Young Bess (25 page)

She tried to say, ‘How do I know these are not forgeries?’ but her breath would not come, nor her voice except in a ridiculous squeak; her face was flaming hot while all the rest of her body seemed to be turning to ice, and her heart hammered so loud against her stiff bodice that surely everyone there must be hearing it.

It seemed a long time before she managed to gasp out that she must examine the signatures carefully to make sure they were genuine.

Tyrwhitt took this insulting suggestion very coolly and saw its intention.

‘Your Grace knows your governess’s and steward’s signatures with half an eye,’ he remarked scornfully.

But Bess was not to be stampeded. She pretended to pore over the signatures while her glance shot here and there over the papers, taking in the worst that she could see.

Parry’s was the danger-point; Cat Ashley would never give away anything that he had not; and so it was his report that she scanned in swift sweeping glances. It seemed to be all about a long gossip he had had with Cat Ashley full of ‘she saids’ and ‘I saids’; and Parry had evidently seized his chance to curry favour with the Protector by abusing the man whom he had been serving so assiduously as go-between, for he had written: ‘Then I chanced to say to her that I had heard much evil report of the Lord Admiral…and how cruelly and dishonourably he had used the Queen.’

This from Parry who was always trying to get kind
messages
out of her for the Admiral and running up to town with them as often as he could! Parry the pandar – Parry the traitor!

And out of all this tittle-tattle there were other sentences sticking up like swords – ‘I do remember also that she told me that the Admiral loved the Lady Elizabeth but too well, and had done so a good while: and that the Queen was jealous of her and him. “Why,” said I, “has there been such familiarity indeed between them?” And with that she sighed and said, “I will tell you more another time.” But afterwards she seemed to repent that she had gone so far with me and prayed me that I would not disclose these matters, and I said that I would not. And again she prayed me not to open it, for Her Grace would be dishonoured for ever and she likewise undone. And I said I would not; and I said I had rather be pulled with horses.’

The silence was filling the room. She would have to speak.
She said, still gasping for breath, and every word seemed to come with a gulp, ‘This man – has proved himself false – through and through. I do not believe – my governess ever said such things to him.’

Tyrwhitt answered her. ‘She denied them and would say nothing on her own account, until they were brought face to face, and Parry stood fast to all this that he has written. Then she burst out against him and called him a false wretch and reminded him that he had promised he would never confess till death. That proved his words.’

Again the silence came creeping out of all the corners and crannies of the room. The eyes round her were boring through her like screws, further and further inside her head, until soon all inside it would lie open for them to read.

At last she looked up; she stared full at Sir Robert with eyes that did not shift, though everything at which they looked seemed to waver.

She spoke in a voice that no longer shook. ‘It was a great matter for him to promise such a promise, and to break it.’

Sir Henry Seymour rode to London for the second time in his forty years of life. The first time had been just two years ago when Brother Ned had made such a pother about his going up for the Coronation to be made a knight because his little nephew was being made King; though for the life of him Henry could not see what that had to do with him. He had flatly refused to be made a peer; if they must make a fool of him they must, but they should not carry it on to his children.

Though he knew, of course, that it wasn’t always Coronation-time, he had ever since pictured London as a crammed shrieking whirligig of a fair-ground, where people drank and danced in the streets and sang and shouted like madmen and jostled and trampled each other into the mud, and you couldn’t see the sky because of a lot of mummers and jugglers played their foolery on platforms or ropes high over your head; and he’d got a cricked neck looking at them, and his ears dinged with noise till they buzzed, and his pocket was picked. Nothing in his life, he thought, would ever get him to London again.

Yet here he was on Dapple’s back, going at a steady jog-trot down the long wintry rides of Savernake Forest, with the
brown interlacing pattern of the bare branches overhead, and the crackling of the horse’s hoofs through the frosty crust on the mud underfoot, jogging once again to London town, to see Brother Ned.

He rode through some of Ned’s vast new estates, past his splendid mansion that was rising higher and higher, brick by brick, till all the ninety hundred thousand of them should be placed on top of each other; and even then it would not be the summit, for dozens of newfangled chimneys were to go on the roofs, wriggling up higher and higher as if to vie with the Tower of Babel.

Henry didn’t fancy all the bright red brick and white stone facings and windows wide as walls, glittering with brittle glass. To his mind, the shining surfaces of the modern houses were harsh and garish, like the modern people who live in them, all for show. Even the land was for show nowadays, a desecration in Henry’s eyes equal to blasphemy.

Rich tradesmen were buying country estates so that their sons should be brought up on them as gentry! And those who already had land must have more. But the more land they got, the more they lost touch with it, and with the people on it; cut off from it by their own climbing ambition, climbing after fame and gold, climbing to the top of the tree, spending their vast new wealth only on fine feathers and feathering their own nests with them, never caring what other nests crumbled and fell to the ground.

‘Charity died when chimneys were built,’ the villagers said, for the poor never got such good fare under them as they had been given in the smoke-raftered, draughty old halls of the old gentry.

Had Brother Ned also lost all sense of charity as his chimneys rose? Well, he would soon see.

But he did not, for he did not see Brother Ned nearly as soon nor as easily as he had imagined. The Lord Protector sent word that he would be glad to see his brother Henry as soon as his press of business gave him a moment’s leisure; as soon as that happened he would send word again.

But word did not come. It was Henry who sent word again, and got the same answer.

Henry began to hang about the precincts of the Duke’s palace. Others were doing the same thing, quite a crowd of them. He talked with them in the casual manner with which he talked with neighbouring farmers at a cattle-sale, and found they were waiting to enter the Court of Requests which the Good Duke had set up in his own house to hear the complaints of the poor who could not afford the expense and delay of the law courts, or who had already tried them and been dissatisfied with the results.

For the Good Duke often overruled the decisions of the magistrates, and made them repair the wrongs they had done, so they told Henry gleefully. ‘The law is ended as a man is friended’ – that was true enough of most of the judges, since if a man could not afford to bribe he had better not go to law at all; but it wasn’t true of the Good Duke. He was told the case of the poor widow who had been defrauded of her lands by Paulet, Lord St John, and how that great lord had been forced to redress the injury done her. ‘The Good Duke doesn’t only bring in laws against the rich, he sees to it that they’re carried out. That’s how he makes the mare bite their thumbs,’ they chuckled. ‘He sees that justice is done and the wrong righted.’

Very good, thought Henry, as long as Brother Ned were always right himself. But it struck him as an extraordinary instance of arbitrary power to reverse the magistrates’ decisions entirely on his own judgement.

And he heard other things, not so much to the credit of the Good Duke. He learnt how he had pulled down two parish churches, St Mary-le-Strand and Pardon Church, and a chapel, to provide further building materials for his Somerset House, and had begun to pull down St Margaret’s Church at Westminster as well, but there the cockneys themselves rose in protest and prevented it by mobbing his workmen and driving them away.

‘’Tisn’t right,’ said the waiting suppliants. ‘Pulled down part of St Paul’s too, he did. Might as well pull down Westminster Abbey next.’

‘Ar,’ said Henry.

He made no claim to priority through his kinship to the Protector, gave his name simply as Squire Seymour (he pronounced it Semmor, and Wolf Hall as Ulfall) and waited his turn in the queue of plaintiffs.

Waiting never troubled Henry. He could stand for an hour or more leaning over a gate staring at his pigs or his brood mares. Here he sat stolidly on a bench along with the other clods of English earth, waiting patiently for his turn and staring at the floor or at his fellows, who stared back at a man like many of themselves, dressed in simple country clothes, a leather jerkin, and long heavy riding-boots, and his face ruddy, wrinkled and tanned, itself a square of weather-beaten leather within its tawny fringe of short beard, like the yellow lichen on a red brick wall. His eyes when he raised them from
the ground were as clear and direct in gaze as those of a boy.

You might think that no thoughts stirred behind those placid brown orbs – and perhaps they did not stir much; but they were there, lying deep and still, reflecting the things that he heard spoken round him, reflecting others that he had heard before.

Strange things he had heard told in dropped tones over the wassail cups of this Christmastide, things that sounded like the old wives’ tales told by his nurse in his childhood, and so for the most part he believed them to be – rehashed and served up in a modern setting.

A wise woman, a midwife, living in a neighbouring county, not a hundred miles from London, was awakened on a night of this winter by a strange horseman who wore a mask of black velvet. She was made to mount behind him and ride off with him through the night. Before reaching their destination, the horseman put a bandage over her eyes and tied her hands that she might not raise it. He then lifted her down from the horse and led her into a house which must, she knew, be very large, for she counted her steps going through the hall and then up one staircase, down another, along one, two, three passages, then into a very warm room where the bandage was taken from off her eyes and she saw an enormous fire blazing on a great stone hearth. A carved and gilded bed hung with bright tapestry was at one side of the room, and by it stood a very tall man, richly clothed, and he also was masked and said no word.

In the bed lay a very young and very fair lady, her red-gold hair falling loose over the pillows, who was in labour. The midwife helped her bear the child, all things being put there
necessary, and all the time not a word spoken. When the baby was delivered, the tall man took it from her hands and threw it on the fire. She was then given a bag of gold, her eyes bandaged as before, and she was taken back to her cottage, the horseman making her swear never to say what she had done that night.

But while she had been at work on her task she had contrived, unseen, to cut a small piece from the tapestry hangings of the bed – and if you were to go to Hatfield, where was the Princess Elizabeth, you would find that a certain bed there in a certain room had a piece cut out of its hangings.

At this point the narrative, told invariably by someone who had met – well, not the midwife herself, but a most reliably unimaginative applewoman, laundrymaid, housekeeper, or, in the best instance, one of the new parsons’ wives, not of the flighty young kind that were setting their husbands’ parishes by the ears, but quite a respectable body, who knew the said midwife intimately – at this point the narrative in a lowered voice would draw to its impressive close in the firelight, followed by an awed silence and a few shocked ‘Ohs!’ and ‘Ahs!’

‘I always liked that tale,’ Henry had said when they turned to him.

And to their protestations of its truth as testified by the aforesaid parsons’ wives, housekeepers, laundrymaids, and applewoman, he would only add, ‘Ar. Reckon feminine kind have always known it for true.’

His turn came at last. He was led into a small room where three men sat at a table, and the centre one was his eldest brother, in a dark velvet coat with a broad fur collar, his face longer, thinner, and more lined than Henry had known it, the
lips more tightly compressed within the drooping moustaches that flowed down into the little pointed beard. The narrow, rather hesitating glance the Protector gave at the sturdy countryman who had just entered flashed into disconcerted surprise; his eyebrows shot up into his forehead, making a network of new furrows; the liverish yellow-whites of the eyeballs swerved like those of a shying horse. Henry felt an instant’s most unusual satisfaction, that there was no one he could meet who could make himself look like that.

‘He-ey, brother,’ he said, on exactly the note he would have said, ‘Whoa there, whoa.’ ‘Well met, brother, at last.’

‘But why – why – what have you come for?’

As if to stave off the real answer to this question, the Duke hurriedly followed it with others: ‘Is it the Purbeck stone or the conduit? I’ve told you about 1,600 feet is not an inch too long for it – if I want water brought to my house I must have it, whatever the cost. I said you need not try to recover the French workmen—’

‘It’s not the Frenchies,’ came the answer, slow and sure as doom, ‘
nor
the conduit,
nor
the marble, that I’ve come to see you about. Reckoned I’d better come, as I never had word from you.’

‘But this is the Court of Requests.’

‘Can’t a brother make a request?’ asked Henry a trifle grimly.

‘I’ll see you later, you can’t stay here now. There are people waiting their turn.’

‘I’ve been waiting
my
turn. Now I’ve got it.’

And Henry planted himself on a chair as four-square as a billet of wood, quite unaware of the gasps round him at his
seating himself before the Lord Protector. But the Protector himself did not seem to notice. His tone became hesitant, almost apologetic.

‘The fools never told me it was you. Did you say you were my brother?’

‘Why, no. I reckoned it might be easier to see you if I didn’t.’

The Protector hastily suggested their talking in private, and led the way into another room, where he offered Henry refreshments after his journey, and Henry had to remind him that that had been over three weeks ago. Pitiful the way living in London dulled the wits.

He thought so the more when Ned remembered to ask after his wife and children but had obvious difficulty with their names. Henry then asked after Ned’s good bedfellow and Ned’s nine children, one by his first wife and eight by his present, by name, from the eldest to the youngest. He mentioned that his sisters, Elizabeth Cromwell and Dorothy Smith, were in good health, and he then asked after Brother Tom.

Again there came that startled swerve of the yellow eyeballs. ‘But – you know about him!’ exclaimed Ned incredulously.

‘I know he’s in the Tower. That’s not to say he’s well.’

‘It’s not indeed. You’d best know it at once. There’s no chance for him. There are thirty-three charges of treason against him.’

‘What did Tom say to the witnesses?’

‘The prisoner under Bill of Attainder is not allowed to speak in his own defence.’

‘Hey, what’s this? Thought you’d abolished the new treason
laws and gone back to the good old laws of the Plantagenets – aye, and better. Haven’t you brought it in that there must be two sufficient witnesses against a man, and that they must be confronted with the accused?’

‘Yes, yes, but you don’t understand. That is for the ordinary prisoner at law. This is a Bill of Attainder.’

‘And why deny to your brother the justice you’d give to the ordinary prisoner?’

‘Attainder is a perfectly constitutional proceeding. It is part of the course of the law.’

‘Then dang and blast the law! I want justice.’

The Protector shifted his ground.

‘You asked me what the prisoner has said. The whole Council waited on him in the Tower, with the exception of Archbishop Cranmer and myself, and told him the charges against him, and he refused to say one word in answer to them – except in open trial.’

‘Why didn’t you go?’

‘I? But – naturally – it would have been too painful – for both of us.’

‘Not as painful as getting beheaded.’

There was a stunned pause. Then Henry added, ‘Why won’t you give him a fair chance in open trial?’

‘I? I? It is not my doing, I took no part in drawing up the articles against him. Nor at his examination in the Tower – I told you I was not there.’

‘And again I say, why not? Tom might ha’ spoken to you.’

‘I spoke to him before. I gave him full warning again and again. So did others. Old Russell warned him. He wouldn’t listen.’

‘I’m not asking what was said before the trial—’

‘I tell you, it wasn’t a trial.’

‘And in God’s name, brother,’ roared Henry, rising slowly to his feet and leaning over the little table behind which Somerset had entrenched himself, ‘
why not?
’

‘The Council decided against it, for the better avoidance of scandal. It is doubtful whether an open trial would have given him any better chance. Anyway, the Government decided against it.’