for more wine, I was proud that he spoke up. More said, it is true I have found nothing today, but you must go with these men. Mr Lieutenant, will you take him?
John Petyt is not a young man. At More's direction he sleeps on a pad of straw laid on the flagstones; visitors have been admitted only so that they can take back to his neighbours the news of how ill he looks. ‘We have sent food and warm clothes,’ Lucy says, ‘and been turned away on the Lord Chancellor's orders.’
‘There's a tariff for bribes. You pay the gaolers. You need ready money?’
‘If I do I shall come to you.’ She puts the cup down on his desk. ‘He cannot lock us all up.’
‘He has prisons enough.’
‘For bodies, yes. But what are bodies? He can take our goods, but God will prosper us. He can close the booksellers, but still there will be books. They have their old bones, their glass saints in windows, their candles and shrines, but God has given us the printing press.’ Her cheeks glow. She glances down to the drawings on his desk. ‘What are these, Master Cromwell?’
‘The plans for my garden. I am hoping to buy some of the houses at the back of here, I want the land.’
She smiles. ‘A garden … It is the first pleasant thing I have heard of in a while.’
‘I hope you and John will come and enjoy it.’
‘And this … You are going to build a tennis court?’
‘If I get the ground. And here, you see, I mean to plant an orchard.’
Tears well into her eyes. ‘Speak to the king. We count on you.’
He hears a footstep: Johane's. Lucy's hand flies to her mouth. ‘God forgive me … For a moment I took you for your sister.’
‘The mistake is made,’ Johane says. ‘And sometimes persists. Mistress Petyt, I am very sorry to hear your husband is in the Tower. But you have brought this on yourselves. You people were the first to throw calumnies at the late cardinal. But now I suppose you wish you had him back.’
Lucy goes out without a further word, only one long look over her shoulder. Outside he hears Mercy greet her; she will get a more sisterly word there. Johane walks to the fire and warms her hands. ‘What does she think you can do for her?’
‘Go to the king. Or to Lady Anne.’
‘And will you? Do not,’ she says, ‘do not do it.’ She scrubs away a tear with her knuckle; Lucy has upset her. ‘More will not rack him. Word will get out, and the city would not have it. But he may die anyway.’ She glances up at him. ‘She is quite old, you know, Lucy Petyt. She ought not to wear grey. Do you see how her cheeks have fallen in? She won't have any more children.’
‘I get the point,’ he says.
Her hand clenches on her skirt. ‘But what if he does? What if he does rack him? And he gives names?’
‘What's that to me?’ He turns away. ‘He already knows my name.’
He speaks to Lady Anne. What can I do? she asks, and he says, you know how to please the king, I suppose; she laughs and says, what, my maidenhead for a grocer?
He speaks to the king when he is able, but the king gives him a blank stare and says the Lord Chancellor knows his business. Anne says, I have tried, I myself as you know have put Tyndale's books into his hand, his royal hand; could Tyndale, do you think, come back into this kingdom? In winter they negotiated, letters crossing the Channel. In spring, Stephen Vaughan, his man in Antwerp, set up a meeting: evening, the concealing dusk, a field outside the city walls. Cromwell's letter put into his hand, Tyndale wept: I want to come home, he said, I am sick of this, hunted city to city and house to house. I want to come home and if the king would just say yes, if he would say yes to the scriptures in our mother tongue, he can choose his translator, I will never write more. He can do with me what he pleases, torture me or kill me, but only let the people of England hear the gospel.
Henry has not said no. He had not said, never. Though Tyndale's translation and any other translation is banned, he may, one day, permit a translation to be made by a scholar he approves. How can he say less? He wants to please Anne.
But summer comes, and he, Cromwell, knows he has gone to the brink and must feel his way back. Henry is too timid, Tyndale too intransigent. His letters to Stephen sound a note of panic: abandon ship. He does not mean to sacrifice himself to Tyndale's truculence; dear God, he says, More, Tyndale, they deserve each other, these mules that pass for men. Tyndale will not come out in favour of Henry's divorce; nor, for that matter, will the monk Luther. You'd think they'd sacrifice a fine point of principle, to make a friend of the King of England: but no.
And when Henry demands, ‘Who is Tyndale to judge me?’ Tyndale snaps a message back, quick as word can fly: one Christian man may judge another.
‘A cat may look at a king,’ he says. He is cradling Marlinspike in his arms, and talking to Thomas Avery, the boy he's teaching his trade. Avery has been with Stephen Vaughan, so he can learn the practice among the merchants over there, but any boat may bring him to Austin Friars with his little bag, inside it a woollen jerkin, a few shirts. When he comes clattering in he shouts out for Mercy, for Johane, for the little girls, for whom he brings comfits and novelties from street traders. On Richard, on Rafe, on Gregory if he's about, he lands a few punches by way of saying I'm back, but always he keeps his bag tucked under his arm.
The boy follows him into his office. ‘Did you never feel homesick, master, when you were on your travels?’
He shrugs: I suppose if I'd had a home. He puts the cat down, opens the bag. He fishes up on his finger a string of rosary beads; for show, says Avery, and he says, good boy. Marlinspike leaps on to his desk; he peers into the bag, dabbing with a paw. ‘The only mice in there are sugar ones.’ The boy pulls the cat's ears, tussles with him. ‘We don't have any little pets in Master Vaughan's house.’
‘He's all business, Stephen. And very stern, these days.’
‘He says, Thomas Avery, what time did you get in last night? Have you written to your master? Been to Mass? As if he cares for the Mass! It's all but, how's your bowels?’
‘Next spring you can come home.’
As they speak he is unrolling the jerkin. With a shake he turns it inside out, and with a small pair of scissors begins to slit open a seam. ‘Neat stitching … Who did this?’
The boy hesitates; he colours. ‘Jenneke.’
He draws out from the lining the thin, folded paper. Unwraps it: ‘She must have good eyes.’
‘She does.’
‘And lovely eyes too?’ He glances up, smiling. The boy looks him in the face. For a moment he seems startled, and as if he will speak; then he drops his gaze and turns away.
‘Just tormenting you, Tom, don't take it to heart.’ He is reading Tyndale's letter. ‘If she is a good girl, and in Stephen's household, what harm?’
‘What does Tyndale say?’
‘You carried it without reading it?’
‘I would rather not know. In case.’
In case you found yourself Thomas More's guest. He holds the letter in his left hand; his right hand curls loosely into a fist. ‘Let him come near my people. I'll drag him out of his court at Westminster and beat his head on the cobbles till I knock into him some sense of the love of God and what it means.’
The boy grins and flops down on a stool. He, Cromwell, glances again at the letter. ‘Tyndale says, he thinks he can never come back, even if my lady Anne were queen … a project he does nothing to aid, I must say. He says he would not trust a safe conduct, even if the king himself were to sign it, while Thomas More is alive and in office, because More says you need not keep a promise you have made to a heretic. Here. You may as well read. Our Lord Chancellor respects neither ignorance nor innocence.’