Read The Courier's Tale Online
Authors: Peter Walker
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.
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.
On my way home I saw that in the bankers’ shops all the wagers were for England, the only cry was ‘England! England!’ and no one else was even mentioned.
On the day the conclave began, I found myself back in the Sistine to help install Pole and his baggage into his temporary lodgings. It was the first time I had been there since going with Flamminio to see the new fresco, and I cast a glance at that great blue field of sky to see if I could see it in the same light again, but that was impossible – the crowds of servants, conclavists, baggage handlers, pot-boys, butlers, footmen, candle-men, sightseers from every country, even England – Master Hoby was present, a great Lutheran who by then was the owner of Pole’s family seat at Bisham – German barons and baronesses, bankers’ spies, carpenters hammering away as they finished the cabins, each of which was hung with silk curtains – green for cardinals made by the last pope, purple for the rest, or was it the other way around? – and then the cardinals themselves, sweeping past among their attendants – it was hard even to keep a footing in that throng, much less stand there and consider the final meeting of heaven and earth, as imagined by M. Michelangelo. Then at about four in the afternoon a loud voice rose above the tumult – ‘
Depart, who must depart
!’
At that, everyone except the cardinals, each with two conclavists and a few servants to assist them, went away, and the great outer door swung closed.
Half an hour later, it swung open again and certain interlopers who had been found there, as expected, under beds and behind curtains – two madmen, three spies from the bankers’ shops, four gentlemen merely curious to see the election of a pope – came forth and bowed to the crowd who greeted them with many jeers and whistles.
Then everyone stood outside and watched as the highest windows and the lesser doors were mured up, and finally the bricklayers came to the main outer door itself, and set to work. Only one small opening, called the wicket, was left.
It was at the wicket that I spent the next three days and nights, along with a crowd of prelates, ambassadors, Roman barons and officials.
The prelates guarding the door were negligent. Servants of the cardinals came in and out as they pleased, their boots stuffed so full of letters that they went over at the ankles and could scarcely totter along at all. In short, everything taking place inside the conclave in great secrecy was known across Rome within an hour.
At the first scrutiny, Pole won twenty-one votes, six short of the two-thirds majority. At the second, he won twenty-four. At the third, twenty-five. If he found one more supporter, and chose to vote for himself, then my master, Mr Pole, of Staffordshire birth, aged forty-eight, and with a death sentence still on his head, would become the Roman pontiff.