batting him on the shoulder, absent, distracted, almost as if they were equals, as if they were friends; his eyes are turned back to Anne, his steps are turned back to his rivals.
One tradesman the same as the next? Not in the real world. Any man with a steady hand and a cleaver can call himself a butcher: but without the smith, where does he get that cleaver? Without the man who works in metal, where are your hammers, your scythes, your sickles, scissors and planes? Your arms and armour, your arrowheads, your pikes and your guns? Where are your ships at sea and their anchors? Where are your grappling hooks, your nails, latches, hinges, pokers and tongs? Where are your spits, kettles, trivets, your harness rings, buckles and bits? Where are your knives?
He remembers the day they heard the Cornish army was coming. He was – what – twelve? He was in the forge. He had cleaned the big bellows and he was oiling the leather. Walter came over and looked at it. ‘Wants caulking.’
‘Right,’ he said. (This was the kind of conversation he had with Walter.)
‘It won't do itself.’
‘I said, right, right, I'm doing it!’
He looked up. Their neighbour Owen Madoc stood in the doorway. ‘They're on the march. Word's all down the river. Henry Tudor ready to fight. The queen and the little ones in the Tower.’
Walter wipes his mouth. ‘How long?’
Madoc says, ‘God knows. Those fuckers can fly.’
He straightens up. Into his hand has floated a four-pound hammer with an ash shaft.
The next few days they worked till they were ready to drop. Walter undertook body armour for his friends, and he to put an edge on anything that can cut, tear, lacerate rebel flesh. The men of Putney have no sympathy with these heathens. They pay their taxes: why not the Cornish? The women are afraid that the Cornishmen will outrage their honour. ‘Our priest says they only do it to their sisters,’ he says, ‘so you'll be all right, our Bet. But then again, the priest says they have cold scaly members like the devil, so you might want the novelty.’
Bet throws something at him. He dodges. It's always the excuse for breakages, in that house: I threw it at Thomas. ‘Well, I don't know what you like,’ he says.
That week, rumours proliferate. The Cornishmen work under the ground, so their faces are black. They are half-blind and so you can catch them in a net. The king will give you a shilling for each you catch, two shillings if it's a big one. Just how big are they? Because they shoot arrows a yard long.
Now all household objects are seen in a new light. Skewers, spits, larding needles: anything for defence at close quarters. The neighbours are paying out to Walter's other business, the brewery, as if they think the Cornishmen mean to drink England dry. Owen Madoc comes in and commissions a hunting knife, hand-guard, blood gutter and twelve-inch blade. ‘Twelve-inch?’ he says. ‘You'll be flailing around and cut your ear off.’
‘You'll not be so pert when the Cornish seize you. They spit children like you and roast them on bonfires.’
‘Can't you just slap them with an oar?’
‘I'll slap your jaw shut,’ Owen Madoc bellows. ‘You little fucker, you had a bad name before you were born.’
He shows Owen Madoc the knife he has made for himself, slung on a cord under his shirt: its stub of blade, like a single, evil tooth. ‘What do you think?’
‘Christ,’ Madoc says. ‘Be careful who you leave it in.’
He says to his sister Kat – just resting his four-pound hammer on her windowsill at the Pegasus – why did I have a bad name before I was born?
Ask Morgan Williams, she says. He'll tell you. Oh, Tom, Tom, she says. She grabs his head and kisses it. You don't put yourself out there. Let him fight.
She hopes the Cornish will kill Walter. She doesn't say so, but he knows it.
When I am the man of this family, he says, things will be different, I can tell you.
Morgan tells him – blushing, for he is a very proper man – that boys used to follow his mother in the street, shouting ‘Look at the old mare in foal!’
His sister Bet says, ‘Another thing those Cornish have got, they have got a giant called Bolster, who's in love with St Agnes and he follows her around and the Cornish bear her image on their flags and so he's coming to London after them.’
‘Bolster?’ he sneers. ‘I expect he's that big.’
‘Oh, you will see,’ Bet says. ‘Then you won't be so quick with your answers.’
The women of the district, Morgan says, clucked around his mother pretending concern: what will it be when it's born, she's like the side of a house!
Then when he came into this world, bawling, with clenched fists and wet black curls, Walter and his friends reeled through Putney, singing. They shouted, ‘Come and get it, girls!’ and ‘Barren wives served here!’
They never noted the date. He said to Morgan, I don't mind. I don't have a natal chart. So I don't have a fate.
As fate had it, there was no battle in Putney. For the outriders and escapees, the women were ready with bread knives and razors, the men to bludgeon them with shovels and mattocks, to hollow them with adzes and to spike them on butchers' steels. The big fight was at Blackheath instead: Cornishmen cut up into little pieces, minced by the Tudor in his military mincing machine. All of them safe: except from Walter.
His sister Bet says, ‘You know that giant, Bolster? He hears that St Agnes is dead. He's cut his arm and in sorrow his blood has flowed into the sea. It's filled up a cave that can never be filled, which goes into a hole, which goes down beneath the bed of the sea and into the centre of the earth and into Hell. So he's dead.’
‘Oh, good. Because I was really worried about Bolster.’
‘Dead till next time,’ his sister says.
So on a date unknown, he was born. At three years old, he was collecting kindling for the forge. ‘See my little lad?’ Walter would say, batting him fondly around the head. His fingers smelled of burning, and his palm was solid and black.
In recent years, of course, scholars have tried to give him a fate; men learned in reading the heavens have tried to work him back from what he is and how he is, to when he was born. Jupiter favourably aspected, indicating prosperity. Mercury rising, offering the faculty of quick and persuasive speech. Kratzer says, if Mars is not in Scorpio, I don't know my trade. His mother was fifty-two and they thought she could neither conceive nor deliver a child. She hid her powers and disguised him under draperies, deep inside her, for as long as she could contrive. He came out and they said, what is it?
In mid-December, James Bainham, a barrister of the Middle Temple, abjures his heresies before the Bishop of London. He has been tortured, the city says, More himself questioning him while the handle of the rack is turned and asking him to name other infected members of the Inns of Court. A few days later, a former monk and a leather-seller are burned together. The monk had run in consignments of books through the Norfolk ports and then, stupidly enough, through St Katharine's Dock, where the Lord Chancellor was waiting to seize them. The leather-seller had possession of Luther's Liberty of a Christian Man, the text copied out
