The Mirror and the Light полностью

‘So we are spying on Wyatt, are we?’ He is amused.

What he sees written are the names of dead men. Rochford. Norris. Weston. In mourning wise since daily I increase … ‘He increases,’ he says. ‘Why does he?’ He reads. Brereton, farewell. ‘Brereton, good riddance,’ he says.

He slaps the paper flat on the desk and runs his finger down the page. ‘Mark is not forgot.’ He pictures the boy’s whey-face. A time thou had’st, above thy poor degree … Addled, desperate, banging on a door in the middle of the night; shut in the dark he believed a phantom had caressed him, with feathers for fingers and holes for eyes.

He thinks, these lines lack form and force. Some of them are more Tom Truth than Tom Wyatt. And yet they present to him those corpses, promiscuous, heaped upon a cart: their pale English limbs intermingled, their heads in sodden bags. And thus farewell each one in heartiwise. The axe is home … He says to Richard, ‘You see that the writer does not plead their case. He says they are dead, he does not say they should be otherwise. He calls George Boleyn to account for pride … and here he says he scarce knows Brereton. So why mourn?’

‘Because grief spreads as a contagion, sir. It grows day by day.’

‘Up to a point.’ He knows about grief. He reads out loud. ‘Ah, Norris, Norris, my tears begin to run, to think what hap did thee so lead or guile, whereby thou hast both thee and thine undone …’ He breaks off. Is that ‘guile’? Or ‘guide’? ‘You note, he does not say anyone else has undone Norris. He does not say someone led him. He says chance led him, or circumstance.’

Richard says, ‘He believes Norris was guilty. It is plain enough.’

‘Well, well,’ he says. ‘And I thought I arranged his fate. But perhaps he did it all himself.’ He holds the paper up to the light. There are no scores or corrections. The watermark is a unicorn.

Richard says, ‘I do not know if these are Wyatt’s own verses, but whoever made them, he knows what passed. You see there is no mention of the lady.’

None is needed, he thinks. Anne is always in the room.

Richard says, ‘Perhaps Wyatt wrote it after all. With his left hand.’

Or his double heart. ‘It changes nothing,’ he says. The axe is home, your heads be in the street. It is only one man’s opinion. But it is one more blow to our faith in our judgement. We did thus, and thus: we might have done less, and let guilty tongues speak for themselves.

He watches as Richard draws the papers together. Pray for the souls of those be dead and gone. ‘I’m going to Mortlake,’ he says. ‘To my new house.’

On his first night he cannot sleep. He walks in the garden till dusk, deciding what needs to be done first: some old rotten stumps to haul out, and fresh planting. He walks the rooms of the house, replanning them, extending them: hall, great chamber and gallery, chapel and library, and the kitchens, sculleries, pantries; the wood store and coal store, wet larder, dry larder, bakehouse. This chamber could be for Call-Me, he thinks, when he stays, and Richard could have this corner room next door – new windows, perhaps? There is still material left over from the king’s rebuilding of Hampton Court, he can order it sent by barge. The principal chambers are served by a privy stair; he will need to set a guard there.

He knew this place in the time of his sister Kat and her husband Morgan Williams. The Williams family had a house on the river, almost under the manor’s wall. They were substantial people, good at laying plans: Thomas, they would say, you’ve not a bad head on your shoulders and if you got away from Walter you could make something of yourself. They imagined he might go as clerk to some cronies of theirs, or be kitchen steward for some dotard, work his way up to book-keeper for a great man. He pictured himself going to Morgan Williams’s tailor and getting a good town coat like his: wearing that coat when, at thirty or thirty-five, he dipped his children in old Bouchier’s font in the parish church. The manor house had always belonged to the archbishops. His uncle had worked in the kitchen one time, and half the lads he knew had picked up pennies for carting wood, for unloading at the wharf, cleaning the fishponds. It did not seem possible he would enter those gates as anything other than a labourer: that he would walk in one day with building plans in his hands, with a new owner’s appraising eye. After all, he never aimed to be an archbishop.