The news of his father’s bastard, Gregory has received with equanimity. He is glad to have a sister again. ‘When my father is king,’ he says, ‘and wed to Latimer’s wife Kate, and to Meg Douglas and Mary Tudor, you will be the Princess Jenneke, and you and I shall harness a gold chariot with white horses, and speed like Phoebus through Whitehall, and throw buns to the populace. The populace will say, “They are plain-looking folk, but see how their faces shine!” And eat up their buns, and bless us as we hurtle past. Surely you will stay with us? What can Antwerp offer, next to the prospects here?’
When he has cleared an afternoon, he sits with his daughter, the snow-light filtering into his workroom: ‘These books?’ she says.
‘Law books.’
She nods. ‘It was your trade.’
He asks her, ‘How is Antwerp now? I try to picture it. I heard about the fire at Onze-Lieve-Vrouwe church. I hear that the roof fell in.’
‘It was a catastrophe,’ she says. He is pleased that she knows the word. ‘It started with one candle. All the timbers from the transept fell, and destroyed the chapels below. Some of us said it was God destroying idols.’
‘When I came back here I was homesick for Antwerp,’ he says. ‘I was settled among its customs, and I would have stayed there, for not much encouragement. You must believe me – if I had understood your mother to be with child, I would not have left her. I would not have dragged her to England – you see, I was returning home after many years, and I had no patron, and no sure livelihood.’
He sees himself then: sleek young Italian, face attentive, eyes busy. What’s left of that boy? Only his glance around a room to note the exits, his dislike of having people moving behind him. Now he settles into a chair when he sits in it. His hands – formerly busy with knife and quill, taking down the words of other people – now rest lightly one in the other, right fist in left palm. He looks as if he is praying; but with a slight shift of posture – a straightening of the shoulders, a dip of the chin – he looks as if he is spoiling for a fight.
He says to his daughter, ‘I forgive Stephen Vaughan, I must, because he meant for the best, even though it would have been a consolation for me to have you here with me. Such things happen. Misunderstandings. Partings.’
‘It is through Stephen Vaughan I know you,’ she says. ‘He talked of you, long before I had reason to listen. He would not admire a soft man or a foolish man. He loves you next to God.’
‘Do people know who you are? In Antwerp?’
‘Some guess. You are well-remembered in the town.’
No doubt he is. The English merchants would say, go out, Thomas, and hear the gossip. Tell us what our neighbours are saying; when they put their heads together and use Antwerp expressions, what are we missing? He wore in those days an air of dazed amiability, the new boy keen to learn. ‘What can Antwerp offer?’ Gregory has asked Jenneke, and once he had asked it himself. In Italy you thought, this is all I want: this misty view from belvedere or turret, this blue, this gold; this heat filtered through leaves, this mosaic across which the light shifts, where ancient eyes look back at me. It was true there were aspects of Italy he preferred to forget. What can you learn from the memory of hunger and pain, of destitution and flight? He remembers the day when his only task was to drag himself undercover before it was too cold to sleep in the streets. But in Florence his fortunes turned. It was there – and in Venice, in Rome – that he had learned to be sly and sidelong, always vigilant, always ready to take offence or pretend it, ready also to back off with a soft word when the odds were against him. He learned to walk by night, to whisper, to bow to magnificos; to step forward at the right time, with the right hint or suggestion made in a low voice, so magnifico can take the credit.
But then he was restless. He thought, what next? And when he set foot in Antwerp he thought, there is more to want and more to know. The sky so wide and the land so flat, possibilities stretching out before you. In Italy you learned cunning, but in Antwerp, flexibility.
And besides, the shopping! Just step out of your door and you can get a diamond or a broom, you can get knives, candlesticks and keys, ironwork to suit the expert eye. They make soap and glass, they cure fish and they deal in alum and promissory notes. You can buy pepper and ginger, aniseed and cumin, saffron and rice, almonds and figs; you can buy vats and pots, combs and mirrors, cotton and silk, aloes and myrrh.
Already he had friends in the city. On the day he first sailed from England, a boy, he had met a merchant family with their samples of wool, and they had seen the marks of his father’s boot on his face. We shall not forget you, they said, there is a bed for you whenever God brings you to our town. The years rolled by: ‘Good Lord!’ they said, when he knocked at the door. ‘It’s Thomas! He is grown up! He is an Italian now!’
