The Courier's Tale (9 page)

‘I?’ I said as if astounded that my opinion should matter, or that I should have one at all.

I then gave the matter some thought. ‘Well,’ I said simply, ‘
I
’m here.’

Then, to my amazement, Cromwell laughed. It was not a full laugh, more a sort of brief bark, yet his teeth showed. As he himself had framed the new laws, perhaps he could observe them with more latitude than anyone else. It seemed I escaped the danger. After all, I was still useful. Nothing would be gained by chopping off my head, at least for the meantime. I was still his best connection to Pole.

I again heard a little sound behind me. This time it was not a hiss but a puff. Morison faintly blew air out over his lips like a horse in a stall.

After that, the mood of the meeting changed. They all became reflective: what was to be done? I was dismissed and told to return in two days. I begged for longer. I had urgent business, I said, in Gloucester.

Why did I say that? It was to Coughton in Warwickshire that I had to go. Yet all the way back from Italy to England, I was thinking ‘Gloucester, Gloucester’ – for some reason the name of Judith’s home always had a strong effect on me, just those two syllables made some hidden wheel in my heart give a turn. By then I had decided the time had come to set all the wheels turning. In other words, I had ridden all the way back to England thinking of Judith, and marriage and no doubt the marriage bed.

‘You are not to leave London,’ said Cromwell.

‘I must,’ I said. ‘I have a most urgent business to attend to.’

‘What business?’

‘I mean to take a wife.’

‘No,’ said the Lord Privy Seal flatly. ‘You’re not going to disappear on me a second time. You may be needed at a moment’s notice. In any case, there’s no hurry for that business you mention. No married man ever thinks he stayed single too long.’

He meant this as a pleasantry, but at the same time shot me such a sparkle of malignity that I was shocked. It was not, I think, even intended for me personally. I always had the impression that Cromwell liked me. That sudden glare was the expression of power that will brook no opposition. I saw then why he frightened people.

I bowed and went away, and later raged at this prohibition.

‘Why do I have to obey him?’ I said. ‘He is not my master as far as I know. I am in service to Pole.’

‘And to the King,’ said Morison. ‘We are all in service to the King. And Cromwell is the voice of the King. Be sensible. Don’t fly against the wind. Wait till things settle down. Who’s the lucky girl? If it was up to me, of course, I would let you go, but this is a high matter, a matter of State.’

Morison was deputed to keep watch over me. This was no great hardship for we were good friends. Several times we went over to Lewisham to hunt partridges – there were still partridges there in those days though they seem to have all flown away today. So off we rode together, side by side. It was almost like old times, although of course we were not in Venice but crossing English fields, I had a gun and dog at heel and Morsion was very well dressed.

He had been changed, I noticed, by his three months’ proximity to power. He now pursed his lips and looked up at the sky with a frown when he stepped out of doors in his fur-lined cloak. But he spoke very candidly about the situation: quite apart from the fury that Pole’s book occasioned, he said, there was great dread that he would publish it. Pole’s reputation was so high both in England and abroad that this thought haunted the King.

‘You don’t think he will publish, do you?’ said Morison. ‘I know you scarcely know him – you were the baby of the house, he was barely aware of your existence – but you have seen him more recently than any of us.’

‘I don’t think he will,’ I said. ‘He made it plain that I was to hand it only to the King.’

‘Then what’s all this “O, England” and “O, my native land!” in there for?’

As I had not read a word of it I kept silent. Morison was really only speaking his thoughts out loud as we went over the fields.

‘It’s a worry, a great worry,’ he said. ‘And, frankly, no one has any idea what to do.’

Chapter 9

As soon as I saw I was trapped in London I wrote to Coughton, suggesting that my sisters come to town to see me and perhaps bring along – if she chose – our Gloucester cousin as well.

A message came back to say they would arrive on a certain morning a few days later. I was very excited by this. Until then I had never spent a full minute in front of a looking glass, but now – this was in the old family house in town – I presented myself there and inspected the wayward figure I saw. He was hard to make out: I suppose we are always in the dark on some matters – how we are seen by others, for instance – and I’m not sure how much a mirror helps us, but off I went and had my hair cropped and even bought a cap of red ormesia, thinking that such no doubt were what lovers wore, and in fact that the human race could scarcely have multiplied without them.

The party from Warwickshire was to arrive the next day.

That same night a message arrived from Cromwell: I was to depart for Italy the following morning. I must leave instantly and without thought of delay, as soon as several urgent letters for Mr Pole were brought to me.

At that I was almost in despair. Everything depended on who arrived first – the party from Warwickshire or a messenger from Whitehall. I slept badly. All night I imagined something being beaten out as thin as gold wire, I could hear the hammering in my sleep. Perhaps it was my own heart I overheard. Before dawn I was up and dressed and at the window watching the street.

Morison arrived first. About an hour after sunrise he came sliding past below me as if on a wooden horse on a rail. With him were two archers. All three were to accompany me to Dover.

I prepared to depart. I said nothing about my private disappointment. The State, even in the shape of a man who used to wear your green breeches, has no interest in such matters. So we set out. There was no sign of the other party. For half a mile I kept willing them to appear, and then, just as we turned towards the bridge, I caught sight of them far away down Cheapside, browsing along looking left and right at the shops and the hanging signs as if there was all the time in the world. Behind them Tom Rutter’s big red face rose like the harvest moon.

Instantly I turned and dashed towards them. Morison came rushing after me, complaining and declaiming in my wake. The archers followed, looking nonplussed. They were there only for grandeur and had no notion about what was going on.

I whirled around: ‘
One
minute!’ I said to Morison, holding up my forefinger with such an absolute air that for a moment he was quelled.

And so I stole a little time from the King and Privy Seal and donated it to the affairs of my own heart.

I told the women I had only a few moments with them, being required by Cromwell to leave on urgent business abroad. My sisters cried out that it was a shame, they hoped that Lord Cromwell was ashamed of himself, taking away a brother so precipitately, especially since no one ever knew how long you might wait at Dover for a fair wind.

But I could see they were impressed by the archers, and the importance of the events I was involved in.

‘I thought them two was going to nab you,’ said Rutter, who had come along as servant and protector of the family honour, and who was watching the archers with narrowed eyes.

My cousin said nothing. She looked flushed. She sat in the saddle very erect and tense, alert to events, as if at that moment she had realised for the very first time that exterior forces have as great a say in our lives as our own wishes. I went to her side and took her hand and said very solemnly that I would be back to see her soon to discuss the great matter I had mentioned once before. She looked straight into my eyes and this time I knew she understood, but then (for Morison was wincing and furrowing his brow as if in horrible pain) I was whirled away again and off we went to Dover.

On the way I asked him what on earth had happened, and why I was being sent to Italy so suddenly, but Morison could no more slow down to explain our journey than a cannonball delay its passage through the air.

‘On, on!’ he cried, ‘I’ll explain as you go aboard.’

And so we reached Dover, where – as anyone’s sister might have told you – there was no wind and no ships sailed until the following day, and so there we rolled to a stop. Morison then felt he was at liberty to describe the terrible event which had put us into motion in the first place.

It seemed that, only three days earlier, a letter had come from Pole to inform the King, as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world, that he had been summoned to Rome.

‘Is he mad?’ said Morison. ‘He refuses to obey the order of his lawful sovereign to return home, and now proposes to go and kneel before the King’s mortal enemy, the Bishop of Rome.’

‘But what am I supposed to do about it?’ I said.

We had walked out of the town, leaving the archers behind.

‘Nothing, yourself,’ said Morison. ‘But I have certain letters for Mr Pole which will bring him to his senses. You must take them to him at once.’

It was by then late in the day. The air below the cliffs was breathless, the sea almost motionless. I could not go
at once
, I said. I must wait until a wind arrived.

‘Yes yes yes,’ said Morison, meaning this was no time for jokes. He embarked on a further long discourse, telling me far more than I could remember – that Pole was called to Rome to help prepare the way for a great council of the Church, and that the Pope had always been against such a council but now was for it, and the King of England had always been for it but was now against it, and so on and so on until my head began to spin.

‘But that’s only the start,’ Morison said as we walked along, our feet sinking in deep pebbles. ‘The reports we have say that if Pole goes to Rome he is to be made a cardinal, and then, everyone agrees, he will certainly be the next Pope. And just to spite the King, the present Pope is sure to die very soon . . .’

By now the sun was setting and the choughs and other birds were making their way into their homes on the cliffs, high above the range of any steeplejack.

‘And think what a disaster that would be!’ said Morison. ‘Here in England everyone has completely forgotten all about the Pope and Rome. But if one of our own nation, and he of the blood royal, were to sit on that throne, imagine the confusions that would ensue, and which would admit no ordering.’

That was the prospect which had sent me rushing towards the coast and from there over sea and land back to Italy.

I found Pole once again in Verona and gave him the letters I was carrying. The first was from Cromwell himself:

Master Pole . . . if you mark my nature, my deeds, my duty, you may perchance partly feel how your bloody book pricketh me and how sorry I was to see him, whose honour I am bound to tender much more than my life, so unreverently handled . . . The Bishop of Rome may bear you a fair face, finding you a useful instrument, but will never love you. Leave fantasies . . . you must leave Rome if you love England . . . The King is one who forgives and forgets displeasures at once . . . Show yourself an obedient subject and I will be your friend.

I watched Pole as he read this. Not a feature of his face moved, and when he finished the page, he put it down calmly like someone laying aside a tailor’s bill.

Then he went on to the next one. This was from his older brother, Lord Montagu, whom he loved very dearly.

The King declared a great part of your book to me at length . . . which made my poor heart so lament that if I had lost mother, wife and children, it could no more have done so . . . You have been so unnatural to so noble a prince from whom you cannot deny you have received all things. And for our family which was clean trodden under foot, he set up nobly, which showeth his charity, his clemency, and his mercy. I grieve to see the day that you should set forth the contrary, or trust your wit above the rest of the country. If there is any grace in you, now you will turn to the right way. It is incredible to me that by reason of a brief sent to you by the Bishop of Rome you should be resident with him this winter. If you should take that way, then farewell all my hope. Learning you may well have, but no prudence, nor pity but show yourself to run from one mischief to another. And then, gentle Reginald, farewell all bonds of nature . . .

I saw that Pole, reading this, turned pale. Then he came to the third letter, which was from his mother.

Son Reginald,

I send you God’s blessing and mine, though my trust to have comfort in you is turned to sorrow. Alas that I, for your folly, should receive from my sovereign lord such a message as I have by your brother. To see you in His Grace’s indignation – trust me, Reginald, there went never the death of thy father nor of any child so nigh my heart. Upon my blessing I charge thee – take another way, unless thou wilt be the confusion of thy mother.

Pole now had the look of a man who receives a violent blow out of thin air. The page stayed between his fingers, and he looked around at all of us: