Dissolution

He smiled his habitual broad grin, showing good teeth a little too large for his mouth.

'Sir. I heard you arrive. A messenger from Lord Cromwell brought a package and said you were back. Forgive me not rising, but I would hate one of these needles to slip.' Despite his grin, his eyes were guarded; if I had seen Cromwell, his disgrace was likely to have been mentioned.

I grunted. I noticed his brown hair was cut short; King Henry, following the close cutting of his own hair to hide his growing baldness, had ordered all at court to wear cropped hair and it had become the fashion. The new style became Mark well enough, though I had decided to keep mine long as it better suited my angular cast of features.

'Could Joan not do your sewing?'

'She was busy preparing for your arrival.'

I picked up a volume from the table. 'You have been reading my Machiavelli, I see.'

'You said I might, for a pastime.'

I dropped into my cushioned armchair with a sigh. 'And how do you like him?'

'Not well. He counsels his prince to practise cruelty and deception.'

'He believes these things are necessary to rule well, and that the calls to virtue of the classical writers ignore life's realities. "If a ruler who wants to act honourably is surrounded by unscrupulous men his downfall is inevitable.'"

He bit off a piece of thread. 'It is a bitter saying.'

'Machiavelli was a bitter man. He wrote his book after being tortured by the Medici prince to whom it was addressed. You had better not tell people you have read it if you go back to Westminster. It is not approved of there.'

He looked up at the hint. 'I may go back? Has Lord Cromwell-'

'Perhaps. We will talk more at dinner. I am tired and would rest a little.' I heaved myself out of the chair and went out. It would do Mark no harm to stew a little.

***

Joan had been busy; there was a good fire in my room and my feather bed had been made up. A candle had been lit and set on the desk beside my most prized possession, a copy of the newly licensed English Bible. It soothed me to see it there, lit up, the focus of the room, drawing the eye. I opened it and ran my fingers across the Gothic print, whose glossy surface shone in the candlelight. Next to it lay a large packet of papers. I took my dagger and cut the seal, the hard wax cracking into red shards and falling onto the desk. Inside was a letter of commission in Cromwell's own vigorous hand, a bound volume of the Comperta and documents relating to the Scarnsea visitation.

I stood a moment, looking through the diamond-paned window into my garden with its walled lawn, peaceful in the gloom. I wanted to be here, in the warmth and comfort of home, as winter came on. I sighed and lay down on the bed, feeling my tired back muscles twitch as they slowly relaxed. I had another long ride tomorrow, and those were becoming more difficult and painful every year.

My disability had come upon me when I was three; I began to stoop forward and to the right, and no brace could correct it. By the age of five I was a true hunchback, as I have remained to this day. I was always jealous of the boys and girls around the farm, who ran and played, while I could manage nothing more than a crab-like scuttle they mocked me for. Sometimes I would cry out to God at the injustice of it.

My father farmed a good acreage of sheep and arable land near Lichfield. It was a great sorrow to him that I could never work the farm, for I was his only surviving child. I felt it all the more because he never reproached me for my infirmity; he simply said quietly one day that when he grew too old to work the farm himself he would appoint a steward, who perhaps could work for me when he was gone.

I was sixteen when the steward arrived. I remember biting back a flood of resentment when William Poer appeared in the house one summer's day, a big, dark-haired man with a ruddy open face and strong hands which enveloped mine in a horny grip. I was introduced to his wife, a pale pretty creature, and to Mark, then a sturdy, tousle-headed toddler who clung to her skirts and stared at me with a dirty thumb in his mouth.

By then it had already been decided that I was to go to London to study at the Inns of Court. It was the coming thing, if one wished financial independence for a son and he had a modicum of brains, to send him to law. My father said that not only was there money to be made, but legal skills would one day help me in supervising the steward's running of the farm. He thought I would return to Lichfield, but I never did.