spoke to him with tenderness, a hand on his arm; he spoke of his own sister, the silver-haired lady like a princess in a book, removed from this life to gardens of Paradise, he had claimed, reserved for royal dead; for it is impossible, he had said, to think of that lady in any low place, any place of darkness, the barred charnel house of Purgatory with its flying cinders and sulphur reek, its boiling tar and roiling clouds of sleet.
‘Alice,’ he says, ‘dry your tears, find Thomas Rotherham, and end his pain. You need not come to Lambeth tomorrow. Jo can come, if she is as formidable as you say.’
Alice turns in the doorway. ‘I will see her again, though? Eliza Barton? I should like to see her before …’
Before they kill her. Alice is no innocent in this world. Just as well. Look how the innocent end; used by the sin-sodden and the cynical, pulped to their purpose and ground under their heels.
He hears Alice running upstairs. He hears her calling, Thomas, Thomas … It is a name that will bring half the house out, tumbling from their bedside prayers, from their very beds: yes, are you looking for me? He pulls his furred gown around him and goes outside to look at the stars. The precincts of his house are kept well lit; the gardens by torchlight are the site of excavations, trenches dug out for foundations, earth banked up into barrows and mounds. The vast timber frame of a new wing juts against the sky; in the middle distance, his new planting, a city orchard where Gregory, one day, will pick the fruit, and Alice, and Alice's sons. He has fruit trees already, but he wants cherries and plums like the ones he has eaten abroad, and late pears to use in the Tuscan fashion, to match their crisp metallic flesh with winter's salt cod. Then next year he means to make another garden at the hunting lodge he has at Canonbury, make it a retreat from the city, a summer house in the fields. He has work in hand at Stepney too, expansion; John Williamson is looking after the builders for him. Strange, but like a miracle the family's prosperity seems to have cured him of his killing cough. I like John Williamson, he thinks, why ever did I, with his wife … Beyond the gate, cries and shouts, London never still or quiet; so many in the graveyards, but the living parading in the streets, drunken fighters pitching from London Bridge, sanctuary men stealing out to thieve, Southwark whores bawling out their prices like butchers selling dead flesh.
He goes inside. His desk draws him back. In a small chest he keeps his wife's book, her book of hours. Inside it are prayers on loose papers which she has inserted. Say the name of Christ a thousand times and it keeps fever away. But it doesn't, does it? The fever comes anyway and kills you. Beside the name of her first husband, Thomas Williams, she has written his own name, but she never, he notices, crossed Tom Williams out. She has recorded the births of her children, and he has written in beside them the dates of his daughters' deaths. He finds a space where he will note the marriages of his sisters' children: Richard to Frances Murfyn, Alice to his ward.
He thinks, perhaps I have got over Liz. It didn't seem possible that weight would ever shift from inside his chest, but it has lightened enough to let him get on with his life. I could marry again, he thinks, but is this not what people are always telling me? He says to himself, I never think of Johane Williamson now: not Johane as she was for me. Her body once had special meaning, but that meaning is now unmade; the flesh created beneath his fingertips, hallowed by desire, becomes just the ordinary substance of a city wife, a fading woman with no particular looks. He says to himself, I never think of Anselma now; she is just the woman in the tapestry, the woman in the weave.
He reaches for his pen. I have got over Liz, he says to himself. Surely? He hesitates, the quill in his hand, weighted by ink. He holds the pages down flat, and strikes out the name of her first husband. He thinks, I've meant to do that for years.
It is late. Upstairs he closes the shutter, where the moon gapes in hollow-eyed, like a drunk lost in the street. Christophe, folding garments, says, ‘Is there loups? In this kingdom?’
‘I think the wolves all died when the great forests were cut down. That howling you hear is only the Londoners.’
Sunday: in rose-tinted light they set out from Austin Friars, his men in their new livery of grey marbled cloth collecting the party from the city house where the nun has been held. It would be convenient, he thinks, if I had Master Secretary's barge, instead of making ad hoc arrangements when we have to cross the river. He has already heard Mass; Cranmer insists they all hear another. He watches the girl and sees her tears flow. Alice is right; she is at the end of her invention.
By nine o'clock she is unwinding the threads she has spent years ravelling up. She confesses in style, so hard and fast that Riche can hardly keep track, and she appeals to them as men of the world, as people with their way to make: ‘You know how it is. You mention something and people are at you, what do you mean, what do you mean? You say you've had a vision and they won't leave you alone.’
‘You can't disappoint people?’ he says; she agrees, that's it, you can't. Once you start you have to keep going. If you try to go back they'll slaughter you.
She confesses that her visions are inventions. She never spoke to heavenly persons. Or raised the dead; that was all a fraud. She never had a hand in miracles. The letter from Mary Magdalene, Father Bocking wrote it, and a monk put gilding on the letters, in a minute she'll think of his name. The angels came out of her own invention, she seemed to see them but she knows now that they were just flashes of light against the wall. The voices she heard were not their voices, they were not distinct voices at all, just the sounds of her sisters singing in the chapel, or a woman in the road crying because she has been beaten and robbed, or perhaps the meaningless clatter of dishes from the kitchen; and those groans and cries, that seemed to come from the throats of the damned, it was someone above scraping a trestle across the floor, it was the whimper of a lost dog. ‘I know now, sirs, that those saints were not real. Not in the way you are real.’
Something has broken inside her, and he wonders what that thing is.
She says, ‘Is there any chance I could go home again to Kent?’
‘I'll see what can be arranged.’
Hugh Latimer is sitting with them, and he gives him a hard look, as if he's making false promises. No, really, he says. Leave it with me.
Cranmer tells her gently, ‘Before you can go anywhere, it will be necessary for you to make public acknowledgement of your imposture. Public confession.’
‘She's not shy of crowds, are you?’ These many years she's been on the road, a travelling show, and will be again, though now the nature of the show has changed; he means to display her, repentant, at Paul's Cross, and perhaps outside London too. He feels that she will take to the role of fraud, with the same relish with which she took to her role as saint.
He says to Riche, Niccolò tells us unarmed prophets always fail. He smiles and says, I mention this, Ricardo, because I know you like to have it by the book.
Cranmer leans forward and says to the Maid, these men about you, Edward Bocking and the rest, which of them were your lovers?
She is shocked: perhaps because the question has come from him, the sweetest of her interrogators. She just stares at him, as if one of them were stupid.
He says, murmuring, she may think lovers is not the word.
Enough. To Audley, to Latimer, to Riche, he says, ‘I shall begin bringing in her followers, and her leaders. She has ruined many, if we care to press for their ruin. Fisher certainly, Margaret Pole perhaps, Gertrude and her husband for sure. Lady Mary the king's daughter, quite possibly. Thomas More no, Katherine no, but a fat haul of Franciscans.’
The court rises, if court is what you call it. Jo stands up. She has been sewing – or rather, unsewing, teasing out the pomegranate border from a crewel-work panel – these remnants of Katherine, of the dusty kingdom of Granada, linger in England still. She folds her work, dropping her scissors into her pocket, pinching up her sleeve and feeding her needle into the fabric for later use. She walks up to the prisoner and puts a hand on her arm. ‘We must say adieu.’
‘William Hawkhurst,’ the girl says, ‘I remember the name now. The monk who gilded the letter from Mary Magdalene.’
Richard