The Courier's Tale

by Peter Walker

  ‘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.

  I soothed her, saying that her views – which were those of Master Luther regarding salvation – had been held by many of my friends, especially Flamminio and the Marchioness, and perhaps even Pole himself. At that she seemed very surprised and as we rode
along, stopping here and there on the way, she questioned me about all my friends, especially the Marchioness, and I described her truthfully – as she was for most the time, that is – as a kind of second mother to me, at which Judith looked very sad and said she wished she had met her.

  ‘It was the Marchioness,’ I said, ‘who taught me how to keep our love safe. She told me not to keep you here’ – I tapped my forehead – ‘but hidden here.’

  I put my hand on my wife’s breast. My wife. It was at that moment I began to realise what a wife was: another being, a stranger infinitely familiar, a deep reflection of the self – and someone else I could never quite catch sight of.

  Later we came to the wood near Visé where I reined up and showed her the entrance to the forest path which Pole and I and the others had taken many years before instead of going to Maastricht to meet Mr Wilson and Mr Heath.

  Judith peered down the dim green lane which was now much overgrown.

  ‘And so that’s where you vanished off to,’ she said.

  A bird was calling somewhere nearby but other than that it was very quiet in the wood.

  ‘I knew you had gone,’ she said. ‘And I stopped thinking about you too. It was, in fact, too dangerous; the Marchioness was right. No one at Coughton ever mentioned your name. But all the time I kept you here.’

  And then she put her hand on my heart. So we lay down there, deep in the wood at Visé, before noon, and later fell asleep for a little while.

  Later that day we galloped on fast as if we had to make up lost time, but of course we did not. We were as free as the day was long.

  There was not a soul to be seen in the fields; the harvest was not ready. We seemed to be alone in the world. I was very happy to be in that company. When I first saw Judith come into the room in London I could see that she had aged. After that day, she never seemed to age by a day.

  She was not, however, one to let sleeping dogs lie. She soon came back to the question of Master Luther and justification by faith or by works and all the terrible questions that have set everything ablaze.

  ‘But what,’ she demanded one night in bed in the inn at Lachen, ‘do you think?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘sometimes, on Mondays and Wednesdays, as it were, I would take the Protestant view, that man is saved by faith alone, that grace pours down free, like sunlight, and cannot be ordered or paid for by good deeds. And at other times – on Tuesdays and Thursdays – I believed the Catholics, that a man must participate in his own salvation, and is transformed by his own actions. And then it sometimes seemed to me that they were both right – in turn, one after the other, as the soul grows up. But how can they both be right, I thought, when so many people much cleverer than I am want to kill the others for being wrong?

  ‘So finally,’ I said, ‘I came to another conclusion. I dared to say to myself: I do not know. Strangely enough the sky did not fall in. And from that day on, that has been my secret doctrine. On any question, to my mind, that is the first truth: I do not know. It is that admission which strips the mind naked, as it were, and lets it roam about in the light, and see further than before.

  ‘And my second doctrine,’ I went on ‘is this: at any time, be ready to say to yourself: I was wrong.’

  Then I told her the story of the youth Ulisse whom I saw stalking through Faenza’s vines, addressing a chicken, and whom I took to be mad, but who was in fact far better informed than I.

  That afternoon on the Quirinal under the towering clouds had changed me for ever, I said. Judith listened carefully, looking at me from under bent brows. I was pleased I did not have a wife who agreed or disagreed on principle, or one who was not interested in these matters at all.

  A few months afterwards, when we were living in Rome, she came to me and said she had thought long and hard about the tenets of my secret religion – ‘All this “I do not know” and “I was wrong”,’ she called it – and had come to the conclusion that it was not for her.

  ‘You must forgive me,’ she said. ‘I find it very uncomfortable. Knowing and being right are far more agreeable to me, and profitable. I’m sure that I’m right about this.’

  ‘And I am happy for the meantime not to be sure that I am,’ I said. ‘On that basis we can have a pact of mutual toleration.’

  To this she agreed and we sealed the arrangement in the way lovers choose, with a kiss. My marriage to Judith was in fact the time of my deepest happiness. I see that now, as it is the saddest to look back on. It was not to last long. It was quite different, as well, from the happiness I knew in Viterbo. There I lived a simple life, roaming about in Arcadia. The happiness of marriage is very different, much deeper, and in the depths there are more fears and cares. In a word, I soon became a father as well as a husband.

  When my son Francis was born within a year of our marriage, I thought back to that wood at Visé. He is now a sprightly child of seven with a hard head, and sly, amused eyes as if he is watching you through wood-shadow. I have certainly never thought of him as made at sea.

  Chapter 10

  Once back in Rome I found my duties in Pole’s household much reduced. He had given up the government of Viterbo. All the archers who protected him had been sent away. There was no sign that those ruling England sought his death. Nor, however, did they want any communication with him. The Protector sent him a letter full of comic abuse of popes, superstition and error. Pole sent a letter back which was very fierce. What did it say? I almost forget:

  It is the custom, nowadays, among those who delight in showing off their wit to treat the affairs of Rome with ridicule . . . No greater scourge can befall a kingdom than to have such men as rulers, who sit ‘in the seat of the scornful’ and for whom a great downfall soon comes.

  Brancetor, who had come back from the wars, took over my role and delivered this to the English ambassador in Paris. Meanwhile Judith and I were setting up house. We had an apartment by the palazzo Spada, near where the big statue of Pompey was found under a wall the next year. For weeks we went out together shopping for furniture and fittings. Until then I had not realised how many items are indispensable to a household. I knew them all by sight, as it were, but had never listed them and gone out to acquire the lot. Judith wanted everything of the best quality. She was used to living in a dainty manner. Every day I was reminded of yet another essential object. And of course she was right. How could one live without, say, scissors? Or a grater? Or a candle-snuffer? Or a salt vat? A meat board, a cheeseboard, a mustard pot, a tin butter dish, a ledger, a coal shovel, a waffle iron? A tablecloth press? It was out of the question. These things took almost all my attention.

  The daily events in Pole’s household, which was always busy, and even the bloody unpheavals in England became somewhat remote to me. When I was in London, as I said, there was some great commotion in the West Country, but the full scale of it was only slowly becoming known. It had begun when the ruling council abolished the mass: thousands rose demanding they keep their ancient form of worship, and also that Pole come back to England and take a place on the Royal Council.

  Soothing promises were made, but then an army was sent in. The priests were hanged from their steeples and thousands of prisoners were taken. The prisoners were tied up and put to the knife – nine hundred, it was said, in one afternoon, seven thousand in a fortnight. I knew of course that all these things were grave and fearful, yet to me, sitting with my son on my knee, they seemed oddly remote. My life now took place within the four walls of my own house. And then, as if to prove the point, disaster arrived right there in our midst. In the second year of our marriage, another child was born and then – behold! – another appeared, hot on her heels. I had fathered twins. But they died on the day they were born. God sent them in the morning, as the saying goes, and took them back in the evening. It is a common event to lose a child, I know, and yet we suffered more from the loss of those two little ones, whom we had scarcely met, than at the departure of very old friends.

  When it was
plain they were not to live long we christened them ‘Michael’ and ‘Judith’.

  That is almost all I remember of that year. More than ever we closed the door on the world. Judith, Francis and I formed our own little circle and lived away from everyone else for several months. This was in the year 1549.

  Then one night, in the autumn, someone came and hammered at the door. It was John Lily, who had been sent by Pole. The Pope, he said, was dying. All those in Pole’s household, of which I was still a chief member, were asked to go and wait on il Signor.

  For years, many people had prophesied that when the Pope died, he would be replaced by the Cardinal of England, the illustrious Reynaldo Polo. I suppose that my master is the only person in history of whom it was ever said, ‘He’s sure to be the next pope – or perhaps the King of England.’ Now the time had come to see if there was anything in these prophecies.

  Paul III had been ill for some time, of an apoplexy brought on by the evil behaviour of his grandsons, and so his death was not wholly unexpected. That day he had fallen into a deep sleep from which it was thought he would never awaken. I went to Pole’s house and waited as the news came in. For a while it seemed that the Pope might recover after all: his infant great-grandson had been brought in and he suddenly opened his eyes, and blessed him, then blessed him again, which so exhilarated him that he called for a boiled egg and half a glass of wine. Then he ordered the return of some property of the Jews, to whom he was always very partial, and the remission of the grist tax, but then fell back into unconsciousness. He died about noon the next day.

  That night the whole city stood by to watch his coffin go from the Quirinale to the palace of St Peter. I was among those of Pole’s household who waited on Monte Cavallo, by the marble statues of the horse-tamers, and then we moved off with the procession. In the darkness all that could be heard were the horses’ hooves and the sound of weeping. This is by no means the conclusion to all pontificates.