The Mirror and the Light

Sometimes in those days he woke from dreams that threatened to drown him, his eyelashes wet; he woke between languages, not knowing where he was but filled with an inchoate longing to be somewhere else. He thinks back to his childhood, his days on the river, days in the fields. His life has been filled with fugitive women. He remembers the stepmothers Walter would bring home: scarcely had you made your duties to one of them, before Walter fell out with her, or she flounced off with her clothes tied up in a bundle. He thinks of his daughters Anne and Grace; perhaps he will meet them as women grown? He thinks of Anselma’s daughter, moving slowly in his house with soft and curious eyes, picking up those things that belonged to him, his seal, his books, examining his globe of the world and asking, ‘This island, where is this? Is this the New World?’

Mr Wriothesley has moved into Austin Friars, they tell him. The king has ordered him to dissolve the Cromwell household. By day, Call-Me strides through the rooms, expansive, breathing in the smell of paper and ink, rosewater and resin. But by night the leopard pads the floor, smelling the fur of long-dead animals, spaniels and marmosets, gazing upward at the nightingale mute in her cage. She sniffs out the boiled meats of a decade of dinners, and the bones of mice behind the panelling; her opaque, unmoved glance follows the flight of a bird outside the window. He thinks, I have spent hundreds of pounds on glass. Wriothesley cannot dissolve my household. He can only walk through the glass and shatter it, bleeding from a thousand cuts.

Christophe comes back. He looks unsteady: drink, or sun, or something else. He says, ‘You could have stayed out longer. I did not lack for company.’

July, and the nights are short. When the light begins to fade, he sends the boy out again to find his supper, while he thinks of Heaven and Hell. When he pictures Hell he can only think of a cold place, a wasteland, a wharf, a marsh, a landing stage; Walter distantly bawling, then the bawling coming nearer. That is how it will be – not pain itself, but the constant apprehension of pain; the constant apprehension of fault, the knowledge that you are going to be punished for something you couldn’t help and didn’t even know was wrong; and the discord in Hell will be constant, repeating for ever and ever, a violent argument being carried on in the next room. When he thinks of Heaven he imagines it as a vast party arranged by the cardinal; like that field in Picardy, the Field of the Cloth of Gold, with palaces built on unlikely and marginal ground, acres of clear glass catching the sun. But his master should have built in a softer climate. Perhaps, he thinks, this time tomorrow I will inhabit some kinder city: the blue shadows lengthening, the sun’s final rays softening the lines of bell towers and domes; ladies in niches at their prayers, a small dog with a plumed tail strolling the streets; indifferent doves alighting on gilded spires.

After supper he packs up his books. He will ask Kingston to give them to Rafe. He puts away Clendardus, his grammar. He has not made much progress with Hebrew, in part because he has been occupied with the king’s business; there was never a prisoner more hard-pressed, or who called for so much ink. He wishes he had ever met the scholar – Nicolas Cleynaerts, as he is properly; his Antwerp friends say he is a very great linguist, who has spent many hours by lamplight, through the northern winters, learning to copy the loops and curls of Arabic script. In pursuit of books in that tongue he went some years ago to Salamanca, and from there to Granada, but only to be disappointed; the Inquisition is diligent these days in locking away the writings of the Arabs. Some say Clendardus will go into Africa next, and learn to read the holy book of the Mohammedans. He pictures this scholar, strolling through the markets. His diet will be dates and olives, and honeyed pears with orange-blossom water, and lamb baked with saffron and apricots.

All your life you tramp the empty road with the wind at your back. You are hungry and your spirit is perturbed as you journey on into the gloom. But when you get to your destination the doorkeeper knows you. A torch goes before you as you cross the court. Inside there is a fire and a flask of wine, there is a candle and beside the candle your book. You pick it up and find your place is marked. You sit down by the fire, open it, and begin your story. You read on, into the night.

At nine o’clock, 27 July, he kneels down and makes his prayer. He had wondered how you would recognise your dead, when you yourself go to Judgement. But as he waits out this last night, he sees how they are visible, and how they shine. They are distilled into a spark, into an instant. There is air between their ribs, their flesh is honeycombed with light, and the marrow of their bones is molten with God’s grace.