The Mirror and the Light

‘I’d like to stay,’ the old man says, ‘but I don’t know if I have the strength.’ He seems, muttering in the corner, to be preoccupied with his own end. He talks about the candles around his deathbed, George Cavendish gripping his hand. He describes the drawn faces of the monks at Leicester Abbey, peering down at him. He talks of his hasty burial, which he seems to know all about. ‘Why do I not have my right tomb,’ he says, ‘when I paid so much to that Italian of yours? Where are my great candlesticks? My dancing angels, where did they go?’

Martin, out of his charity, comes to sit with him. In More’s last days, the gaoler says, he talked a lot – he always did talk, just not when you wanted him to. He would talk of when he was a little boy, a scholar at St Anthony’s school. He would bear his satchel down West Cheap towards Threadneedle Street. On a winter’s morning at six o’clock, the streets were lit only by the frost on the cobblestones. St Anthony’s pigs, they called them, those little schoolfellows; by lantern light they assembled to chant their Latin.

‘Did he ever talk about Lambeth, about the palace?’

‘What, Archbishop Cranmer? He hated him.’

‘I mean, Lambeth in Morton’s day, when we were young. Thomas More was there as a boy, getting ready for Oxford, day after day at his books. Did he mention me?’

‘You? What had you to do with it, sir?’

He smiles. ‘I was there too.’

Uncle John says, ‘See the trays? That’s the young gentlemen’s suppers. They’re all studying hard, so if they wake up in the night, they’re turning over in their head a hard problem about Pythagoras, or St Jerome. And it makes them peckish. So they need a little bite of bread in their cupboards, and a measure of small beer. Now, boy, you know the third staircase? Up the top there’s Master Thomas More. He don’t like disturbing, so you creep in like a mouse. If he looks up you make your reverence. If he don’t you just creep out again, and not so much as a “Bless you.” Have you got that?’

He’s got it. He’s got the tray in his grasp, and he sets off on the sturdy legs that would make you think he was well-fed. What if he sat down on the bottom step, and ate the bread and drank the beer himself? Would he hear in the night Master More crying out with pangs in his belly? ‘Oh, feed me, feed me,’ he whimpers in a pitiful voice, as he mounts. ‘Oh, St Jerome, feed me!’

On the top step, the devil enters into him. He kicks open the door and bawls, ‘Master Thomas More!’

The young scholar looks up. His expression is mild and curious but he circles his book with his arm as if to protect it.

‘Master Thomas More, his supper!’

He rams it in the corner cupboard. ‘Hinge wants oiling,’ he says. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow and see to that.’ He creaks it to and fro, so it makes a double squeak. He wants to ask, what’s Pythagoras, is it an animal, is it a disease, is it a shape you can draw?

‘Master Thomas More, God bless him!’ he shouts. ‘Good night!’

He is about to slam the door when Master More calls, ‘Child?’ He intrudes himself back into the room. Master More sits blinking at him. He is fourteen, fifteen, skinny. Walter would laugh him out of the yard. Master More says softly, ‘If I gave you a penny, would you not do that, another night?’

He bounces down the stair richer. He bounces on every tread, and whistles. Fair’s fair. He was only paid to be quiet in the room, not quiet outside it. Master More will have to dig deeper into his pocket if he wants to live in the silence of the tomb. He runs away, towards his football game.

After that, every night he would lurk on the stair like a demon, till More thought the danger was passed. Then he’d burst in, bellowing ‘How do you, sir?’ slapping his tray down so that More splashed his ink. When More reminded him about the penny he’d paid, he opened his eyes wide: ‘I thought that was one time only?’

With a sigh and a half-smile, Master More disbursed.

He thought Thomas More would complain about him to the kitchen steward, who would call him in and hit him. Or perhaps the archbishop himself would call him in and hit him; or being a man of God, only harangue him. If that happened, he was planning to harangue him back. There were things old Morton should know, about how his kitchen was run: pewter that jumped off the table into some blackguard’s sack, fingers that dipped straight from a laundrymaid’s quim and into the fricassee.