[Master Mercurius 02] - Untrue Till Death

by Graham Brack

  ‘Friendship, loyalty, honesty, love,’ I suggested. I put love lower on the list lest I appear too enthusiastic.

  ‘I am sure you are right, Master,’ she replied. ‘Though I am just a silly woman and not learned, it seems to me that these things must be precious, being so rarely met with.’

  ‘I would not describe you as a silly woman,’ I insisted, doing my utmost to convey that this was not mere gallantry but an indication of the respect in which I held her.

  Her mother began to walk towards the door, so we followed.

  ‘I wonder, juffrouw,’ I asked, ‘do you play a musical instrument?’

  ‘Why, yes,’ she said. ‘At least I try. I play the harpsichord.’ So my dream was not pure imagination after all! My heart was lightened at the thought. ‘Did you not see it in our parlour last night?’ she asked.

  I was keen to return to Leiden on Monday, so I agreed with Gijsbert Voet that I would take copies of the papers I had been lent and work on them there. This was sensible because I would have to show my conclusions to the Stadhouder in The Hague, and Leiden is much closer to it than Utrecht is. I know he did not want to see them, but they were my cover for visiting him so we had to go through the process to make the story credible; which meant, of course, that I actually had to do the work, but I reasoned I could do that on Tuesday, travel to The Hague on Wednesday, tidy up my Leiden desk on Thursday and be back in Utrecht for Friday to present my results and take the weekend to brief the Voets on the Stadhouder’s views.

  The alert reader might wonder why I was so eager to leave given that I had enjoyed the company of Janneke. I will confess there was an attraction, but I was wary of being absent from Leiden for too long at the end of the academic year, otherwise my esteemed colleagues would take the opportunity to shift all the heavy work for the new term onto me. I was well aware that one of them was scheming to pass the lectures on the Ten Commandments in my direction, and he would not be the only one trying to lighten their load. Besides which, I was rather hoping to get someone else to take on the moral teachings of Peter Abelard, which I had taught for so long that I was finding it hard to present them in a balanced and constructive way, given my belief that the man was an utter charlatan and an unprincipled blackguard to boot. I can get away with saying that in a Protestant setting, but I have to be more circumspect when there are Catholics around. And you never know when there are: occasionally I sit in a meeting and think, Well, I know I’m a secret Catholic. I wonder if anybody else here is. It just goes to show me how difficult it would be to plot against the government of the day — not that I intend to do so, I hastily add.

  I collected the papers from the university office, but the look on Gijsbert Voet’s face made it clear that working on the Sabbath was completely out of the question — which is strange, because as a minister I am very accustomed to working on the Sabbath. I think most church elders would take a dim view of a minister who asked for his day off to be a Sunday. Looking on the bright side, this offered the prospect of strolling over to the Van Leusden house to see if Janneke would care to go for a walk.

  I did, and she did, and her mother came too to act as chaperone. I realised that I could hardly take them to an inn, and any coffee houses that Utrecht might boast would be closed on a Sunday, but mevrouw van Leusden supplied the deficiency for me when she threw into the conversation that if we walked up to the Janskerk, she knew of a place where we might find a dish of hot chocolate and a cake. Having found it, she became so engrossed in sampling the wares that I would swear a lesser man might have ravished her daughter on the table without distracting her from her delights.

  I am sure that a few readers are asking whether I was trifling with Janneke’s affections, knowing, as I did, that we would never marry; to which I reply that I did not know it. I entertained fancies, foolish though they may have been, of recanting on my conversion. As a minister of the Reformed Church, I could marry at will. And since I was an underground priest and did not have to report to anyone regularly, it could be a long time before the Catholic Church knew that I had left. But then it dawned on me that there would be a record somewhere of my ordination, and I wouldn’t put it past them to send a copy to my employers, who would immediately dismiss me, just to discourage anyone else from doing the same thing. That’s the trouble with bishops; they take religion too seriously.

  The journey back to Leiden took a large part of Monday, despite an unreasonably early start, but eventually we berthed at the butter market and I was able to get back on dry land; or what would have been dry land had it not been pouring with rain.

  As a result of this deluge, I ran across the city to the Academy building and was shaking off my wet cloak in the doorway when I was addressed by the Cerberus of the university, Van Looy. (All right, I admit he had only one head, but I suspect he had three pairs of eyes to know so promptly of my return.)

  ‘Master Mercurius, welcome back. How was Utrecht?’

  How did he know I was in Utrecht, I wondered? But then I hadn’t made any secret of it, I suppose. ‘Drier than this, Van Looy. Has all been well here while I’ve been gone?’

  ‘Surprisingly we have been able to keep going despite your absence,’ he replied. ‘Shall I inform the Rector of your return?’

  ‘Please do. I’ll just find a dry gown and then I’ll wait upon him.’

  ‘Excellent. He will be pleased.’

  I thought I detected a slight emphasis on the “he”, as if to indicate that there was no accounting for individual taste.

  I dried myself off in my room and found a change of clothes, though it was clear that I was in need of some new underlinen, my stocks having been seriously depleted by just a few days away. All this gallivanting was messing up my laundry timetable. There were laundrywomen attached to the university, but I had never really felt comfortable about getting them to wash my small clothes, so I preferred to do that myself. This meant that my room was often festooned with drying underwear, a matter which militated against holding tutorials there as other lecturers preferred to do; though, thinking about it, Master Hubertus did not seem to exercise himself too much about the state of his room before allowing students to enter. Maybe I was fretting about nothing.

  Thus costumed, I made my way to the Rector’s office. As I approached, Van Looy oozed into view.

  ‘I have informed the Rector of your intentions,’ he said, with all the distaste that I might have expected had I been a dancing master about to give a private lesson to the Rector’s daughters.

  Van Looy helpfully knocked for me, and on the command to come he opened the door, as if I were too imbecilic to do it for myself. We both attempted to bow politely to each other in the cramped doorway, resulting in the very satisfying outcome that he headbutted my shoulder as I turned into the room.

  The Rector greeted me civilly and invited me to sit beside the fire. To my surprise, he then walked over to the door and threw it open suddenly before looking out in each direction. ‘Just wanted to be sure we weren’t being eavesdropped,’ he explained. ‘How did your mission go?’

  ‘Very well,’ I answered. ‘The technique we used here at Leiden should work just as well for the university there.’

  ‘Don’t treat me like a fool, Mercurius,’ he snapped. ‘I mean your real mission.’

  I smelt danger. I smell danger a lot of times when danger is not there, but that’s better than being blissfully ignorant when it is. ‘Rector,’ I answered carefully, ‘if I had a mission other than the public one — which I’m not admitting — surely I would be sworn to secrecy about it and could not discuss this mission, if it existed, with anyone who did not already know about it?’

  ‘And surely if the Stadhouder asks me to send him my most cunning lecturer for some special task, I am aware that the special task exists even if I do not need to know what it is?’

  I could not resist it. I am a philosophy lecturer, after all. ‘Forgive me, you would know that it might exist, but not that it assuredly does exist.
’

  ‘Rather like your job here then,’ he answered. ‘It might have a future, but it does not assuredly have a future.’

  I gulped.

  ‘For Heaven’s sake, man!’ blazed the Rector. ‘I’m not asking what it is, just whether it went well. The favour of the Stadhouder is important to us. I just want to know that he’s going to be happy.’

  I gulped again.

  ‘Spit it out!’ the Rector commanded.

  ‘Well, it’s a little difficult to explain the difficulty without divulging the mission.’

  ‘Which you mustn’t. And I am alarmed by your use of the word “difficulty”, Mercurius.’

  I took a deep breath and decided to try a different tack. ‘May we approach this hypothetically?’

  ‘If it would help resolve the “difficulty”.’

  ‘Then, let us suppose that a certain person in a position of responsibility wanted to reassure himself that another person in whom he had reposed great trust was physically well enough to be able to carry out those duties.’

  ‘That would be only prudent, especially when the other person had a very public collapse just a few months ago.’

  This was getting a bit too close to reality. ‘In this hypothetical example,’ I continued, ‘let us assume that the certain august person’s agent was tasked with lining up a replacement with a view to any future incapacity.’

  ‘Again, that would be only prudent.’

  ‘And suppose the august person had a list of unacceptable candidates which happens to coincide closely with the preferred choices of the person in whom that trust had been reposed.’

  ‘I see.’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘Do you have any suggestions, Rector?’

  ‘How can I? It’s just a hypothetical example, isn’t it?’

  I should have anticipated such a comment. He is far too clever to give an opinion on a topic like that.

  ‘I suppose,’ he continued, ‘that the agent’s advice might depend on the view the agent had himself formed of the candidates’ merits. If he were convinced that the august person was troubling himself unnecessarily, he could say so. After all, he has met those concerned, whereas the august person has not. And what was he chosen for if not to form his own judgement?’

  ‘You don’t think that the august person might think the agent was a fool who has ignored a clear direction given to him?’

  ‘Not unless the august person were himself a fool. And very few fools get to be august persons.’

  I might have taken issue with him then, because I could reel off a pretty extensive list who had, a surprising number of them being leading figures in the church, but I let it go.

  ‘Thank you for this little chat, Mercurius,’ the Rector said. ‘No doubt you will wish to visit The Hague at the earliest opportunity to discuss the matter.’

  I had been hoping not to spend another day sitting on a barge, but I could not argue with the idea. There was some urgency after all.

  ‘I happen to know that the Mayor has been summoned to The Hague for a meeting tomorrow morning. I shall send Van Looy to see if he would find it convenient to take you in his carriage.’

  ‘That is very kind, but his meeting may end before the Stadhouder can see me, and I would not wish to keep him waiting.’

  ‘You won’t. He’ll leave when he’s ready. There are barges, Mercurius. You can’t expect luxury all your life.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  Van Looy came over to me at supper to give me the wonderful news that I was going to have to be ready to go just after dawn on the next morning. The Mayor was going to be kind enough to bring his carriage past the Academy’s door, which was a signal mark of favour. This involved a detour of around two hundred paces from the direct road out of town towards The Hague, but I must not be churlish.

  Being on official business, the Mayor had not brought his wife and sons with him, which was a great blessing. His wife was an elegant woman, the perfect hostess and a lady whose beauty had been considerably enhanced by the discovery that she came with a thumping dowry from her father, leading there to be a frenzied competition for her hand. The fact that the elder of her two sons was born eight months and a week after her wedding led to some speculation about the tactics that the Mayor may have used to win her hand, though the midwife attested that the child was very small due to his early birth.

  I had met the younger son recently, because he was now eighteen years old and his father was very keen that he should have the benefit of a university education. The only supervening obstacle was that no faculty wanted to take him on, because he was, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the stupidest boys I have ever encountered.

  In the end, the Rector suggested to the Mayor that perhaps if the lad attended a few lectures and wrote an essay or two it would meet the case, since it would be unhealthy for a spirited young man like his son to spend years indoors studying for an actual degree. The Mayoral ambitions were satisfied by this plan, so the younger son occasionally sauntered into a classroom to while away an hour. He came to a lecture I was giving on Giordano Bruno (“The tormented soul of the believer”, since you ask) in which I expatiated on Bruno’s view that the desirable union of the soul with God could not be achieved during an earthly lifetime but could be consummated after death and that true believers were therefore destined for earthly disappointment followed by heavenly bliss.

  I spoke for nearly an hour, then asked if there were any questions. I had dealt with a couple when I saw his hand shoot up.

  ‘This Bruno fellow — was he a Dago?’ he asked.

  ‘He came from Italy,’ I replied.

  The fool just shrugged as if that explained it all and there was little point in attempting to understand his thinking since he was a foreigner. I heard afterwards that in the theology class he correctly identified Luther as a “cabbage-eater”.

  Anyway, neither boy was in the carriage, so I sat opposite the Mayor and spoke when I was spoken to. The Mayor showed no great interest in my reason for going, and I reciprocated heartily, though I could see that he faced the prospect with some trepidation.

  We arrived at the Binnenhof where the courtyard appeared to be filled with the carriages of dignitaries from various cities and towns in the district. This brightened the Mayor considerably since he now knew that he had not been particularly singled out for contumely, and he headed for the large hall with a certain jauntiness of step while I presented myself at the guardroom, once more anticipating a lengthy wait.

  The sentries recognised me at once.

  ‘You’re the fellow who left that pie behind,’ said one. ‘We’ve still got it here somewhere.’ He began to rummage through a chest on the floor.

  ‘Do me a favour,’ I said. ‘When you find it, please heave it in the river, ideally where no poor birds will attempt to eat it.’

  ‘They’d have to dive for it,’ he answered, ‘because it sure as hell won’t float.’

  I gave my name and was marched to a door when I was handed to another pair of soldiers. The officer of the watch took my details and went on ahead, so I had only had time to be handed on once more when he came running back.

  ‘Not that way!’ he exclaimed to the guards. ‘Take him through the corner door and up the back stairs. He’ll be met at the top by the Stadhouder’s secretary.’

  This intelligence sharpened up the guards considerably, who must have decided that I was much more important than they had previously believed, because we marched at a fair lick to the doorway. Their attempts to march up the back stairs alongside me were doomed to failure, so finally they adopted my suggestion of proceeding up the narrow steps with one before and one behind me.

  My brother Laurentius was a naval officer, and I began to understand how pleasant it must be to give commands to people who obey them without dispute. I could imagine that it would become quite addictive were it not for the great disadvantage of military rank which Laurentius also experienced, being killed at the B
attle of Lowestoft in 1665.

  It is curious to see how the paths of brothers diverge. My brother was always a lively, daring boy, the first to climb trees or swim across a canal. For myself, I preferred indoor pursuits, books and prayer, none of which played a big part in Laurentius’ life. Shortly before he died, he hinted to me that he had a sweetheart but we did not know whom it might be, and nobody came forward when his death was known. I could only hope that she had somehow learned his fate and was not saving herself for a man who would never return.

  If I had shown any inclination to follow Laurentius in his martial pursuits, our mother would probably have prevented it. Having lost one son she had no desire to sacrifice another, which was exactly how I felt about it, so I returned to my studies and mourned him quietly, but nine years later I still found myself occasionally hoping that the reports were mistaken and that one day he would bound up the stairs, throw my door open and lob his hat upon the table in the old, familiar way. Ah, poor Laurentius!

  As the upper door opened I found Pieters, a small weaselly-looking individual in a black suit, waiting for me.

  ‘Good day, Master Mercurius,’ he said. ‘I will conduct you to the Stadhouder.’

  I may have mentioned that the Stadhouder, while undoubtedly impressive, was not the tallest of people, and in Pieters he had contrived to find one of the few men markedly smaller than himself. As we passed his desk, I found myself pondering how the secretary was able to climb up on his chair, but our arrival at a large pair of doors interrupted my thoughts.

  Pieters composed himself, strode forward and waited for the sentries to open the two doors, which they did in perfect unison, allowing us to pass within. I had assumed we would be coming into a receiving chamber, but instead we seemed to be in a small dressing-room of some kind. It was empty.

  ‘Master Mercurius is here, my lord,’ announced Pieters.

  ‘I’ll be there presently,’ came a voice from behind a folding wooden screen, and in a short time the Stadhouder appeared, buttoning his breeches and wiping his hands on a towel. ‘The chamberpot needs emptying, Pieters,’ he said, which the secretary rushed to do. I was just asking myself whether the Stadhouder would be offended if I did not kiss his hand when he indicated that we should sit without undergoing such formalities. ‘How did your visit to Utrecht go?’