The Courier's Tale by Peter Walker Page B

England:
     
    In each of her two eyes
    There smiles a naked boy
    It would you all suffice
    To see those lamps of joy
    If all the world were sought full far
    Who could find such a wight?
    Her beauty twinkleth like a star
    Within the frosty night.
     
    Everyone rejoiced at this rehabilitation: beauty and virtue rescued from disgrace and bastardy . . .
    ‘Our country suddenly brings forth such events, such comedies and tragedies,’ said Lily, ‘there is no place to compare with it. I am quite homesick, I can hardly bear to stay here another day.’
    ‘You may not have to,’ said Harvel. ‘We may all be going home soon.’
    By this time, Pole had completed his book. Everyone had been eagerly looking forward to this moment. With Katherine and Anne both dead, and Pole back home, in favour and in high office, everyone hoped to be swept along with him.
    Morison left first for England. He had been asked to join Cromwell’s staff. Starkey, who was by then the King’s chaplain, had had a hand in this. Morison’s excitement was wonderful to behold.
    ‘My joy and thanks cannot contain themselves,’ he wrote to Starkey. ‘They burst the banks, flood the fields of my friends, the more witnesses I have of my felicity the more it grows. To be praised by Cromwell! Who will not love the man whom you praise so in your letters to me, to Harvel and to the accomplished Pole.’
    But for a long time Pole still hesitated to send his book. Things were changing so fast, it seemed, that whatever he had written was already out of date. The delay went on for months. In fact, it might have lasted indefinitely, but then there was an unfortunate turn of events. Early one morning, Pole appeared in my room at the top of the house. He had never been up there before and he came in, stooping under the low beams and looking all around, and then went to gaze out the window as if assistance could be found there. Finally he turned and faced me. His agitation was clear. The trouble was as follows: certain quires of his manuscript he had written for the King had vanished. The thief had chosen them carefully: they were the critical part of the argument, and the most personal and sensitive.
    There was one suspect: a Frenchman, one of the ambassador’s servants, who had just left the house.
    ‘Those roosters!’ I said. ‘I never trusted them. I don’t know why you have them in the house.’
    He held up his hand to silence me, and then came to the point. At that very moment, he believed, the missing pages were on their way to Paris for the amusement and delectation of the King of France. It was essential that the King receive the book before any word of it reached him from that mischievous quarter, the French court. I had to hurry to London with the full text.
    ‘I had planned all along to ask you to take it,’ he said, ‘if I ever sent it, that is. As everything is moving so fast, I have had some doubt whether my opinion is needed at all. But this calamity changes everything. Now the book must go. I have watched you for a year and I know you are discreet. I was right to trust you. And I know you ride fast. But there is one thing—’
    ‘What is it?’
    ‘There may be some danger involved in this task,’ he said. ‘The King perhaps will dislike what I have written. You should know that I have used some stern and bitter words. I had no choice. Flattery has been the cause of all the problems. The King is so used to hearing only hymns of praise, it is probable that he will hate me, like a patient who hates the surgeon approaching with the knife. You should know this – and yet there is danger in that as well. The best thing I think would be to take the middle path: you know a little about what I have written, but care for nothing in the world but hunting and hawking and riding across borders.’
    I agreed to this and accepted the commission. In fact there was some truth in this disguise I adopted. People may wear masks which resemble their own faces.