‘If he is wise enough to tell us all he knows without pressing, then no.’
She made a wry face. ‘What do you think? I heard my lord the earl shouting when I came past the door.’
Simon put down the paper and turned to her. His own skin felt stretched against his face, as if it did not belong to him. ‘My opinion is that he will not tell, he will be tortured, he will break and then he will be tried and executed.’
She pulled back from him as if he smelled bad. Stupid, stupid, he thought, she is Sir Francis’ daughter, and he would have found some kind of words to soften what he had said, only she walked out of the dispatch room. After a moment, he turned back to his paper and began underlining some of the words in it.
XXII
Like Angels, Tom prefers rooftops. Even in the thinner spread suburbs beyond the walls, we who are held up by the Queen Moon can step across alleys from gutter to gutter as if over a brook, where the unangelled would look down, totter and fall. So I climbed the red lattices of the Nine Stones alehouse behind the French embassy in Salisbury Court, and strode like a giant across two alleys and a building site to come at Hanging Sword Court which is full of the sweet green smell of wood. In the centre stood the skeleton of the firedrake, half-clad with red and gilt scales, stretched across its two carts. All about it scurried men in leather aprons with chalk stuck behind their ears and truculent expressions on their faces.
At a table in a comer made by two rows of lattice-built planks sat Adam Strangways, once Semple, now Stone, always Lucifer, and the Master Carpenter Richard Broom, drinking cheap wine from pewter goblets. Before them spread out between the flagon and three offcuts was the delicately drawn plan of Sir Philip Sidney’s precious dragon along with the Master’s copy of the estimatio that had been accepted six months before.
* * *
“Imprimis: two carts of sound axles, one of six wheels, one of two; item: seasoned timber, ash, elm and oak; item: hemp rope and pulleys for the inner workings; item: bellows for the puffing of dragon smoke and slow match to make it; item: ii round silver mirrors for the flashing of the firedrake’s eyes, made to swivel in their holes; item: pay of one man to work within the dragon; item: pay of one boy to work the tail; item: viii strong cart horses, gelded, caparisoned in red silk, of Dutch breeding, to draw the whole…’
* * *
The list covered five pages, marked out in a neat scrivener’s hand. The sums of money were low, particularly for anything built for acourtier, where a wise master craftsman will mark up by a third to cover the time between presenting the bill and seeing any money. Master Broom had whittled his profit to the bone, creating Sidney’s dragon for the honour of the thing. Or so he said to Sir Philip and also to his over-curious clerk.
I, who can peer between ill-built chimneys and see him talk with my brother Cain, I know that neither Sir Philip nor Mr Secretary Walsingham nor Mr Ames know, which is that this tall handsome old man believes he is a rightful king.
‘Have you sufficient to cover the shortfall?’ Adam was asking.
‘More than enough,’ said Mr Broom. ‘Our friend is more than generous.’
Adam nodded.
After a while, Mr Broom patted the paper with his broad square hand. ‘My daughter is happy that I am doing this work,’ he said. ‘She is proud of rtie, she says. She thinks me reconciled. She thinks I have forgotten my old tales as she calls them. Christ, if she knew.’
Adam smiled in agreement. ‘You do not plan to warn her?’
Mr Broom shook his head. ‘How can I? She is a heretic like her husband, worse than a heretic, Bible reading every day, great long sermons every Sunday, troubling her poor woman’s brain with religious questions. Her children are growing the same way. They laugh at me when I tell them their ancestry.’
There is so little bar between past and present for me: squatting behind a pile of wood, part of me soaked in fear of discovery and the return to Bedlam, I could take the smell of sawn wood and return to the hall of our house when my father was having a priesthole made to content my mother. Broom came, whispered to be reliable and careful, and stripped the panelling off one wall of the parlour. He measured and considered and drew up a plan and began building the place while I slipped away from Fr Gurney’s Latin lessons and Adam away from his nurse to hover about him and pass chisels and hammers and ask foolish questions.
He told one strange tale, towards the end, the two of us sitting together among blocks of wood that Adam was piling up to make a fort.
‘People are not always what they seem,’ he began. ‘Have you ever heard the tale of Robin Hood and how King Richard disguised himself as a simple knight?’
I nodded and so did Adam.
‘Now, can you tell me what is my name.’
‘Richard Broom, ’ piped Adam, balancing a triangular block and watching it fall.
‘You Ralph, do you know what Broom is called in old French?’
I thought a while, then shook my head.
‘Planta Genesta. Planta genet.’
Both of us sat there looking blank and he sighed. ‘Do you know who was Queen before our present mistress, Queen Elizabeth?’
‘Blessed Queen Mary?’ said Adam, who had heard our mother talk of her.
‘Good. And before her?’
‘Poor King Edward who died of poison by the Lord Protector,’ I said.
‘And before him?’
Both of us together, echoing our mother again. ‘Wicked King Henry the Eighth.’
‘Never say so to anyone but me or your mother, but yes. He broke us from Rome and stole all the Church’s land to give to his favourites so he could marry his trollop. Henry the Heretic. And before him?’
Again we looked blank. I could have spoken eloquently of the founding of London by Brutus the Roman and of King Arthur but this was in that middling ground between the stories of our parents and the mists of the past.
Mr Broom sighed. ‘Henry VII the miser, who began as Henry Tydder, the Welsh nobody, ill-got of the Beauforts and the daughter of the mad King of France.’ He spat into curls of shaved wood and Adam and I exchanged glances. ‘And who was before him?’
‘Brutus?’ I asked.
He laughed. ‘Well, at least they have not yet taught you to call him a hunchback. No, Richard the Third, Richard of York, Richard of the white boar, Richard Plantagenet.’
I frowned, very puzzled now. ‘Why do you have the same name as…’
He held out his left hand as a fist and I saw the gold ring, with the worn shape of a white boar enamelled upon it.
‘He was my grandfather,’ said Richard Broom.
‘Did you ever meet him?’ Adam asked eagerly, while I still groped about in puzzlement. Kings’ grandsons were at the very least dukes or earls who went about in velvets and ermines and never did anything except fight exciting battles and jousts. Perhaps Mr Broom was too old for it.
‘No,’ he said to Adam kindly, ‘Henry Tydder killed him in battle and stole his crown from him so he could be King instead. But my grand- mother was his leman and I knew her well and she told me stories of his Court and his terrible trouble and sorrow and how they brought him to a wicked sin. She knew his Queen and nursed their little boy when he died because of God’s judgment, which was why King Richard lost the battle with Henry’s army.’
This had lost us long ago, it was too like history, like Livy. I clung on to one trail. ‘Your grandmother was not his Queen.’
‘No, she was his leman. Kings may take other women if they wish, it is the custom.’
‘But then your father was a…’
‘He was a bastard, true. But so is Queen Elizabeth since her father was not rightfully married to her mother when she was bom. It seems no bar to the throne nowadays.’
His beard then was grey, not white, and his voice held an undertone which I now know was proud bitterness. The story went on and melted into the sound of hammering and sawing and his occasional grunts of satisfaction when a panel slid into its proper p
lace. Fr Gumey came to find me and hauled me off to more painful calculations in Roman numerals. Adam stayed and struggled to carry his toolbag for him, and almost burst with pride when Mr Broom made a little hobby horse for him from offcuts. A few days later he disappeared from the house, leaving a little sawdust in crevices by the place where the priesthole was and no other sign, and that was swept out the next day with the old rushes. He went back to London in the carrier’s wagon, carrying his ancient lineage and his pride in every turn of his head: he loved his work with wood and yet his grandmother had put poison in his mind, so that he could not abide the thought that he, a King’s grandson, should be hammering nails and sawing wood in a small manor house for pay and not hammering heads in battle for honour. He had made it a moral tale in the end: England groaned under the scandalous oppression of a woman’s rule and a heretical woman at that, all because the King his grandfather had been forced into a grievous sin by circumstances and conspiracies.
This was before our mother wasted her flesh into nothingness with the vehemence of her love for Jesus, when sin was a stealing of apples or a dirtying of ruffs.
Many years later I saw a portrait of Edward IV, Richard Broom’s royal great-uncle, and saw there a resemblance, though the painting was badly done. The resemblance was still there in Broom’s old age, in his height which was three inches above two yards, in the turn of his mouth and the smallness of his eyes. Now as he sat and spoke to Adam, he looked very old and reverend, but his cheeks were fallen inwards with the loss of many teeth and his face had a grey unhealthy look and his bones seemed to be burrowing up through his thinning flesh.
‘They laugh at me…’ he was saying to Adam, lines worrying his face, ‘my grandchildren laugh at me, but still I would not have them touched by this. If we fail…’
Adam patted his hand. ‘We will not fail.’
Mr Broom stared down at the plan. ‘…I will not be here soon. The line ends with me, my daughter is no true descendant of kings, she takes after her mother… I will not see the end I think. Truly, I have no need of our friend’s money.’
‘It is here, we might as well use it to good effect.’
It was money that had traversed the sea in an egg of a paper banker’s draft, money originally laid from Potosi where the wild men of the New World bleed and starve and die for its sake. Rather than risk one of the German moneychangers on Cheapside, it had been taken to Mr Tyrrel and sold at a discount.
Adam stood, Richard Broom stood, Adam touched his hat to the master in case any were watching. I scrambled across roofs again to watch my brother in his mean wool suit striding down towards Fleet Bridge with the ballad seller in his wake, and no connection between them but what mine eyes could see. If I could I would have gone to him and asked if he had lately hired an arquebusier and two swordsmen, but I dared not and I knew his answer anyway. And this was my brother, but this was also Cain, who put me in Bedlam, Lucifer with demons of certainty in his eyes, believing he served God.
And why could I not go to Simon Ames, and say to him, here is a man lately come from Spain, with silver and gold in his pocket and here he is building a magnificent float for the Queen’s Accession Day Tilts and there, that place, is where he lodges? Ames would call together his English Spartans and there would be another morning raid and a search and so treason’s egg would be broken and the meat spoiled. Yet how could I do so? Here was Cain, full of Lucifer’s pride in his certainty and righteousness, so like unto Sir Francis Walsingham, so unlike, yet here also was my brother who would not cry when his pony threw him and he broke his arm, who sat in his baby’s petticoats and listened while an old carpenter told tales of kings and lemans. And he was lodging with my sister.
XIII
To an angel’s eyes it will seem that when Simon goes to work with Thomas Norton upon some prisoner, he wraps himself in his mantle of ice, for a questioner must allow no touch of human warmth to undermine him. There are men who suffer from a brainsickness that causes them to delight in pain, their own or another creature’s, men like Richard Topcliffe whom Sir Francis permits to operate a rack in his own home, asking no questions, hearing no lies from him because the man is an arch-getter of confessions. As Mr Secretary Walsingham works for the cause of right, he leaves the question of pity and mercy for those helpless in Topcliffe’s power to Jesus Christ, who knows all causes and all men’s hearts. And although Christ was Himself hanged upon a tree, Walsingham does not dread being called upon to explain himself on the Day of Judgment for all his acts have as their reason the protection and defence of True Religion against the power of the Beast.
But Simon Ames, being as they call them (and bum them) in Spain, a Crypto-Christian, he is less buttressed by faith. What he does is done in the end for the good of the realm, something which he is English enough that he takes it too seriously to think about it clearly or often. And it is further a tenet of his religion that he must serve loyally the land wherein he dwells and the sovereign thereof.
Yet there is a worm of doubt gnawing at his heart, beneath its saving ice, a snake of self-blame. Neither Walsingham nor any other of his men harbours such a thing, for they doubt not but what they do is not only for the Common Weal, but also the pains they inflict may perhaps save from Hell a poor soul now mired in the idolatry and wickedness of Rome. That which is armour to them is like sand in his hose to Simon, for it is a strange fact that a Jew may not persecute for religion’s sake. But as Walsingham is blind to his own tears for his lost child, so also is Simon made deaf by his doubt. He does what he can, half-unknowing, he goes about his work as mercifully as he may. Though Norton and Sir Francisboth have doubts of him, they use him nonetheless which speaks well of his habit of mercy.
There is an element of the play to a questioning. In all of them that he undertakes with Norton, Simon plays the part of a mere clerk, a small man and a fearful one, a fellow mouse in the cat’s den. In this Simon is welbassisted by his smallness and clerkish tendency to peer. At the time of the questioning of Francis Throgmorton he had also a plentiful issue of phlegm from his nose and a hacking cough.
It is cold in the Tower, all who have been there and survived – including our own Sovereign Lady – attest to and complain of the cold. In the round upper room of the Lanthom Tower the combination of cold and damp is redoubled by the nearness of the water from the Thames in the moat, casting its ugly miasma full of the dirt of London upon all the poor prisoners.
Which made it damnably hard for Simon to hold a pen and hard to see also, in that the watery sun made scarcely an imprint on the dirty dim air of the room where he was working. He longed to call for a brazier, but that would have sat ill with his character and further comforted a prisoner who must be broken open swiftly, like an oyster, for the sake of the pearl of truth within him. It is true that not all oysters bear pearls, but they must nonetheless be opened, else how will you know which contain the pearl?
Francis Throgmorton was shivering and pale, inadequately dressed for the Tower in only his doublet and shirt, hose and boots. Simon was weighed down by two shirts, a padded waistcoat, his irksome cuirass, his doublet, a lined leather jerkin (the plain one without the cutwork) and a plain stuff gown daubed with candle grease. The doublet being of red grosgrain he looked like a fat robin redbreast upon spindly legs and he thought that there might be a spot of warmth near the struggling furnace of his heart.
At last he finished noting the circumstances of the arrest and the list of papers found in the house, put his pen down on the desk and flexed his fingers. Throgmorton sat before him on a low milking stool and stared down at the cold fetters on his wrists as if he had newly woken and found them there. At times he would lift them up as if testing their weight, a thing commonly done by fresh prisoners, Simon had observed.
There was a thombush in Simon’s heart. He coughed and peered at Mr Mall who stood stolidly by the door.
‘Mr Mall, would you do me the kindness of asking Mr Henderson if he will send for some mulled ale?’
Francis Throgmorton cleared his throat .
‘Um…. Your honour…’
‘I am Mr Ames,’ Simon said kindly. ‘I am but a clerk here to take down your words if Mr Norton comes.’
‘Oh. Well, Mr Ames. If I might ask…you said…Norton. Is that Mr Thomas Norton?’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘That wrote A Declaration of Favourable Dealing by Her Majesty’s Commissioners for the Examination of Certain TraitorsV ‘The same.’
‘The one they call Rackmaster Norton?’
‘Some Papists so miscall him, Mr Throgmorton. Have you read his Honour’s declaration?’
‘I glanced through it…’
‘Then you will know that only certain traitors are ever racked here and none is tormented for his religion alone. The Queen has said she will make no windows in men’s souls and nor do we, only if a man is so foolish and treacherous to deny us answers to the questions we ask, then must we go about other methods.’ Simon dropped his official voice, and with a nervous look at Mall said to Throgmorton, ‘Which for myself I do not like. I pray you, Mr Throgmorton, hold nothing back. It was very ill to hold silent before the Privy Council as you did this morning.’
‘What if I have done nothing wrong, have nothing to say?’
‘Then what harm can there be in answering a few questions?’ Simon smiled. ‘The quicker answered, the quicker tried and the quicker out of uncertainty. ’
‘Tried? I am not guilty of…’
‘Sir, you are certainly guilty of the possession of Papist trumpery for we found Agnus Deis and suchlike in your house.’
[David Becket and Simon Ames 01] - Firedrake's Eye Page 12
