. Honor knew whom to ask to take it away.

  Abigail is buried with no marker in a corner of the churchyard of what was, before the troubles, Southwark Priory, on the river. Abigail is safe, she is with the angels in Heaven.

  I hardly wept. I was numb and dumb. My heart was a block of ice.

  And then, on the Borough High Street, I found myself walking behind a man, a common workman, carrying a fair-haired child in a sling on his back. She was perhaps eighteen months old, looking solemnly out on to the world with her clear blue eyes. She pumped her little legs up and down, and called out ‘Dada!’ Her father turned his head and spoke to her over his shoulder, and gave a little jump, which bounced her and made her laugh. Then they turned
into an alleyway and I saw them no more.

  Tears flooded my eyes, the ice in my heart melted, and I ran like a mad person to hide in the Priory church – dark, cold, empty, no one there. I squatted in a corner and wept and cried and howled like an animal for the loss of Abigail, for the scent of her downy head, for her tiny fingernails, for the tug at my womb when she sucked. And for Tom, my only love, not lost to me entirely because of her – until now. I cried until I could cry no more.

  After that I carried grief like a bundle that I could never put down. Onslaughts of uncontrollable weeping continued to ambush me. Honor grew impatient with my sobbing. She remarked drily that it was all very sad, but infants do die so easily, it is only to be expected, it is commonplace. Few women raise every child that they bear.

  ‘I kept my Daniel. But I lost three. Two boys and a girl. Well, my Clemency was never right but she lived for five years until her guts turned to water and she was gone within twenty-four hours. You are not the only pebble on the beach, Agnes Peppin.’

  Tough but true. It was time to move along. I did not want to break the contact with Honor, who was so good, nor lose the memory of my short time with Abigail. So I left in Honor’s safe keeping all my writings up until then, and my lion tile from Shaftesbury, and some of my money. I took my books with me. At the last minute I rolled up the blue cloak Thomas had given me and added it to my bundle. I watched as Honor stowed everything away in a cupboard in her kitchen. I was sad to say goodbye to her but knew I would come back.

  When I returned to Hay Hill, Anne asked me nothing about my absence but I am sure she knew. Never have I known a woman so coarse and at the same time so delicate. Or was she just indifferent?

  She had worries of her own. Master Piers Perceval was behaving strangely. Anne fretted that his wife had come to suspect his intimacy with the Hay Hill establishment, and with herself.

  I could guess how that might be. Just suppose that Master Perceval, a braggart, spoke freely to Robert Parker, as man to man. Robert Parker, spending much time with Mistress Agnes Perceval and under a courtier’s obligation to keep her entertained, may have regaled her with an amusing account of an unusual establishment presided over by a certain Mistress Arundell. He may even, under pressure, have admitted that he had visited the place with her husband – oh, they went only just the once of course, out of idle curiosity, and never again. No, certainly not, never again. I could imagine the two of them sitting in the garden, Mistress Agnes dressed in a fashionably shepherdess kind of way and Robert with a book of Latin verses on his knee. Nothing could be more decorous or more civilised.