The Mirror and the Light

So I am to die with a monster, he thinks. Or a man who has made monstrous enemies, who have great imaginative powers to shape the condemned to their desires.

Walsingham says, ‘Will you have a confessor?’

‘I will if I can have Robert Barnes.’

The two officers look at each other. ‘You should know he is condemned,’ the lieutenant says. ‘He will go to Smithfield in a day or so.’

‘Alone?’

‘With the priest Garrett, and Father William Jerome. We are waiting for our orders. And certain papists are expected to hang in a day or two: Thomas Abel, that was chaplain to the Princess of Aragon.’

Garrett, Jerome: friends of his and of the gospel. Abel, a veteran opponent. A crowded week, he thinks. ‘I hope there are enough competent people.’

Kingston says testily, ‘We do our best.’

He stands up. He wishes to be left alone. ‘It is not long since I confessed, and I have had scant opportunity of sin since I came here.’

‘That is not it.’ Kingston is disconcerted. ‘You are meant to pass your whole life in review, and discover new sins each time.’

‘I know that,’ he says. ‘I know how to do it. I live here with Thomas More. I have read the books. We are all dying, just at different speeds.’

Walsingham says, ‘The Duke of Norfolk has asked that your lordship be informed – the king marries Katherine Howard tomorrow.’

Christophe says, ‘I will bring my pallet. I will stay beside you tonight.’

‘You need not fear,’ he says. ‘I shall not put an end to myself. I shall trust the headsman to do it quicker than I could.’

‘You will write letters?’

He thinks about it. ‘No. I am done.’

He sends Christophe out to bask in the sunshine: to drink his health, and sit, drowsy, on a wall, among other servants, talking no doubt of the uncertainty of their fortune, with such masters.

He thinks of how tomorrow will be. By rank he is above Hungerford, so he will die first. The king’s decision has spared him much agony and shame. He will pray for a clean stroke. He thinks of Anne Boleyn, ordering up her coronation clothes: ‘Thomas must go into crimson.’

On the scaffold he will praise the king: his mercy, his grace, his care for all his people. It is expected of him, and he has a duty to those left behind. He will say, I am not a heretic, I die a member of the universal church; and let the crowd make what they will of it. Though every man dreads to know the hour of his death, the Christian dreads more a sudden end, such as his father met: mors improvisa with no time to repent. Neighbours in Putney believed Walter Cromwell had mended his ways, given up the drinking, rowing and fighting. But one night he quarrelled with a fellow churchwarden – and it was no godly dispute, it was a row over cockfighting. Coming away, leaving the other fellow with a black eye, Walter kicked his way into the house and shouted for victuals. He was pale and sweating, the witnesses said, but still he fell on a dish of cold meat, all the time vituperating. Next he complained about his dinner, rubbing his chest and saying it had given him a pain; five minutes later he fell face-down on the table. They laid him flat, and, ‘God damn you, I’m choking,’ he said, ‘get me up, get me up –’ and that was the last word he spoke.

There was a good crowd at his burying. He, Thomas, had paid for Masses for his soul. ‘Do you think it does any good?’ he had said to the priest.

‘Don’t despair of him,’ the fellow said. ‘He was rough, but he wasn’t all bad.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t mean, will prayers do Walter any good. I mean, do they do good for any dead person? God is watching us all our lives. Surely, if you live as long as Walter, God has formed a view. Unless He always knows.’

‘That sounds like heresy to me,’ the priest said.

‘Of course it does. It hits your pocket. If God knows His mind, what becomes of your chantries and your rosaries and your fees for a thousand years of Masses?’

He remembers himself lying smashed and broken in the inn yard in Putney, fifteen years old: his father standing over him, his blood on the cobbles, the twine of his father’s boot sprung free from the leather. Walter shouting down at him and he shouting back, je voudrais mourir autrement – not here, not now, and not like this.

But, no, he thinks, I was not shouting. I did not speak French. Torn and contused, I got myself off the ground and across the Narrow Sea. I fought other men’s wars, for money, till at last I had the sense to earn it in easier ways: Cremuello at your service, your shadow in a glass.

One night long ago in Venice he had glimpsed a woman, a wraith in the watery mist. A courtesan, she let her lazy laughter float after her on the air; the streak of her yellow scarf was the only colour, the click of her shoes on cobbles the only sound. Then a door opened in the wall, and darkness swallowed her up. She was gone so swiftly and completely that he wondered if he had dreamed her. He had thought, if ever I need to disappear, Venice is where I will come.