by Peter Walker
I was almost certain that she returned my feelings. The gleam of merriment in her eyes was not just amusement. She was happy to be in my company for another reason. One night, sitting up late by the fire, she taught me a game of cat’s cradle – the most complicated cat’s cradle ever known, she said, in the world, or at least in Gloucester – in which, after many bewildering manoeuvres with a loop of silk ribbon, two lesser loops chase each other over the knuckles of the hand, and then, on the verge of parting for ever, they meet and embrace.
One of the loops, she said, was a woman, and the other was a man. For an hour that night we sat side by side, with our fingers like so many troopers, engaged in marches and counter-marches. Several times Judith burst out laughing at my clumsiness and several times she gave up the tuition completely, saying I was beyond all hope. I for my part was somewhat distracted by her lowered eyelids, the nimbleness of her fingers and a certain aspect of her upper lip. In fact, just as I was about to give up the tuition and lean forward and kiss her, Sir George came stamping in with his candlestick, and began raking out the fire and banging the shutters open and closed again and saying, ‘Time to shut up shop!’ As usual, this made Judith go pink with amusement, and thus we parted and went to our beds. But before we did, she gave me the loop of silk thread to keep and practise with.
The next day, the time came for me to leave. I had promised Dr Starkey and Cromwell that I would be back in London after three days, to see what message I might take back to Mr Pole in Italy. Now a whole week had passed. I suddenly became alarmed. Perhaps I had let this show of carelessness go too far. It is hard to make these calculations. In any event, I left the next day, as I say. Just before I mounted my horse, I had a word alone with Judith.
‘I will be back,’ I said. ‘There is some information which I need, and only you possess.’
I looked straight into her eyes as I spoke. Naturally, just at that moment, she became inscrutable and gave no sign that she knew what I meant or what her answer might be.
I rode away just before dusk. A few miles down the road, Rutter came out of the hedgerow and we went together to Weethley Wood. There we dismounted. Rutter whistled softly into his fist. After a pause, an owl hooted. Soon his brother appeared. They cuffed each other about the head for a little while and then the younger one led us into the depths of the wood, to the foot of the tree where the goshawks nested. He was slighter in build than Tom and he went up that tree as easily as a man goes up his own stairs in the dark, and then he came down with two fledglings in his shirt. I slipped a hood on each and put them in a wicker cage and we went back to the horses.
Then I rode on to Inkberrow where we had a farm and I slept there the night. I left the next day and rode away for London feeling strangely solitary and sad. Of course I had no idea then that I would not see Coughton for many years.
Chapter 3
Cromwell, although then not yet an earl or even baron of Wimbledon, was, after the King, the most powerful man in the country and nobody cared to cross or disappoint him. Yet when I, five days in arrears, presented myself at his house, for some reason I was quite calm and unafraid. I was led in to see him at once – leapfrogging, as it were, over many ladies and gentlemen waiting outside who, to judge from their very long faces, had been there the same amount of time. I felt conscious only of my distinction: I was more important than they. Even on the step of the gallows I suppose men take pleasure in precedence. Cromwell was indeed angry with me. I could tell that at once from a glint in his eye. Yet it was the glint of restraint. Think of a big sleek house cat that will not pounce until the mouse comes forward another inch. No, that’s not right either: Cromwell had no intention of pouncing. He did not want to kill me or even alarm me. On the contrary, I was necessary to him alive, and at liberty and in good spirits. I suppose I knew that as well as he did. All the same, the dignity of his high office made remonstrance necessary. A frown deepened on his brow.
‘Young Throckmorton!’ he said. ‘You have given me several sleepless nights. I was about to send the officers to beat the bushes and hedges to find you. “Has he fallen into harm’s way?” I asked myself. “Or is it some young man’s business he has run off on, which we older men have forgotten?” ’
‘O my lord,’ I said, ‘forgive me. Five years I have been away from home, and I had forgotten – I don’t know how – how excellent the hunting and the hawking is in that corner of the country, much better than anywhere else in England or in Italy, for that matter. I could not bring myself to leave. As well as that, there was my family to see, and I had to go and stand at my mother’s grave . . .’
Cromwell was watching me closely, thinking, no doubt, ‘How great a fool is he?’ But I could also see that he was interested in what I was saying. Remember: the father made his living fulling cloth in Putney, and now here was the son, Lord Privy Seal, soon to be ennobled, already amassing great estates and ruling over the peers of the realm, and, above all, wishing to be one of them. In short, hunting was now his passion. There is, after all, no accomplishment more necessary for a nobleman than to hold a hawk well on his fist.
At this point I opened the wicker cage.
‘I have brought you a gift,’ I said, ‘from our own place. They are high-mettled birds, I can assure you: we know their parents, which are wild birds, pretty well.’
Cromwell thanked me abruptly – the frown deepened still more – and yet I knew he was pleased.
‘You can see they are very young,’ I went on, ‘which is the very best thing possible. At this age they will completely forget their mothers and instead grow fond of and come to love the man who fosters them and brings them up. Master Secretary, if you want a loving bird that hears your voice and comes back to you from no matter what distance, there is no better way than to feed and handle and hood her yourself and caress her and cure her. I beg you to delegate none of these offices but keep them for yourself.’
‘Yes, yes, very well,’ said Master Secretary, and then he stacked some papers sharply to show the time had come for business. Yet as we then spoke I noticed that several times he threw a glance at the young goshawks which had just arrived in that room at the centre of power from the top of the highest tree in the middle of Weethley Wood. And they were indeed a fine sight – a princely gift, in fact, little princes of the air, fierce and erect.
At the sound of each of our voices, they turned their hooded heads together first in one direction, then in the other.
The business in question was Mr Pole’s book.
‘Do you know, Michael,’ said Cromwell, ‘what is in this book?’
At that I became angry. The book was sealed, I cried, when I left Italy and sealed when I reached England. Did he think I had stopped by the side of the road to meddle with it or read it by candle in some French inn?
‘No, no,’ he said soothingly, holding up his hand. ‘No one accuses you of any misdemeanour. I ask merely if you know, roughly, the matter, the argument, of this writing?’
‘As to that,’ I said, ‘I was supposed to tell you – but perhaps I forgot – that never did a man put pen to paper so unwillingly as Mr Pole, but none the less he obeyed the King’s command to write and state his opinion truly and plain, without colour or cloak of dissimulation, which the King most princely abhors, and that if what he has written is displeasing—’
‘Displeasing?’ said Cromwell. ‘Oh no – it is far from displeasing. It is very clerkly written, some of the matter could not have been handled better. We – the King, that is – perhaps does not agree with everything he has written. In fact, we disagree with all of it. That is what makes it so desirable now to confer in person. Letters are dead things. The living man is, as it were, heaven-sent. In short, the book has marvellously whetted the King’s appetite to see the author stand in front of him again. How long is Mr Pole to remain lost to his native land, living in umbra – in the shadows – drowned in his studies? The King desires you therefore to repair to Italy at once and to tell him to return. I
ndeed, we want you to do more than that. You must persuade him to come. Put him up on a horse yourself if necessary and seize the bridle. Will you do that, Michael? You are to leave at once.’
Thus I returned to Italy and completed the first of my round journeys. I left London the next day. It was the height of summer. The heat was unexampled. Even on the sea, the air breathed hot on us. Halfway over the Channel, late in the afternoon, I saw a shooting star that trickled down the sky as if it were melting. The great heat did not abate all the way to the city of Verona, where I found Pole waiting for me.
I conveyed the King’s command that he return home at once, adding that letters are dead things, that a living man is heaven-sent, etc., and that no one understood how long he meant to live in the shadows and drown in his studies.
Before leaving London I had, on Cromwell’s order, gone to see Pole’s mother, the Lady of Sarum, in her house at Dowgate. She was an old woman, tall and thin, with eyelids like acorn caps – one of those elderly ladies who look as if a puff of wind could carry them off and yet who have a will of iron.
She told me she had known my father, and that she knew why I had now come to see her. ‘You are going back to Italy to see my son.’
‘Yes, madam.’
‘He has written a wondrous great book for His Grace, and now you are to bring him home.’
I bent my head.
‘Do you see this?’ she said, pointing to words picked out on the wall: Spes mea in Deo est. Her hand was trembling a little. ‘ “In God Is My Hope.” Tell him that by this token his mother greets him, and begs him now to come home again and be a comfort to her in her old age.’
I repeated all this to Pole.
‘And what do you think I should do?’ he said.
‘You must obey your sovereign lord, and your mother, and go home,’ I said.
‘And what will happen when I get there?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I expect you will be dead within a week.’
‘What?’ he cried.
‘The King will put you to death on the spot.’
‘Good God,’ he said, ‘then why tell me to go?’
‘I promised Cromwell that I would.’
There was a pause.
‘I see,’ he said.
After a while he asked, ‘How are you so certain of this?’
‘Starkey let me know,’ I said, ‘although he didn’t mean to. He is not very discreet. I do not think he is suited to life at court.’
And then I described how, just as I was leaving the palace after seeing Cromwell, I had bumped into our old friend.
‘Doctor Starkey!’ I said, ‘how are you?’
He was as white as a sheet, and seemed to have aged ten years.
‘I think I must be in a nightmare,’ he said.
Then he stopped himself and gave me a peculiar look, as if we had never met before, and he turned and went away.
So all the way from England to Italy, from Calais to Montreuil, to Abbeville, to Fontainebleau in the forest full of wolves, past Sancerre on the right, on to Nevers and down to St Jean and the river which has no fish in it and makes men deaf with its noise, and then over the mountains and across the plain, all that way in the great heat, I was thinking ‘And as soon as I get there, I’m going to have to turn round and come straight back’.
For I had promised Cromwell that, if Pole refused to return, I myself would immediately go back to England.
But I had also lied to Cromwell: I had a very good idea of what was in the book which Pole wrote for the King, and I knew that he could never go back, not if he wanted to keep a head on his shoulders.
Chapter 4
How I, of all people, came to be in possession of this information, then known to only a handful of people in the world – Pole himself, and the King, Cromwell and Starkey – was one of those strokes of chance, or, if you prefer it, one of the tricks played by the god of the crossroads by which the whole course of your life is changed, although you may not realise it at the time. Everyone can think of an instance in their own story.
In my case, I was not even awake as I came riding up to the crossroads of my life, but still asleep in bed in Pole’s house in Venice, where I lived along with several other Englishmen. It was late in the morning, but then I was in my twenties; the young consider the night is their natural field of operations and forgo many hours of day without disquiet. In any event, there I was, still asleep, nearly at noon, when I heard a distant voice crying out ‘Maggiore! Maggiore! ’ (‘Greater! Greater!’)
This rather puzzled me – which is possible in sleep – since, being the youngest and least distinguished member of the household, I was in the smallest and highest room of the house, in fact an attic where sounds rarely penetrated. And what did it mean, this ‘Maggiore! Maggiore!? ’ In my half sleep, I took it as a signal to me. But who was calling so loudly? I got up and stumbled down the stairs. My head was bad. The night before, Morison had been teaching me to drink Friulian reds. It was already very hot, one of those stifling days which Venice sets like a trap for her citizens. I remember the dry odour of marigolds – Italians believe that marigolds keep a house cool at night – and of the salt sea, with hints of dead cat: in short, the aroma of Venice. And down there at the front door, with the sea rocking on the marble step, I found a great altercation in progress.
Although violent, it was of a simple nature. A messenger had arrived with a bundle of letters for Pole, sent on from one of the embassies. Now Pole – ‘il Signor’ as we called him – was away at the time, and while the messenger was prepared to leave the letters, or to take them away and bring them back later, he utterly refused to go in search of Pole, who was at the time on the nearby island of S. Giorgio Maggiore.
This seemed reasonable enough, but our Sandro, who served as butler in the household, would not hear of it. The messenger must go to the island at once. Who could doubt the letters were of the greatest importance? Was not Pole a friend of the ambassador, not to mention the Doge?
The courier was unmoved. It was not his job to chase all over Italy for vagrant foreigners, no matter how exalted.
The two stood on the wide stair, battling it out at the top of their voices.
‘My God,’ cried Sandro, ‘what are things coming to when a common messenger no longer performs his basic tasks?’
‘I’ll take them back, or I’ll leave them with you, but I’ll do no more – take it or leave it,’ cried the messenger.
At this point I intervened. I said that I would take the packet over to il Signor.
Now this greatly disappointed both combatants – what’s that phrase about anger as sweet as honey in the veins? Sandro turned on his heel haughtily, saying ‘Oh, I give up’, and he went off downstairs. He had a difficult life, our Sandro: he saw himself as a scholar, and indeed he was a scholar and was busy translating St Basil, yet Pole also put him to work as butler, and when the cook fell ill he sent Sandro down to the kitchen to oversee the pantry and even, on occasion, to cook.
The messenger, whose face I can no longer bring to mind, slapped the packet into my hand and turned and also went away muttering. The local boatmen, rocking on their little skiffs, had been highly pleased with the entertainment and were also sorry to see it concluded. But I myself was very pleased to be out of that hot attic and within half an hour crossing the strait, on which the sun, at every instant, carelessly lit a thousand sparkles while the noontide clouds carelessly put them out.
I had never been to the island before. I knew that Pole had once stayed there with Pace, the last English ambassador, and on landing I went first to that house, but was directed instead to the monastery. I was then led this way and that around many long Benedictine corridors until we came to a narrow door. I went through this and found myself in a little wood. This astonished me: living in Venice you almost forget that fields and trees exist. Even the richest citizens hardly bother to bring horses over on the ferry, for the streets are no wider than windowsills and you have no mo
re chance of a gallop on a live horse than on those bronze steeds above the porch of the cathedral, which always look as if they mean to leap downward and scatter sparks over the square one night but which never will. In short, you live in a world of water and walls and occasionally glimpse a garden the size of a handkerchief. Yet here were trees arching overhead, and a green field beyond, and there were even some birds singing nearby, exactly as if they were in a wood in England.
I went down a path towards the open garden, where I saw ‘il Signor’ Pole, with two or three other men talking under the shade of a tree.
In those days, Abbot Cortese and all the clever young men who gathered around him, such as Pole, were reading Luther and the new thinkers. I paused for a moment, somewhat embarrassed at the thought of interrupting such a high discourse, but Pole caught sight of me and came over and took the bundle of letters. I should have left then, but instead I remained looking all around in delight. Pole was amused at my reaction to a bit of green grass and leafy shadow. As their discussion was coming to an end, he said, he would show me the whole garden. Then Abbot Cortese, who always loved to honour il Signor, declared that he would come along as well and show me the rest of the island, and so we set out on this great perambulation.
Now this intimidated me a bit. I would have been happy to roam about the place on my own, but to be led off by these great personages . . . After all, I was not only the youngest of Pole’s household, but also the most ignorant. I should say now that I had not been sent to the University of Padua because I was a great scholar. In fact, I went abroad under something of a cloud. I was completely innocent in the case: the mercer was stabbed on account of a certain want of courtesy on his part, and although I was present I did not draw my dagger. I think I can safely say I have never shed innocent blood. But we were mad young fighting fellows in those days and there was a good deal of trouble about the mercer. So it was judged best for me to go and see the world and then to continue my studies. My brother paid my way. That was how I came to be under Pole’s roof in Padua and in Venice. Even then, I often did not see him for months on end, and when we did meet I used to think he looked puzzled at the sight of me, wondering what I was doing on his stairs. Yet in point of fact, these two grandees, Pole and the abbot, could not have been easier company. Pole explained to Cortese that his family and mine had had a long alliance, and then Cortese entertained himself by repeating my name – ‘Trock-mor-ton-e’ – and inquiring as to its origin. I explained it meant the moor with the rock on it, and that led to the question of the words ‘moor’ and ‘rock’ and in the end he laughed and said it was no wonder that no other people in the world had ever learnt English or ever would, it being so strange and abrupt a tongue, with the syllables hanging in mid-air.
