‘Wait till the king gets among them,’ my lord Privy Seal says with relish. But only part of him believes the king will go.
We are all concerned about our friends in the north. When Lord Latimer set out for London, to give an account of his conduct in last year’s broils, a rebel host entered Snape Castle and took his wife Kate hostage. There is eye-rolling and elbowing among the young clerks at the Rolls and at Austin Friars: ‘Our master will ride to her rescue – he must, she is his bride-elect.’
According to the northerners, it is the king’s niece Margaret Douglas who is his bride-elect, and he is aiming to be named the king’s heir.
He says, ‘This Douglas marriage, is this instead of the Princess Mary, or as well? The rebels think I am a heretic, but surely they know I am not an infidel, to have a wife in every house?’
Gregory says, ‘I think I should have some choice in my stepmother, but nobody asks me what I think. These ladies are none of them much my senior. And anyway,’ he says, puzzled, ‘why do people think my lord father will outlive Henry, to reign after him? It does not say much for Dr Butts and his art.’
The news of his father’s bastard, Gregory has received with equanimity. He is glad to have a sister again. ‘When my father is king,’ he says, ‘and wed to Latimer’s wife Kate, and to Meg Douglas and Mary Tudor, you will be the Princess Jenneke, and you and I shall harness a gold chariot with white horses, and speed like Phoebus through Whitehall, and throw buns to the populace. The populace will say, “They are plain-looking folk, but see how their faces shine!” And eat up their buns, and bless us as we hurtle past. Surely you will stay with us? What can Antwerp offer, next to the prospects here?’
When he has cleared an afternoon, he sits with his daughter, the snow-light filtering into his workroom: ‘These books?’ she says.
‘Law books.’
She nods. ‘It was your trade.’
He asks her, ‘How is Antwerp now? I try to picture it. I heard about the fire at Onze-Lieve-Vrouwe church. I hear that the roof fell in.’
‘It was a catastrophe,’ she says. He is pleased that she knows the word. ‘It started with one candle. All the timbers from the transept fell, and destroyed the chapels below. Some of us said it was God destroying idols.’
‘When I came back here I was homesick for Antwerp,’ he says. ‘I was settled among its customs, and I would have stayed there, for not much encouragement. You must believe me – if I had understood your mother to be with child, I would not have left her. I would not have dragged her to England – you see, I was returning home after many years, and I had no patron, and no sure livelihood.’
He sees himself then: sleek young Italian, face attentive, eyes busy. What’s left of that boy? Only his glance around a room to note the exits, his dislike of having people moving behind him. Now he settles into a chair when he sits in it. His hands – formerly busy with knife and quill, taking down the words of other people – now rest lightly one in the other, right fist in left palm. He looks as if he is praying; but with a slight shift of posture – a straightening of the shoulders, a dip of the chin – he looks as if he is spoiling for a fight.
He says to his daughter, ‘I forgive Stephen Vaughan, I must, because he meant for the best, even though it would have been a consolation for me to have you here with me. Such things happen. Misunderstandings. Partings.’
‘It is through Stephen Vaughan I know you,’ she says. ‘He talked of you, long before I had reason to listen. He would not admire a soft man or a foolish man. He loves you next to God.’
‘Do people know who you are? In Antwerp?’
‘Some guess. You are well-remembered in the town.’
No doubt he is. The English merchants would say, go out, Thomas, and hear the gossip. Tell us what our neighbours are saying; when they put their heads together and use Antwerp expressions, what are we missing? He wore in those days an air of dazed amiability, the new boy keen to learn. ‘What can Antwerp offer?’ Gregory has asked Jenneke, and once he had asked it himself. In Italy you thought, this is all I want: this misty view from belvedere or turret, this blue, this gold; this heat filtered through leaves, this mosaic across which the light shifts, where ancient eyes look back at me. It was true there were aspects of Italy he preferred to forget. What can you learn from the memory of hunger and pain, of destitution and flight? He remembers the day when his only task was to drag himself undercover before it was too cold to sleep in the streets. But in Florence his fortunes turned. It was there – and in Venice, in Rome – that he had learned to be sly and sidelong, always vigilant, always ready to take offence or pretend it, ready also to back off with a soft word when the odds were against him. He learned to walk by night, to whisper, to bow to magnificos; to step forward at the right time, with the right hint or suggestion made in a low voice, so magnifico can take the credit.
But then he was restless. He thought, what next? And when he set foot in Antwerp he thought, there is more to want and more to know. The sky so wide and the land so flat, possibilities stretching out before you. In Italy you learned cunning, but in Antwerp, flexibility.
And besides, the shopping! Just step out of your door and you can get a diamond or a broom, you can get knives, candlesticks and keys, ironwork to suit the expert eye. They make soap and glass, they cure fish and they deal in alum and promissory notes. You can buy pepper and ginger, aniseed and cumin, saffron and rice, almonds and figs; you can buy vats and pots, combs and mirrors, cotton and silk, aloes and myrrh.
Already he had friends in the city. On the day he first sailed from England, a boy, he had met a merchant family with their samples of wool, and they had seen the marks of his father’s boot on his face. We shall not forget you, they said, there is a bed for you whenever God brings you to our town. The years rolled by: ‘Good Lord!’ they said, when he knocked at the door. ‘It’s Thomas! He is grown up! He is an Italian now!’
In Antwerp, the more tongues you could master, the more you could succeed. If he lacked a phrase in one language, he had it in another, and his earnest vehemence made up for any gaps. He sought out, as he had in Italy, the company of sober elders, whose table talk was refined and who would give away their wisdom to a young foreigner who admired them, one who asks questions, questions, and looks impressed by the replies. Such dignitaries always need a repository for their secrets, just as they need a man who will take a confidential dispatch and be back with an answer before you notice he’s gone. The drawback is that one must consent to their indoor lives: no calcio, just polite archery on a Sunday. The courtyards where one trades in wool and money may be open to the sky, yet they cannot help but smell of tallow, ink and dinners, seeped into the wool of dark winter garments: he would walk, and under the shadow of the Steen with its warehouses take a breath of river air, and imagine the great world beyond. There were some hundred of his countrymen – Englishmen, that is – dwelling in or around their English House; they lived side by side with the Castilian nation, the Portuguese and the Germans, but they were cherished by the city because they paid so well for their privileges. When their ships came in they had first use of the crane at the docks, powered by a man treading inside a wheel. He asked one of the Antwerpers, ‘Does it have a name?’
A baffled look. ‘We call it the crane.’
He thought, if a cannon has a name, if a bell has a name, the crane should have a name too.
‘It is not unreasonable,’ he said coolly.
The Flemish fellow said, laughing, ‘We can call it Thomas if you like.’
‘By the way,’ he muttered, as he walked away, ‘it would work a lot better if you had men treading the outside, not the inside.’
No use trying to disturb the fixed notions of a strange city. But he is a man who thinks about lifting heavy weights, about winches, beams and pulleys, and about joints, how to make them frictionless.
Of course they gossiped about him, when h
e moved into Anselma’s house. She undertook to show him the country and introduce him to people who could do him good, relatives of hers. One day they went to Ghent together and stepped into the church of John the Baptist to say a prayer. It is only on a feast of the church that they open the doors of the great altarpiece to show you the crowds of angels and prophets flocking to the Lamb of God. Instead they saw the donors of the piece, portrayed on the outer doors. They were a careworn couple, she purse-featured, he bald: but no doubt full of grace. He thought, give it thirty years, and that could be us. I would have forgotten my English and be entirely a Fleming: a stout burger, persuading younger legs to run to the wharves for me, or climb up to high places to see if my ships are coming in.
The church was bustling and noisy, but they could hear each other whisper: their heads close, her fingers sliding into his palm. Their breath mingled; she leaned against him, soft and warm. He said, ‘Make me good, O Lord, but not yet.’
She laughed, and he said, ‘Not me. Augustine.’
Yet the day came when she told him, ‘Time to sail, Thomas. You are my past now, and I am yours.’
He goes to the Tower to interview Robert Kendall, the vicar of Louth, the first begetter of the trouble in Lincolnshire: the pardon does not extend to such principal offenders as he. Clouds stack over the town in grey-blue fortresses of air, battered by the wind as if by cannon-fire. Mr Wriothesley attends him. He misses Rafe, but Rafe is heading to Newcastle, to await his safe-conduct over the border.
Reginald Pole has left Rome, in his new cardinal’s hat. Now that peace has broken out, he has missed his chance to invade and lead the English, though the Scots have made clear they would have been ready to come to his aid. When Lord Cromwell hears Pole is en route to Paris, Francis Bryan crosses the Narrow Sea with a demand for his extradition. Reginald reaches the French capital to find the king is elsewhere. Thwarted and scanted, blocked and barred, he skulks off towards Imperial territory: but our man in Brussels has already persuaded the Emperor’s regent not to receive him.
The new cardinal’s relations – his mother Lady Salisbury, his brother Lord Montague – still protest they abhor his foolery. All they want is to see Reginald conformable and loyal to the Tudors, as they are and ever shall be. To hear them talk, if they saw Reginald in his red hat, they would snatch it off and spit in it.
Mr Polo, the Spanish call him. It makes my lord Privy Seal laugh.
‘I hear you have had a visitor, Cromwell,’ the Imperial ambassador says.
‘Oh yes? Why don’t you tell me all about it, Eustache?’
The ambassador waves a hand. ‘Naturally the neighbours talk. It is not every day they see the Queen of Sheba’s daughter with her travelling bag.’
Their dinner comes in: in deference to the cold, a thick ragout of mutton, and an ox-tongue pie heavy with mace. ‘Ça va, Christophe?’ the ambassador enquires, but Christophe only grunts; he is wondering how much of the pie they might chance to leave.
‘I wish it were spring,’ Chapuys says. ‘I am like the Israelites in the desert, I long for the melons and cucumbers of Egypt.’ He sighs. ‘Mon cher, you must not blame me if your amours are of interest to all Europe. Hitherto, observers have been frustrated by your extreme discretion.’
‘It is a stale sin,’ he says. ‘If it was ever a sin at all.’
Chapuys serves himself a little ragout. The scent of dried sage fills the room. ‘You think your Lutheran God will understand?’
‘I tire of telling you I am not a Lutheran.’
‘Rest from your labours, for I shall never believe it,’ Chapuys says cheerfully. ‘Certainly you are a sectary of some sort. Perhaps one of those who oppose the baptism of infants?’
He chews a little, his eyes on Chapuys. This is the rumour young Surrey has spread, and other ill-wishers; it is the way to ruin him with Henry, and the ambassador knows it. ‘Christophe,’ he calls, ‘where’s that capon?’ He puts down his napkin. ‘Is it likely?’ he says to Chapuys. ‘How could I profess such a creed, and remain the servant of a Christian commonwealth? Those people oppose the payment of taxes. They oppose the taking of oaths. They oppose books and writing and music.’
‘Yet they say this sect has crept in everywhere in Calais. And Lord Lisle cannot do much against it.’
Christophe bears in the capons, the flesh cubed and seethed in red wine, the sauce thickened with breadcrumbs.
‘This is a very brown repast,’ Chapuys says, ‘but it tastes better than it looks.’
‘Soon it will be Lent. Then you will be crying for the fleshpots of Egypt, and never mind the melons and cucumbers.’
The ambassador dabs his mouth. ‘What will you do with your new daughter? Marry her quietly, I suppose, with a good dowry. You will confess to the world who she is?’
‘I shall have a hard time to hide it, with you shouting it through the streets.’
‘It is a miracle,’ Chapuys says. ‘Like Lazarus. Though one wonders, was he truly welcome?’
It has crossed his mind before now. Were his family pleased to see him, or did they think he had been too self-important, in violating the laws of nature?
‘What does she want, actually?’ Chapuys asks.
‘Just to see me. She says she will not stay.’
‘Back to the heretics’ refuge?’
‘Antwerp is hardly that. Your Emperor keeps his hand on it.’
‘As I understand it, the whole place is hollow. There are tunnels and cellars, a whole city underground, and from the surface you would not know it was there. Of course, you will have been in them yourself, in your young days?’
‘Naturally. Because they are warehouses. Nothing more.’
Chapuys says, ‘If you want to keep your daughter in England, you will have to tempt her. You must unlock your chests and spend your money. Is there a woman in this world who will refuse a string of pearls, or a border of goldsmiths’ work?’
In Antwerp you open a door that you think leads to another room. Instead, plunging at your feet is a stair down into the earth. You strain your eyes into the darkness. You creep like a snail, your shoulder brushing the wall to steady you, a foot feeling for the edge of the step. Yet within weeks, you can run up and down easily, your feet knowing exactly where to go.
But only in your own house. On another man’s steps, look out.
Austin Friars, January: his daughter turns over, in a flood of splintered sunlight, the Book of Hours that belonged to Lizzie Wycks. ‘Your wife, what was she like?’
What can he tell her? We were practical people, who did each other acts of practical kindness; she died and I missed her. Her affections were deep and stern and when she spoke to the children about their derelictions she would say, ‘I tell you this for your own good.’ When she went into company she wore a gable hood like a woman of fashion but when she was at home she wore a housewife’s coif. She was a maker of lists, a tabulator of stores: servants careless as they are, a woman must always be taking stock. She kept a list of his sins, in the pocket of her apron: took it out and checked it from time to time.
When his children were born, the house was entirely given over to women. Elizabeth was well-furnished with cousins and godsibs. They knew his family, his history, and perhaps they did not think he could rise above it. He was very pleasant to them, very mild. One day he heard a cousin say to Liz, ‘He tries really hard, your husband.’ He could not hear Liz’s muffled response. For all he knew she might have said, ‘He tries really hard but he consistently fails.’
When they married he had said to her, one thing I guarantee: no woman of mine will be poor. He had hoped to be a good husband, to be provident, faithful. He was exceptionally provident and mostly faithful. By the time Grace was born he was working for Wolsey every hour. The cousins would look at him warily when he came in: where have you been? As if it must be somewhere nefarious. They were waiting to see another self:
the wolf that lives in man, his father Walter bristling through his skin.
By the time he returned from Antwerp, Walter was a man of consequence in the district. Formerly he had enlarged his land-holdings by kicking over his neighbours’ boundary-markers, but now he had acres by lawful purchase, and he had invested in his brewery, even tempting a Lowlander over to teach him to improve his beer, for the art was well-mastered there. His brother-in-law Morgan had said, ‘Thomas, you should go to Putney and see your dad now. You should see the belly on him. You should see the hat he’s got, now he’s a churchwarden.’
‘If you recommend it,’ he’d said, ‘I’ll go and have a look.’
The day came. Before he caught sight of Walter, the neighbours caught sight of him. Word spread. Some gawper said, ‘It’s bloody little Put-an-edge-on-it. Where’s he been, do you think?’
He did not feel a need to answer.
‘Show his face here!’ a woman said. ‘He must think we have short memories!’
He had nothing to say.
‘We thought you were dead,’ a fellow exclaimed.
He did not correct him.
Then he looked up and Walter was rolling towards him. He wasn’t wearing the hat but he was wearing the belly. It didn’t soften him. He might be sober and shaven, but he still looked as if he would knock you down as soon as blink.
The smithy was still there, not that Walter did the work these days; when he held out his hand it was pink and clean and you would have to look close to see the burn marks.
He, Thomas, prowled around the premises. Tools in their racks; a leather apron on a peg, with the stench of the tannery still about it. Or perhaps he imagines that: sweat, salt, shit, all the savours of his early life. Walter said, ‘Taking inventory, are you? I’m not dead yet, boy.’
He made no answer.
The Mirror and the Light: 2020’s highly anticipated conclusion to the best selling, award winning Wolf Hall series (The Wolf Hall Trilogy, Book 3) Page 46