First off, huge thanks to everyone who has reviewed, favourited and story-alerted so far. It makes me happy! *tacklehugs* And makes me want to post more, too. Joy.

Secondly, I hope everyone bears with the change in tone in this chapter. I have an outline in my head of where I want this story to go, and it involves a little ground-work first. You'll have to trust me when I say that everything connects…somehow =D

More comprehensive author's notes at the end of the chapter.

2. Fata Morgana

February 1536

It had occurred to Thomas Cromwell, through a not entirely painless process of trial and error, that the numerous and varying causes of disquiet in the world could very rarely be realistically countered through the small virtues of a set of scales and an abacus. Yet it was with precisely these humble tools that he had been equipped to repel the combined forces of corruption and iniquity, the collective crises of superstition arising from portentous alignments of celestial bodies (the recent sighting of a comet over the Kentish marshes had provoked a veritable storm of doom-mongering), and, less expected but entirely more problematic, the meddlesome infractions created by one Ferdinand Cawley, latterly usurped dean of Rochester.

Cawley's history had been a colourful one, to say the least. Removed from his position at Rochester after his unfortunate taste for nature's more bacchanalian properties had led to a suspicious increase in the growth in poppies outside his study window, he had enjoyed a brief flourishing in the aftermath of the dissolution of the local abbey when his vociferous stance against the building's demolition had elevated his previously insignificant reputation to the level of minor notoriety. Cawley had campaigned tirelessly for approximately one day, before his arrest by a muster of local noblemen and his own premature boredom with his briefly burning activist spirit conspired against him, and he retired deeper into Kent in a state of disappointingly non-existent infamy.

But the crusading heart chafes at dormancy…or at least, the inspirational effects of good ale can result in surprising resourcefulness. By the September of 1534, Cawley had been living in modest obscurity in Meopham where he had opened his house to the local poor, offering provisions and sustenance of a tactfully non-religious ilk. Meanwhile, it appeared that he had acquired a fervent but otherwise largely harmless taste for carpentry; throughout the year of 1535, his spacious, previously dilapidated house flourished piecemeal, sprouting adjacent lean-tos, precarious extensions to the attic that drooped over the road, teetering curlicues of façade that overlapped the original building in an irregular quadrangle so that the mingled rich and erratic grandeur of the building seemed to straggle past and present, and it was possible to stand between the two opposing walls, neither within the house nor without it, but stranded somewhere in-between like the incongruent patchwork tending an elderly blanket. At any time of the day, it was possible to detect Cawley himself, scrambling like an industrious termite over the varyingly decrepit and burgeoning parts of the building. In time, it became something of a spectator sport for the townsfolk to gather and observe the vertiginous feats of their local eccentric, and occasionally exchanging wagers as to whether today he might lose his tentative balance and plunge to his death from the highest tower of his wonderful but mystifying creation.

Thus it was perhaps not unsurprising that it was a disgruntled neighbour who first raised a suspicious eyebrow as to just what precisely was dwelling within the confines of this architectural prodigy. Within days of the first murmurings of possible transgression in their midst, the sergeant-at-arms and his men paid Cawley a visit, and panel by panel, board by board, splinter by splinter, the house was taken apart.

But instead of exiled dissidents from the Continent plotting the overthrow of the monarchy from the crow's-nest of Cawley's house, or gold and jewels beaten into the floorboards, what they found there were priests, holed up like skeletons of the murdered in the hollow walls of the building. About him, Cawley had built the most splendid, tattered palace of recusancy in the kingdom.

It could have been argued that Cawley had been misled by sentiment. He was an elderly man, impressionable to the tender wiles of the heart, and these recalcitrant dogs of the old faith had surely preyed upon that and exploited him most heinously. Yet the artfulness of Cawley's deception was undeniable, as was its sheer scale, and even if it could be proposed that he had been taken advantage of and duped into providing shelter for traitors to the realm, the evidence provided in the shape of his tottering castle of fallacy told otherwise. Along with those he had sought to protect, Cawley was clapped in irons and removed forthwith to the gaol.

And that should have been the end of the matter. Indeed, it would have been, had Thomas Starkey not chosen that moment to return home to England from Venice.

Cromwell's suspicions should have been aroused by the irritatingly tactful reprimand woven into the impeccable rhetoric of Starkey's letter:

On matters regarding policy and governance, we may not have always agreed, but my dear friend, I have firmly held the belief that in you I trust to ever speak the truth on all issues, and that it has never been the case that, as wiser men have stated, probitas laudatur er alget.

Well, touché. He was playing back before the die had even been cast. Cromwell was well-acquainted with the idiosyncrasies of his own conscience, but the walls around him were sprung with an acrostic of trick-locks through which he pleased to task no one to find their way. If it had been anyone but Starkey, he would have dismissed the matter out of hand and applied his entreating letter to the flame, but Cromwell owed the man several more favours than he cared to list, and…well, it was possible that Starkey held his own shining key. Perhaps they had been friends too long for him not to.

So grimly, expecting the worst, he read on. As Starkey posited it, this man Cawley was an embodiment of the culture of intolerance that was now prospering out of the ruins of torn-down corruption, a martyr to the enlightened era that was as emblematic of the commendable generosity of the human spirit as it was the of Reformation's own flaws, flaws that could have potentially far-reaching consequences should they not be checked in time and brought to a unifying conclusion. If, Starkey argued, Cawley was released and afforded the freedom to present his case to an assembly (perhaps even to Cromwell himself, the letter wheedled implicitly), then surely a resolution that benefited all concerned might be reached. After all, could charity, even when wrong-headed, ever be considered truly a crime?

It was an absurd notion.

And utterly impracticable given the circumstances. To set one precedent for listening to the demands of traitors would open the sluice to every other plaintive in the land to come knocking at the gates of London with their grievances like so many pilgrims seeking the alms of a miracle-worker. Clearly Starkey had spent far too long troubling the libraries of Italy to have developed any form of understanding of the complexities of the new world order. One could not simply acquiesce to these people; it was only through a process of the systematic enforcement of the reformed faith that the deeply embedded habits of exploitation and immorality could be driven out for good. And here was this lawyer with the Venetian sun in his eyes, shambling back into the country with ideas about conversation.

I flatter myself not; hearing of your recent successes leads me to presume that you have been able to subsist most admirably without my guidance, and yet I nonetheless have a fancy to look in on you whilst in London. Should it please you to be available for me to look at, I will attend on you at the earliest convenience.

Starkey could couch his visit in whatever cosily familiar terms he liked; quite baldly, it was a petition, and a most inconvenient one at that.

And yet…. Yet something in the letter had sparked off a fire-line in Cromwell's mind that proved impossible to ignore. He was guilty of his own share of legal wrangling in the past, after all. He found himself getting the chancellery records from last year down off the shelf and flicking through to the report on Ferdinand Cawley's arrest. The man had been interviewed extensively throughout the month of November, but had never been brought to trial. There were addenda cluttering the margins of the report, scribbled in a brisk, unfamiliar hand, and with a reluctant curiosity Cromwell inspected each and every one of them, slipping with unconscious ease into habitual fervency as his shoulders hunched in concentration. It didn't take long to refresh his memory on the particulars of the case; he remembered feeling a small glimmer of amused admiration for the man's audacity. Treason it might well have been, but there was something almost charmingly imprudent in the sheer imagination of Cawley's dissemblance. Still, he seriously compromised himself by robustly refusing to confess to any wrong-doing. At the time, Rich had implied the possible effectualness of strong-arm tactics, but that solution had seemed…inelegant at best, monstrous at worst. It would have been a dark day at court when the men of the chancellery resorted to roughing up elderly prisoners. A younger man would have borne it better. No, there had to be a way of reasoning with the fellow. Everyone, it usually emerged, could be found to be persuadable, given the right incentives.

Although, as the report now told Cromwell, evidently not.

He had pulled his chair up at a careless angle to his desk, and he now sat with his legs crossed and twisted to the side, one tense hand supporting the engrossed tilt of his head as he bent forward over the papers. The transcriptions of Cawley's interrogation were frustratingly disjointed; whoever had compiled them clearly had no idea about how to succinctly collate material. Here, something from the twenty-fifth of November last year, six days after Cawley's arrest: the prisoner was asked about his involvement with the Suffolk insurgents, a rising of very little significance that had taken place towards the end of 1533 that had been easily put down by the Duke's own retainers. Cawley denied the accusation emphatically, and with some justification. He had still been attached at Rochester at that time, and for him to have taken part in a rebellion some hundred and twenty miles away would have been nigh on impossible. However, the next part of the transcription seemed to argue otherwise; here Cawley claimed to have been in contact with several of the uprising's leaders, one of whom was later to be discovered secreted behind a false panel in Cawley's own pantry, and that indeed he had liaised with a number of them as recently as the June of that year. Which would have been entirely feasible as evidence for Cawley's faltering alibi, had this confession not come two days before Cawley's strident denial of having any knowledge of the uprising whatsoever.

And here -- Cromwell flicked the edge of the paper in disgust, as though he could somehow prompt its writer into being less wilfully obtuse. The twenty-eighth of November: Cawley was interviewed by Sir Henry Rotham, a reliable enough source. But in this transcription, one of the very men Cawley had been convicted of sheltering, and who he himself had identified and named six days earlier, was now the same man Cawley claimed to know not a thing about.

Upon my soul, he is a stranger to me, sir.

Either the man was mad, or Cromwell was employing the services of incompetent knaves.

In brief submission to his fraying temper, he flung the report back down on his desk before his patience finally extinguished itself in a long sigh and he sat back in his chair, grinding the heels of his hands into his eyes. A headache had been growing behind his temples all morning, and this irritation was doing nothing to relieve it. He rested his head against the back of the chair, his eyes absently pursuing the spidery fissure of a long crack in the ceiling as his thoughts expanded outward. So it was the desire of Starkey's conscience that they pay court to the whims of a lunatic who couldn't keep his story straight from one day to the next? Of course, the frustration was that it would be impossible to discern whether the fault indeed lay with the clerk who had originally set the report down, and therein lay the very real danger of the matter; if the dates of Cawley's interviews had simply been transposed, then human error could be responsible for the dismissal of a case against a traitor to the realm. As it stood, Cawley's conviction, should Starkey indeed choose to pursue it, was potentially unsafe. Cromwell's headache made its own feelings about that idea clear with a sharp twinge of discomfort, and he grimaced as he pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to both stave off the pain and crystallize the possible avenues of mistake. How could he himself have missed this when the report was first issued? So many hundreds of different writs passed through his hands from day to day that it was all but impossible to distinguish one from the other in his memory, but that was no real excuse. Was it possible that Starkey had somehow obtained copies of the transcription, and that was why he seemed so confident of the old man's acquittal? Surely not…surely not even if…

"Mr Secretary?"

He had retreated so far into the cloudy depths of his memory that the cautious entreat seemed as intrusive a disturbance as a pair of hands grasping at his shoulders, and he started so violently that his arm slipped off the armrest of the chair, jolting a nerve in the groove of his elbow. His hand automatically moving to grasp at the tremoring pain, he looked up to meet the eyes of the clerk.

"Yes?" A little more sharply than he had intended.

The boy, perhaps understandably, made a small, anxious moue. "Mr Secretary, the King commands that you attend on him at once."

Cromwell slowly pushed his chair away from his desk, rubbing his still-tingling elbow. He was struggling to pull himself back into the present, and in a foggy attempt at re-aligning his wits he frowned speculatively at the window. A watery noon sun was stealthing through the leaves of the silver birch outside.

"Did His Majesty say what it was that he requested?" As he spoke, his hand moved to smooth down across his Chain of Office, an unconscious act that was becoming almost habitual, like a talisman of reassurance. Now though, his hand lingered a moment over the cold links of metal where he felt his heart beating beneath.

The boy's head shook in an apologetic negative. "No, sir." Which was all one came to expect. Perhaps it was wise to beware the portent of comets after all.

With a swift, irritable gesture, Cromwell flipped the chancellery records shut. Honesty be praised, indeed, he thought darkly.

tbc...

A/N:

'Probitas laudatur er alget -- Honesty is praised and left to starve.'

The Satires of Juvenal.

Thomas Starkey (c. 1495 – 1538) was an English political theorist and humanist. He came to Cromwell's attention soon after returning to England in 1534 from Padua, where he had been studying for his law degree. An abiding friendship quickly developed. Cromwell and Starkey were known to have disagreed over the suppression of the smaller monasteries, with Starkey believing that monastic revenues should be used for the common good and 'of the benefits of prayers and alms'. However, the two men remained close friends until Starkey's death just two years before Cromwell's own. Starkey was an admirer of the government of Venice, hence my placing him in Venice around the time of this story.

Apologies for the slight pre-empting of history in this chapter. As far as I know, the sheltering of 'recusants', a term used to describe those who committed the statutory offence of not complying with and conforming to the Established church or the State religion, the Church of England, was only first practised and thus deemed an offence during the reign of Elizabeth I. But I decided to massage the facts a little in order to accommodate a fictional subplot of mine that will grow in significance as the story progresses. Also, to my knowledge, there has never been an abbey in Rochester. Ferdinand Cawley, and all events concerning him, are my own invention and have no basis in history.