The Mirror and the Light

This time it is true. It is trembling. He looks at it as if it is some other man’s hand. Of all the words he has written, will this plea endure? Rats have eaten the laws of ancient times. They relish fish-glue and vellum; anything that was once alive, they will eat it, and then out of habit, they will eat what is dead; from the margins they chew their way in, to the secret history of England. It is the glory of the men who have worked with Cromwell that instead of merely cursing the vermin they have patched, they have mended, they have stretched a point to replace a gnawed vowel; they have been ready to substitute a digested phrase with a clause that will help the crown. But what has it availed? He has lived by the laws he has made and must be content to die by them. But the law is not an instrument to find out truth. It is there to create a fiction that will help us move past atrocious acts and face our future. It seems there is no mercy in this world, but a kind of haphazard justice: men pay for crimes, but not necessarily their own.

Rafe comes to take the letter. He has no seal, so he folds it, and before he gives it over he hesitates, trapping it under his palm. ‘I always told Henry, frightening people is cheap but it doesn’t get the best results. If you want a prisoner to yield you everything, offer him hope.’

Rafe says, ‘I have read how the philosopher Canius, when Caligula’s hangmen came for him, they found him playing chess. He said to them, “Mark this, I am winning – count my pieces on the board.”’

‘I make no such bold reply,’ he says sadly. ‘Canius still had his queen.’ He pushes the letter across the table. ‘Here. Everything he wants is in that package. Will Cleves make war on us now?’

Rafe says, ‘It appears the duke is content to leave his sister here in England. And if she does not oppose him in anything, the king will make her fair and honourable terms.’

‘Why would she oppose him? Poor lady.’ To make a winter journey, he thinks, and find herself unwanted at the end of it.

Rafe says, ‘Duke Wilhelm is talking to the French. Word is they have offered him a princess, and an alliance.’

‘Ah, so he is not marrying Christina?’

‘No, he cannot make terms with the Emperor, or not at this time. They say the French princess is unwilling.’

Unwilling. That will leave room for an annulment, when the Emperor offers something better. ‘Wilhelm has not done badly out of us,’ he says. ‘Better than Anna.’ He thinks, I doubt she will want to marry any other man, now Henry has mauled her.

Rafe says, ‘The French swear they will carry their princess to the altar, if need be. She is only twelve years old, so she cannot weigh heavy.’ He sighs. ‘Helen, sir, begs to be commended to you. She prays night and morning for you. As do our little children, and all your friends.’

Not a great number of prayers, then, to bowl at Heaven’s door. Though he can count on some from the Archbishop of Canterbury, and surely his requests roll in like thunder. And Robert Barnes is praying for me, and I for Robert Barnes. Neither of us has much to ask for now, but courage. As Wyatt writes, Lauda finem: praise the end.

Edmund Walsingham, the Lieutenant of the Tower, comes next day. ‘Do not be alarmed, my lord. I bring no bad news. Only that you must move house.’

So his interrogators are done with him. ‘Where am I going?’

‘The Bell Tower, sir, next my lodging.’

‘I am familiar with it,’ he says dryly. ‘Can I not go to the Beauchamp Tower?’

‘Occupied, my lord.’

‘Christophe,’ he says, ‘pack my books. Send to Austin Friars for warmer clothes for me, the walls are thick there.’ He says to the lieutenant, ‘When Thomas More was held in the Bell Tower, he was allowed to walk in your garden. Shall I have that liberty?’

‘No, my lord.’

Walsingham is a tight-lipped Flodden veteran. He has been in his post fifteen years, and has no intention of making a slip-up now.

‘More was not locked in. Shall I be locked in?’

‘Yes, my lord.’

He puts his coat on. ‘Allons.’ He says his goodbyes to the goddesses; a last flitting glance over his shoulder. No trace of Anne Boleyn. He remembers her saying – was it in this very room? – ‘Be good to me.’ He thinks, if I see her again, perhaps this time I will.

Out into the open air. He looks about him. All he can see is armed men. The lieutenant says, ‘I trust the guard will not disturb you.’

A breath of the river air. A dance of green leaves. He feels the sun on his shoulder. A workman sitting on scaffolding, whistling, his shirt off; ‘The Jolly Forester’ … He feels netted by the past, suspended in some high blue instant, strung up in air. By noon the forester will be scorched.

I have been a foster long and many day,

My locks ben hore.

I shall hang up my horn by the greenwood spray:

Foster will I be no more.

The walk is too brief. ‘Shall I go to the lower chamber or the upper?’