Read The Courier's Tale Online
Authors: Peter Walker
I was almost certain that she returned my feelings. The gleam of merriment in her eyes was not just amusement. She was happy to be in my company for another reason. One night, sitting up late by the fire, she taught me a game of cat’s cradle – the most complicated cat’s cradle ever known, she said, in the world, or at least in Gloucester – in which, after many bewildering manoeuvres with a loop of silk ribbon, two lesser loops chase each other over the knuckles of the hand, and then, on the verge of parting for ever, they meet and embrace.
One of the loops, she said, was a woman, and the other was a man. For an hour that night we sat side by side, with our fingers like so many troopers, engaged in marches and counter-marches. Several times Judith burst out laughing at my clumsiness and several times she gave up the tuition completely, saying I was beyond all hope. I for my part was somewhat distracted by her lowered eyelids, the nimbleness of her fingers and a certain aspect of her upper lip. In fact, just as I was about to give up the tuition and lean forward and kiss her, Sir George came stamping in with his candlestick, and began raking out the fire and banging the shutters open and closed again and saying, ‘Time to shut up shop!’ As usual, this made Judith go pink with amusement, and thus we parted and went to our beds. But before we did, she gave me the loop of silk thread to keep and practise with.
The next day, the time came for me to leave. I had promised Dr Starkey and Cromwell that I would be back in London after three days, to see what message I might take back to Mr Pole in Italy. Now a whole week had passed. I suddenly became alarmed. Perhaps I had let this show of carelessness go too far. It is hard to make these calculations. In any event, I left the next day, as I say. Just before I mounted my horse, I had a word alone with Judith.
‘I will be back,’ I said. ‘There is some information which I need, and only you possess.’
I looked straight into her eyes as I spoke. Naturally, just at that moment, she became inscrutable and gave no sign that she knew what I meant or what her answer might be.
I rode away just before dusk. A few miles down the road, Rutter came out of the hedgerow and we went together to Weethley Wood. There we dismounted. Rutter whistled softly into his fist. After a pause, an owl hooted. Soon his brother appeared. They cuffed each other about the head for a little while and then the younger one led us into the depths of the wood, to the foot of the tree where the goshawks nested. He was slighter in build than Tom and he went up that tree as easily as a man goes up his own stairs in the dark, and then he came down with two fledglings in his shirt. I slipped a hood on each and put them in a wicker cage and we went back to the horses.
Then I rode on to Inkberrow where we had a farm and I slept there the night. I left the next day and rode away for London feeling strangely solitary and sad. Of course I had no idea then that I would not see Coughton for many years.
Cromwell, although then not yet an earl or even baron of Wimbledon, was, after the King, the most powerful man in the country and nobody cared to cross or disappoint him. Yet when I, five days in arrears, presented myself at his house, for some reason I was quite calm and unafraid. I was led in to see him at once – leapfrogging, as it were, over many ladies and gentlemen waiting outside who, to judge from their very long faces, had been there the same amount of time. I felt conscious only of my distinction: I was more important than they. Even on the step of the gallows I suppose men take pleasure in precedence. Cromwell was indeed angry with me. I could tell that at once from a glint in his eye. Yet it was the glint of restraint. Think of a big sleek house cat that will not pounce until the mouse comes forward another inch. No, that’s not right either: Cromwell had no intention of pouncing. He did not want to kill me or even alarm me. On the contrary, I was necessary to him alive, and at liberty and in good spirits. I suppose I knew that as well as he did. All the same, the dignity of his high office made remonstrance necessary. A frown deepened on his brow.
‘Young Throckmorton!’ he said. ‘You have given me several sleepless nights. I was about to send the officers to beat the bushes and hedges to find you. “Has he fallen into harm’s way?” I asked myself. “Or is it some young man’s business he has run off on, which we older men have forgotten?” ’
‘O my lord,’ I said, ‘forgive me. Five years I have been away from home, and I had forgotten – I don’t know how – how excellent the hunting and the hawking is in that corner of the country, much better than anywhere else in England or in Italy, for that matter. I could not bring myself to leave. As well as that, there was my family to see, and I had to go and stand at my mother’s grave . . .’
Cromwell was watching me closely, thinking, no doubt, ‘How great a fool
is
he?’ But I could also see that he was interested in what I was saying. Remember: the father made his living fulling cloth in Putney, and now here was the son, Lord Privy Seal, soon to be ennobled, already amassing great estates and ruling over the peers of the realm, and, above all, wishing to be one of them. In short, hunting was now his passion. There is, after all, no accomplishment more necessary for a nobleman than to hold a hawk well on his fist.
At this point I opened the wicker cage.
‘I have brought you a gift,’ I said, ‘from our own place. They are high-mettled birds, I can assure you: we know their parents, which are wild birds, pretty well.’
Cromwell thanked me abruptly – the frown deepened still more – and yet I knew he was pleased.
‘You can see they are very young,’ I went on, ‘which is the very best thing possible. At this age they will completely forget their mothers and instead grow fond of and come to love the man who fosters them and brings them up. Master Secretary, if you want a loving bird that hears your voice and comes back to you from no matter what distance, there is no better way than to feed and handle and hood her yourself and caress her and cure her. I beg you to delegate none of these offices but keep them for yourself.’
‘Yes, yes, very well,’ said Master Secretary, and then he stacked some papers sharply to show the time had come for business. Yet as we then spoke I noticed that several times he threw a glance at the young goshawks which had just arrived in that room at the centre of power from the top of the highest tree in the middle of Weethley Wood. And they were indeed a fine sight – a princely gift, in fact, little princes of the air, fierce and erect.
At the sound of each of our voices, they turned their hooded heads together first in one direction, then in the other.
The business in question was Mr Pole’s book.
‘Do you know, Michael,’ said Cromwell, ‘what is in this book?’
At that I became angry. The book was sealed, I cried, when I left Italy and sealed when I reached England. Did he think I had stopped by the side of the road to meddle with it or read it by candle in some French inn?
‘No, no,’ he said soothingly, holding up his hand. ‘No one accuses you of any misdemeanour. I ask merely if you know, roughly, the matter, the argument, of this writing?’
‘As to that,’ I said, ‘I was supposed to tell you – but perhaps I forgot – that never did a man put pen to paper so unwillingly as Mr Pole, but none the less he obeyed the King’s command to write and state his opinion truly and plain, without colour or cloak of dissimulation, which the King most princely abhors, and that if what he has written is displeasing—’
‘Displeasing?’ said Cromwell. ‘Oh no – it is far from displeasing. It is very clerkly written, some of the matter could not have been handled better. We – the King, that is – perhaps does not agree with everything he has written. In fact, we disagree with all of it. That is what makes it so desirable now to confer in person. Letters are dead things. The living man is, as it were, heaven-sent. In short, the book has marvellously whetted the King’s appetite to see the author stand in front of him again. How long is Mr Pole to remain lost to his native land, living
in umbra
– in the shadows – drowned in his studies? The King desires you therefore to repair to Italy at once and to tell him to return. Indeed, we want you to do more than that. You must persuade him to come. Put him up on a horse yourself if necessary and seize the bridle. Will you do that, Michael? You are to leave at once.’
Thus I returned to Italy and completed the first of my round journeys. I left London the next day. It was the height of summer. The heat was unexampled. Even on the sea, the air breathed hot on us. Halfway over the Channel, late in the afternoon, I saw a shooting star that trickled down the sky as if it were melting. The great heat did not abate all the way to the city of Verona, where I found Pole waiting for me.
I conveyed the King’s command that he return home at once, adding that letters are dead things, that a living man is heaven-sent, etc., and that no one understood how long he meant to live in the shadows and drown in his studies.
Before leaving London I had, on Cromwell’s order, gone to see Pole’s mother, the Lady of Sarum, in her house at Dowgate. She was an old woman, tall and thin, with eyelids like acorn caps – one of those elderly ladies who look as if a puff of wind could carry them off and yet who have a will of iron.
She told me she had known my father, and that she knew why I had now come to see her. ‘You are going back to Italy to see my son.’
‘Yes, madam.’
‘He has written a wondrous great book for His Grace, and now you are to bring him home.’
I bent my head.
‘Do you see this?’ she said, pointing to words picked out on the wall:
Spes mea in Deo est
. Her hand was trembling a little. ‘ “In God Is My Hope.” Tell him that by this token his mother greets him, and begs him now to come home again and be a comfort to her in her old age.’
I repeated all this to Pole.
‘And what do you think I should do?’ he said.
‘You must obey your sovereign lord, and your mother, and go home,’ I said.
‘And what will happen when I get there?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I expect you will be dead within a week.’
‘What?’ he cried.
‘The King will put you to death on the spot.’
‘Good God,’ he said, ‘then why tell me to go?’
‘I promised Cromwell that I would.’
There was a pause.
‘I see,’ he said.
After a while he asked, ‘How are you so certain of this?’
‘Starkey let me know,’ I said, ‘although he didn’t mean to. He is not very discreet. I do not think he is suited to life at court.’
And then I described how, just as I was leaving the palace after seeing Cromwell, I had bumped into our old friend.
‘Doctor Starkey!’ I said, ‘how are you?’
He was as white as a sheet, and seemed to have aged ten years.
‘I think I must be in a nightmare,’ he said.
Then he stopped himself and gave me a peculiar look, as if we had never met before, and he turned and went away.
So all the way from England to Italy, from Calais to Montreuil, to Abbeville, to Fontainebleau in the forest full of wolves, past Sancerre on the right, on to Nevers and down to St Jean and the river which has no fish in it and makes men deaf with its noise, and then over the mountains and across the plain, all that way in the great heat, I was thinking ‘And as soon as I get there, I’m going to have to turn round and come straight back’.
For I had promised Cromwell that, if Pole refused to return, I myself would immediately go back to England.
But I had also lied to Cromwell: I had a very good idea of what was in the book which Pole wrote for the King, and I knew that he could never go back, not if he wanted to keep a head on his shoulders.
How I, of all people, came to be in possession of this information, then known to only a handful of people in the world – Pole himself, and the King, Cromwell and Starkey – was one of those strokes of chance, or, if you prefer it, one of the tricks played by the god of the crossroads by which the whole course of your life is changed, although you may not realise it at the time. Everyone can think of an instance in their own story.
In my case, I was not even awake as I came riding up to the crossroads of my life, but still asleep in bed in Pole’s house in Venice, where I lived along with several other Englishmen. It was late in the morning, but then I was in my twenties; the young consider the night is their natural field of operations and forgo many hours of day without disquiet. In any event, there I was, still asleep, nearly at noon, when I heard a distant voice crying out ‘
Maggiore! Maggiore!
’ (‘Greater! Greater!’)
This rather puzzled me – which is possible in sleep – since, being the youngest and least distinguished member of the household, I was in the smallest and highest room of the house, in fact an attic where sounds rarely penetrated. And what did it mean, this ‘
Maggiore! Maggiore!?
’ In my half sleep, I took it as a signal to me. But who was calling so loudly? I got up and stumbled down the stairs. My head was bad. The night before, Morison had been teaching me to drink Friulian reds. It was already very hot, one of those stifling days which Venice sets like a trap for her citizens. I remember the dry odour of marigolds – Italians believe that marigolds keep a house cool at night – and of the salt sea, with hints of dead cat: in short, the aroma of Venice. And down there at the front door, with the sea rocking on the marble step, I found a great altercation in progress.