Read The Courier's Tale Online
Authors: Peter Walker
Soon our numbers increased again. We were joined by Elizeus Heywood, a wild, wayward young man whose father had sent him abroad to keep out of trouble. He made a beeline for Pole. Pole, immersed in his books, sent him on to us. Finally there arrived another nephew, John Throckmorton, Long John, as we called him, for he was so tall he towered over all of us and indeed over every head in the Mantuan street. The young men brought a lively spirit to the household. Judith already knew my nephews well; she found herself queen of a little court which had sprung up around her. We spent most of the summer in the country, at Cerese, where the air was sweeter than in town.
I told the boys they must not stop with us old folk out in the sticks but hurry off and see the world.
‘Oh no, dear Uncle,’ said Long John. ‘We’re staying. We know which side our bread is buttered on.’
Being a married lady, and pregnant again as well, Judith ruled them all easily. It was to Agnes Hide they made love. She, in turn, at the age of twenty-six, laughed at them. George was the oldest and he was only twenty-one or twenty-two.
‘She would love me if I had more money,’ said Long John at supper one evening. Every night we had supper at the long table under the apricot trees.
‘You know nothing about these matters,’ said Elizeus. ‘Lovers live on love as larks live on leeks.’
‘Ah – but there’s more to marriage than four bare legs in a bed,’ said John.
‘That’s enough,’ said Judith, who would not permit any hint of indelicacy at her court.
Agnes, tall and fair, sat there smiling but with her eyes lowered as if she had a secret.
Late one night a white bow was seen across the fields. It was a night rainbow – a thing never dreamt of in a lifetime but when you see one you know at once what it is.
Sometimes I had to blink at what had happened to me. There I was, with a wife and children, possessions, horses, and English visitors coming and going without any danger. It was hard to believe my old life spent half on horseback, with nothing to my name but a few books and clothes, and the forces of a dangerous enemy, my own king, always threatening on the horizon.
In the autumn the time came for Judith’s lying-in. John and Elizeus had gone off to Florence. I remember that week very clearly. George was always with me in the parlour; he read aloud to entertain me and keep my mind from wandering upstairs. Above our heads there was a great campaign under way: I could hear the drumming footsteps and orders, as to the commissariat, for linen, hot water, lidded basins, a winestoop, a warming pan, pictures of St Margaret . . . Men are kept at a distance from this campaign, and in fact know no more about its progress than people on dry land who hear the sounds of a battle out at sea. George by then was reading aloud the history of all the four-footed beasts – I remember that night we met the sphinx, which belongs to the ape family and stores its food in its cheeks, and the hedgehog whose ribs, dried and powdered, are a cure for colic, and two types of the vulgar little mouse, the rustic and the urban: ‘They can discern their enemies: not fearing the ox, they run from a cat. Thus it is clear they have sound judgement and make good choices.’
Seeing that I could hardly concentrate, George turned his attention back to the horse, the most noble of the animals:
The eyes of a horse are great or glassy; it is reported of Emperor Augustus that his eyes were much brighter than other men’s, and resembled those of horses; their eyes also see perfectly in the dark . . . Homer affirms that there are in horses divine qualities, for, being tied to their manger, they mourned the death of Patroclus, and foreshadowed what would happen to Achilles . . . They lament their lost masters with tears and they foreknow battles . . . They love wet places, and baths, and also music – the whole host of the army of the Sybarites taught their horses to dance to the sound of a pipe.
I could not listen any longer. I begged George to put his book aside. Above us the footsteps were thudding back and forth very furiously. There came the sound a husband dreads – most pitiful cries. After a time there was a silence, and then came another sound which I could not fail to recognise. It was the newcomer, who, lifting her voice, made herself known through the whole house. This was my sixth child.
The neighbours came in and gave me boxes of pickled pumpkin, which is the reward for new fathers in Italy. In Italy, as well, the newborn is washed in warm white wine. In half an hour my little daughter was brought down to me smelling sweet and, frankly, rather bibulous. The maid-servants allowed me to hold her. I kept her in my arms, and went straight upstairs, but at the door of the bedchamber I met Agnes.
She looked pale and she tried to keep me out.
‘Not yet,’ she said.
But I went past her and went in and saw Judith, who was the colour of snow. I saw at once that although body and soul were still together, life itself was marching away. I instantly ran down and called for a doctor. This was Portaleone, whom I knew by then but only slightly. Sometimes Jews could or would treat gentiles, sometimes not – I never made out the rules too clearly. In this instance, Portaleone came at once and then there commenced a great battle to order back the force that was retreating before our eyes.
How long the engagement went on I scarcely knew. Portaleone was the commanding general, I was a messenger and foot-soldier. Judith herself seemed oblivious to the danger. She took the baby for a moment, and smiled at me.
‘She has a little cap of black hair like me,’ she said, ‘but she has a resemblance to you, which makes me love her.’
Then she slid back on the pillow. I became truly fearful. There was a great deal of blood being lost. Basin after basin was taken away. Later, Portaleone said that I began to act like a madman: at one point I left the room and came back with a songbird in a cage. That was true, but it was not wholly a deranged act. The bird was Judith’s pet, which she greatly loved. I had the idea that if she heard it sing that might alert her to how far she was journeying from us.
The bird in fact did sing a little, and hopped back and forward in the candlelight. What did it know about our human tales? But I thought that Judith’s eyes moved under their lids. I was not mad, but as watchful as I have ever been in my life. In time, I saw that Portaleone had given up the engagement, though he said nothing and kept applying compresses and poultices and elixir of sage.
Finally he turned to me and opened his hands. I sent for the priests. I realised then it was morning. The boys were brought in to see their mother, but she did not open her eyes. Francis was then five years old. The priests began to chant the prayer for the dying. The bird chirped too, now and then, but no one dared put it out because of my glance. But I was not mad. It was only much later, when I realised what I had lost, that despair and self-pity seized me. When I went down the stairs early that afternoon I was a widower with four living children, but I still hadn’t taken in that description of myself.
The baby was christened Judith. A wet nurse had been found immediately, but she soon dried up, and so did the next one, and then a third. Looking back now, I see that that baby flew round Mantua like a sample of new silk, but then I was hardly aware of the fact. Agnes Hide took care of all those matters; I was abstracted and in despair. No, it was more than that: I was in a rage with God. Why, after so many years apart, and such a little time together, was she been taken away from me, my love, the true companion of my life?
Why do you do this to us?, I demanded. Why do you search for new ways to break people’s hearts?
There was no answer at the time.
The worst thing was this: I discovered that my thoughts almost always took the form of an imagined conversation with Judith. How long this had been going on I had no idea; I only noticed it when she had gone. Perhaps everyone has a conversation running in their mind with someone or other – wife or husband or God, or their children, or their men or dogs and horses. This idea filled me with alarm, for mine was only with Judith, who would never actually hear me or answer again. Yet so strong was the habit I could not stop doing it, which was painful and absurd. But for whom else was I to form my thoughts? My children were infants, I had no fellow-countrymen nearby – George had suddenly been called home – and I’d had enough of talking to dogs and horses.
The long and short of it is this: three months later I married Agnes Hide.
One day she came to me and said she had decided to go home to her father in Venice. Everything was settled now, she said. The children had their nurse; little Judith had a wet nurse who stayed wet. And, she said, since she had come as a companion to my wife, who was no longer there, it was time she went away.
I stared at her aghast.
‘To
Venice
?’ I cried, and I leapt to my feet and embraced her.
I see now that that is what she hoped for. And why not? The fact is that I have been extremely lucky. I have had one great love of my life, but two good wives. The children loved Agnes already, and she them, as far as I could tell.
Then there was the question of propriety. It is unseemly for a man and a young woman to live under the same roof without the arrangement being regulated in one way or the other, after – let’s say – three months.
I had few doubts on the brink of the marriage and none afterwards. One night a few months later, speaking tentatively as though admitting a grave fault, she declared that she had long ago fallen in love with me, and had therefore decided that she would never marry anyone.
‘This was my secret,’ she said. ‘I did not hope for my own happiness. How could I? You were married to Judith. She was my dearest friend.’
Agnes Hide is as unlike Judith as anyone could be. She is tall, fair, peaceable and always anxious to be just. Judith was not so scrupulous. Life for her was to be lived with passionate feeling. Agnes, even on the wedding night, always reminded me of the woman in the zodiac carrying the scales.
This marriage also turned out to be fortuitous for practical reasons, although I had never dreamt of what was going to happen next.
A few months after Agnes Hide and I were wed, a message came from the palace commanding me to appear before the Regent. I promised the herald – a skinny youth who came huffing and puffing out to the farm at Cerese – that I would do so at once. However, I did not increase my pace. To tell the truth, the Regent Cardinal Ercole summoned me to the palace rather more than was strictly necessary. He was very interested in horse breeding; he was considering sending one of his mares to my
rozzone
– my brute – of which he had heard good reports – although, he warned me with an upheld forefinger – ‘one should beware of a handsome horse, as of a handsome man. Despite appearances, there may be no good in him at all.’
Lord Ercole was also interested in England and indeed the whole island of Britain. Sometimes he called me in and read aloud reports that he had received from the Mantuan ambassador there or from other sources, stopping from time to time to stare at me as if it was
my
doing that no vines grew in England, or olives, or that the tide rises the height of a house twice a day, or that the English affirm that torture is a great evil, which injures not only the bodies of the innocent but the soul of a commonwealth.
As for Scotland, that country, being still more remote to his imagination, pleased him even more.
‘Scotland is marvellously mountainous, sterile, rugged and marshy, and therein is its safety. As half the country is without trees, they burn stones’ – here the Regent stopped and looked hard at me – ‘and peat, of which there is plenty. They have wool and gold and silver mines, but do not know how to work them. The plenty and the variety of fish in Scotland, as also the size of the whales and sea-monsters, are incredible.’
The fact of the matter was that Cardinal Ercole was somewhat bored. Mantua is of course a splendid place but it is not Rome or Venice. It is what you might call a handkerchief state. I sometimes felt depressed at the narrow horizons myself. That very morning, in fact, when the skinny herald came out to the stables looking for me, I was in that frame of mind. It had been raining all week; there was a kind of mould on the apricot trees. I had lost my dearest companion in life. So far I had spent all that morning examining horses’ hooves. My own life, it seemed, had shrunk to that, in a mildewed corner of the world.
So I dismissed the herald and after checking that all the mangers were sweet and clean, and then going home to bathe and dress, I presented myself in the ducal palace.
When I arrived, the Regent, most uncharacteristically, was in a rage.
‘What have you been doing?’ he cried. ‘Didn’t my messenger tell you the case was urgent?’
Then, without waiting for an answer, he spoke further, saying something which I could not at first catch. I heard the words ‘
Madama
’ and ‘
Maria
’ and perhaps ‘
regnante
’, and, to tell the truth, I got it into my head that he was telling me that one of his mares was pregnant. My mind was running on horses and pregnancy a lot at the time. I dare say I gaped at him: if what he said was true, it had nothing to do with me. My ‘brute’ had not yet been near his mares.