He thinks it’s Gregory; he thinks his son is dead. Then he half
knows, because where is Liz? He begs her, ‘Say it.’
‘We looked for you. We said, Rafe, go and see if he’s at Gray’s
Inn, bring him back, but the gatekeepers denied they’d seen you
the whole day. Rafe said, trust me, I’ll find him, if I go over the
whole city: but not a sign of you.’
He remembers the morning: the damp sheets, her damp forehead. Liz, he thinks, didn’t you fight? If I had seen your death
coming, I would have taken him and beaten in his death’s head; I
would have crucified him against the wall.
The little girls are still up, though someone has put them into
their nightdresses, as if it were any ordinary night. Their legs and
feet are bare and their nightcaps, round lace bonnets made by their
mother, are knotted under their chins with a resolute hand. Anne’s
face is like a stone. She has Grace’s hand tucked in her fist. Grace
looks up at him, dubious. She almost never sees him; why is he
here? But she trusts him and lets him lift her, without protest, into
his arms. Against his shoulder she tumbles at once into sleep, her
arms flung around his neck, the crown of her head tucked beneath
his chin. ‘Now, Anne,’ he says, ‘we must take Grace to bed,
because she is little. I know you are not ready to sleep yet, but you
must go in beside her, because she may wake and feel cold.’
‘I may feel cold,’ Anne says.
Mercy walks before him to the children’s room. Grace is put
down without waking. Anne cries, but she cries in silence. I’ll sit
with them, Mercy says: but he says, ‘I will.’ He waits until
Anne’s tears stop flowing, and her hand slackens in his.
These things happen; but not to us.
‘Now let me see Liz,’ he says.
The room – which this morning was only their bedroom – is
lively with the scent of the herbs they are burning against contagion. They have lit candles at her head and feet. They have bound
up her jaw with linen, so already she does not look like herself.
She looks like the dead; she looks fearless, and as if she could judge you; she looks flatter and deader than people he has seen
on battlefields, with their guts spilled.
He goes down, to get an account of her deathbed; to deal with the
household. At ten this morning, Mercy said, she sat down: Jesu, I
am so weary. In the middle of the day’s business. Not like me, is
it? she’d said. I said, it’s not like you, Liz. I put my hand to her
forehead, and I said, Liz, my darling … I told her, lie down, get to
bed with you, you have to sweat this out. She said, no, give me a
few minutes, I’m dizzy, perhaps I need to eat a little something,
but we sat down at the table and she pushed her food away …
He would like her to shorten her account, but he understands her
need to tell it over, moment by moment, to say it out loud. It is like
a package of words she is making, to hand to him: this is yours now.
At midday Elizabeth lay down. She was shivering, though her
skin burned. She said, is Rafe in the house? Tell him to go and
find Thomas. And Rafe did go, and any number of people went,
and they didn’t find you.
At half past twelve, she said, tell Thomas to look after the children. And then what? She complained her head ached. But
nothing to me, no message? No; she said she was thirsty.
Nothing more. But then Liz, she never did say much.
At one o’clock, she called for a priest. At two, she made her
confession. She said she had once picked up a snake, in Italy. The
priest said it was the fever speaking. He gave her absolution. And
he could not wait, Mercy said, he could not wait to get out of the
house, he was so afraid he might take the contagion and die.
At three in the afternoon, she declined. At four, she put off the
burden of this life.
I suppose, he says, she will want to be buried with her first
husband.
Why should you think that?
Because I came more lately. He walks away. There is no point in
writing the usual directions about mourning clothes, beadsmen, candles. Like all the others touched by this sickness, Liz must be
buried quickly. He will not be able to send for Gregory or call the
family together. The rule is for the household to hang a bunch of
straw outside the door as sign of infection, and then restrict entry
for forty days, and go abroad as little as possible.
Mercy comes in and says, a fever, it could be any fever, we
don’t have to admit to the sweat … If we all stayed at home,
London would come to a standstill.
‘No,’ he says. ‘We must do it. My lord cardinal made these
rules and it would not be proper for me to scant them.’
Mercy says, where were you anyway? He looks into her face;
he says, you know Little Bilney? I was with him; I warned him,
I said he will jump into the fire.
And later? Later I was learning Polish.
Of course. You would be, she says.
She doesn’t expect to make sense of it. He never expects to
make any better sense of it than it makes now. He knows the
whole of the New Testament by heart, but find a text: find a text
for this.
Later, when he thinks back to that morning, he will want to
catch again that flash of her white cap: though when he turned,
no one was there. He would like to picture her with the bustle
and warmth of the household behind her, standing in the
doorway, saying, ‘Tell me when you are coming home.’ But he
can only picture her alone, at the door; and behind her is a wasteland, and a blue-tinged light.
He thinks of their wedding night; her trailing taffeta gown, her
little wary gesture of hugging her elbows. Next day she said,
‘That’s all right then.’
And smiled. That’s all she left him. Liz who never did say much.
For a month he is at home: he reads. He reads his Testament, but
he knows what it says. He reads Petrarch whom he loves, reads
how he defied the doctors: when they had given him up to fever he lived still, and when they came back in the morning, he was
sitting up writing. The poet never trusted any doctor after that;
but Liz left him too fast for physician’s advice, good or bad, or
for the apothecary with his cassia, his galingale, his wormwood,
and his printed cards with prayers on.
He has got Niccolò Machiavelli’s book, Principalities; it is a
Latin edition, shoddily printed in Naples, which seems to have
passed through many hands. He thinks of Niccolò on the battlefield; of Niccolò in the torture chamber. He feels he is in the
torture chamber but he knows that one day he will find the door
out, because it is he who has the key. Someone says to him, what
is in your little book? and he says, a few aphorisms, a few
truisms, nothing we didn’t know before.
Whenever he looks up from his book, Rafe Sadler is there. Rafe
is a slight boy, and the game with Richard and the others is to
pretend not to see him, and say, ‘I wonder where Rafe is?’ They
are as pleased with this joke as a bunch of three-year-olds might
be. Rafe’s eyes are blue, his hair is sandy-brown, and you couldn’t
take him for a Cromwell. But still he is a tribute to the man who
brought him up: dogged, sardonic, quick on the uptake.
He and Rafe read a book about chess. It is a book printed
before he was born, but it has pictures. They frown over them,
perfecting their game. For what seems like hours, neither of them
makes a move. ‘I was a fool,’ Rafe says, a forefinger resting on the
head of a pawn. ‘I should have found you. When they said you
weren’t at Gray’s Inn, I should have known you were.’
‘How could you have known? I’m not reliably where I
shouldn’t be. Are you moving that pawn, or just patting it?’
‘J’aboube.’ Rafe snatches his hand away.
For a long time they sit gazing at their pieces, at the configuration which locks them in place. They see it coming: stalemate.
‘We’re too good for each other.’
‘Perhaps we ought to play against other people.’
‘Later. When we can wipe out all-comers.’ Rafe says, ‘Ah, wait!’ He seizes his knight and makes it leap.
Then he looks at the result, aghast.
‘Rafe, you are foutu.’
‘Not necessarily.’ Rafe rubs his forehead. ‘You might yet do
something stupid.’
‘Right. You live in hope.’
Voices murmur. Sunlight outside. He feels he could almost
sleep, but when he sleeps Liz Wykys comes back, cheerful and
brisk, and when he wakes he has to learn the lack of her all over
again.
From a distant room a child is crying. Footsteps overhead.
The crying stops. He picks up his king and looks at the base of it,
as if to see how it is made. He murmurs, ‘J’adoube.’ He puts it
back where it was.
Anne Cromwell sits with him, as the rain falls, and writes her
beginner’s Latin in her copy book. By St John’s Day she knows
all common verbs. She is quicker than her brother and he tells her
so. ‘Let me see,’ he says, holding out his hand for her book. He
finds that she has written her name over and over, ‘Anne
Cromwell, Anne Cromwell …’
News comes from France of the cardinal’s triumphs, parades,
public Masses and extempore Latin orations. It seems that, once
disembarked, he has stood on every high altar in Picardy and
granted the worshippers remission of their sins. That’s a few
thousand Frenchmen free to start all over again.
The king is chiefly at Beaulieu, a house in Essex he has
recently bought from Sir Thomas Boleyn, whom he has made
Viscount Rochford. All day he hunts, undeterred by the wet
weather. In the evening he entertains. The Duke of Suffolk and
the Duke of Norfolk join him at private suppers, which they
share with the new viscount. The Duke of Suffolk is his old
friend and if the king said, knit me some wings so I may fly, he
would say, what colour? The Duke of Norfolk is, of course, chief of the Howard family and Boleyn’s brother-in-law: a sinewy
little twitcher, always twitching after his own advantage.
He does not write to the cardinal to tell him that everybody in
England is saying that the king means to marry Anne Boleyn. He
doesn’t have the news the cardinal wants, so he doesn’t write at
all. He gets his clerks to do it, to keep the cardinal updated on his
legal affairs, his finances. Tell him we are all well here, he says.
Tender him my respects and my duty. Tell him how much we
would like to see his face.
No one else in their household falls sick. This year London
has escaped lightly – or at least, everyone says so. Prayers of
thanksgiving are offered in the city churches; or prayers of
appeasement, perhaps one should call them? In the little
conclaves that meet at night, God’s purpose is interrogated.
London knows that it sins. As the Bible tells us, ‘A merchant
shall hardly keep himself from doing wrong.’ And elsewhere it is
stated, ‘He that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent.’ It
is a sure sign of troubled minds, the habit of quotation. ‘Whom
the Lord loveth he correcteth.’
By early September, the plague has run its course and the
family is able to gather to pray for Liz. Now she can have the
ceremonies that were denied her when she left them so suddenly.
Black coats are given to twelve poor men of the parish, the same
mourners who would have followed her coffin; and each man in
the family has pledged seven years of Masses for her soul. On the
day appointed, the weather clears briefly, and there is a chill in
the air. ‘The harvest is passed, the summer is ended, and we are
not saved.’
The small child Grace wakes in the night and says that she sees
her mother in her shroud. She does not cry like a child, noisy and
hiccupping, but like a grown woman, weeping tears of dread.
‘All the rivers run into the sea, but the seas are not yet full.’ Morgan Williams shrinks year by year. Today especially he looks
small and grey and harassed, as he grips his arm and says, ‘Why
are the best taken? Ah, why are they?’ Then, ‘I know you were
happy with her, Thomas.’
They are back at Austin Friars, a swarm of women and children and robust men whom mourning hardly takes out of their
customary black, the garb of lawyers and merchants, of accountants and brokers. There is his sister, Bet Wellyfed; her two boys,
her little daughter Alice. There is Kat; his sisters have their heads
together, deciding who shall move in to help out Mercy with the
girls, ‘until you marry again, Tom.’
His nieces, two good little girls, still clutch their rosary beads.
They stare around them, unsure what they must do next. Ignored,
as the people talk over their heads, they lean against the wall, and
flick their eyes at each other. Slowly, they slide down the wall,
straight-backed, till they are the height of two-year-olds, and
balancing on their heels. ‘Alice! Johane!’ someone snaps; slowly
they rise, solemn-faced, to their proper heights. Grace approaches
them; silently they trap her, take off her cap, shake out her blonde
hair and begin to plait it. While the brothers-in-law talk about
what the cardinal is doing in France, his attention strays towards
her. Grace’s eyes grow wide as her cousins draw her hair back
tight. Her mouth opens in a silent gape, like a fish’s mouth. When
one squeak escapes her, it is Liz’s sister, the elder Johane, who
crosses the room and scoops her up. Watching Johane, he thinks,
as he often has, how alike the sisters are: were.
His daughter Anne turns her back on the women, slides her
arm into her uncle’s. ‘We’re talking about the Low Countries
trade,’ Morgan tells her.
‘One thing’s for sure, Uncle, they won’t be pleased in
Antwerp if Wolsey signs a treaty with the French.’
‘That’s what we’re saying to your father. But, oh, he will stick
by his cardinal. Come, Thomas! You don’t like the French any
more than we do.’ He knows, as they do not, how much the cardinal needs the
friendship of King François; without one of the major powers of
Europe to speak for him, how will the king get his divorce?
‘Treaty of Perpetual Peace? Let’s think, when was the last
Perpetual Peace? I give it three months.’ It is his brother-in-law
Wellyfed who speaks, laughing; and John Williamson, who is
Johane’s husband, asks will they take bets on it: three months,
six? Then he remembers they’re at a solemn occasion. ‘Sorry,
Tom,’ he says, and breaks into a spasm of coughing.
Johane’s voice cuts across it: ‘If the old gamester keeps coughing like this, the winter will finish him off, and then I’ll marry
you, Tom.’
‘Will you?’
‘Oh, for sure. As long as I get the right piece of paper from
Rome.’
The party smile and hide their smiles. They give each other
knowing looks. Gregory says, why is that funny? You can’t
marry your wife’s sister, can you? He and his boy cousins go off
into a corner to talk about private subjects – Bet’s boys Christopher and Will, Kat’s boys Richard and Walter – why did they call
that child Walter? Did they need a reminder of their father,
lurking around after his death, to remind them not to get too
happy? The family never meet but he thanks God that Walter’s
not with them any more. He tells himself he should have more
kindness towards his father, but his kindness extends only to
paying for Masses for his soul.
In the year before he came back to England for good, he had
crossed and recrossed the sea, undecided; he had so many friends
in Antwerp, besides good business contacts, and as the city
expanded, which it did every year, it seemed more and more the
right place to be. If he was homesick, it was for Italy: the light,
the language, Tommaso as he’d been there. Venice had cured him
of any nostalgia for the banks of the Thames. Florence and Milan
had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who’d stayed at home. But something pulled at him – curiosity about
who was dead and who’d been born, a desire to see his sisters
again, and laugh – one can always laugh somehow – about their
upbringing. He had written to Morgan Williams to say, I’m
thinking of London next. But don’t tell my father. Don’t tell him
I’m coming home.
During the early months they tried to coax him. Look,
Walter’s settled down, you wouldn’t know him. He’s eased back
on the drink. Well, he knew it was killing him. He keeps out of
the law courts these days. He’s even served his turn as churchwarden.
What? he said. And he didn’t get drunk on the altar wine? He
didn’t make off with the candle funds?
Nothing they said could persuade him down to Putney. He
waited more than a year, till he was married and a father. Then he
felt safe to go.
It was more than twelve years he’d been out of England. He’d
been taken aback by the change in people. He left them young
and they had softened or sharpened into middle age. The lissom
were lean now and dried out. The plump were plumper. Fine
features had blurred and softened. Bright eyes were duller. There
were some people he didn’t recognise at all, not at first glance.
But he would have known Walter anywhere. As his father
walked towards him he thought, I’m seeing myself, in twenty,
thirty years, if I’m spared. They said that drink had nearly done
for him, but he didn’t look half-dead. He looked as he had
always looked: as if he could knock you down, and might decide
to do it. His short strong body had broadened and coarsened.
His hair, thick and curling, had hardly a thread of grey. His
glance was skewering; small eyes, bright and golden-brown. You
need good eyes in a smithy, he used to say. You need good eyes
wherever you are, or they’ll rob you blind.
‘Where’ve you been?’ Walter said. Where once he would have
sounded angry, he now sounded merely irritated. It was as if his son had been on a message to Mortlake, and had taken his time
over it.
‘Oh … here and there,’ he said.
‘You look like a foreigner.’
‘I am a foreigner.’
‘So what have you been doing?’
He could imagine himself saying, ‘This and that.’ He did say
it.
‘And what sort of this and that are you doing now?’
‘I’m learning the law.’
‘Law!’ Walter said. ‘If it weren’t for the so-called law, we
would be lords. Of the manor. And a whole lot of other manors
round here.’
That is, he thinks, an interesting point to make. If you get to be
a lord by fighting, shouting, being bigger, better, bolder and
more shameless than the next man, Walter should be a lord. But
it’s worse than that; Walter thinks he’s entitled. He’d heard it all
his childhood: the Cromwells were a rich family once, we had
estates. ‘When, where?’ he used to say. Walter would say, ‘Somewhere in the north, up there!’ and yell at him for quibbling. His
father didn’t like to be disbelieved even when he was telling you
an outright lie. ‘So how do we come to such a low place?’ he
would ask, and Walter would say it was because of lawyers and
cheats and lawyers who are all cheats, and who thieve land away
from its owners. Understand it if you can, Walter would say, for
I can’t – and I’m not stupid, boy. How dare they drag me into
court and fine me for running beasts on the so-called common?
If all had their own, that would be my common.
Now, if the family’s land was in the north, how could that be?
No point saying this – in fact, it’s the quickest way to get a lesson
from Walter’s fist. ‘But was there no money?’ he’d persist. ‘What
happened to it?’
Just once, when he was sober, Walter had said something that
sounded true, and was, by his lights, eloquent: I suppose, he said, I suppose we pissed it away. I suppose once it’s gone it’s gone. I
suppose fortune, when it’s lost, it will never visit again.
He thought about it, over the years. On that day when he
went back to Putney, he’d asked him, ‘If ever the Cromwells
were rich, and I were to go after what’s left, would that content
you?’
His tone was meant to be soothing but Walter was hard to
soothe. ‘Oh yes, and share it out, I suppose? You and bloody
Morgan that you’re so thick with. That’s my money, if all have
their own.’
‘It would be family money.’ What are we doing, he thought,
quarrelling right off, rowing within five minutes over this nonexistent wealth? ‘You have a grandson now.’ He added, not
aloud, ‘And you aren’t coming anywhere near him.’
‘Oh, I have those already,’ Walter said. ‘Grandsons. What is
she, some Dutch girl?’
He told him about Liz Wykys. Admitting, therefore, that he
had been in England long enough to marry and have a child.
‘Caught yourself a rich widow,’ Walter said, sniggering. ‘I
suppose that was more important than coming to see me. It
would be. I suppose you thought I’d be dead. Lawyer, is it? You
were always a talker. A slap in the mouth couldn’t cure it.’
‘But God knows you tried.’
‘I suppose you don’t admit to the smithy work now. Or
helping your uncle John and sleeping among the turnip shavings.’
‘Good God, father,’ he’d said, ‘they didn’t eat turnips at
Lambeth Palace. Cardinal Morton eat turnips! What are you
thinking?’
When he was a little boy and his uncle John was a cook for the
great man, he used to run away to Lambeth to the palace, because
the chances of getting fed were better. He used to hang around
by the entrance nearest the river – Morton hadn’t built his big
gateway then – and watch the people come and go, asking who was who and recognising them next time by the colours of their
clothes and the animals and objects painted on their shields.
‘Don’t stand about,’ people bellowed at him, ‘make yourself
useful.’
Other children than he made themselves useful in the kitchen
by fetching and carrying, their small fingers employed in plucking songbirds and hulling strawberries. Each dinner time the
household officers formed up in procession in the passages off
the kitchens, and they carried in the tablecloths and the Principal
Salt. His uncle John measured the loaves and if they were not just
right they were tossed into a basket for the lower household.
Those that passed his test he counted as they went in; standing by
him, pretending to be his deputy, he learned to count. Into the
great hall would go the meats and the cheeses, the sugared fruits
and the spiced wafers, to the archbishop’s table – he was not a
cardinal then. When the scrapings and remnants came back they
were divided up. First choice to the kitchen staff. Then to the
almshouse and the hospital, the beggars at the gate. What wasn’t
fit for them would go down the line to the children and the pigs.
Each morning and evening the boys earned their keep by
running up the back staircases with beer and bread to put in the
cupboards for the young gentlemen who were the cardinal’s
pages. The pages were of good family. They would wait at table
and so become intimate with great men. They would hear their
talk and learn from it. When they were not at the table they were
learning out of great volumes from their music masters and other
masters, who passed up and down the house holding nosegays
and pomanders, who spoke in Greek. One of the pages was
pointed out to him: Master Thomas More, whom the archbishop
himself says will be a great man, so deep his learning already and
so pleasant his wit.
One day he brought a wheaten loaf and put it in the cupboard
and lingered, and Master Thomas said, ‘Why do you linger?’ But
he did not throw anything at him. ‘What is in that great book?’