LITMIR.BIZ

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      ‘So must we fetch an Italian doctor?’ Christophe sounds dubious.

      Rafe is here. The whole household is here. Charles Brandon is here, who he thinks is real, till Morgan Williams comes in, who is dead, and William Tyndale, who is in the English House at Antwerp and dare not venture. On the stairs he can hear the efficient, deathly clip of his father's steel-tipped boots.

      Richard Cromwell roars, can we have quiet in here? When he roars, he sounds Welsh; he thinks, on an ordinary day I would never have noticed that. He closes his eyes. Ladies move behind his lids: transparent like little lizards, lashing their tails. The serpent queens of England, black-fanged and haughty, dragging their blood-soaked linen and their crackling skirts. They kill and eat their own children; this is well-known. They suck their marrow before they are even born.

      Someone asks him if he wants to confess.

      ‘Must I?’

      ‘Yes, sir, or you will be thought a sectary.’

      But my sins are my strength, he thinks; the sins I have done, that others have not even found the opportunity of committing. I hug them close; they're mine. Besides, when I come to judgment I mean to come with a memorandum in my hand: I shall say to my Maker, I have fifty items here, possibly more.

      ‘If I must confess, I'll have Rowland.’

      Bishop Lee is in Wales, they tell him. It might take days.

      Dr Butts comes, with other doctors, a swarm of them sent by the king. ‘It is a fever I got in Italy,’ he explains.

      ‘Let's say it is.’ Butts frowns down at him.

      ‘If I am dying, get Gregory. I have things to tell him. But if I am not, don't interrupt his studies.’

      ‘Cromwell,’ Butts says, ‘I couldn't kill you if I shot you through with cannon. The sea would refuse you. A shipwreck would wash you up.’

      They talk about his heart; he overhears them. He feels they should not: the book of my heart is a private book, it is not an order book left on the counter for any passing clerk to scrawl in. They give him a draught to swallow. Shortly afterwards he returns to his ledgers. The lines keep slipping and the figures intermingling and as soon as he has totalled up one column the total unmakes itself and all sense is subtracted. But he keeps trying and trying and adding and adding, until the poison or the healing draught loosens its grip on him and he wakes. The pages of the ledgers are still before his eyes. Butts thinks he is resting as ordered, but in the privacy of his mind little stick figures with arms and legs of ink climb out of the ledgers and walk about. They are carrying firewood in for the kitchen range, but the venison that is trussed to butcher turns back into deer, who rub themselves in innocence on the bark of the trees. The songbirds for the fricassee refeather themselves, hopping back on to the branches not yet cut for firewood, and the honey for basting has gone back to the bee, and the bee has gone back to the hive. He can hear the noises of the house below, but it is some other house, in another country: the chink of coins changing hands, and the scrape of wooden chests over a stone floor. He can hear his own voice, telling some story in Tuscan, in Putney, in the French of the camp and the Latin of a barbarian. Perhaps this is Utopia? At the centre of that place, which is an island, there is a place called Amaurotum, the City of Dreams.

      He is tired out from the effort of deciphering the world. Tired from the effort of smiling at the foe.

      Thomas Avery comes up from the counting house. He sits by him and holds his hand. Hugh Latimer comes and says psalms. Cranmer comes and looks at him dubiously. Perhaps he is afraid that he will ask, in his fever, how is your wife Grete these days?

      Christophe says to him, ‘I wish your old master the cardinal were here to comfort you, sir. He was a comfortable man.’

      ‘What do you know of him?’

      ‘I robbed him, sir. Did you not know? I robbed his gold plate.’

      He struggles to sit up. ‘Christophe? You were the boy at Compiègne?’

      ‘Certainly it was me. Up and down the stairs with buckets of hot water for the bath, and each time a gold cup in the empty bucket. I was sorry to rob him, for he was so gentil. “What, you again with your pail, Fabrice?” You must understand, Fabrice was my name in Compiègne. “Give this poor child his dinner,” he said. I tasted apricots, which I never had before.’

      ‘But did they not catch you?’

      ‘My master was caught, a very great thief. They branded him. There was a hue and cry. But you see, master, I was meant for greater fortune.’

      I remember, he says, I remember Calais, the alchemists, the memory machine. ‘Guido Camillo is making it for François so he will be the wisest king in the world, but the dolt will never learn how to use it.’

      This is fantasy, Butts says, the fever rising, but Christophe says, no, I assure you, there is a man in Paris who has built a soul. It is a building but it is alive. The whole of it is lined with little shelves. On these shelves you find certain parchments, fragments of writing, they are in the nature of keys, which lead to a box which contains a key which contains another key, but these keys are not made of metal, or these enfolded boxes of wood.

      Then what, frog-boy? someone says.

      They are made of spirit. They are what we shall have left, if all the books are burned. They will enable us to remember not only the past, but the future, and to see all the forms and customs that will one day inhabit the earth.

      Butts says, he is burning up. He thinks of Little Bilney, how he put a hand in the candle flame the night before he died, testing out the pain. It seared his shrinking flesh; in the night he whimpered like a child and sucked his raw hand, and in the morning the city councillors of Norwich dragged him to the pit where their forefathers had burned Lollards. Even when his face was burned away, they were still pushing into it the emblems and banners of popery: their fabric singed and fringes alight, their blank-eyed virgins cured like herring and curling in the smoke.

      He asks, politely and in several languages, for water. Not too much, Butts says, a little and a little. He has heard of an island called Ormuz, the driest kingdom in the world, where there are no trees and no crop but salt. Stand at its centre, and you look over thirty miles in all directions of ashy plain: beyond which lies the seashore, encrusted with pearls.

      His daughter Grace comes by night. She makes her own light, wrapped within her shining hair. She watches him, steady, unblinking, till it is morning, and when they open the shutter the stars are fading and the sun and moon hang together in a pale sky.

      A week passes. He is better and he wants work brought in but the doctors forbid it. How will it go forward, he asks, and Richard says, sir, you have trained us all and we are your disciples, you have made a thinking machine that marches forward as if it were alive, you don't need to be tending it every minute of every day.

      Still, Christophe says, they say le roi Henri is groaning as if he were in pain himself: oh, where is Cremuel?

      A message is brought. Henry has said, I am coming to visit. It's an Italian fever, so I am sure not to take it.

      He can hardly believe it. Henry ran away from Anne when she had the sweat: even at the height of his love for her.

      He says, send Thurston up. They have been keeping him on a low diet, invalid food like turkey. Now, he says, we are going to plan – what? – a piglet, stuffed and roasted in the way I once saw it done at a papal banquet. You will need chopped chicken, lardo, and a goat's liver, minced fine. You will need fennel seeds, marjoram, mint, ginger, butter, sugar, walnuts, hen's eggs and some saffron. Some people put in cheese but we don't make the right kind here in London, besides I myself think it is unnecessary. If you're in trouble about any of this send out to Bonvisi's cook, he'll see you right.

      He says, ‘Send next door to prior George, tell him to keep his friars off the streets when the king comes, lest he reform them too soon.’ It's his feeling that the whole process should go slowly, slowly, so people will see the justice of it; no need

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