He says, ‘In the king’s service, yes, I regret.’ Henry controls what you look at; you cannot direct the angle of your gaze. ‘I have seen a woman burned.’ He feels a tightness in his chest. ‘But that was a long time ago. She died for Wyclif’s book. It was an old Bible. She was what they call a Lollard, and many such folk were poor and could not read, and so they learned the scriptures by heart. But she whose death I witnessed – this heretic, as they termed her – she was not poor, and not unfriended. It was only that, I being a child, and seeing her bareheaded and in a smock, and seeing their base usage of her, I took her for a beggar.’
She interrupts him. ‘You were a child? Who took you to see such a sight?’
‘I brought myself. Wandering through the city, to Smithfield. It is open ground, where folk suffer even to this day. My family did not know or care where I was. My mother was dead.’
In deference to her English, which is good but not perfect, he is speaking simply; a lesson for me, he thinks, a lesson for us all, to converse with Jenneke. Never have events seemed so plain: no nuance, but a clear noonday light. She says, ‘Stephen Vaughan has told me of how he first met Master Tyndale. He says it was at your instruction.’
‘I hoped at that time Tyndale would come back to England. Be reconciled with the king.’
‘They did not stay within doors,’ she says, ‘because walls have eyes and ears. They went out to the fields – not the
‘Ah,’ he says, ‘not bleach fields, you mean the tenter-grounds. Where they pin out the cloth to dry.’
But she has put in his mind an image of Tyndale strolling in the open air, the ground dissolving into a pale radiance, the city walls whispering into vapour: his shabby cross-grained countryman transfigured, and Meester Vaughan beside him, hood pulled up, his secret instructions hugged to his heart.
‘Tyndale lodged with the merchant Poyntz,’ she says. ‘He lived quiet, like the poor apostles, working to make his Bible, and he sought no payment for the great pains he took. The merchants fed him, they gave him a little money in his hand, and out of that he gave charity. He made no trouble, so the city magistrates were content.’
‘Your overlords, of course, were aware of him.’ The Emperor’s black double eagle flies over the walls; Antwerp is not a free city, though it has free men in it.
She says, ‘He was careful, he drew no attention. The English language is not much understood of them, nor did they know his face. But then the man Phillips came, the man who sold him.’
‘Harry Phillips,’ he says. ‘Yes.’
‘You know him?’
‘I know who paid him. Everybody knows.’
‘Meester Poyntz misliked this person. From the first he warned, beware of that one, you do not know his intentions. But Tyndale was not of that suspicious sort. His mind was only on his book. No one who knew him would have given him away. Only a stranger, and a paid stranger. Phillips learned his habits, where he would walk and with whom converse. He enquired, how far along with his holy work? Then he took the word to Brussels. The councillors did not listen at first but he had money to buy their attention. He brought them papers of Tyndale that he had stolen, letters, and he put them into Latin so that those councillors could understand, and always he was urging how the Emperor would recognise their services, and reward them. And so they decided to seize up Tyndale. They waited for a day when the quarter was empty, when all the merchants were out of town, gone to the Easter market at Bergen. They wished, you understand, to do it quietly and without any disturbance on the street.’
‘Poyntz would be away,’ he says. ‘Everybody.’
‘You will hear he was taken outside the English merchants’ house. This is not true. It was outside the house of Poyntz.’
‘The first news is always wrong,’ he says.
‘Phillips led the soldiers, and they blocked the way. He pointed: “That is the heretic, take him.” The good man went with them like a lamb. Even the soldiers pitied him.’
That narrow place, he can picture it as if he stood there. He has lived and worked in that same net of streets. He sees Tyndale – a little man, irate – turning desperate between gate and wall.
‘When they returned from Bergen the English merchants made their protest. But they could not do anything.’
‘Thomas More paid for Tyndale’s death,’ he says. ‘He vowed he would follow him to the world’s end. He planned it from his prison, and he had plenty of time, the king was patient with More and so was I. You must not think he was straitly confined. His friends sent his dinners in. He had good wine and good fires and good books. He had visitors. Letters came and went.’
‘I would have kept him closer,’ she says.
‘We were remiss, I see that now. Killing Thomas More did not avail because the payments were already in the pocket of that shabby knave Phillips.’
