Dissolution Read online

  ‘I can’t fathom it. It appears completely sealed.’

  ‘Pity. I wanted to show it to the king, it would amuse him.’ He walked me to the door and opened it, his arm still round me so that the clerks should see I was favoured. But as I left the chamber my eye fell again on the two grinning skulls, the candlelight playing about their ancient eye sockets. My master’s arm still round me as it was, I had to suppress a shiver.

  Chapter Two

  MERCIFULLY THE RAIN had stopped when I left Westminster. I rode home slowly as dusk fell. Lord Cromwell’s words had frightened me. I realized I had grown used to being in favour; the thought of being cast out chilled me, but more than that I was frightened by his questions about my loyalty. I must take care what I said around the courts.

  Earlier that year I had bought a spacious new house in Chancery Lane, the broad avenue bearing the name of His Majesty’s court and of my horse. It was a fine stone property with fully glassed windows, and had cost a great deal. Joan Woode, my housekeeper, opened the door. A kindly, bustling widow, she had been with me some years and greeted me warmly. She liked to mother me, which I did not find unwelcome even if sometimes she exceeded her place.

  I was hungry, and though it was early I told her to prepare supper, before going through to the parlour. I was proud of the room, whose panelling I had had painted with a classical woodland scene at some expense. Logs burned in the fireplace and beside it, on a stool, sat Mark. He made a strange sight. He had taken off his shirt, baring a white muscular chest, and was sewing buttons of agate embossed with an elaborate design onto the neck. A dozen needles, each trailing a length of white thread, were stuck into his codpiece, one of the exaggerated ones then in fashion. I had to check myself from laughing.

  He smiled his habitual broad grin, showing good teeth a little too large for his mouth.

  ‘Sir. I heard you arrive. A messenger from Lord Cromwell brought a package and said you were back. Forgive me not rising, but I would hate one of these needles to slip.’ Despite his grin, his eyes were guarded; if I had seen Cromwell, his disgrace was likely to have been mentioned.

  I grunted. I noticed his brown hair was cut short; King Henry, following the close cutting of his own hair to hide his growing baldness, had ordered all at court to wear cropped hair and it had become the fashion. The new style became Mark well enough, though I had decided to keep mine long as it better suited my angular cast of features.

  ‘Could Joan not do your sewing?’

  ‘She was busy preparing for your arrival.’

  I picked up a volume from the table. ‘You have been reading my Machiavelli, I see.’

  ‘You said I might, for a pastime.’

  I dropped into my cushioned armchair with a sigh. ‘And how do you like him?’

  ‘Not well. He counsels his prince to practise cruelty and deception.’

  ‘He believes these things are necessary to rule well, and that the calls to virtue of the classical writers ignore life’s realities. “If a ruler who wants to act honourably is surrounded by unscrupulous men his downfall is inevitable.” ’

  He bit off a piece of thread. ‘It is a bitter saying.’

  ‘Machiavelli was a bitter man. He wrote his book after being tortured by the Medici prince to whom it was addressed. You had better not tell people you have read it if you go back to Westminster. It is not approved of there.’

  He looked up at the hint. ‘I may go back? Has Lord Cromwell—’

  ‘Perhaps. We will talk more at dinner. I am tired and would rest a little.’ I heaved myself out of the chair and went out. It would do Mark no harm to stew a little.

  JOAN HAD BEEN BUSY; there was a good fire in my room and my feather bed had been made up. A candle had been lit and set on the desk beside my most prized possession, a copy of the newly licensed English Bible. It soothed me to see it there, lit up, the focus of the room, drawing the eye. I opened it and ran my fingers across the Gothic print, whose glossy surface shone in the candlelight. Next to it lay a large packet of papers. I took my dagger and cut the seal, the hard wax cracking into red shards and falling onto the desk. Inside was a letter of commission in Cromwell’s own vigorous hand, a bound volume of the Comperta and documents relating to the Scarnsea visitation.

  I stood a moment, looking through the diamond-paned window into my garden with its walled lawn, peaceful in the gloom. I wanted to be here, in the warmth and comfort of home, as winter came on. I sighed and lay down on the bed, feeling my tired back muscles twitch as they slowly relaxed. I had another long ride tomorrow, and those were becoming more difficult and painful every year.

  MY DISABILITY had come upon me when I was three; I began to stoop forward and to the right, and no brace could correct it. By the age of five I was a true hunchback, as I have remained to this day. I was always jealous of the boys and girls around the farm, who ran and played, while I could manage nothing more than a crab-like scuttle they mocked me for. Sometimes I would cry out to God at the injustice of it.

  My father farmed a good acreage of sheep and arable land near Lichfield. It was a great sorrow to him that I could never work the farm, for I was his only surviving child. I felt it all the more because he never reproached me for my infirmity; he simply said quietly one day that when he grew too old to work the farm himself he would appoint a steward, who perhaps could work for me when he was gone.

  I was sixteen when the steward arrived. I remember biting back a flood of resentment when William Poer appeared in the house one summer’s day, a big, dark-haired man with a ruddy open face and strong hands which enveloped mine in a horny grip. I was introduced to his wife, a pale pretty creature, and to Mark, then a sturdy, tousle-headed toddler who clung to her skirts and stared at me with a dirty thumb in his mouth.

  By then it had already been decided that I was to go to London to study at the Inns of Court. It was the coming thing, if one wished financial independence for a son and he had a modicum of brains, to send him to law. My father said that not only was there money to be made, but legal skills would one day help me in supervising the steward’s running of the farm. He thought I would return to Lichfield, but I never did.

  I arrived in London in 1518, the year after Martin Luther posted his challenge to the pope on the door of Wittenberg Castle church. I remember how hard it was at first to get used to the noise, the crowds - above all, the constant stench - of the capital. But in my classes and lodgings I soon found good company. Those were already days of controversy, the common lawyers arguing against the spreading use of the Church courts. I sided with those who said the king’s courts were being robbed of their prerogative - for if men dispute the meaning of a contract, or slander each other, what business is that of an archdeacon? This was no mere cynical desire for business; the Church had become like a great octopus, spreading its tentacles into every area of the nation’s life, all for profit and without authority in Scripture. I read Erasmus, and began to see my callow thraldom to the Church of my youth in a new light. I had reasons of my own to be bitter against the monks especially, and now I saw that they were good ones.

  I completed my schools and began to make contacts and find business. I discovered an unexpected gift for disputation in court, which stood me in good stead with the more honest judges. And in the late 1520s, just as the king’s problems with the papacy over the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon began to make a public stir, I was introduced to Thomas Cromwell, a fellow lawyer then rising high in the service of Cardinal Wolsey.

  I met him through an informal debating society of reformers, which used to meet in a London inn - secretly, for many of the books we read were forbidden. He began to put some work from departments of state my way. And so I was set on my future path, riding behind Cromwell as he rose to supplant Wolsey and became the king’s secretary, commissioner general, vicar general, all the time keeping the full extent of his religious radicalism from his sovereign.

  He began to seek my assistance with legal matter
s affecting those who enjoyed his patronage - for he was building a great network - and I became established as one of ‘Cromwell’s men’. So when, four years ago, my father wrote to ask if I could find William Poer’s son a post in one of the expanding departments of state my master controlled, it was something I was able to do.

  Mark timed his arrival for April 1533, to see the coronation of Queen Anne Boleyn. He much enjoyed that great celebration for the woman we were later taught to believe was a witch and fornicator. He was sixteen then, the same age I was when I had come south; not tall but broadly built, with wide blue eyes in a smooth angelic face that reminded me of his mother’s, although there was a watchful intelligence in his pale-blue eyes that was his distinctively.

  I confess when he first arrived in my house I wanted him out of it again as soon as possible. I had no wish to act in loco parentis for this boy, who I had no doubt would soon be slamming doors and sending papers to the floor, and whose face and form stirred all the feelings of regret I associated with home. I had imaginings of my poor father wishing Mark were his son instead of me.

  But somehow my wish to be rid of him eased. He was not the country boor I had expected; on the contrary he had a quiet, respectful demeanour and the rudiments of good manners. When he made some mistake of dress or table etiquette, as he did in the early days, he showed a self-mocking humour. He was reported as conscientious in the junior clerking posts I obtained for him, first at the Exchequer and then at Augmentations. I let him come and go as he pleased and if he visited the taverns and bawd houses with his fellow clerks he was never noisy or drunken at home.

  Despite myself I grew fond of him, and took to using his agile mind as a sounding board for some of the more puzzling points of law or fact I dealt with. If he had a fault it was laziness, but a few sharp words could usually rouse him. I went from resenting that my father might have wished him for a son to wishing he might have been my own. I was not sure now that I would ever have a son, for poor Kate had died in the plague of 1534. I still wore a death’s head mourning ring for her, presumptuously, for had she lived Kate would certainly have married another.

  AN HOUR LATER Joan called me down to supper. There was a fine capon on the table, with carrots and turnips. Mark was sitting quietly at his place, in his shirt again and a jerkin of fine brown wool. I noticed the jerkin was adorned with more of the agate buttons. I said grace and cut a limb from the chicken.

  ‘Well,’ I began, ‘it seems Lord Cromwell may have you back at Augmentations. First he wants you to aid me with a task he has set me, and then we shall see.’

  Six months before Mark had had a dalliance with a lady-in-waiting to Queen Jane. The girl was only sixteen, too young and silly to be at court but pushed there by ambitious relatives. In the end she brought them disgrace, for she took to wandering all over the precincts of Whitehall and Westminster until she found herself in Westminster Hall, among the clerks and lawyers. There the little wanton met Mark, and ended by rutting with him in an empty office. Afterwards she repented and blurted everything out to the other ladies, from where in due course the story reached the chamberlain. The girl was packed off home and Mark found himself turned out of a hot sheet into hot water, interrogated by high officials of the royal household; he had been astonished and frightened. Though angry with him, I sympathized with his fear as well; he was very young after all. I had petitioned Lord Cromwell to intervene, knowing he had an indulgent approach towards that type of misdemeanour at least.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ he said. ‘I am truly sorry for what happened.’

  ‘You are lucky. People of our station don’t often get a second chance. Not after something like that.’

  ‘I know. But - she was bold, sir.’ He smiled weakly. ‘I am but flesh.’

  ‘She was a mere silly girl. You could have got her with child.’

  ‘If that had happened I would have married her if our degree had permitted. I am not without honour, sir.’

  I put a piece of chicken in my mouth and waved my knife at him. This was an old argument. ‘No, but you are a light-brained fool. The difference in degree is everything. Come, Mark, you have been in government service four years. You know how things work. We are commoners and must keep our place. People of low birth like Cromwell and Rich have risen high in the king’s service, but only because he chooses to have them there. He could remove them in a moment. If the chamberlain had told the king instead of Lord Cromwell you could have found yourself in the Tower, after a whipping that would have scarred you for life. I feared that might happen, you know.’ Indeed the affair had given me several sleepless nights, though I never told him that.

  He looked cast down. I washed my hands in the fingerbowl.

  ‘Well, this time it may blow over,’ I said more gently. ‘What of business? Have you prepared the deeds for the Fetter Lane conveyance?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I will look at them after dinner. I have other papers to study as well.’ I put down my napkin and looked at him seriously. ‘Tomorrow we have to go down to the south coast.’

  I explained our mission, though saying nothing of its political importance. Mark’s eyes widened as I told him of the murder; already the thoughtless excitement of youth was returning.

  ‘This could be dangerous,’ I warned him. ‘We have no idea what is happening down there; we must be prepared for anything.’

  ‘You seem worried, sir.’

  ‘It’s a heavy responsibility. And, frankly, just now I would rather stay here than travel down to Sussex. It is desolate down there beyond the Weald.’ I sighed. ‘But like Isaiah we must go down and fight for Zion.’

  ‘If you succeed Lord Cromwell will reward you well.’

  ‘Yes. And it would keep me in favour.’

  He looked up in surprise at my words, and I decided it would be wise to change the subject. ‘You have never been to a monastery, have you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You went to the grammar school, you didn’t have the doubtful privilege of the cathedral school. The monks scarcely knew enough Latin to follow the ancient tomes they taught from. It’s as well for me I had some native wit, or I would be as illiterate as Joan.’

  ‘Are the monasteries truly as corrupt as it is said?’ Mark asked.

  ‘You’ve seen the Black Book, the extracts from the visitations, which is being hawked around.’

  ‘So has most of London.’

  ‘Yes, people love tales of naughty monks.’ I broke off as Joan came in with a custard.

  ‘But yes, they are corrupt,’ I continued once she had gone. ‘The rule of St Benedict - which I have read - prescribes a life devoted to prayer and work, separate from the world and with only the barest essentials of life. Yet mostly these monks live in great buildings attended by servants, living off fat revenues from their lands, scabbed with every sort of vice.’

  ‘They say the Carthusian monks lived austerely and sang joyful hymns when they were taken to be disembowelled at Tyburn.’

  ‘Oh, a few orders live straitly. But don’t forget the Carthusians died because they refused to recognize the king as head of the Church. They all want the pope back. And now it seems one of them has turned to murder.’ I sighed. ‘I am sorry you must be involved in this.’

  ‘Men of honour should not be afraid of danger.’

  ‘One should always be afraid of danger. Are you still attending those swordsmanship classes?’

  ‘Yes. Master Green says I progress very well.’

  ‘Good. There are sturdy beggars everywhere on the quieter roads.’

  He was silent a moment, looking at me thoughtfully. ‘Sir, I am grateful I may get my post back at Augmentations, but I wish it were not such a sewer. Half the lands go to Richard Rich and his cronies.’

  ‘You exaggerate. It is a new institution; you must expect those in charge to benefit those who have given them loyalty. It is how good lordship works. Mark, you dream of ideal worlds. And you should be careful what you say. Have
you been reading More’s Utopia again? Cromwell quoted that at me today.’

  ‘Utopia gives you hope for man’s condition. The Italian makes you despair.’

  I pointed at his jerkin. ‘Well, if you want to be like the Utopians, you should exchange those fine clothes for a plain shift of sackcloth. What is the design on those buttons, by the way?’

  He removed his jerkin and passed it across. Each button had a tiny engraving of a man with a sword, his arm round a woman, a stag beside them. It was finely done.

  ‘I picked them up cheaply in St Martin’s market. The agate is fake.’

  ‘So I see. But what does it signify? Oh, I know, fidelity, because of the stag.’ I passed the jerkin back. ‘This fashion for symbolic designs that people have to puzzle out, it tires me. There are enough real mysteries in the world.’