The Mirror and the Light

‘You should not promote a man because he hates Gardiner. That is no safe way.’ Wyatt walks about. ‘I hear you dined.’

‘I dined. Stephen looked as if he were swallowing tadpoles.’

‘You have had Suffolk here, your people say. Be warned. He will not stand with you if you need a friend.’

‘You and Brandon have been at odds for ten years. And I have forgotten why.’

‘So have I. So has he. It does not mean we can make peace.’

‘Go home to Bess Darrell,’ he says. ‘Go down to Allington and enjoy the summer. Bess has helped me. And I am now able to help you in your turn.’

‘You owe me nothing,’ Wyatt says. ‘The obligation is all the other way. I have been in agony, as to what you would think of me. I obeyed my instructions. Make a breach, you said, tear François and the Emperor apart. I have done it, but I fear I have not helped you.’

‘Their enmities were so old, so ingrained,’ he says, ‘that you should not give yourself all the credit. They only reverted to the pattern they knew. Anyway, you followed your instructions, what else could you do? Be assured, it is no detriment to me.’

‘Except you stand to lose your queen.’

So Wyatt knows everything. The waves of the Narrow Sea rustle like sheets, whispering through Europe the news of Henry’s incapacity. ‘It will be a poor game without her, it’s true.’

Wriothesley comes in. ‘Wyatt? I thought it was you.’ They embrace, comrades-in-arms. ‘You can explain to us what is happening here.’

‘But I have been out of the realm,’ Wyatt says.

‘That does not weigh. In it, out of it, we neither walk on the earth nor swim nor fly, we do not know which element we dwell in. Summer is coming, but the king rains and shines like April. Men change their religion as they change their coats. The council makes a resolution and next minute forgets it. We write letters and the words expunge. We are playing chess in the dark.’

‘On a board made of jelly,’ he says.

‘With chessmen of butter.’

Wyatt says, ‘Your images upheave me.’

‘Then make us better ones, dear heart,’ Wriothesley says.

When they embraced, he saw Call-Me’s eyes over Wyatt’s shoulder. They were like Walter’s eyes, one day when he had burned himself in the forge. He had walked away, silent, to plunge his arm in water: he uttered nothing, neither oath nor self-reproof, but sweat started out on his forehead, and his legs buckled.

This year, business tears him away from the feast. The Lord Deputy of Ireland must be replaced, and the need is urgent. It is four or five years since he backed Leonard Grey for the post: well, there again he was mistaken. There are councillors who say the only way forward is to depopulate the island and resettle it with Englishmen. But, he thinks, the Irish would shrink into the interior, and hide in holes where rats could not live.

He says to Audley, ‘There are rumours that Pole’s army has landed in Galway. Or else in Limerick. I doubt Reynold could tell them apart, or say if he was in Ireland or the Land of Nod. If his past wanderings are any guide, he will try to invade us by way of Madrid.’

Audley looks at him: how can you make a joke? He is solemnity personified, now he has been elected to the Garter, and has a chain and a new George shining on his breast.

When Lord Lisle got a permit to leave Calais for the Garter feast, he thought it a mark of favour. He is surprised to be ordered before the council, and questioned. It is an open secret that members of his household have quit their posts and made their way to Rome. The boy Mathew, among others, has brought home fat files of evidence. But the Lord Privy Seal has not got what he wants – one damning document, to link the Lord Deputy to Pole.

Rafe says, ‘At this point we usually arrest Francis Bryan, do we not? When we cannot make the answers fit the questions?’

He smiles. Bryan knows all about Calais, it is true. He could help bring Lisle down, maybe also the ambassador Valloppe. But who will believe Francis? The Vicar of Hell has drained too many cups. He has played too many hands, he has given too much offence: if you think in vino veritas, look at Francis. Yet he knows everybody’s secrets, and appears to be everybody’s cousin. He has friends in every treasury, watchmen at every port.

Rafe shrugs, as if trying to shift an ill-balanced load. We servants of the king must get used to games we cannot win but fight to an exhausted draw, their rules unexplained. Our instructions are full of snares and traps, which mean as we gain we lose. We do not know how to proceed from minute to minute, yet somehow we do, and another night falls on us in Greenwich, at Hampton Court, at Whitehall.

The king wonders aloud, what shall we do when knights of the Garter are found to be traitors – men like Nicholas Carew? Certainly their names should be stricken from the volumes that contain the history of the order. But will that not mar the beauty of the pages?