The King's Achievement Part 8

Ralph listened with all his ears. Cromwell was not very communicative on the subject of the Religious houses, but Ralph had gathered from hints of this kind that something was preparing.

When supper was over and the servants were clearing away, Cromwell went to the window where the gla.s.s glowed overhead with his new arms and scrolls--a blue coat with Cornish choughs and a rose on a fess between three rampant lions--and stood there, a steady formidable figure, with his cropped head and great jowl, looking out on to the garden.

When the men had gone he turned again to Ralph.

"I have something for you," he said, "but it is greater than those other matters--a fool could not do it. Sit down."

He came across the room to the fireplace, as Ralph sat down, and himself took a chair by the table, lifting the baudkin cushion and settling it again comfortably behind him.

"It is this," he said abruptly. "You know that Master More has been in trouble. There was the matter of the gilt flagon which Powell said he had taken as a bribe, and the gloves lined with forty pound. Well, he disproved that, and I am glad of it, glad of it," he repeated steadily, looking down at his ring and turning it to catch the light. "But there is now another matter--I hear he has been practising with the Holy Maid and hearkening to her ravings, and that my Lord of Rochester is in it too. But I am not sure of it."

Cromwell stopped, glanced up at Ralph a moment, and then down again.

"I am not sure of it," he said again, "and I wish to be. And I think you can help me."

Ralph waited patiently, his heart beginning to quicken. This was a great matter.

"I wish you to go to him," said his master, "and to get him into talk.

But I do not see how it can be managed."

"He knows I am in your service, sir," suggested Ralph.

"Yes, yes," said Cromwell a little impatiently, "that is it. He is no fool, and will not talk. This is what I thought of. That you should go to him from me, and feign that you are on his side in the matter. But will he believe that?" he ended gloomily, looking at the other curiously.

There was silence for a minute, while Cromwell drummed his fingers softly on the table. Then presently Ralph spoke.

"There is this, sir," he said. "I might speak to him about my brother Chris who, as I told you, has gone to Lewes at the Maid's advice, and then see what Master More has to say."

Cromwell still looked at him.

"Yes," he said, "that seems reasonable. And for the rest--well, I will leave that in your hands."

They talked a few minutes longer about Sir Thomas More, and Cromwell told the other what a quiet life the ex-Chancellor had led since his resignation of office, of his house at Chelsea, and the like, and of the decision that he had apparently come to not to mix any further in public affairs.

"There is thunder in the air," he said, "as you know very well, and Master More is no mean weather-prophet. He mis-liked the matter of the Lady Katharine, and Queen Anne is no friend of his. I think he is wise to be quiet."

Ralph knew perfectly well that this tolerant language did not represent Cromwell's true att.i.tude towards the man of whom they were speaking, but he a.s.sented to all that was said, and added a word or two about Sir Thomas More's learning, and of the pleasant manner in which he himself had been received when he had once had had occasion to see him before.

"He was throwing Horace at me," said the other, with a touch of bitterness, "the last time that I was there. I do not know which he loves best, that or his prayers."

Again Ralph recognised an animus. Cromwell had suffered somewhat from lack of a cla.s.sical education.

"But it is a good thing to love the cla.s.sics and devotion," he went on presently with a sententious air, "they are solaces in time of trouble.

I have found that myself."

He glanced up at the other and down again.

"I was caught saying our Lady matins one day," he said, "when the Cardinal was in trouble. I remember I was very devout that morning."

He went on to talk of Wolsey and of his relations with him, and Ralph watched that heavy smooth face become reminiscent and almost sentimental.

"If he had but been wiser;" he said. "I have noticed again and again the folly of wise men. There is always clay mixed with gold. I suppose nothing but the fire that Fryth denied can purge it out; and my lord's was ambition."

He wagged his head in solemn reprobation, and Ralph did not know whether to laugh or to look grave. Then there fell a long silence, and Cromwell again fell to fingering his signet-ring, taking it off his thumb and rolling it on the smooth oak, and at last stood up with a brisker air.

"Welt," he said, "I have a thousand affairs, and my son Gregory is coming here soon. Then you will see about that matter. Remember I wish to know what Master More thinks of her, that--that I may know what to think."

Ralph understood sufficiently clearly, as he walked home in the evening light, what it was that his master wanted. It was no less than to catch some handle against the ex-chancellor, though he had carefully abstained from saying so. Ralph recognised the adroitness, and saw that while the directions had been plain and easy to understand, yet that not one word had been spoken that could by any means be used as a handle against Cromwell. If anyone in England at that time knew how to wield speech it was his master; it was by that weapon that he had prevailed with the King, and still kept him in check; it was that weapon rashly used by his enemies that he was continually turning against them, and under his tutoring Ralph himself had begun to be practised in the same art.

Among other causes, too, of his admiration for Cromwell, was the latter's extraordinary business capacity. There was hardly an affair of any importance in which he did not have a finger at least, and most of them he held in the palm of his hand, and that, not only in the ma.s.s but in their minutest details. Ralph had marvelled more than once at the minutiae that he had seen dotted down on the backs of old letters lying on his master's table. Matters of Church and State, inextricably confused to other eyes, was simple to this man; he understood intuitively where the key of each situation lay, and dealt with them one after another briefly and effectively. And yet with all this no man wore an appearance of greater leisure; he would gossip harmlessly for an hour, and yet by the end had said all that he wished to say, and generally learnt, too, from his companion whoever he might be, all he wished to learn. Ralph had watched him more than once at this business; had seen delicate subjects introduced in a deft unsuspicious sentence that roused no alarm, and had marvelled at his power to play with men without their dreaming of what was going forward.

And now it was Master More that was threatened. Ralph knew well that there was far more behind the scenes than he could understand or even perceive, and recognised that the position of Sir Thomas was more significant than would appear, and that developments might be expected to follow soon.

For himself he had no shrinking from his task. He understood that government was carried on by such methods, and that More himself would be the first to acknowledge that in war many things were permissible that would be outrageous in times of peace, and that these were times of war. To call upon a friend, to eat his bread and salt, and talk familiarly with him, and to be on the watch all the while for a weak spot through which that friend might be wounded, seemed to Ralph, trained now and perfected in Cromwell's school, a perfectly legitimate policy, and he walked homewards this summer evening, pleased with this new mark of confidence, and anxious to acquit himself well in his task.

The house that Ralph occupied in Westminster was in a street to the west of the Abbey, and stood back a little between its neighbours. It was a very small one, of only two rooms in width and one in depth, and three stories high; but it had been well furnished, chiefly with things brought up from Overfield Court, to which Ralph had taken a fancy, and which his father had not denied him. He lived almost entirely in the first floor, his bedroom and sitting-room being divided by the narrow landing at the head of the stairs that led up to the storey above, which was occupied by Mr. Morris and a couple of other servants. The lower storey Ralph used chiefly for purposes of business, and for interviews which were sufficiently numerous for one engaged in so many affairs.

Cromwell had learnt by now that he could be trusted to say little and to learn much, and the early acts of many little dramas that had ended in tragedy had been performed in the two gravely-furnished rooms on the ground floor. A good deal of the law-business, in its early stages, connected with the annulling of the King's marriage with Queen Katharine had been done there; a great canonist from a foreign university had explained there his views in broken English, helped out with Latin, to a couple of shrewd-faced men, while Ralph watched the case for his master; and Cromwell himself had found the little retired house a convenience for meeting with persons whom he did not wish to frighten over much, while Ralph and Mr. Morris sat alert and expectant on the other side of the hall, with the door open, listening for raised voices or other signs of a quarrel.

The rooms upstairs had been furnished with considerable care. The floors of both were matted, for the plan involved less trouble than the continual laying of clean rushes. The sitting-room was panelled up six feet from the floor, and the three feet of wall above were covered with really beautiful tapestry that Ralph had brought up from Overfield.

There was a great table in the centre, along one side of which rested a set of drawers with bra.s.s handles, and in the centre of the table was a deep well, covered by a flap that lay level with the rest of the top.

Another table stood against the wall, on which his meals were served, and the door of a cupboard in which his plate and knives were kept opened immediately above it, designed in the thickness of the wall.

There were half-a-dozen chairs, two or three other pieces of furniture, a backed settle by the fire and a row of bookshelves opposite the windows; and over the mantelpiece, against the tapestry, hung a picture of Cromwell, painted by Holbein, and rejected by him before it was finished. Ralph had begged it from the artist who was on the point of destroying it. It represented the sitter's head and shoulders in three-quarter face, showing his short hair, his shrewd heavy face, with its double chin, and the furred gown below.

Mr. Morris was ready for his master and opened the door to him.

"There are some letters come, Mr. Ralph, sir," he said. "I have laid them on your table."

Ralph nodded, slipped off his thin cloak into his servant's hands without speaking, laid down his cane and went upstairs.

The letters were very much what he expected, and dealt with cases on which he was engaged. There was an entreaty from a country squire near Epping Forest, whose hounds had got into trouble with the King's foresters that he would intercede for him to Cromwell. A begging letter from a monk who had been ejected from his monastery for repeated misconduct, and who represented himself as starving; Ralph lifted this to his nostrils and it smelt powerfully of spirits, and he laid it down again, smiling to himself. A torrent of explanation from a schoolmaster who had been reported for speaking against the sacrament of the altar, calling the saints to witness that he was no follower of Fryth in such detestable heresy. A dignified protest from a Justice of the Peace in Kent who had been reproved by Cromwell, through Ralph's agency, for acquitting a st.u.r.dy beggar, and who begged that he might in future deal with a responsible person; and this Ralph laid aside, smiling again and promising himself that he would have the pleasure of granting the request. An offer, written in a clerkly hand, from a fellow who could not sign his name but had appended a cross, to submit some important evidence of a treasonable plot, on the consideration of secrecy and a suitable reward.

A year ago such a budget would have given Ralph considerable pleasure, and a sense of his own importance; but business had been growing on him rapidly of late, as his master perceived his competence, and it gave him no thrill to docket this one, write a refusal to that, a guarded answer to another, and finally to open the well of his table and drop the bundle in.

Then he turned round his chair, blew out one candle carefully, and set to thinking about Master Thomas More.

CHAPTER V

MASTER MORE

It was not until nearly a month later that Ralph made an opportunity to call upon Sir Thomas More. Cromwell had given him to understand that there was no immediate reason for haste; his own time was tolerably occupied, and he thought it as well not to make a show of over-great hurry. He wrote to Sir Thomas, explaining that he wished to see him on a matter connected with his brother Christopher, and received a courteous reply begging him to come to dinner on the following Thursday, the octave of the a.s.sumption, as Sir Thomas thought it proper to add.