The Secret Diaries of Juan Luis Vives

by Tim Darcy Ellis

  “And what do you have to say to my little sister?” Meg intervened.

  The gypsy snarled. “What to say to the one they’ll call the cleverest woman in England, as if such a thing was possible to tell! You’re cleverer than the next queen, who’ll hate you for it and try to take him from you. You are loved above the others, but you are not loved.”

  A tear appeared in Cicely’s eye and, after a pause, the gypsy spoke to Meg in a softer tone. “Do not fear when the night grows cold. He will be with you, and he will be watching you. I’ve seen the depths of your daughter’s love. You’ll not leave him, even in death.”

  What could she mean in saying Your dead mother will be killed? What did this bode for the future, and what did it say about my family, still living there? And what of the next queen, who’ll hate Meg, and who will she try to take from her? Is it me?

  Exhausted, we sat by the ring for a wrestling match between the giant of York and the ogre of Oxford. It was nothing but show, and we lost a few groats in the game they call shove ha’penny. The girls were overcome with excitement as we passed a stall selling puppies and kittens.

  “Mummy, oh, Mummy, look at that one.” Meg beamed like a six-year-old. Even to my eyes this creature was beautiful, a black bundle of fur with a wet nose and eyes, dark as pieces of polished coal.

  “We simply cannot have more animals,” Lady Alice said.

  “No, we can’t, but Juanito can.”

  My heart sank. She called me Juanito, a word reserved for family, for Álvaro, for Marguerite.

  “But I am leaving for Oxford,” I countered.

  “He needs a family in his new home,” Meg declared.

  Before I knew it, the deal was done, and in a wicker basket at my side was a bundle of fur and sharp teeth.

  “What shall we call him?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Why Henry, of course,” I replied, “for the great King of England.”

  We made our way back, weary now, through the side streets of St. Bartholomew’s, passing the ancient hospital and the monastery, the one where Sir Thomas had studied and prayed. The puppy in the basket, slung over my shoulder, whined his earth-shattering, almighty “I am.”

  Once at home, with jugs of lemon and rose water, we gathered on the patio of the garden. Álvaro played Spanish music on the lute that took me to other places, of Mother dancing with Father and of a sweet girl named Ana from Andalusia. Lost in the memory, I fell asleep.

  It was dark when I awoke but for the candlelight, and found that it was just Meg and me, the two of us on adjoining cushions, neither awake nor asleep. Her face was lit from her left side, and I could see every curve of her face had become beautiful, every lock of her light brown hair lit with the magic of the candle flame. She reached her hand towards my elbow and said with her eyes still shut, “Will there be another evening as blissful as this one, Juanito?”

  “I hope so, Mistress Roper.”

  “Meg.”

  “I hope my family and yours can live honestly in a fair land. I hope there are many more summers together like this, many more fairs. Can I share my secrets with you, Meg?”

  “Please, yes.”

  “How I’d love to show you the palaces and the whitewashed houses of my home. I hope I take you there as…” I hesitated.

  “As your love,” she said.

  I could not stand because of the bulge in my pants.

  “I see you are in conflict, sir,” she said, eyes cast towards it.

  We lay there in silence and giggled. Every moment felt like an hour. Eventually, she rose and touched my hand, and I got up and followed her to the stairwell. It was only then that I realised I was still holding her fingers.

  “Good night, my lady.”

  She did not turn back.

  Drawn like a magnet to my bed, I slept soundly in the bliss of the moment, imagining I was still on the pillows, that my breath was mixed with hers.

  In that summer, corn was billowing, oak trees were murmuring, and from the oaks came shadows. I ran into the oaks, and she was in a ruby dress. I grabbed her. She turned, and it was Marguerite of Bruges, of Toledo. I hugged her with my body and soul.

  “When will you fly over the seas to come for me, señor?”

  “Someday soon, love, and I will bring you back here to make a home.”

  The magic was broken, and I woke up with a start.

  8 September 1522

  So, my fickle friend, consisting of vellum and coded letters, where did you go? We were leaving, and with a heavy heart, too, but as we agreed, we’d always leave together. So, where were you? I searched the trunk a hundred times over. I took out the false bottom, went through my clothes again—pockets, wallets, more false bottoms. Was I going mad? Had you become invisible to me? On the morning we left, I searched one more time and you were back.

  Don’t worry. Who could understand the secret code: Hebrew-Arabic-Spanish-Greek written sideways, right to left, sometimes in a mirror? Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps my worry is the figment of an overactive imagination. Perhaps it’s the pain of leaving Bucklersbury, of getting back to the task I’ve come here for.

  But perhaps you’ve got a new master? In any case, you know me well enough now, so why stop telling you what’s truly in my heart.

  There I was, as flat as the unleavened bread I had taken as I left London for Oxford. Meg, too—she had the same look. I guess that’s because her husband was there. I kept my goodbyes brief. And with you strapped tightly to my stomach with a bandage, we were off, a train of academics, a secret Jew, his impenetrable companion, and the undersheriff of London. Henry, the poodle pup, growing so fast, was tethered by four leather leads in a cart and protested with his razor-sharp teeth. At each stop, he looked to me for liberty, imploring me with a cocking of his head and those obsidian eyes.

  Like a war-weary captain, Sir Thomas rode with me, mostly with his head down, deep in thought. I sensed that secrets were for the taking. I tried to draw him out, and when I thought I’d never succeed, he cracked.

  “He’s been deceived by a family of chancers, worming and squirming and thrusting their daughter on him,” he said.

  I knew of whom he was talking, for the girls cannot help but gossip. Who else would it be but the one I’d met in Paris: Mary Boleyn.

  “But he takes a new lover every year. It’ll pass, the infatuation, no?”

  “And well she knows it, so she tries to get a son on him while she can.”

  “But she’s no true rival to the queen,” I said.

  “You know her?’ he asked, halting.

  “Just by reputation.”

  Even the crows in the ploughed fields seemed to stop searching for scraps.

  “God save our Catholic queen and all she lives for, who never flinches from her duty to Christ and his message,” he proclaimed.

  My mind was in a different place. Christ was a Jew, a great rabbi. How would he be disposed to her parents’ cruelty to the Jews?

  He waved the party on and rode close to me.

  “The king has listened to her family and others,” he continued. “They tell him that the holy book condemns the marriage. I know your people follow Deuteronomy in this. I mean your father’s people, of course.”

  A flock of starlings chattered past, a cloud like a dark portent. The road was tortuous at this point. Thick mud lay in the furrows better suited for pigs than horses.

  “Ludovicus, my friend, you must draw on all your knowledge and superior wisdom to strengthen the position of the queen and the princess.”

  This was, after all, the reason I had been brought here. But it was not the reason that I myself came. In that moment I felt the break from him and from Bucklersbury. I was following higher orders than those of Sir Thomas More. Álvaro must have caught my thoughts on the wind as he rode up beside us.

  “Juanito, se ac
erca el invierno, no? Hoy en dia es brillante, y podemos sembrar las semillas para la cosecha de primavera, no?”

  “Winter is coming, no? But today is bright, and we can sow the seeds for the spring crop, no?”

  He laughed like a clown and raced off. Clarity, that transient friend, spoke again. I was back on the quest to save my family and to save my people. I pointed to Álvaro, bucking his horse in the distance: “Crazy Spaniard!”

  Sir Thomas laughed.

  “And what of Mary Boleyn and her family?” I asked. “Where are they on theology?” I hoped he would never discover that it was I, in Paris, who had stoked the fires of reform in the Boleyn girls. I wouldn’t let him know that it was her sister, Anne, who was the real threat.

  “Can’t fault them on wit and learning,” he replied. “Perhaps this nonsense came from Paris. They are secret reformer champions of the new church. But the king will tire of Mary Boleyn.”

  “A tolerant bunch then?”

  “Too fucking tolerant,” he yelled. “I’d cover them all in pig shit and throw them in a tar pit, and their English bibles after them.”

  “Let us hope so, Master Thomas!” I said. “Let’s ride!”

  That, my diary, was the journey from London to Oxford, and here, now at last, is this town of history and scholars. The towers and spires loom high above the cottages and townhouses, as if holding a promise of greatness, a whisper on the wind that says, “This is where you will make your mark, Vives.” At dusk, long shadows fall across the town like the arms of Barbary apes. There is so much sandstone here! It is like a golden city, a warm place teeming with young scholars in black robes carrying books through the ancient streets. I heard the wind calling my name, telling me it was time to take my place among great men, that the little fish had grown up.

  My college is known as Corpus Christi, The Body of Christ, and you can still smell the sawyer on the wood panels, the blacksmith on the bolts, the currier on the leather. On one side of the quadrangle is a dining hall that seems forever anticipating a feast. On another is a well-stocked library that smells of knowledge, and there is a lofty tower with a neatly finished chapel. The president is a famous student of Pliny, known as John Claymond, a well-built man. He wears a stunning sapphire ring and has eyes of the same colour.

  ‘Señor Vives,” he says, “we’ve already decided you’ll be known as John Lewis, and your famous discipulus, the cardinal’s boy, what shall we call him? Alan Castle? Welcome to your new home.”

  “Please, sir,” I said, “tell us more about your college funded by the cardinal.”

  “The butcher’s son,” he said, as if remembering something. “From the subsidy tax on the rich. And there’s more funding to come from the dissolution of a few unnecessary religious houses.”

  Perhaps Cardinal Wolsey would be my friend after all? Sir Thomas looked down and shook his head as Claymond went on. “For our revival of Greek and for our Hebrew library, we’re called the Renaissance College.”

  We may fit in well here, diary. It may be just the right place to bring this princess into the light. There is a warm and well-furnished room of reds and green, one high bed for me and a truckle for Álvaro, now called Alan Castle. Sir Thomas has already explained that I must have a constant companion for the apoplexies lest I harm myself, as well as a dog also to tell me when the attacks are coming. They do not realise that somewhere, in a place of his mind he still can’t name or understand, he still suspects I am a Jew. And who better to be his eyes and ears than the Cardinal of Burgos’s boy? That way, every gesture, every prayer, every kiss of the sacred book will be noted.

  Not a very successful strategy, is it? His eyes and ears, having meditated with a gentle chanting of Hebrew words, are now closed, asleep. His chest rises and falls like a gentle ocean. I light a candle and cover my head with a silk cloth to say a prayer, hamapil. Away now from the strange spell of Meg Roper, my thoughts return to Marguerite Valldaura.

  I must have lapsed into a dream in which there was a voice that sounded like Mother. What she said, I do not know, but it was good, and it was warm. We are here where we wanted to be, and though I haven’t heard a word from my hermandad, from my brotherhood, the quest is still on.

  And these Boleyns, they push things on, eh? Perhaps it can be exploited. Is that treachery or just stealth? Whatever it is, I must pursue it.

  1 October 1523

  I’d been here only a day or two, and then one morning, just as early light spliced through the gap between my curtain and its pole, there was a knock on the door, and I was up. I’d been summoned. I reached the destination, a room with no air in which I had to open my mouth to.

  “My Spaniard, my scholar, here to tread the funambulatory path of rightfulness.”

  I knew at once who had spoken: the famous physician to both this king and the last. Five feet tall, he was stooped and withered, though he had a spark in his eye, full of love and kindness. His face was angled like a dreidel. He smelled of old books, but one whose pages are still turned, whose pages will forever be turned. I did what Álvaro told me to do: listen to the silence, which told me that God was close to him on the final leg of his journey. He drifted into an oratory about the future of the college.”

  “Recently obtained funds, Lewis, for the Royal Charter of the College of Physicians where I am president. Not bad, eh, hom-hum, ho diddley dum.” With the vivacity of a man thirty years younger, not frayed by the journey of life nor the proximity of its finality, he said, “Things move quickly with this great prince and his friends, Wolsey and More, who will see your plans a reality, eh, señor? For you understand the psyche, my friend.”

  I nodded and smiled.

  “Just as well,” he said. “We’ve got work to do yet.”

  “Indeed, sir, and you are?” I knew who he was but wanted to see his response.

  “Sir Thomas Linacre. Whom else could I possibly be?” He laughed before his face went blank. Then he was off again. “This is wonderful! We will have hospitals built. We will make England fair and free. I will have more of you, Lewis, more indeed.” He moved to the door, his old bones creaking like a ship setting sail. “Stay here. I’m going to get the princess.”

  After a long wait, the door swung open, and there she was, my great work, an angel in human form. She walked with tiny steps, barely making a sound on the polished floor. She was like a midget woman, face made up white like a statue of the Virgin Mary, slight of frame even for a seven-year-old. Her hair was between red and brown and tied behind her inside a Spanish hood far too heavy for so little a girl. I approached her and bowed.

  “Your royal highness, it is my greatest pleasure,” I said in Latin.

  “Señor, the pleasure is mine.”

  That was all I was to going to get as she turned and said, “Good day, señor.” Linacre opened the door, but she suddenly stopped. Her two ladies-in-waiting walked into her, and the princess was thrust into the guards before her.

  “Your highness!” I rushed over but was pushed away. She turned and brushed down her dress, too old and too grey for one so young, and then told the guard to leave me alone.

  “I can see that you’re a good man. Will you help me be a good queen?”

  My heart melted. How I’d love a little one like this to love and nurture, for though she had privilege, she seemed lonely and old for one so young. Álvaro had found his way to Linacre’s room and had seen everything. He didn’t bow, but mouthed, “Do not promise her.”

  But didn’t I owe her something? This little girl was the reason Sir Thomas had wrested me from the grip of solitary confinement and the hands of Louis de Praet. I bowed long and low.

  “Para siempre, para siempre.” She got closer and blinked away a tear. She trembled and then composed herself, as a future queen must.

  “Señor, will you promise, as a Spaniard, that you will stay with me and Mother, even if your life depends
on it?”

  Here was the granddaughter of the inquisitors, the zealots, the ones who’d instigated the terror, commanding me to pledge my life to her mother, the fruit of Isabella’s womb. In an instant of realisation, the walls came in, the ceiling lowered, the shaking began. I tried to stammer a reply but could not.

  I am scared. Are these episodes happening more frequently now?

  Six hours later, Álvaro brought me water and sugared fruit. He muttered that the prophet Elijah had saved me from swearing a lie. My throat felt like it had been force-fed road-soil. Henry, the poodle pup, nudged gently against my hand. Álvaro, who was through with caretaking, had the yetzer hara, the evil inclination within.

  “What about her maids?”

  I looked up, my head too heavy to lift. “Good.”

  “Do you think they would like a Spanish cock to remind them of their loyalties?”

  “For the sake of our fathers, Álvaro de Castro, son of Abraham, do not say that again.”

  “I will,” he replied, “when you least expect it.”

  The next day, a young boy thrust a parcel into my hands as I made my way to the lecture. He ran away like a pig that had escaped the slaughter. I opened the letter, and though I already knew who it was from, I cried for joy when I saw Papa’s slanted writing, for he had sent me a Spanish book concerning the martyrdom of St. Cecilia. There, between the seventeenth and twenty-third pages, was his piercing of the letters, vowels omitted—one of our codes. He tried to disguise it, but I could smell the scent of desperation, as I decoded it.

  “Son, my greetings and prayers. Remember words of Rabbi: those accepting exile demonstrate faith, a belief in the unity of the one, a brotherhood. Look at Abraham and Joseph. Here, various people disappear and every day more are taken, mostly just for questions. I myself was brought before them twice. You’d laugh, mainly from other cloth men, some of them conversos. I have beseeched your three sisters to leave, but I am safe, so fear not. It will be a happy outcome when the king comes to his senses. I will take my chances within these city walls and its narrow streets. Padre.”