LITMIR.BIZ

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the churchmen’s curses, and the grave resolutions of judges, sacred and secular: all and each can be defeated by a woman’s body, can they not? God should have made their bellies transparent, and saved us the hope and fear. But perhaps what grows in there has to grow in the dark.’

      ‘They say that Katherine is ailing,’ Richard Riche says. ‘If she should die within the year, I wonder what world would be then?’

      But look: we have sat here too long! Let’s be up and out into the gardens of Austin Friars, Master Secretary’s pride; he wants the plants he saw flowering abroad, he wants better fruit, so he nags the ambassadors to send him shoots and cuttings in the diplomatic bag. The keen young clerks stand by, ready to break a code, and all that tumbles out is a rootball, still pulsing with life after a journey through the straits of Dover.

      He wants tender things to live, young men to thrive. So he has built a tennis court, a gift to Richard and Gregory and all the young men of his house. He is not quite beyond the game himself … if he could play a blind man, he says, or an opponent with one leg. Much of the game is tactics; his foot drags, he has to rely on cunning rather than speed. But he is proud of his building and glad to stand the expense. He has recently consulted with the king’s keepers of tennis at Hampton Court, and had the measurements adjusted to those Henry prefers; the king has been to Austin Friars to dine, so it is not unpossible that one day he may call in for an afternoon on the court.

      In Italy, when he was a servant in Frescobaldi’s household, the boys would go out in the hot evening and play games in the street. It was tennis of a kind, a jeu de paume, no racquets but just the hand; they would jostle and push and scream, bounce the ball off the walls and run it along a tailor’s awning, till the master himself would come out and scold: ‘If you boys don’t respect my awning, I’ll shear off your testicles and hang them over the doorway on a ribbon.’ They would say sorry, master, sorry, and back off down the street, and play subdued in a back court. But half an hour later they would be back again, and he can still hear it in his dreams, the rattle as the ball’s crude seam hit metal and skimmed into the air; he can feel the slap of leather against his palm. In those days, though he was carrying an injury he tried to run the stiffness off: this injury he’d got the other year, when he was at Garigliano with the French army. The garzoni would say, look Tommaso, how is it you got the wound in the back of the leg, were you running away? He would say, Mother of God, yes: I was only paid enough for running away, if you want me facing the front you have to pay me extra.

      From this massacre the French scattered, and in those days he was French; the King of France paid his wages. He had crawled then limped, he and his comrades dragging their battered bodies as fast as they could from the victorious Spanish, trying to struggle back to ground not bogged with blood; they were wild Welsh bowmen and renegade Switzers, and a few English boys like himself, all of them more or less confused and penniless, gathering their wits in the aftermath of the rout, plotting a course, changing their nation and their names at need, washing up in the cities to the north, looking for the next battle or some safer trade.

      At the back gate of a great house, a steward had interrogated him: ‘French?’

      ‘English.’

      The man had rolled his eyes. ‘So what can you do?’

      ‘I can fight.’

      ‘Evidently, not well enough.’

      ‘I can cook.’

      ‘We have no need of barbarous cuisine.’

      ‘I can cast accounts.’

      ‘This is a banking house. We are well supplied.’

      ‘Tell me what you want done. I can do it.’ (Already he boasts like an Italian.)

      ‘We want a labourer. What is your name?’

      ‘Hercules,’ he says.

      Against his better judgement, the man laughs. ‘Come in, Ercole.’

      Ercole limps in, over the threshold. The man bustles about his own duties. He sits down on a step, nearly weeping with pain. He looks around him. All he has is this floor. This floor is his world. He is hungry, he is thirsty, he is over seven hundred miles from home. But this floor can be improved. ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph!’ he shouts. ‘Water! Bucket! Allez, allez!’

      They go. Quick they go. A pail arrives. He improves this floor. He improves this house. He does not improve it without resistance. They start him off in the kitchen, where as a foreigner he is ill-received, and where with the blades and spits and boiling water there is so much possibility for violence. But he is better at fighting than you would think: lacking in height, without skill or craft, but almost impossible to knock over. And what aids him is the fame of his countrymen, feared through Europe as brawlers and looters and rapists and thieves. As he cannot abuse his colleagues in their own language, he uses Putney. He teaches them terrible English oaths – ‘By the bleeding nail-holes of Christ’ – which they can use to relieve their feelings behind the backs of their masters. When the girl comes in the mornings, the herbs in her basket damp with dew, they step back, appreciate her and ask, ‘Well, sweetheart, and how are you today?’ When somebody interrupts a tricky task, they say, ‘Why don’t you fuck off out of here, or I’ll boil your head in this pot.’

      Before long he understood that fortune had brought him to the door of one of the city’s ancient families, who not only dealt in money and silk, wool and wine, but also had great poets in their lineage. Francisco Frescobaldi, the master, came to the kitchen to talk to him. He did not share the general prejudice against Englishmen, rather he thought of them as lucky; although, he said, some of his ancestors had been brought close to ruin by the unpaid debts of kings of England long ago dead. He had little English himself and he said, we can always use your countrymen, there are many letters to write; you can write, I hope? When he, Tommaso or Ercole, had improved in Tuscan so much that he was able to express himself and make jokes, Frescobaldi had promised, one day I will call you to the counting house. I will make trial of you.

      That day came. He was tried and he won. From Florence he went to Venice, to Rome: and when he dreams of those cities, as sometimes he does, a residual swagger trails him into his day, a trace of the young Italian he was. He thinks back to his younger self with no indulgence, but no blame either. He has always done what was needed to survive, and if his judgement of what was necessary was sometimes questionable … that is what it is to be young. Nowadays he takes poor scholars into his family. There’s always a job for them, some niche where they can scribble away at tracts on good government or translations of the psalms. But he will also take in young men who are rough and wild, as he was rough and wild, because he knows if he is patient with them they will be loyal to him. Even now, he loves Frescobaldi like a father. Custom stales the intimacies of marriage, children grow truculent and rebel, but a good master gives more than he takes and his benevolence guides you through your life. Think of Wolsey. To his inner ear, the cardinal speaks. He says, I saw you, Crumb, when you were at Elvetham: scratching your balls in the dawn and wondering at the violence of the king’s whims. If he wants a new wife, fix him one. I didn’t, and I am dead.

      Thurston’s cake must have failed because it doesn’t appear that evening at supper, but there is a very good jelly in the shape of a castle. ‘Thurston has a licence to crenellate,’ Richard Cromwell says, and immediately throws himself into a dispute with an Italian across the table: which is the best shape for a fort, circular or star-shaped?

      The castle is made in stripes of red and white, the red a deep crimson and the white perfectly clear, so the walls seem to float. There are edible archers peeping from the battlements, shooting candied arrows. It even makes the Solicitor General smile. ‘I wish my little girls could see it.’

      ‘I’ll send the moulds to your house. Though perhaps not a fort. A flower garden?’ What pleases little girls? He’s forgotten.

      After supper, if there are no messengers pounding at the door, he will often steal an hour to be among his books. He keeps them at all his properties: at Austin Friars, at the Rolls House at Chancery Lane, at Stepney, at Hackney. There are books these days on all sorts of subjects. Books that advise you

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