They sit in silence. Tyndale has left us his New Testament and some of the Old; the Law and the Prophets, the records of Israel’s fearful wars, God’s long campaigns against His chosen people. ‘The king sees …’ he begins. But he lapses into silence. Smoke is what he sees; hears the distant bellowing of a crowd. ‘He sees that an English church needs a Bible. We have worked long to bring him to it. We have agreed a translation, and it is Tyndale’s, as far as we have his work, but it goes under another scholar’s name. We have put Henry’s own image on the title page. We want him to see himself there. We need him to set forth a Bible under his own licence, and set the scriptures up in every church, for all to read who can. We need to get it out in such numbers that it can never be recalled or suppressed. When the people read it there will be no more of these armed and murdering Pilgrims. They will see with their own eyes that nowhere in the scripture does it mention penances and popes and purgatory and cloisters and beads and blessed candles, or ceremonies and relics –’
‘Not even priests,’ she says.
Not even priests. Though we do not stress that point to Henry.
‘Jenneke,’ he says, ‘you have come so far to bear witness. Now it is done, you will not abandon me? This place is strange to you now but you will soon feel at home. I will make you a marriage, if you think you could love an Englishman.’
Sometimes it is years before we can see who are the heroes in an affair and who are the victims. Martyrs don’t reckon with the results of their actions. How can they, when their mind is only on how to endure pain? A month after Tyndale, the merchant Poyntz himself was arrested, on the word of Harry Phillips. Poyntz was accused of being a Lutheran and he would likely have burned, but he escaped and is now in London. His wife Anna has refused to join him. Why should she leave her life, her language, to dwell with a man whose name is besmirched and who has abandoned her and his children, and whose livelihood has gone too?
As for Phillips: with Thomas More dead, he is seeking other paymasters. He has been in Rome, and our man there, Gregory Casale, reports him trying to worm into the Pope’s favour by claiming to be one of More’s relations. Now he is in Paris, they say, looking for who he might destroy. Phillips is plausible, none more: a witty, conversible young man, easy to like, with a bagful of hard-luck tales, and a treasury of names he can mention from his time at Oxford. It is easy to see how he insinuates himself, the ever-helpful youth with his mastery of several tongues.
He says, ‘Do not go back, daughter. Life will be harder. Antwerp will be less free. The city magistrates – the sway they thought they had, they do not have. There will be more arrests. The printers must take care.’
There are more English books printed in Antwerp than in London, but those who print without a licence are branded, sometimes an eye is gouged out or a hand cut off. And informers are everywhere. Even, no doubt, amongst our own merchants.
He says, ‘Your mother –’
‘The Queen of Sheba?’ She smiles.
‘– she knows this is her home, Austin Friars. I never move her. If I quit this house for the summer I roll her up and put her in store.’
Anselma’s woollen self has never aged. But he fears if she is carried too much across country, her features may fuzz and blur. She came into his house only after his wife was dead. He is not the sort to run two women at once, or, like Thomas More, to marry a second wife before the sheets of the first are cold.
The fire is low; he throws a log on it. ‘My wife’s mother, Mercy, she is aged now. A house needs a mistress. I am always hearing that I am about to marry, but I never seem to do it.’
He pictures Meg Douglas swishing across his threshold. Or Kate Latimer, which seems a lot more likely, if old Latimer would go and die. He pictures Mary Tudor blundering in, flailing around her as she did at Hunsdon, her tiny feet grinding his Venetian goblets to dust.
‘Or you could live with Gregory,’ he says.
‘Gregory has a house?’
‘He will have. I will marry him this year.’
‘He knows?’
‘No,’ he says shortly. ‘I shall tell him when I have found a bride.’
‘Would it be the same with me? This Englishman you say I might wed?’
He looks up. ‘I will give you your choice of bridegroom, of course. Gregory is my heir, it is not the same. I will make you a good settlement.’
She says, ‘I am like poor Anna Calva. Poyntz’s wife. She would not live among strangers.’
‘But think of Ruth, in the Bible. She adapted herself.’
She laughs. ‘You mistake those times for these? We live in the last days, they at the dawn of the world.’
So. She is one of those who think, what is the use of marrying, or giving in marriage? These are the end times.
He thinks of Wolsey’s daughter, knocking him back. He is not sure he has got up again.
‘I shall leave you,’ she says. ‘I mean, for tonight only. I shall not go without a goodbye.’
She came to tell a story, and she has done it; to see a father, and she has seen one: what’s to keep her now?
Lazarus, of course, died twice. The second time it was for good and all. Travelling east for his bank once, he visited his second and final tomb. It is guarded by ferocious monks, who stick a collecting bowl in your face and make you empty your pockets to see something that, after all, is only proof that miracles do not last. The crippled man walks, but only twice around the churchyard before he collapses in a flailing of limbs. The blind man sees, but the faces he knew in his young days are altered; and when he asks for a mirror, he doesn’t recognise himself at all.
After his daughter has left, Mr Wriothesley comes in. ‘So what about Harry Phillips? Could she tell you anything you didn’t know?’
He says, ‘I see he is a useful man. And mobile.’
‘One might send him after Polo. I do not think Phillips is a papist, sir, for all his pretences. I think he will work for anybody.’
He nods. ‘But I fear only direct force will do for Polo, and a man like Phillips leaves the killing to others.’ He pauses. ‘But no harm to sound Phillips out. Interest him a little. One never knows if there might be a use for him.’
‘After all,’ Call-Me says, ‘you employ Dr Agostino. Even though –’
‘Yes.’ He cuts him off. He uses him even though he suspects him of selling the cardinal. Dr Agostino travels Europe, and sends much useful intelligence back.
He thinks of Tyndale in the bleach fields, his human sins whited-out, speaking from within a haze of smoke. He thinks of the river at Advent, its frozen path. There is a poet who writes of winter wars, where sound is frozen. The soil beneath the snow seals in the noise of stampeding feet, the clank of harness, the pleas of prisoners, the groans of the dying. When the first rays of spring warm the ground, the misery begins to thaw. Groans and cries are unloosed, and last season’s blood makes the waters foul.
Now Tyndale has put on the armour of light. On the last day he will rise in a silver mist, with the broken and the burned, men and women remaking themselves from the ash pile: with Little Bilney and young John Frith, with the lawyers and the scholars and those who could barely read or read not at all but only listen; with Richard Hunne who was hanged in the Lollards’ Tower, and all those martyrs from the years before we were born, who set forth Wyclif’s book. He will clasp hands with Joan Boughton, whom he, the Lord Privy Seal, saw burned to bone when he was a boy. In those blessed days the whole of creation will shine, but till then we see through a glass darkly, not face to face.
Somewhere – or Nowhere, perhaps – there is a society ruled by philosophers. They have clean hands and pure hearts. But even in the metropolis of light there are middens and manure-heaps, swarming with flies. Even in the republic of virtue you need a man who will shovel up the shit, and somewhere it is written that Cromwell is his name.