Chapter 4

We Assign Ourselves a Project

 

 

 

 

The shadows of evening come early to Paris this time of year. So, with the light rapidly fading in the garden courtyard of my pension-hotel on rue de la Comet, I gathered up my papers and my precious diary and prepared to take a walk in the chilly evening air before going over to Hank’s for dinner. She had appointed herself my research assistant and had invited me over, ostensibly, to compare notes on Howard family history. I enjoyed watching her get excited over some small detail before turning around and levelling me with one of her teasing glances, when I had the temerity to disagree with her. I was following what was by now a familiar course, along the imperial bridge that led like a military column to the Napoleonic temple of Les Invalids. My thoughts, however, kept pulling me back to my work.

Although my diarist described such occurrences, as the one just related, with a certain amount of deliberation and detachment, Howard was an actor in the events he described and not just an observer. He was not adverse to examining and questioning his own motives and circumstances to a larger extent than he ever questioned the motives of others. Howard had escaped from turbulent events to a place where the rules about being at home were much more relaxed, but was he headed towards the rest of his life or away from all that remained of it? Do lives have direction, purpose and ends, or do they just plod along from moment to moment taking any one of several possible paths? If we are constantly repeating our past mistakes, is it possible to anticipate the future, just as we can revisit the past, and by a subtle change of course avoid seemingly inevitable consequences? If we were to have more than one chance to make life altering decisions, how likely is it that we would end up in the same place anyway?

These were questions that Howard had put into his journal on some cold and rainy winter night huddled around the meagre warmth of a candle’s flame, tilting his book into the small circle of light around which complete and total darkness was pressing like an inky sea. He permitted himself these reflections in between his accounts of boisterous tavern trysts and long somnolent Latin lectures from threadbare friars who held classes in converted barns and out-buildings. Howard commented about how he and his fellow students would settle down on straw covered floors, trying to avoid stepping or sitting in the urine or fesses of the people and animals who had been there before.

When he was not writing about his friends or the buxom barmaids, or the clerical masters who lectured on rhetoric, philosophy, theology and Socratic logic, or the mysterious Doctor Michel who haunted the same drinking holes as did the students and their still youthful masters, he would reflect on why he was here. By “here”, he did not mean just his own damp and dingy room, but this particular location in time for whatever larger purpose might later come to light. Howard seemed to enjoy these kinds of musings which, in some way, allowed him to make some sense out of the string of events that had gone before.

Hank’s apartment was up three flights of stairs in an older building on Rue St Dominique. The hallway was dark with discoloured, greying walls of rough, uneven plaster. Her door (marked 3E) was heavy and equipped with a double tumbler lock. No one would get in there unless they were let in. When she opened for me, the passage was suddenly awash with light and colour from two lamps and an overhead fixture that dispelled the gloominess of the hallway. The walls, as well, were painted a cheerful peach colour, and there was a feeling of warmth that came from her innate ability to match her simple furnishings to the kinds of spaces she needed to fill. She handed me a glass of white wine, a vin du paye from the Loire, and shepherded me to the coach, where she had a manila folder stuffed with her Howard notes and bibliographical references.

“All right,” she said, crossing her legs and flipping her hair out of her eyes, “here is what I’ve got:

“Henry Howard’s grandfather was Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk and Earl Marshal of England, one of the most powerful figures in the court of Henry VIII and the uncle of both Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, the disgraced and beheaded queens. After Catherine Howard’s execution, the Duke, her uncle, retired from court to look after his country estates, hoping that his removal from under the King’s eye might enable him to avoid the full weight of the royal wrath. This left his eldest son, Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, responsible for looking after the family’s interests at court.”

“Oh yes, we know all about Surrey, the poet.”

“And I’ve checked out the account from the journal, of how the Earl of Surrey fell out of the royal favour, for having decided to take on the Seymours. According to my notes, he was sentenced to death on January 13, 1547 and beheaded on Tower Green six days later. His wife and children became wards of the crown and were given over to the widow of the King’s bastard son, a kindly young woman who was also their Aunt Mary (Howard). Aunt Mary was charged with their financial security and the further education of the children. The younger boy, Henry, was seven years old, at the time.”

“Yes, I forgot to tell you about the Henry Fitzroy and Mary Howard branch of the family tree.”

Hank ignored me and just kept talking. “The Duke, the grandfather, was finally sentenced to follow his son to the chopping block, but the King died first, and the old man was left, by the Seymours, to rot in the Tower.

“The family remained in semi-disgrace (suspected of latent Catholic sympathies) during the brief reign of King Henry’s only surviving son. So it was that Henry Howard was schooled by a hand-picked tutor, for the next six years, under the watchful eye of his de Vere mother and Howard aunt, until in July of 1553, Mary Tudor became Queen. She promptly set about rewarding those previously out of favour and sending to the block those who had prospered under her Protestant brother and his guardians.”

“So the Howards were restored to favour by Queen Mary for their so-called Catholic leanings?”

“One of her first acts, as Queen, was to order the release of the old Duke of Norfolk, from the Tower. What’s more, she took a particular interest in the education of young Henry and eventually arranged to have him travel to Paris to attend the University there. She had a need, so she said, for courtiers with the right kind of education, and also with knowledge of the ways of the world. She assured young Howard that his family would be well cared for in his absence, and that a place in court would await him, upon his return.”

“Yes, it seemed that the tide of events was to be kinder to the younger Henry Howard than it had been to the elder. That would account for all of those journal entries referring to how his father had died and actually expressing anxiety, even guilt, about his own good fortune.

“In a sense, it was like being rewarded for not saving his father from certain death. It seemed to him that the brave often go to the block and those who stand by and do nothing are rewarded and praised for their inaction. Was he, in fact, to profit from his father’s death? Did he somehow want his father to die so that he could have all of these good things?”

“Don’t get carried away, Michael,” said Hank with one of those looks that are usually able to bring me back to a more detached and scholarly approach to the available evidence. “Remember, this is Henry Howard we’re talking about, not Sigmund Freud!”

“I still think that these questions haunted young Howard and chased him across the channel and all the way from Calais to Paris. He had a real case of hero worship for is father. He talks about having carefully stowed in the recesses of his travel bag, some volumes of his father’s poetry, little morsels of a kind of immortality, the only part of the elder Henry Howard that the headsman was not able to take away. He writes about dreaming of executions and murders and waking up in a sweat, not wondering if he himself were dead but asking why he had been left alive at such a cost. I guess I keep thinking of his finding himself in a strange city, in another country, where he knew more Latin for the classroom than French for ordering a meal in a tavern. He describes himself as someone tossed by an absurd and wayward destiny into a place where he had to act out what he was evidently meant to do, to become the man he was somehow meant to be.”

Although Hank didn’t appear to completely buy it, I was beginning to get a picture of this young man who had left me his words from four and a half centuries ago and who seemed to be coming alive again for me from these ancient and crumbling pages. I experienced a strange empathy for him, despite the differences of time and circumstance. I wanted to come to grips with his situation and try to understand how an adolescent, orphaned and alone in a city far from his home, managed his grudge against capricious circumstances and an overwhelming sense of - what was it – guilt, regret, anger? I reached out, with both my hands to hold Hank’s attention long enough to get her to understand.

“Look. This was a kid who was confronting, in his own way, what we would nowadays call his personal ‘ghosts’. I want to try to understand how he must have thought and felt about what he’d been through. Did he continue to feel his father’s absence deeply, or did he resent the man for not being there when he needed him? Did it seem to Howard that his father had left him, so to speak, in the lurch, and did he hate himself for feeling that way? I have to find the words (his words) that will let me inside his head.”

“…and you also have to keep enough objectivity about his words to be able to read what he meant to say or leave unsaid, to listen for his voice and not to drown it out with your own.”

I shook my head, as if I were trying to wake myself up. There was Hank, sitting next to me with that bemused smile that was part scolding and part deep understanding, as if she could see deeply into the recesses of my innermost thoughts. She looked at me, her blue eyes repeatedly glancing in playful jealousy at the little book that had become an extension of my arm and hand. She moved to touch the book with her finger tips only to make me pull it away reflexively, so that she could give me that offended look that she knew I found irresistible.

“Listen,” I said, “I need you to take a page of this to your friend at the Prefecture for an analysis of the handwriting. I need to establish, for sure, that Henry Howard actually wrote these pages. I have to be certain that this is genuine!”

Hank picked up on the fact that I had emphasized the word, “friend,” a little more than I had to, and she nodded, while giving me a self-satisfied smile. “OK,” she said. “What are you going to compare it against? You don’t suppose that Henry Howard has a parking ticket on the municipal police data base anywhere?”

“Here,” I said, reaching into the left breast pocket of my jacket. I pulled out a folded piece of paper, one of the photocopies I had taken in London, of the pages from Howard’s 1583 ‘Poison of Supposed Prophecies’ manuscript. ‘This is from a private Howard family collection. We know this was written by Henry Howard about 28 years after the time of this journal. A handwriting specialist should be able to establish if this (and I pulled a single folded sheet from between two pages of the journal) was penned by the same person.”

“Quite the little detective,” teased Hank with her beguiling playfulness that did not quite mask her own excitement about the venture. “I can take this to Jean-Paul first thing tomorrow morning, or tonight, if you prefer.”

“Tomorrow is quite soon enough,” I said, not trying to hide my annoyance. This pleased her, and she smiled at me with the magnanimous forgiveness of one who knew she had won this round. I wondered if we could ever stop sparring long enough to tell each other how we really felt. Why is it that she can always make me feel like a stammering adolescent, when I’m around her? The feeling, I confess, is not at all unpleasant, but why does she have to enjoy it so much?

Hank saw that she was pushing me just about as far as I wanted to go, so she brought us back to the subject of the pages. “Are you prepared for the let down, if it turns out that Henry Howard did not write this journal?”

“It’s still a great story,” I said, feeling suddenly crest fallen at the possibility that, I confess, I hadn’t seriously considered yet. I must have looked as deflated as I felt, for Hank tilted her head to one side, without a trace of her playful derision, and started to stroke the hand that held the book.

“This means a lot to you, doesn’t it?” she asked with uncharacteristic tenderness.

“If it IS genuine, it could be a very important piece of evidence!”

“It still doesn’t prove that he was Shakespeare,” said Hank, trying to help me to rein in my expectations.

“No, it doesn’t,” I admitted. I was about to add a “but”, when I lost my train of thought and just sat there thinking about what we had just said.