The Courier's Tale

by Peter Walker

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:

  ‘I cannot go to Rome,’ he said.

  Chapter 10

  At that, the others in the room cried out, as with one voice. They were the two bishops, Giberti and Carafa, both very learned men, who had also been summoned to Rome to prepare for the council.

  When they realised that Pole was determined not to go with them, they set out to change his mind with many arguments. But Pole was insistent: ‘I have already lost the love of the King. Not even the Pope would ask me to lose my family as well, and cast off all the bonds of nature . . .’

  The two bishops finally seemed to give way. ‘Very well, perhaps you are right,’ they said. ‘You must write to the Pope and ask for a remission. But at least ride with us some of the way, so we can discuss all these things. Your King would not object to that.’

  So we all set off together, with Carafa, Giberti and Pole leading the way, and a long train of friends and servants following behind. Apart from both being very learned, those two bishops were as unlike as night and day. Giberti short, stout, pallid – his stubby fingers grasped the bridle as if his life depended on it – had a down-turned mouth from which all his words departed reluctantly and had a kind of added force on account of their rarity. Carafa, on the other hand, was tall, fiery, voluble – he rode almost standing on his s
tirrups, straining ahead to spy out any foe. He was a true son of Naples, fond of that black wine they make there, and given to sudden eruptions of rage or joy.

  I rode just behind them alongside Marc’Antonio Flamminio, the poet. It was on that journey, I think, that our great friendship began. Flamminio nudged me as we rode along and pointed ahead: ‘Look at them,’ he said. ‘Carafa rides forward like Mars, and Giberti brings up the rear like Saturn. And poor Signor Reynaldo’ – as he called Pole – ‘moves between them sadly like Mercury. He doesn’t stand a chance.’

  It was soon clear that the two had not given up their campaign to win Pole back.

  Giberti was mild and thoughtful in his manner. He said nothing for a long time as we rode across the plains, and then he made one speech: ‘It may be unwise of you to come to Rome,’ he said. ‘You must make up your own mind. Yet I keep wondering to myself how you will now live. You can hardly expect your King to keep paying your allowance. I know him well, we are very good friends and I have often noticed (for I have the same fault) that he is always eager to cut costs. Now that you two have fallen out, he will say to himself: “Well, at least that saves me a hundred pounds a year.” And so you will be penniless. Nor will you be very safe, even in an attic in Venice. After all, Thomas More was killed for remaining silent, whereas you, as far as I know, have stated your opinions all too frankly. Do you really think that you will now be left in peace?’

  Carafa then took up the assault. He was all for fire and courage. ‘It is now many years since I was made a bishop,’ he declared at one point, when we had stopped to eat by a stream, ‘and I first went to visit a town which had urgent need of pastoral care. But my presence was insupportable to a petty tyrant of the place. He came to see me and in almost threatening form ordered me to have respect for certain ancient and devilish customs of the place. At that, I instantly departed and, outside the gate, following the holy precept of the gospel, shook the dust from my sandals, praying to God to provide for the inhabitants. When I was only two days distant, the people, unable to bear his tyranny any longer, rose up in a body against him, and the tyrant, having sought shelter in an oven, was found there and they tore him quite to pieces. Thus are evil-doers punished!’ At this recollection Carafa evinced the greatest satisfaction, shaking a fist, so to speak, at all tyrants.

  Further along the road, he addressed Pole again, saying that indeed it would be sad for him to lose the love of his family.

  ‘It would be a great loss,’ he said. ‘Yet some have given up more. In fact, they have given up their lives for what is right. Of course, not everyone can be expected to follow the path of the martyrs. And yet did not Christ himself say: “He who will not give up his mother or his father or his brother for my sake is not worthy of me”?’

  And then he spurred his horse on and galloped on ahead, forcing the whole party and the train of servants behind to pick up speed and follow.

  After two days of this, Pole looked not merely woebegone but puzzled, as if he could not tell how he had got himself into this position or how to get out of it. The wind had turned cold and that day, the third of our journey, I saw the sky filled with veins of birds flying south. The summer was over. When we reached Bologna, Pole announced he had changed his mind again: he would go on to Rome after all. He then wrote a letter to the King, saying that he would not give in to his or Cromwell’s threats, and he wrote to his family, begging their forgiveness, but saying he must follow his destiny. He handed me the packet, and I prepared to turn around and begin my fifth journey across Europe that year.

  Before I left, I mentioned the rumours that when he reached Rome he would be made a cardinal. I begged him not to accept this promotion while I was still in England, as nothing would infuriate the King more.

  Pole promised he would refuse as long as I was away, and so we set off in different directions, I turning back north while they went south into the hills towards the abbey of Vallombrosa. It was suddenly autumn; all the way across the plain the wind was blowing hard and leaves were streaming from the long lines of poplars. I should have taken more note of this, but I was young and full of confidence. I had ridden to England and back twice in the last three months, and I was so sure of myself I now decided I could afford a slight detour. I had it in my head to take back a gift for Judith. There was a bolt of blue silk cloth I had seen in a shop in Padua, faintly sprigged, as far as I could remember, with roses. What possible harm could there be in taking a few hours to go and buy a length of silk sprigged with roses? And what might not the effect of that be at Coughton, in Warwickshire!

  I arrived at the shop late in the afternoon. This was in one of those dark, vaulted arcades in Padua where you can go dry-shod even in the worst weather. There was a very pretty girl serving there whom I had noticed before, and during our conversation two things happened. First she let me know her master was away for the night, and secondly, by mistake, she laid her hand on mine as we bent our heads together over the unrolled bolt of silk. The silk was in fact green rather than blue, and the flowers were not roses after all, but some other bloom, in a shade deeper than pink.

  One thing led to another. It was dusk – she closed the shop and shuttered it – and led the way upstairs and, to cut a long story short, in climbing the stairs I fell, so to speak, and did not leave Padua until early the next day. Now this was very strange, because even when young I was not unusually given to licence, and yet on that occasion, on my first shopping errand for one I loved, what did I do but sleep with another girl?

  We are strange beings, is all I can say, and even the most loving heart is unsearchable. And yet it is subject to harsh corrections. Almost as soon as I left Padua, these began.

  I took the road through Grisony and no sooner was I among those mountains than the air thickened and the first snow of the season, which I would have completely missed a day earlier, began to fall, and then set to work falling in such volumes, without a breath of wind, that when I stopped and went into the inn at Lachen and looked at the window the whole room seemed to be rising slowly up through the air. At the same time a great hush had fallen over the world. In short, within two hours, every trace of a road in the land of the Grisons had vanished. I spent four days trapped in the inn at Lachen, where the stove smelt as strongly of rancid butter as any of those in Germany, and then finally both skies and the roads reappeared, and I rushed away and in fact soon began to make up lost time. I reached Paris, I flew through that city, and then came to Montreuil near the coast.

  There, however, the donkey of a captain who keeps the castle took it into his head that I was an imperialist spy. (The Emperor and King of France were once more at war.) I was arrested and pushed into a cell. After an hour or so, Captain Donkey came to see me. The reason I was arrested, he told me, was that I had been heard speaking Italian.

  ‘I was speaking,’ I said, ‘to my horse.’

  ‘An honest man,’ cried the captain, ‘talks to his horse in his own language.’

  ‘I talk to mine in Italian, as he is an Italian horse.’

  ‘Your papers!’

  Ten days passed before I was released. I do not know whether it was the effect of fatigue, but I slept better there in the castle at Montreuil than I ever have in my life before or since. There was nothing to do but wait. The straw was clean, the food was no worse than in some other places, my horse was stabled, my possessions were intact.

  The captain had examined them in front of me. He glanced at the silk and dismissed it. He then came to the packet of letters.

  At that point I held up my forefinger – always an earnest parable – and said:

  ‘That packet contains letters for the King of England. If you so much as lay a finger on it’ – and here I waved my own very slowly under his nose – ‘then the King will come to know of it, and I assure you that he will feel most bitter resentment, not merely towards France but towards you, personally, Captain of Montreuil.’

  At that, the captain, looking blackly at me, neverth
eless shrank back a little. He was one of those miserable men of about twenty-eight, which is a very bad age to be in authority, too old to be generous and too young to be wise. I could see that he began to think he had made a mistake and would like to let me go, but he did not know how to go about it without losing his dignity.

  Thus, for ten nights in a row, and during the day as well, for there was nothing else to do, I lay down and reliably went off into the deepest regions of repose that I ever discovered. I did not realise my good fortune at the time. Nowadays, I suffer from insomnia; I seem to have forgotten the way to that desirable kingdom.

  Meanwhile, although I had no idea of it, the whole world was searching for me. In London, Brussels and Paris the embassies plied one another with enquiries. By that time everyone knew of the story of Pole and the King, and was eager to see what would happen next. But what had become of Pole’s servant? I had been seen leaving Italy, was seen flying through Paris, and then nothing.

  How exactly my whereabouts in Montreuil were discovered I was never told, but as I was ushered from my cell, I had the pleasure of catching sight of Captain Donkey looking thoroughly chastened in his own castle courtyard. He had a sulky air – he refused to meet my eye as I crossed the yard – and had clearly been reprimanded, and quite rightly, too: he had committed a grave offence. He had interfered with a tale which, that year, everyone was following – even God Himself, if the saying is true that God made man because He loves stories. In any case, I rode on happily to Calais in the winter sunlight. But my punishments were not over. There in Calais I fell violently ill. First there came a slight headache, then a fever, then a foul sweat, and then I became delirious, and for a week I lay in an inn not knowing if it was night or day. The episode gave me a kind of dread which has never quite gone away. There beside the northern sea I made my first acquaintance with mortality, or rather, I realised that one day even I would certainly die. In my delirium, a parade of creatures came to visit me – some, like the landlady who brought soup, relatively substantial, others ghosts and goblins or the images of my own dear departed. One night – which seemed to last a whole season – I was plagued by a little monkey watching me attentively from among the upper folds of the curtain.