London (83 page)

“Why didn’t I think of him? Why didn’t I bring him to Bocton?” Bull cried in misery. Though when he went to the house, it was not clear to him whether his friend had died of the plague or of something else. The gardener said plague; the monks said not.

“But I can promise you this,” one monk assured him, “he made a good death. He repented of all his works at the end, you know. Impious and ungodly, those tales were. He said we should burn them all,” he added with satisfaction.

“Did you?” Bull asked.

“Those we could find,” the monk replied.

Could his friend, Bull wondered, in the last extremities of pain, have cried out such a thing? Who knew? But as he considered Chaucer’s huge and panoramic work, unfinished at his death and so hopelessly, so mistakenly, in English, it hardly seemed to him to matter.

“It will all be lost or forgotten anyway,” he said sadly as he left the house.

The bells were tolling for vespers as he was led back through the Abbey. “Would you like to see his grave?” the monk kindly enquired, and led him to the place.

“I’m glad, at least, he is buried in the Abbey,” Bull said. “He was an ornament to England. I’m pleased to see you recognized it.”

But the monk shook his head.

“You misunderstand, sir,” he explained. “He is here because of his house.” He smiled. “He was an Abbey tenant, you see.”

Bull died five years after that and Bocton came to Tiffany. She went there more often than Ducket, though he too came to love the Bulls’ ancient place.

“But my home is in London,” he would truthfully say. And he lived there contentedly. He saw his friend Whittington become mayor not one, or even twice, but a legendary three times. He saw him build many of the things he had always said he would, including a new water fountain. In his will, the mayor even provided for sanitary public lavatories not far from dirty old St Lawrence Silversleeves.

He watched James Bull’s brewery prosper from its modest beginnings at the George to a great affair which supplied beer to the troops of the next king, Henry V, when they went to fight at Agincourt. He saw England, in its old conflict with France, once again triumph as it had in the days of the Black Prince. He saw his own children grow up and grow rich until it was nearing the time when he, too, should depart.

Yet even now, as he grew old, and remained in the house on London Bridge, his greatest pleasure of all was to watch the river, not only in the evening out of the big window that faced upstream, but better yet, in the early morning, standing by the road on the Southwark side not far from the spot where he had first been found, from which vantage point he could gaze for an hour or more at the great stream of the Thames flowing eternally towards the rising sun.

HAMPTON COURT

1533

She should not have entered the garden. She should have walked past when she heard the whispers. Hadn’t her brother warned her about such things?

A sultry August afternoon; a clear blue sky. In its great deer-park beside the Thames, a dozen miles upriver from London, the huge, red-brick Tudor palace of Hampton Court lay in the warm sun. Across the green spaces before the palace, she could hear the distant sounds of the courtiers’ laughter. Further away, amongst the parkland trees, the deer moved delicately, like dappled shadows. There was a faint scent of mown grass and, it seemed, of honeysuckle in the gentle breeze.

She had walked away to the riverbank, wanting to be alone, and it was only now, as she came past the hedge, that she heard the whispers.

Susan Bull was twenty-eight. In an age which admired pale, oval faces, her features were pleasantly regular. People said that her hair was her best feature. When not pinned up, it hung very simply close to her face, only curling a little at her shoulders. But it was the colour that everyone remembered – a dark, rich brown with a hint of warm auburn that gave it a lustrous sheen, like polished cherry wood. Her eyes were of the same colour. But secretly she was more proud of the fact that, after four children, her body had not lost its slim shape. Her dress was simple but elegant: a starched white coif on her head, under which her hair was neatly tied, and a pale brown silk gown. The modest gold cross that hung round her neck suggested, correctly, that she loved her religion, though many a lady would have made a similar show of piety at the court, where it was quite the fashion.

She had not wanted to come here. The courtiers always seemed so devious, and she hated any kind of falseness. Nor would she have done so if she had not felt she must. She sighed. It was all Thomas’s idea.

Thomas and Peter, her two brothers: it really was astonishing how different they were. Thomas, the baby of the family: quick, brilliant, charming, wilful. She loved him of course, but with reservations. Large reservations.

And Peter, comfortable, solid Peter. Though actually her half-brother from an earlier marriage, he was the one to whom she felt closer. It was Peter, the eldest of the Meredith family, who had taken the place of their father when he died young. Peter who was still, and always would be, the family conscience. She had not really been surprised when he had entered the priesthood, leaving young Thomas to pursue the things of the world.

There had been no better parish priest in London than Father Peter Meredith. A good height, balding and pleasantly stout by his forties, his comforting presence was as familiar as it was welcome to his flock. He was a clever man and, but for a streak of laziness in his youth, he might have been a fine scholar. His parish of St Lawrence Silversleeves was not a place for an ambitious man. Yet he was content. He had restored the little church with its dark rood screen, and under his wardenship, it had gained two fine new stained glass windows. He knew the name of every child in his parish; the women liked his bonhomie because they knew he observed his vows of celibacy; he could drink with the men but keep a genial dignity. After giving the last rites, he would always hold the dying person’s hand until they were safely gone. His sermons were simple, his conversation matter-of-fact. He was a solid Catholic priest.

Only the previous year he had fallen sick, quite seriously so, and after a time announced: “I can’t keep up the pastoral work any more.” He had chosen to retire to the great Charterhouse monastery in London; but before doing so had decided to make a pilgrimage to Rome. “See Rome and die,” he had cheerfully remarked, “though I shan’t die yet, I dare say.” He was still there now. And she had had to write to him for guidance about this business today. For the twentieth time, that morning, she had read his reply.

I can only tell you to follow your conscience. Your religion is strong. Pray therefore, and you will know what to do.

She had prayed. Then she had come here.

Somewhere in the great labyrinth of Hampton Court was her dear husband Rowland. It was an hour since Thomas had led him in there – to what they both knew would be the most important meeting of his life. She had never seen him so on edge. For three days he had repeatedly been sick and looked so deathly pale that, if she had not been used to his intense and nervous constitution, Susan might have thought that he was really ill. He was doing it for her and the children, but for himself too. Perhaps that was why she wanted him to succeed so much.

Peter’s greatest gift of all to her had been her husband. It was Peter who had found Rowland, Peter who had quietly sent him to her with a message:
This is the one
. “Damn it, they even look the same,” Thomas had complained. For it was true that Peter and her husband with their stout build and prematurely balding heads did look rather similar. But despite this superficial resemblance there was an important difference. Even if the monk was the older and wiser of the two, gentle Rowland had a quiet ambition which, she knew, Peter lacked. “I couldn’t have married a man without ambition,” she confessed.

As for the physical side of their marriage, that too, she felt confident, could hardly be bettered. Yet she smiled when she thought of the early days. How devout, how hesitant they had been! How seriously they had both tried to follow the rules and make their intimacy a sacrament. It was she, after a short while, who had decided to take charge.

“But you are wanton,” he had said, looking rather surprised.

“I need something to confess,” she had replied. And many times since then their own priest, with a smile they did not see, had given them each a little penance and a kindly absolution.

Now Rowland had his chance. If the interview which Thomas had arranged was successful, there was no denying what it might mean. An outlet for his talents; a respite from their endless worries over money; perhaps even modest riches one day. When she thought of the children she told herself: it must be right.

There was one other consolation. Whatever she might think of courts, she knew they were a necessary evil, the courtiers only servants. Behind them lay the all-important figure whose cause they would really be serving. Her father’s friend; her brother’s benefactor; the man she had been brought up to love and trust all her life.

Good King Henry, England’s pious king, head of the house of Tudor.

The Plantagenet dynasty had collapsed in that terrible series of family feuds between John of Gaunt’s House of Lancaster and its rival the House of York, known as the Wars of the Roses. So many royal princes had been killed, that an obscure Welsh family, married by chance into the old royal house, had emerged. When he killed the last Plantagenet, Richard III, at the Battle of Bosworth, fifty years before, Henry’s father had established the Tudor dynasty on England’s throne.

Susan could still remember the day – she had been five, a year before her father died – when he had taken her to court; and how, advancing across the great hall had come the most splendid figure she had ever seen. Big and broad-chested in his jewel-encrusted tunic with its huge, rolled shoulder-pads, Henry was a magnificent giant. His tightly fitting hose revealed the powerful legs of an athlete; and between them, padded to emphasize the bulk of his sexual parts, a bulging cod-piece. Her heart missed a beat when suddenly a pair of tremendous arms scooped her up, raised her high, and she found herself looking straight into a large, handsome face with a pair of wide-set, merry eyes and a square-cut, reddish-brown beard.

“So this is your little girl,” the mighty monarch had smiled, as he brought her to his face and gave her a kiss. And, even at her age, Susan knew that surely this was everything a man could be.

No prince in Europe was finer than Harry of England. England might be small – at under three million, her population was only a fifth of that of the now united kingdom of France – but Henry made up for the deficiency with lavish style. Mighty sportsman, accomplished musician, occasional scholar, tireless builder of palaces – he was everything a Renaissance man should be. At Flodden, his armies had crushed the Scots; at the gorgeous pageant of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, he had made a peace with the equally splendid King of France. And most important of all, at a time when Christendom was facing its greatest crisis in a thousand years, Harry of England was devout.

It was early in Henry’s reign that Martin Luther had begun his religious protest in Germany. Like the English Lollards before, the Lutherans’ original demands for Church reform had soon grown into a huge challenge to Catholic doctrine. Soon these Protestants were denying the miracle of the Mass and the need for bishops, and were saying priests could marry. Shockingly, some ruling princes were even sympathetic. But not good King Henry. When German merchants had infiltrated Lutheran tracts into London, he had stamped them out. A translation of the New Testament by Tyndale had been publicly burned seven years before at St Paul’s. And the scholar king had personally penned such a splendid rebuttal of the heretic Luther that the grateful Pope had given him a new title: Defender of the Faith.

As for Henry’s recent problems with the Pope over the question of his wife, like many devout people in England Susan had great sympathy for Henry. “I believe he is doing his best in a very difficult position,” she would declare. Besides, the business might still be resolved. “I’m not prepared,” she said, “to judge him yet.”

The grounds that lay before Hampton Court, known as the Great Orchard, were typical of those around such houses – an elaborate network of formal gardens, gazebos, arbours and private places which King Henry, who loved such displays, had been decorating with all manner of heraldic beasts, sundials and other ornaments in painted wood or stone.

It was chance that, as she walked by a high, green hedge enclosing one of the gardens, she should have heard the whispers. Then she thought she heard a laugh.

Daniel Dogget stood by the landing stage at Hampton Court, looked down at his squat wife and her sturdy little brother, and wondered.

It was quiet. Out in the stream, white swans glided and black moorhens bobbed, as though that summer would never cease.

Dan Dogget was a giant. Over two centuries had passed since Barnikel of Billingsgate had visited the Dogget sisters on the Bankside and left one of them with a baby. The child took on the Barnikel stature, but the sisters’ colouring and name. His children, apart from their size, were hardly distinguishable from their cousins of the old Ducket family, except by their slightly different name; but by the time of the Black Death, when little Geoffrey Ducket was taken in by Bull, it was this other, Dogget branch of the family that had mainly survived. Dan Dogget was six foot three; big-boned and spare in build, with a huge mane of black hair with a flash of white over his forehead. He was the strongest waterman on the Thames. He could break a chain across his chest. Ever since the age of twelve, he had been allowed to row with the men; by the age of eighteen he could out-curse any of them – a notable achievement, for the watermen of London were legendary for their loud mouths. At twenty, not a man would fight him, even in the roughest of the waterside taverns.