The Mirror and the Light

Gregory smiles. There is a shout from below. ‘My lord, do you want to be disturbed?’

It seems from the noise that everybody is running outside. Gregory goes down. A moment later, he storms back up the stairs: ‘You have to come and see.’

In the courtyard is a wagon, guarded by four carters. On the wagon is a crate or cage, open at the front, barred. His first impression is that they are guarding an area of darkness, but then a movement betrays something within. He sees an expanse of spotted fur, and a pugged head that flinches from the light. It is a leopard. Its fur is crusted with its own shit and vomit, or so it seems from the smell.

He pulls his gown around him. His folk stop staring at the animal, and start staring at him. He has an impulse to cross himself. Such a distance it has come, perhaps from China: how can it be still alive?

‘Do you think it’s hungry?’ Thurston says. ‘I mean, do you think it’s hungry this very minute?’

The bars are stout, but the household keep their distance. The creature presses itself away from them. It can’t know it’s arrived at its destination; it thinks this is some way station, in its procession of cramped and stinking days.

The wagoners are staring around them while they wait to be paid. They are Englishmen, and they have fetched it as bidden from Dover, fearful that it would break out and terrify the population of Kent; and so, they hint, it is worth a sum on top of the usual. It’s not, one of them says, like fetching up a pile of logs.

‘So who did you pick it up from, at Dover?’

One of them says, mildly belligerent, ‘The usual man.’

‘Have you papers?’

‘No, sir.’ Another says, in a burst of inspiration, ‘We did have papers, but it ate them.’

Where it was before it crossed the sea, they don’t know or care. ‘Where would you find such a thing except among heathens?’ one of them asks. ‘Probably you ought to fetch a priest to it and have it blessed.’

‘It looks as if it would eat a priest,’ Thurston says. He chuckles appreciatively.

Well then: it appears the donor’s name has been detached from it, somewhere on the journey. He pictures some turbaned potentate, waiting for thanks. What he’ll do is, he’ll thank everybody. Thank you for the marvel, he’ll say.

Gregory says – it’s the first sense anyone has spoken – ‘Do you think it’s meant for the king?’

That could be: in which case it is just another item that crosses his desk. Dick Purser is at his elbow. ‘Dick,’ he says, ‘it will need a keeper, till we can get it to the Tower. It cannot go to the king in its present state. I think it can go no further.’

Credit to Dick, he does not say, no, not me, sir. He pulls off his cap and passes his hand over his stubble hair.

There is a shout. ‘Look, it stirs!’

Until now the beast was torpid. Now it stands up, and in the cramped fetid space it stretches itself. It takes a pace forward, and that pace brings it to the limits of its freedom, and it stares at him, at him; its eyes are sunk deeply into its folds of fur, so you cannot see its expression, whether awe, or fear, or rage.

There is quiet. Dick says uneasily, ‘It knows its master.’

As an arrow its target. He feels pierced by its scrutiny: thin as it is, a walking pelt. The first thing is to get it off the wagon. ‘Pay these men,’ he says. It will have to stay in its travelling gaol till one more capacious can be built, but the stench can be decreased by washing away its excrement. We’ll need to feed it so that it fills its skin.

‘What do you think?’ he says to Dick Purser. ‘Are you man enough?’

Dick grows taller inside his jerkin. Gregory says, ‘With respect to you, my lord father, you always say that to people, when you want them to do something that can in no case be to their advantage.’

‘Aye,’ Thurston says. ‘What he means is, Dick Purser, are you fool enough?’

Dick says, ‘If I was to keep this beast, and be over the dogs as well, I’d need a boy, to train up.’

‘You can have a boy.’

‘It would eat a side of beef a day.’

‘You can indent for it. We’ll work you out a budget.’

‘On one proviso.’ Dick glares around him. ‘I am its sole keeper. Nobody to poke it with a stick. In fact nobody to come at it unless I say so. I don’t want it stirred up once I get it quiet. Nobody to walk by it with greyhounds, taunting it.’

Gregory says, ‘I marvel that God could create it.’

‘That He could even dream it,’ he says. Think of the faith of the men who carried it! Not these carters, but those who have guarded it, every stage of its journey, and wedged food into its cage, thrust water at it. You cannot complain it is in poor condition, when you think that at any time they could have put a spear in its throat, and then sold its hide for a great sum.