Halloween: the world’s edge seeps and bleeds. This is the time
when the tally-keepers of Purgatory, its clerks and gaolers, listen
in to the living, who are praying for the dead.
At this time of year, with their parish, he and Liz would keep
vigil. They would pray for Henry Wykys, her father; for Liz’s
dead husband, Thomas Williams; for Walter Cromwell, and for
distant cousins; for half-forgotten names, long-dead half-sisters
and lost step-children.
Last night he kept the vigil alone. He lay awake, wishing Liz
back; waiting for her to come and lie beside him. It’s true he is at
Esher with the cardinal, not at home at the Austin Friars. But, he
thought, she’ll know how to find me. She’ll look for the cardinal,
drawn through the space between worlds by incense and candlelight. Wherever the cardinal is, I will be.
At some point he must have slept. When daylight came, the
room felt so empty it was empty even of him.
All Hallows Day: grief comes in waves. Now it threatens to
capsize him. He doesn’t believe that the dead come back; but that
doesn’t stop him from feeling the brush of their fingertips, wingtips, against his shoulder. Since last night they have been less
individual forms and faces than a solid aggregated mass, their flesh slapping and jostling together, their texture dense like sea
creatures, their faces sick with an undersea sheen.
Now he stands in a window embrasure, Liz’s prayer book in
hand. His daughter Grace liked to look at it, and today he can
feel the imprint of her small fingers under his own. These are
Our Lady’s prayers for the canonical hours, the pages illuminated by a dove, a vase of lilies. The office is Matins, and Mary
kneels on a floor of chequered tiles. The angel greets her, and the
words of his greeting are written on a scroll, which unfurls from
his clasped hands as if his palms are speaking. His wings are
coloured: heaven-blue.
He turns the page. The office is Lauds. Here is a picture of the
Visitation. Mary, with her neat little belly, is greeted by her pregnant cousin, St Elizabeth. Their foreheads are high, their brows
plucked, and they look surprised, as indeed they must be; one of
them is a virgin, the other advanced in years. Spring flowers grow
at their feet, and each of them wears an airy crown, made of gilt
wires as fine as blonde hairs.
He turns a page. Grace, silent and small, turns the page with
him. The office is Prime. The picture is the Nativity: a tiny
white Jesus lies in the folds of his mother’s cloak. The office is
Sext: the Magi proffer jewelled cups; behind them is a city on a
hill, a city in Italy, with its bell tower, its view of rising ground
and its misty line of trees. The office is None: Joseph carries a
basket of doves to the temple. The office is Vespers: a dagger
sent by Herod makes a neat hole in a shocked infant. A woman
throws up her hands in protest, or prayer: her eloquent, helpless palms. The infant corpse scatters three drops of blood,
each one shaped like a tear. Each bloody tear is a precise
vermilion.
He looks up. Like an after-image, the form of the tears swims
in his eyes; the picture blurs. He blinks. Someone is walking
towards him. It is George Cavendish. His hands wash together,
his face is a mask of concern. Let him not speak to me, he prays. Let George pass on.
‘Master Cromwell,’ he says, ‘I believe you are crying. What is
this? Is there bad news about our master?’
He tries to close Liz’s book, but Cavendish reaches out for it.
‘Ah, you are praying.’ He looks amazed.
Cavendish cannot see his daughter’s fingers touching the
page, or his wife’s hands holding the book. George simply looks
at the pictures, upside down. He takes a deep breath and says,
‘Thomas …?’
‘I am crying for myself,’ he says. ‘I am going to lose everything, everything I have worked for, all my life, because I will go
down with the cardinal – no, George, don’t interrupt me –
because I have done what he asked me to do, and been his friend,
and the man at his right hand. If I had stuck to my work in the
city, instead of hurtling about the countryside making enemies,
I’d be a rich man – and you, George, I’d be inviting you out to
my new country house, and asking your advice on furniture and
flower beds. But look at me! I’m finished.’
George tries to speak: he utters a consolatory bleat.
‘Unless,’ he says. ‘Unless, George. What do you think? I’ve
sent my boy Rafe to Westminster.’
‘What will he do there?’
But he is crying again. The ghosts are gathering, he feels cold,
his position is irretrievable. In Italy he learned a memory system,
so he can remember everything: every stage of how he got here.
‘I think,’ he says, ‘I should go after him.’
‘Please,’ says Cavendish, ‘not before dinner.’
‘No?’
‘Because we need to think how to pay off my lord’s servants.’
A moment passes. He enfolds the prayer book to himself; he
holds it in his arms. Cavendish has given him what he needs: an
accountancy problem. ‘George,’ he says, ‘you know my lord’s
chaplains have flocked here after him, all of them earning – what?
– a hundred, two hundred pounds a year, out of his liberality? So, I think … we will make the chaplains and the priests pay off the
household servants, because what I think is, what I notice is, that
his servants love my lord more than his priests do. So, now, let’s
go to dinner, and after dinner I will make the priests ashamed,
and I will make them open their veins and bleed money. We need
to give the household a quarter’s wages at least, and a retainer.
Against the day of my lord’s restoration.’
‘Well,’ says George, ‘if anyone can do it, you can.’
He finds himself smiling. Perhaps it’s a grim smile, but he
never thought he would smile today. He says, ‘When that’s done,
I shall leave you. I shall be back as soon as I have made sure of a
place in the Parliament.’
‘But it meets in two days … How will you manage it now?’
‘I don’t know, but someone must speak for my lord. Or they
will kill him.’
He sees the hurt and shock; he wants to take the words back;
but it is true. He says, ‘I can only try. I’ll make or mar, before I
see you again.’
George almost bows. ‘Make or mar,’ he murmurs. ‘It was ever
your common saying.’
Cavendish walks about the household, saying, Thomas
Cromwell was reading a prayer book. Thomas Cromwell was
crying. Only now does George realise how bad things are.
Once, in Thessaly, there was a poet called Simonides. He was
commissioned to appear at a banquet, given by a man called
Scopas, and recite a lyric in praise of his host. Poets have strange
vagaries, and in his lyric Simonides incorporated verses in praise
of Castor and Pollux, the Heavenly Twins. Scopas was sulky, and
said he would pay only half the fee: ‘As for the rest, get it from
the Twins.’
A little later, a servant came into the hall. He whispered to
Simonides; there were two young men outside, asking for him by
name. He rose and left the banqueting hall. He looked around for the
two young men, but he could see no one.
As he turned back, to go and finish his dinner, he heard a terrible noise, of stone splitting and crumbling. He heard the cries of
the dying, as the roof of the hall collapsed. Of all the diners, he
was the only one left alive.
The bodies were so broken and disfigured that the relatives of
the dead could not identify them. But Simonides was a remarkable man. Whatever he saw was imprinted on his mind. He led
each of the relatives through the ruins; and pointing to the
crushed remains, he said, there is your man. In linking the dead
to their names, he worked from the seating plan in his head.
It is Cicero who tells us this story. He tells us how, on that day,
Simonides invented the art of memory. He remembered the
names, the faces, some sour and bloated, some blithe, some
bored. He remembered exactly where everyone was sitting, at
the moment the roof fell in.