‘I shall have a hard time to hide it, with you shouting it through the streets.’
‘It is a miracle,’ Chapuys says. ‘Like Lazarus. Though one wonders, was he truly welcome?’
It has crossed his mind before now. Were his family pleased to see him, or did they think he had been too self-important, in violating the laws of nature?
‘What does she want, actually?’ Chapuys asks.
‘Just to see me. She says she will not stay.’
‘Back to the heretics’ refuge?’
‘Antwerp is hardly that. Your Emperor keeps his hand on it.’
‘As I understand it, the whole place is hollow. There are tunnels and cellars, a whole city underground, and from the surface you would not know it was there. Of course, you will have been in them yourself, in your young days?’
‘Naturally. Because they are warehouses. Nothing more.’
Chapuys says, ‘If you want to keep your daughter in England, you will have to tempt her. You must unlock your chests and spend your money. Is there a woman in this world who will refuse a string of pearls, or a border of goldsmiths’ work?’
In Antwerp you open a door that you think leads to another room. Instead, plunging at your feet is a stair down into the earth. You strain your eyes into the darkness. You creep like a snail, your shoulder brushing the wall to steady you, a foot feeling for the edge of the step. Yet within weeks, you can run up and down easily, your feet knowing exactly where to go.
But only in your own house. On another man’s steps, look out.
Austin Friars, January: his daughter turns over, in a flood of splintered sunlight, the Book of Hours that belonged to Lizzie Wycks. ‘Your wife, what was she like?’
What can he tell her? We were practical people, who did each other acts of practical kindness; she died and I missed her. Her affections were deep and stern and when she spoke to the children about their derelictions she would say, ‘I tell you this for your own good.’ When she went into company she wore a gable hood like a woman of fashion but when she was at home she wore a housewife’s coif. She was a maker of lists, a tabulator of stores: servants careless as they are, a woman must always be taking stock. She kept a list of his sins, in the pocket of her apron: took it out and checked it from time to time.
When his children were born, the house was entirely given over to women. Elizabeth was well-furnished with cousins and godsibs. They knew his family, his history, and perhaps they did not think he could rise above it. He was very pleasant to them, very mild. One day he heard a cousin say to Liz, ‘He tries really hard, your husband.’ He could not hear Liz’s muffled response. For all he knew she might have said, ‘He tries really hard but he consistently fails.’
When they married he had said to her, one thing I guarantee: no woman of mine will be poor. He had hoped to be a good husband, to be provident, faithful. He was exceptionally provident and mostly faithful. By the time Grace was born he was working for Wolsey every hour. The cousins would look at him warily when he came in: where have you been? As if it must be somewhere nefarious. They were waiting to see another self: the wolf that lives in man, his father Walter bristling through his skin.
By the time he returned from Antwerp, Walter was a man of consequence in the district. Formerly he had enlarged his land-holdings by kicking over his neighbours’ boundary-markers, but now he had acres by lawful purchase, and he had invested in his brewery, even tempting a Lowlander over to teach him to improve his beer, for the art was well-mastered there. His brother-in-law Morgan had said, ‘Thomas, you should go to Putney and see your dad now. You should see the belly on him. You should see the hat he’s got, now he’s a churchwarden.’
‘If you recommend it,’ he’d said, ‘I’ll go and have a look.’
The day came. Before he caught sight of Walter, the neighbours caught sight of him. Word spread. Some gawper said, ‘It’s bloody little Put-an-edge-on-it. Where’s he been, do you think?’
He did not feel a need to answer.
‘Show his face here!’ a woman said. ‘He must think we have short memories!’
He had nothing to say.
‘We thought you were dead,’ a fellow exclaimed.
He did not correct him.
Then he looked up and Walter was rolling towards him. He wasn’t wearing the hat but he was wearing the belly. It didn’t soften him. He might be sober and shaven, but he still looked as if he would knock you down as soon as blink.
The smithy was still there, not that Walter did the work these days; when he held out his hand it was pink and clean and you would have to look close to see the burn marks.
He, Thomas, prowled around the premises. Tools in their racks; a leather apron on a peg, with the stench of the tannery still about it. Or perhaps he imagines that: sweat, salt, shit, all the savours of his early life. Walter said, ‘Taking inventory, are you? I’m not dead yet, boy.’
He made no answer.
‘You moving back?’ Walter asked.
‘No.’
‘We not good enough for you?’
‘No.’
People are always prompting you, you notice, to forgive and forget. They are always urging you, do as your father did, boy: be what your father was. Young men claim they want change, they want freedom, but the truth is, freedom just confuses them and change makes them quake. Set them on the open road with a purse and a fair wind, and before they’ve gone a mile they are crying for a master: they must be indentured, they must be in bond, they must have someone to obey.
He would like to be the exception. He has travelled a mile and more. But perhaps he isn’t that different from the mass of men. As a boy, before he ran away, all he wanted was to be his father – Walter, but tidier. He had thought, one day the old man will keel over and get buried: then I, Thomas, will be master of the brewery and runner of the sheep, and I’ll hand the smithy work to boys I’ll train, only because of lack of hours in the week. There’s something about a smithy (it’s the warmth) that draws in all the idlers of the district on a winter’s day, and they stand around gossiping, till the light drains from the sky, and the colours of burning, cherry red to pale straw, are replaced by a sky of slate, by the moon heeled underfoot by late drinkers heading home. The day gone, and what’s to show for it? Rose-headed nails or brads, hooks, skewers, stakes, bolts, holdfasts, bars.
In Florence, and then in Antwerp, Walter patrolled his dreams: he would wake up belly churning, awash with rage. But still, he came home to Putney. When Walter died the neighbourhood mourned his loss: the new, reformed Walter. He believed in Purgatory in those days, and though he paid a priest to pray for Walter’s soul, he hoped Purgatory had a good strong lock on the door. He sees no need for Walter’s grandchildren to put him in their prayers.
Anne is a child who grizzles and wails, a trouble to the wet nurse: greedy, Liz says. She always wants something but nobody knows what it is. All of us are born into sin, our souls already besmirched: Anne illustrates it, the picture of infant turpitude. She creates spillages and knocks objects flying. She sits on the stairs outside the room where he is working, till he brings her in and she sits under the table with the dog, twisting Bella’s fur into spirals, humming to herself; till he says, ‘For God’s sake, daughter, can’t you read a book?’
‘Not yet,’ she says. ‘When I’m six.’
‘How old are you now?’ (He loses track.)
‘I don’t know.’
It is a good enough answer. Why would she know, if he doesn’t? He brings her out from under the table, and says he’ll teach her. ‘But I should warn you,’ she says, ‘I’m not fit to have a book.’ She speaks in her mother’s voice. ‘Give that child anything and she destroys it. You’d think she was brought up in a midden. Look at the state of her.’
When Anne applies to her needle, beads of blood decorate her work. Liz says, she’d be better with a cobbler’s awl, except a cobbler wouldn’t be so chatty. He will not let his wife strike her; Anne cannot be faulted for diligence, and for the rest he feels she should not be faulted. ‘I suppose she will outgrow it,’ Liz says. As Gregory will outgrow his bad dreams, in which demons who live south of the river try to bribe the guards to let them across the bridge; or knock down the watermen and commandeer their barges, leaving them bloody smudges on the quays; or simply wade through the black tide and pad the streets with their webbed feet, looking for Gregory Cromwell to chew and digest.