The Courier's Tale (2 page)

Pole and Lupset have no opportunity to consider their impression of the chamber. Woodpecker is in a hurry to leave. Temporary custodian of the Medici tombs, Woodpecker is a tyrant. His modern equivalents, glaring over their morning paper at American tourists, are not much better. Suddenly Woodpecker puts his finger to his lips. Then he blows out the lantern. He has heard a noise. They must not be caught there, especially not by Michelangelo, the terrible
maestro
with his ‘eyes the colour of horn’ (according to his contemporary, Vasari) ‘flecked with bluish and yellowish sparks’, of whom even the Holy Father in Rome is afraid. The three men stand there stock-still in the dark. But nothing happens. There was no noise. There never had been one. Michelangelo is still fast asleep in his house around the corner. Nevertheless the tour is finished. In a few moments Pole and Lupset are hustled out of the chapel, down the aisle of the outer church and then out into the street and away, through the city under the stars.

By that time, in 1525, among the nine or ten models made of pitch and tow, two or three of their marble descendants were almost complete – the figures of Duke Lorenzo, and his two companions, the
Dawn
, a beautiful young woman, reluctantly waking, and
Dusk
, a middle-aged man, looking back sadly at the end of the day.

It was this trio which stayed in Pole’s mind when the lantern went out, and the next day, and indeed, for the rest of his life – the naked girl, the middle-aged man and the figure of Lorenzo, eyes shadowed by a helmet, the pupils un-engraved, the whole figure somewhat inert, withdrawn, elegant, sunk in thought . . .

BOOK I

Chapter 1

I was just a
boy
when my father died and left me his second-best ambling mare – a grey, milky in colour and with the eyes black, a sure sign of good disposition in a light-coloured horse.

My father was on his way to the Holy Land at the time, but his journey ended in Italy. In fact, it was on the road between Florence and Rome that he closed his eyes and ended all his journeys. Even as a young child, I knew that Florence was a long way off – further than Alcester, further than Bredon Hill, which I sometimes saw on the horizon, and away over the sea, which I had never seen but envisaged quite clearly. I knew exactly where Florence was, as my father had always promised that one day, when I had finished my studies, I could go there with my brother Anthony. Anthony, who was already in Italy, inherited my father’s best horse, but I did not mind that. My eldest brother, George, inherited much more than both of us, which is to say almost everything,  and I did not care about that either. Every day I hurried out to watch for my grey mare. I must have spent hours sitting on the gatepost at Coughton looking down the road. This was partly to avoid the gloom in the house – my mother and aunts and sisters all wept a great deal on hearing of the death of my father, which  made me feel sad, but I don’t think I understood that he was in fact
never
to come back. So I stayed well out of the way, watching the road for my inheritance.

The lads in the stables gave me a switch so that when she saw me she would know her master. In fact, we knew each other quite well already. Once at the Alcester fair I ran out across her path and she knocked me down: I can still remember being struck by her breast, which was surprisingly soft and silken, and then she ran on sure-footedly over me. Someone screamed. A woman I had never seen before swooped and picked me up and held me to her breast, also surprisingly soft and silken.

My father, who had been riding the mare, came back and leapt off, in a rage with everyone – with me, with himself, with the horse, perhaps with the woman holding me to her bosom. I was, however, quite unharmed.

After that, I felt we knew each other, the grey and I; when I used to go out to the stables and look up at her in the stall, there was a kind of severe understanding between us. A few years later she was ridden away to Italy.

She never came back. I forget the reason. Perhaps she was sold and the money was sent home, which would have been the sensible arrangement, but one which I didn’t grasp. In any event, for a whole summer I sat on one of the gateposts, a globe of stone roughly pricked with yellow lichen, watching for my inheritance. One night I even dreamt that I was on her back and riding towards her owner, that is to say, towards me, asleep in bed at the time, at Coughton. This did not unduly trouble the dream. And now when I look back at my life, I think that perhaps its whole course was laid down right there, on that gatepost at Coughton in Warwickshire, looking down the road towards the wide world. Most people, thinking back to their childhood, can see signposts which long ago were pointing to their future. My intimation, however, was simpler than most: for me, the road ahead
was
the road – and specifically, the road to Italy. For I doubt if anyone alive has ridden back and forth between England and Italy as often as I, Michael Throckmorton, Esq. of Warwickshire and London and now of Mantua. In short, it has been my whole career.

Of course I have performed a good many other feats as well – married twice, fathered six children, been twice to prison, become rich, and bred some excellent horses – but chiefly in my life that is what I have done: ridden back and forth between England and Padua or Verona or Venice or Rome, almost always in service to the most illustrious Mr Pole.

On his account I have met one emperor, two kings, a queen, two popes, and any number of lords, ladies, fools, thieves, liars and, I think, more than one murderer. On Pole’s behalf I once made a long address before a king and queen and the greatest gathering of nobles and prelates ever seen in England. My voice did not shake at all: I had become an accomplished professional – a courier.

It was not an occupation I ever sought, although it is not entirely without honour, being carried out in the service of Mercury, who reveals to men the decisions of destiny, which are not necessarily pleasant. For this reason his servants are sometimes disliked and even hated; being in his service is not a safe occupation. This is something we couriers and envoys have to put up with, but we take due precautions: the god of the highway, the crossroads and the city gate, is also the patron of thieves, reporters and pickpockets. In short, we learn a few tricks to survive, but that in turn earns us even deeper suspicion.

On my very first mission, I noticed the mistrustful expression that greets you even if you have just crossed Europe in record time.

That was on the journey I undertook to deliver Mr Pole’s great book or letter to the King. By that time, you must know, King Henry had divorced his wife, married Dame Boleyn and, refusing any longer to recognise the authority of the Pope, declared himself Head of the Church. One day, a year or two after these events, he remembered his beloved cousin, Reynald Pole, immersed in his studies far away in Italy and, recalling also his great reputation for wisdom and goodness, he sent a message requiring him to state his opinion of the changes in England. In reply Pole wrote a long, long letter – I think more than two hundred pages – and gave it to me to take to Henry. So there I was, in front of the King, on one knee as required, holding out the leather satchel which contained the book.

The King stood looking at me for a minute as if I was an apparition from the underworld.

‘You came on your own?’ he said.

I nodded my head.

‘That seems very strange,’ said the King. ‘Suppose this packet had fallen into the wrong hands.’

‘The
wrong
hands!’ I said. I felt my face burn. As if I would permit some stranger to disburden me on the road. I suppose I had rather a hot temper in those days.

‘Ah, well,’ said the King, pacifically, ‘perhaps it’s all right. After all – here you are. And they say that good writing is like a good man: it needs no protection as it makes its way through a wicked world.’

Then he unbent a little more and asked me one or two other questions – what I thought of the ladies in Venice, for instance.

I said that some were beautiful, but they were haughty and that I was thinking more of an English wife.

To this he said nothing.

He wore a gold dagger slung on a silk girdle from his hip. It was a magnificent object, with the face of a lion on the pommel, or was it a man or a woman turning into a lion?

He had made no move to take the satchel, and was still looking thoughtfully at me.

‘Why you?’ he said.

I was puzzled and said nothing.

‘There are many gentlemen in Mr Pole’s household,’ he said. ‘Why were
you
chosen as courier?’

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I’m the fastest.’

And at that His Majesty suddenly beamed and opened his hands, as at some charming new economy.

At the same moment Dr Starkey, the King’s chaplain, came up and plucked the satchel from my hands as if it was his own trophy. In a way, I suppose it was – Starkey was Pole’s great friend, it was Starkey who had reminded the King of Pole’s genius. If the King was pleased with Pole’s book, that would be a great triumph for Starkey. All the same, I was enraged. I had been strictly ordered by Pole to hand the book to the King and to no one else. But what could I do? I didn’t know how things were done at court; perhaps kings don’t unwrap parcels. The satchel was of very fine leather. It was my own – I never saw it again, by the way. After that, I don’t remember what was said, or how I left the room or the palace, or, for that matter, London. And this is my defect: not to be far-sighted and see what one day will be of importance. What I do remember are many things of little or no value to others and often enough of little or none to me.

Yet now that I have passed the age of forty – at which point, says Portaleone, who is my doctor here in Mantua, a man may without blame recount the story of his life and describe the splendid deeds he has done and the terrible things he has suffered – I must make do with the currency I have. And so there we were – the King’s golden dagger was in front of my eyes, Starkey took the book out of my hands as if it was his own first-born child – and the next thing I remember is the following day, riding through Warwickshire, where as far as the eye could see the elms were casting noontide shadows as dark as inkblots in the middle of the fields. It was almost midsummer’s day. Then a little later I rode through the six-furlong wood, where there is always feeding for fifty hogs, and I came in sight of Coughton, the house where I was born.

There I stopped short and rubbed my eyes. I don’t suppose I actually rubbed them, it’s only an expression for astonishment and not very apt: rubbing your eyes or any other member is not going to restore the world to its proper state. And at that moment it was in a most improper one. For the house was gone. In its place rose a pompous castle, or rather the commencement of one, fifty-feet high and adorned with oriels, battlements, turrets and pinnacles.

Above the arch of the gate were the family crest and the royal arms carved in stone, and an inscription, HA, both above and below: HA HA.

I forgot to say that when I got back to England on that first journey, these initials HA, of King Henry and his second wife, Dame Anne, could still be seen carved, painted, inscribed or sewn above archways, door-yards, the entrances to tunnels, stables and mews, on pelmets, cushions and the backs of chairs. By then, however, Anne had been dead for months, executed for treason, and the device was rapidly disappearing. But some people, such as my brother Sir George, for instance, were strangely languid when it came to removing it. On her coronation day, it was said, she wore a gown embroidered with tongues pierced by nails, just to show anyone who spoke against the marriage – HA – what they might expect. Now I suppose the joke was on her.

But for my part I felt a joke had been played on me. Everything was utterly different from what I expected. How often had I imagined this moment, my first sight of home, in the years I was away! Yet there above me stood strange bran-coloured battlements of newly dressed stone, and even the gateposts of my childhood with their old globes of stone were gone. In their place were two of those nasty sharpened pillars called obelisks. Nothing, in short, had kept faith with my imagination.

At that moment, on the threshold of my birthplace, I felt a pang of homelessness as sharp as any I had known on foreign shores.

Portaleone laughed very merrily when I described this.

‘Everyone knows the memory plays tricks,’ he said. ‘Why should you expect your foresight to be any better? The mind looks both ways, like a man crossing the road who can be knocked down by a cart from either direction. Even so, you should have known your brother better. Of course he spent the family fortune on turrets and battlements! What – a man who sent you abroad to live on a pittance for five years! A brother? A fiend in human form, more like! And here is your other great defect: you are no judge of your fellow man.’

In point of fact, my brother George had given me the usual allowance. But I let Portaleone carry on lecturing me. He does not approve of our English inheritance laws. In any case, he has an upbraiding streak – he likes to stroke fur the wrong way. But as he is my physician, and now my literary advisor here in Mantua, I listen to him peaceably enough.

He then began to laugh and to shake his head. ‘You are altogether too innocent, too trusting.’ (This is not true.) ‘Your memory plays tricks on you. Your foresight is faulty. What a start to this project! Still, it is a good idea to write your life story. I, as your physician, advise it. It will help with your insomnia. And it will send your readers to sleep as well. No, no – I’m only joking. But what do you intend to call your book?’