The night before the trial, as he is going through his papers at the
Austin Friars, a head appears around the door: a little, narrow
London head with a close-shaved skull and a raw young face.
‘Dick Purser. Come in.’
Dick Purser looks around the room. He keeps the snarling
bandogs who guard the house by night, and he has not been in
here before. ‘Come here and sit. Don’t be afraid.’ He pours him
some wine, into a thin Venetian glass that was the cardinal’s. ‘Try
this. Wiltshire sent it to me, I don’t make much of it myself.’
Dick takes the glass and juggles it dangerously. The liquid is
pale as straw or summer light. He takes a gulp. ‘Sir, can I come in
your train to the trial?’
‘It still smarts, does it?’ Dick Purser was the boy whom More
had whipped before the household at Chelsea, for saying the
host was a piece of bread. He was a child then, he is not much
more now; when he first came to Austin Friars, they say he cried
in his sleep. ‘Get yourself a livery coat,’ he says. ‘And remember
to wash your hands and face in the morning. I don’t want you to
disgrace me.’
It is the word ‘disgrace’ that works on the child. ‘I hardly
minded the pain,’ he says. ‘We have all had, saving you sir, as
much if not worse from our fathers.’
‘True,’ he says. ‘My father beat me as if I were a sheet of metal.’
‘It was that he laid my flesh bare. And the women looking on.
Dame Alice. The young girls. I thought one of them might speak
up for me, but when they saw me unbreached, I only disgusted
them. It made them laugh. While the fellow was whipping me,
they were laughing.’
In stories it is always the young girls, innocent girls, who stay
the hand of the man with the rod or the axe. But we seem to have
strayed into a different story: a child’s thin buttocks dimpling
against the cold, his skinny little balls, his shy prick shrinking to
a button, while the ladies of the house giggle and the menservants
jeer, and the thin weals spring out against his skin and bleed. ‘It’s done and forgotten now. Don’t cry.’ He comes from
behind his desk. Dick Purser drops his shorn head against his
shoulder and bawls, in shame, in relief, in triumph that soon he
will have outlived his tormentor. More did John Purser to death,
he harassed him for owning German books; he holds the boy,
feeling the jump of his pulses, his stiff sinews, the ropes of his
muscles, and makes sounds of comfort, as he did to his children
when they were small, or as he does to a spaniel whose tail has
been trodden on. Comfort is often, he finds, imparted at the cost
of a flea or two.
‘I will follow you to the death,’ the boy declares. His arms, fists
clenched, grip his master: knuckles knead his spine. He sniffs. ‘I
think I will look well in a livery coat. What time do we start?’
Early. With his staff he is at Westminster Hall before anybody
else, vigilant for last-minute hitches. The court convenes around
him, and when More is brought in, the hall is visibly shocked at
his appearance. The Tower was never known to do a man good,
but he startles them, with his lean person and his ragged white
beard, looking more like a man of seventy than what he is.
Audley whispers, ‘He looks as if he has been badly handled.’
‘And he says I never miss a trick.’
‘Well, my conscience is clear,’ the Lord Chancellor says
breezily. ‘He has had every consideration.’
John Parnell gives him a nod. Richard Riche, both court official
and witness, gives him a smile. Audley asks for a seat for the prisoner, but More twitches to the edge of it: keyed up, combative.
He glances around to check that someone is taking notes for
him.
Words, words, just words.
He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn’t
remember me. You never even saw me coming.