Wolf Hall (97 page)

“Let me be killed cleanly. I ask nothing, but I ask that.” Swaying on his stool, he is seized, between one heartbeat and the next, in the grip of bodily agitation; he cries out, shudders from head to foot. His hand beats, weakly, at the clean tabletop; and when he leaves him—“Martin, go in, give him some wine”—he is still crying out, shuddering, beating the table.

The next time he sees him will be in Westminster Hall.

On the day of the trial, rivers breach their banks; the Thames itself rises, bubbling like some river in Hell, and washes its flotsam over the quays.

It's England against Rome, he says. The living against the dead.

Norfolk will preside. He tells him how it will be. The early counts in the indictment will be thrown out: they concern sundry words spoken, at sundry times, about the act and the oath, and More's treasonable conspiracy with Fisher—letters went between the two of them, but it seems those letters are now destroyed. “Then on the fourth count, we will hear the evidence of the Solicitor General. Now, Your Grace, this will divert More, because he cannot see young Riche without working himself into a fit about his derelictions when he was a boy—” The duke raises an eyebrow. “Drinking. Fighting. Women. Dice.”

Norfolk rubs his bristly chin. “I have noticed, a soft-looking lad like that, he always does fight. To make a point, you see. Whereas we damned slab-faced old bruisers who are born with our armor on, there's no point we need to make.”

“Quite,” he says. “We are the most pacific of men. My lord, please attend now. We don't want another mistake like Dacre. We would hardly survive it. The early counts will be thrown out. At the next, the jury will look alert. And I have given you a handsome jury.”

More will face his peers; Londoners, the merchants of the livery companies. They are experienced men, with all the city's prejudices. They have seen enough, as all Londoners have, of the church's rapacity and arrogance, and they do not take kindly to being told they are unfit to read the scriptures in their own tongue. They are men who know More and have known him these twenty years. They know how he widowed Lucy Petyt. They know how he wrecked Humphrey Monmouth's business, because Tyndale had been a guest at his house. They know how he has set spies in their households, among their apprentices whom they treat as sons, among the servants so familiar and homely that they hear every night their master's bedside prayers.

One name makes Audley hesitate: “John Parnell? It might be taken wrong. You know he has been after More since he gave judgment against him in Chancery—”

“I know the case. More botched it, he didn't read the papers, too busy writing a billet-doux to Erasmus, or locking some poor Christian soul in his stocks at Chelsea. What do you want, Audley, do you want me to go to Wales for a jury, or up to Cumberland, or somewhere they think better of More? I must make do with London men, and unless I swear in a jury of newborns, I cannot wipe their memories clear.”

Audley shakes his head. “I don't know, Cromwell.”

“Oh, he's a sharp fellow,” the duke says. “When Wolsey came down, I said, mark him, he's a sharp fellow. You'd have to get up early in the morning to be ahead of him.”

The night before the trial, as he is going through his papers at the Austin Friars, a head appears around the door: a little, narrow London head with a close-shaved skull and a raw young face. “Dick Purser. Come in.”

Dick Purser looks around the room. He keeps the snarling bandogs who guard the house by night, and he has not been in here before. “Come here and sit. Don't be afraid.” He pours him some wine, into a thin Venetian glass that was the cardinal's. “Try this. Wiltshire sent it to me, I don't make much of it myself.”

Dick takes the glass and juggles it dangerously. The liquid is pale as straw or summer light. He takes a gulp. “Sir, can I come in your train to the trial?”

“It still smarts, does it?” Dick Purser was the boy whom More had whipped before the household at Chelsea, for saying the host was a piece of bread. He was a child then, he is not much more now; when he first came to Austin Friars, they say he cried in his sleep. “Get yourself a livery coat,” he says. “And remember to wash your hands and face in the morning. I don't want you to disgrace me.”

It is the word “disgrace” that works on the child. “I hardly minded the pain,” he says. “We have all had, saving you, sir, as much if not worse from our fathers.”

“True,” he says. “My father beat me as if I were a sheet of metal.”

“It was that he laid my flesh bare. And the women looking on. Dame Alice. The young girls. I thought one of them might speak up for me, but when they saw me unbreached, I only disgusted them. It made them laugh. While the fellow was whipping me, they were laughing.”

In stories it is always the young girls, innocent girls, who stay the hand of the man with the rod or the ax. But we seem to have strayed into a different story: a child's thin buttocks dimpling against the cold, his skinny little balls, his shy prick shrinking to a button, while the ladies of the house giggle and the menservants jeer, and the thin weals spring out against his skin and bleed.

“It's done and forgotten now. Don't cry.” He comes from behind his desk. Dick Purser drops his shorn head against his shoulder and bawls, in shame, in relief, in triumph that soon he will have outlived his tormentor. More did John Purser to death, he harassed him for owning German books; he holds the boy, feeling the jump of his pulses, his stiff sinews, the ropes of his muscles, and makes sounds of comfort, as he did to his children when they were small, or as he does to a spaniel whose tail has been trodden on. Comfort is often, he finds, imparted at the cost of a flea or two.

“I will follow you to the death,” the boy declares. His arms, fists clenched, grip his master: knuckles knead his spine. He sniffs. “I think I will look well in a livery coat. What time do we start?”

Early. With his staff he is at Westminster Hall before anybody else, vigilant for last-minute hitches. The court convenes around him, and when More is brought in, the hall is visibly shocked at his appearance. The Tower was never known to do a man good, but he startles them, with his lean person and his ragged white beard, looking more like a man of seventy than what he is. Audley whispers, “He looks as if he has been badly handled.”

“And he says I never miss a trick.”

“Well, my conscience is clear,” the Lord Chancellor says breezily. “He has had every consideration.”

John Parnell gives him a nod. Richard Riche, both court official and witness, gives him a smile. Audley asks for a seat for the prisoner, but More twitches to the edge of it: keyed up, combative.

He glances around to check that someone is taking notes for him.

Words, words, just words.

He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming.

JULY 1535

 

On the evening of More's death the weather clears, and he walks in the garden with Rafe and Richard. The sun shows itself, a silver haze between rags of cloud. The beaten-down herb beds are scentless, and a skittish wind pulls at their clothes, hitting the backs of their necks and then veering round to slap their faces. Rafe says, it's like being at sea. They walk at either side of him, and close, as if there were danger from whales, pirates and mermaids.

It is five days since the trial. Since then, much business has supervened, but they cannot help rehearse its events, trading with each other the pictures in their heads: the Attorney General jotting a last note on the indictment; More sniggering when some clerk made a slip in his Latin; the cold smooth faces of the Boleyns, father and son, on the judges' bench. More had never raised his voice; he sat in the chair Audley had provided for him, attentive, head tipped a little to the left, picking away at his sleeve.

So Riche's surprise, when More turned on him, was visible; he had taken a step backward, and steadied himself against a table. “I know you of old, Riche, why would I open my mind to you?” More on his feet, his voice dripping contempt. “I have known you since your youth, a gamer and a dicer, of no commendable fame even in your own house . . .”

“By St. Julian!” Justice Fitzjames had exclaimed; it was ever his oath. Under his breath, to him, Cromwell: “Will he gain by this?”

The jury had not liked it: you never know what a jury will like. They took More's sudden animation to be shock and guilt, at being confronted with his own words. For sure, they all knew Riche's reputation. But are not drinking, dice and fighting more natural in a young man, on the whole, than fasting, beads and self-flagellation? It was Norfolk who had cut in on More's tirade, his voice dry: “Leave aside the man's character. What do you say to the matter in hand? Did you speak those words?”

Was it then that Master More played a trick too many? He had pulled himself together, hauling his slipping gown onto his shoulder; the gown secured, he paused, he calmed himself, he fitted one fist into the other. “I did not say what Riche alleges. Or if I did say it, I did not mean it with malice, therefore I am clear under the statute.”

He had watched an expression of derision cross Parnell's face. There's nothing harder than a London burgess who thinks he's being played for a fool. Audley or any of the lawyers could have put the jury right: it's just how we lawyers argue. But they don't want a lawyer's argument, they want the truth: did you say it, or didn't you? George Boleyn leans forward: can the prisoner let us have his own version of the conversation?

More turns, smiling, as if to say, a good point there, young master George. “I made no note of it. I had no writing materials, you see. They had already taken them away. For if you remember, my lord Rochford, that was the very reason Riche came to me, to remove from me the means of recording.”

And he had paused again, and looked at the jury as if expecting applause; they looked back, faces like stones.