The Courier's Tale (24 page)

A few months later it was announced in England that ‘the enemies of the old King’ were pardoned.

There were two exceptions: Pole, and his cousin Exeter’s son, who was still in the Tower, remained under sentence of death for treason. There was no mention of the other child, Montagu’s son.

I decided to go to England at once. Pole was enthusiastic. After Henry’s death, he had written to the new boy King. Pole was his nearest kinsman on the royal side. But his letter had been returned unopened by the maternal uncles who ruled England.

Pole nevertheless decided to send another Englishman with me, one who could discuss the great questions of State and Church on his behalf. Dr Hilliard and I were on the very point of departure – my foot was in the stirrup – when Pole and others of the household came hurrying into the stable.

‘The trip is off,’ he said.

‘Off?’

‘It seems the Emperor Charles will be offended. I have just seen his ambassador. The Emperor does not wish anyone to handle these gentry’ – he meant the government of England – ‘except himself. Of course, he is very suspicious and grasping in all matters, but one must not exasperate Caesar.’

‘Caesar may do as he pleases, including going to hell,’ I said, and mounted my horse. Some of those present looked shocked at my words, but I thought them quite pious and reasonable in the circumstances. ‘The King of England banished me for ten years,’ I said, looking down at them all. ‘I will not be kept out of my own country by some other prince, even for a day. It’s not his realm. I’m not his subject.’

‘Things are not so simple,’ said Pole. ‘You will be thought to represent me, and through me, the Pope, and therefore—’

‘I don’t care about that,’ I said. ‘As soon as I heard of this pardon, I told myself
I’m going home
! I may even get married there. I may take a wife, if she will still have me, and the Emperor has nothing to do with it.’

‘Ah!’ said Beccatelli, one of Pole’s secretaries, ‘you see: his decision is made for love. And off the cuff –
alla ventura
! No one can stop him, and why should they?’

‘Exactly,’ I said, and nodded to Beccatelli to show he was right.

He was usually right, Beccatelli, he was short and fat, and short of breath, and of sight as well, but he knew the heart. All the same, I then dismounted. It was clear what was going to happen: Hilliard would stay, and I would go. New arrangements were therefore needed. Two days later I departed alone, just as I used to long ago, setting off to ride from Italy to England. But this time I was carrying a message for no one but myself.

I did, however, promise to speak on Pole’s behalf, and try and open communication between him and the rulers of England, if I could find the right ear to whisper in.

In the days before I left, I became known as the venturer.

‘Alla ventura!’
people said to me on the stairs.

‘But you must also beware,’ said Flamminio. ‘The dangers created by your terrible King Enrico are not over. There is thunder and lightning to come. Why do you think so many people have gone off to the next world recently?’

There had in fact been a heavy harvest of late. It was not just King Henry and the Marchioness who had died – the King of France soon hurried after Henry, no doubt to continue their quarrels in the underworld. Bembo had gone, Contarini, Giberti, Sadoleto all departed, even Tom Wyatt had made off into eternity . . .

‘I have no idea,’ I said.

‘Summonsed!’ said Flamminio. ‘To attend a trial in heaven. When a great tyrant is alive, everyone is punished. When he dies, many are subpoena’d. I have often noticed the phenomenon. There will be more deaths to come.’

I pretended to pay careful attention to this. But I was more concerned about Flamminio himself. He was looking very poorly. I thought then that he too might not be long for this world and I began to dread his absence.

When I reached Calais I stayed there for several days, watching the ships sail for England. This was a delicate manoeuvre I was engaged in; it required thought and luck, and some stagecraft, as in the masques of love seen at court.

I posted a letter to Coughton to say that I would be in London on such and such a day, and that I hoped to see any of my relatives – including nieces, nephews and cousins – who might care to lay eyes on me once more. We forget how strange things were at that time. Nothing like it had ever happened before: for ten years even a word from me could have cost my family their lives. We had been made strangers and enemies, by force of law. Who knew what the effects of that might be? What did they think of me, the ‘unnatural and unthrifty’ brother? What did
Judith
think of me? I had made her a kind of promise, then vanished for a decade. Was she still at Coughton? Was she married? Was she even alive?

In Calais, I counted the days until I was sure my message must have been delivered, and then, my mind dwelling on all those questions, I set off across the Channel. At Dover I lost patience with my doubts and my questions, and ran through the town like a hunting spaniel, looking for horses for myself and for a young Savoyard who had attached himself to me in Calais and who was eager to see London and all the faraway towns in the world, just for the pleasure of it – an ambition I once had myself, but have now lost. I wonder where it went.

We rode out of Dover at ten in the morning. At noon we stopped for an hour to shelter under my Lord Cobham’s hedges.

‘I see there is no shortage in your country of wind, rain, thunder and lightning,’ said my Savoyard. He was pleased with all he saw. And I was pleased with his ‘your country’. I felt at home, although in a strange way, as if I was not fully visible to those who had never left.

It was almost midsummer, I remembered, and then I thought to myself: ‘Twelve years ago I was riding along this very road, planning to seek Judith out and ask her to marry me. And here I am, older and more foolish, and wet through, under another man’s hedge, and still hoping to do the same. Is my life really as pitiable as it looks?’

Everything, you see, depends on description. I’ve known men hang themselves from the branch of a tree because they would insist on describing their own lives in dismal terms. As if any of us know much about the matter.

In a few hours I had an answer. I reached my grandparents’ house in London. (By then, they were both dead.) Two servants I had never seen before let me into the house. They told me that certain members of my family were about to arrive. The servants did not know their names. They had been written to and told to open the house for the owners. These servants cared nothing about any of us, in the way of Londoners who watch strangers come and go, and quarrel and marry and rule from their city, while they, the real owners, carry on with their ordinary lives.

I waited in the house with my Savoyard, who had nothing else to do but follow me about, and who was pleased with all he saw.

By this time I had lost all my moods: hope, fear, gloom. I became as hard-headed as a lawyer. Everything contracted down to questions of fact. Would Judith come? And if she did, who was she to me, and I to her? Was there, in this contracting, a contract between us at all? I looked around and noted these facts: the floor was swept but there was dust on the wainscot. Strawberries used to grow in a bed in the narrow back garden but now there were none. There was a cranefly, which the children call father-long-legs, on the window; for the first time I saw how fine were the panes of his wings.

And at that moment the door opened and my sisters were staring at me together, Ursula and Elizabeth. They came in and at once began weeping a great deal, quite as much as on previous occasions. Behind them came my nephew George, a brave youth who had fought at the gates of Boulogne and was not likely to weep. And then, lastly, I saw out of the corner of my eye my Gloucester cousin enter the room.

It was very strained and curious. I saw she was a greater stranger to me than the others. She did not look me fully in the eye. Her head was turned away a little; she seemed downcast.

‘Cousin Judith,’ I said. I took her hand, it was very light and warm. And then suddenly away blew all my doubts. ‘It came true!’ I thought. ‘Here I am, just as I thought I would be!’ A glimpse of her grey-green eyes, her upper lip, rewrote on my heart what she had written there long before.

‘Why,’ I thought, ‘here she is, as near to me as the ball of my eye, and as dear, and if she was married she wouldn’t be here or at least not downcast but triumphant as young married women often are—’ and a great many other thoughts went through my mind, very confusedly, but I said nothing to her. And I did not dare kiss her, kisses being far too light for such a serious moment.

In the room there was still a great deal of hubbub. My sisters had dried their eyes and found themselves pleased with my Savoyard and engaged with him on many subjects, the state of roads, the puddings and drinks in Paris and so on, and then George took up with him the question of the siege of Budapest, and my sisters disclosed the fact that no subject was ever more fascinating to them. During all this, no one took any notice of Judith and me. I led her towards the window looking over the little narrow garden; for a minute or two I had the impression we were completely alone as if out on an open moor.

‘You know you gave me something once,’ I said.

‘I?’ she said.

‘I gave you nothing back, although once I tried to – but never mind about that. Yet I always kept your gift to me.’

I took out of my pocket a cord of red silk, tied in a loop.

She looked at it with puzzlement. ‘What is it?’ she said.

‘One night you showed me a cat’s cradle on this. A difficult one, too, which I have mastered, although I can do no others, even the very simplest.’

She took the ribbon. In her hand I saw that over the years it had become frayed and faded almost to pink. She turned it over her fingers.

‘But why ever did you keep it?’ she asked.

For a moment I thought of the last ten years of my life, hunting up and down the roads of the world, alone or in a crowd, and I could think of nothing to say. Yet I could see she was pleased. She knew the answer. And only then did I understand that the question in my mind had in fact been decided many years ago – ten, eleven, twelve? – one cold summer night in front of a fire at Coughton when she last held that cord looped on her fingers.

We were married three days later – early one morning before anyone was about – in the church by a priest who knew his way round the banns. I was desirous to leave England at once. My nephew George made discreet enquiries as to my legal status. Another nephew, Nicholas, was well placed inside the government; he was a friend of Mr Secretary Cecil and even, to my wonder, of Morison, by then a wealthy and important man in the government. It turned out that I was not nearly as safe as I had imagined. I was perhaps no longer an attainted traitor, but I was still a creature of the detested Pole. My presence in London was known, but not officially. Eyes, however, would not be averted for ever.

I was given to understand as well, by George, that there was a tremendous commotion in the West Country. It had something to do with Pole – he would say no more – and for that reason my presence was especially inconvenient

We rode to Dover immediately after the marriage. As it happened, there was a Venetian ship in port belonging to a certain Lorenzo Bembo, a cousin of my old friend, if I could call him that, he being so high above me in the world, but on the basis of that friendship, the captain, an excellent man, agreed to give us passage to Antwerp. He was waiting for the right wind.

When he heard it was my wedding day, he declared, on behalf of Lord Lorenzo, and of the late Lord Pietro Bembo, and all the Bembos who had ever lived, that as newly-weds we would have the use of the best cabin.

‘It is very good luck for a ship,’ he said, inventing this superstition, I think,
alla ventura
, off the cuff. And that was where I entered the married state. The walls were hung with a certain amount of green damask. We had the impression of being in a casket made for precious objects. Before the candle was blown out, Judith remembered something.

‘The cat’s cradle I showed you
was
very complicated,’ she said. ‘I think it makes two knots, one a man and one a woman. In the end, the man catches the woman. I doubt that you remember it at all. You will have to show me.’

I proved to her that I did. Then I showed her again in real life. In the night the wind came up and the ship set sail, amid much shouting from above; an hour before daybreak I went on deck and there, under the finery of the stars, with the silk cord back in my pocket, I saw how well we were dashing along over black abyssal seas.

Chapter 9

Judith was slight, dark-haired, fierce; she had her own distinct kind of beauty and every day I felt I was seeing it clearly for the first time. She coloured easily, and stamped her foot. She had been well named – she, Judith, would chop off the head of a tyrant as quick as look at him. Even before we had set foot on dry land, she let me know that she was coming to Rome out of love for me, but she would have no
Works
, and as to
Merit
and
Satisfaction
– why, she set them at nothing.

These were exactly the terms of the great theological debate I used to hear in our household in Viterbo.