Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

The cause of Catholicism in that lapsed country, of course, had long been closely bound up with the claim of Mary Queen of Scots to the English throne. If the illegitimacy of Elizabeth were granted — and there was no doubt whatsoever of that — Mary, as the granddaughter of Margaret Tudor, was the lawful sovereign. Consequently, the cardinal soon became a vigorous, but secret, friend of the Duke of Norfolk, whom he sought personally to wed to Mary, hoping that with the support of Spain and such prominent English Catholics as the Earl of Northumberland; the Throckmortons; the Stourtons; the Berkeleys; the Arundells; the Scropes; the Vauxes of Harrowden; and the deposed Suffragan Bishop of Hull, Robert Purseglove (who sheltered the cardinal for several years), he might restore the country to the Mother Church, but then, with the uncovering of the Ridolfi plot by Burghley in 1571, Norfolk in due course was brought to the block, and Cardinal Théroux-d’Arconville was thereupon hunted throughout the country like a dog.

We hear of him wandering, starved and exhausted, through Yorkshire, Herefordshire, and Chester, which probably had the largest aggregation of ardent Catholics within the realm, and then, shortly after the harsh enactments of Elizabeth’s sixth Parliament of 1586–1587, finally being captured in Lancashire, “the very sincke of Poperie,” and sent with other recusants to the gloomy dungeon in the casde of Wisbeach on the Isle of Ely. The charges were clear: civil disobedience, disobedience to the statutes of Parliament regulating public worship, and deliberately undermining the Protestant orientation of the realm, the penalty for which was death.

One need go no further than the nearest non-sectarian history to read the facts of his brutal execution, the direct order for which was given by that stork-faced malphoebe, Betsy the Bawd, she of the thousand fright wigs, who — with a drop of the cruel blood of the Visconti in her veins — found nevertheless her hysterical proscriptions could do everything, apparently, but curb truth. She could stint the victuals of her hard-fighting soldiers. She could shop up in the Tower her caracoling courtiers. She could bumfondle any lackey in sight, sink her black teeth into thousand-year-old dogmas, and hound holy priests into ignominy, exile, and death. But she would never kill the spirit of one noble cardinal, who, although his pen was wrested from his hand and his tongue silenced, nevertheless glorified God and edified the Church by patient suffering and invincible constancy as the opponent of heresy and schism. His name will ever be in benediction in the Catholic Church in England as one of the last and not degenerate successors of St. Hugh and St. George.

Apologists, generally, believe Cardinal Théroux-d’Arconville to have written a good deal more than the two works of his extant, the less famous one — for which in his fifty-seventh year the then Holy Father, Sixtus V, presented him the cross of the Order of the Holy Spur with a diploma and patent bearing the great pontifical seal and declaring him in his quality of doctor of laws pronotarius apostolicus extra urbem —the exact but brief animadversion in flawless Latin, dated 1584, in defense of the assassination of that goofball in the orange helmet, mouthy William the Silent of Dutchland. The by-far-greater work, one rare copy of which Darconville now perused, was the uncompromisingly frank propaedeutics he had written, in English, for the students of the school he had secretly re-established at the plundered monastery at Wednesbury.

This book was called The Shakeing of the Sheets: A Yare Treatise on ye Englissh Tongue and Sage Counsel on Clinches, Flashes, Whimzies, and Prick-Songs with Regards to Stile; or, Put Not More Inke on thy Paper Than Thou Hast Brains in thy Head . It was now witty, now rather heavily doctrinal, showing the rhetorical power of Gorgias but, often, the herpetical glower of the Gorgon. And how so? Its advice as to how to achieve an understanding of, and a respect for, language was indeed formidable — yes, and this was commendable — for the old cardinal saw, wisely, that correctness in language was the foundation of clear thinking, that clear thinking would lead to right reason, and that right reason would not only shed light on the quidditive perfections of Catholic dogma, proving the inexorability of the Roman persuasion, but also that, for once and all, it would put paid to all the lies and willful deceptions of the faithless clerical secun-digravidicals thereabouts with long faces and square hats who, though living in England, were breathing the air of Geneva and Wittenberg.

Sitting there, turning the pages, Darconville nevertheless found one particular aspect of the treatise disagreeable — its misogyny. That bias rose like a poison fume from almost every paragraph, and Darconville, who, even in his early teens, had been somewhat scandalized the first time he read it, was no less so now — and, possibly for being in love, more. How, he wondered, could anyone hate women? What, he thought, had the contrivances of that nail-spitting abishag called the Virgin Queen wrought in this poor priest? And yet in spite of that what validity value could ever be given to such an unfair, out-of-hand denunciation of the most beautiful half of the human race? The fault was not larger than the fault was fine — but nevertheless a fault. It was foolish and sad, long having been the cause of Darconville’s keeping silence, sensitively, on both the subject and the saint.

Darconville knew from his heart what to reject in the book, shut his thumb on a page, and then put it away, glad at bottom not only that no one ever bothered to read it nowadays but that no one had ever even heard of it anymore.

DARCONVILLE, meanwhile, was living solitary as a waldgrave. His days seemed as empty as the window frame he often paused before, staring out, intermittently, for almost two weeks now. Isabel seemed to have vanished. Hopeful, he had waited for her to come, initially to have it explained to him why she’d dropped out of his life, but then simply to have her with him again, a secret, if not divulged, that at least should have been understood. He either slept too much or stayed awake too long, listening for the slightest noise and smoking, so much, in fact, that when smoking one cigarette it became a strange source of misery to him that he wasn’t smoking another.

It seemed almost diabolical, her never appearing. Oh, I know , he thought, you’re going to leave me —but he dared not laugh at the irony. God might misunderstand it.

One more day passed, then two again, and another. Darconville claimed to himself in the mirror that he was being haunted by a suc-cubus who crept into his bed every night and that, though he flogged her, it was his own body every morning found full of welts, but the unshaven face in the mirror, showing havoc and rueful lines, spoke back to him: “A true lover doesn’t mind being disappointed. But he cannot bear the thought of his loved one being disappointed, and it frustrates him beyond all else, for disappointment, worse than mere complaint, is blackmail.” Spellvexit, who despised philosophy, showed an utter disregard for Darconville’s neautontimoroumenotic pain and preferred to stay outside clacking his teeth at birds until all this blew over.

It was time to do something: graduation week, Darconville realized, meant time was running out. But the telephone calls were all the same: seven numbers dialed, a slight quietus in the swallowing phone, several expectant rings, and then the apology of each correspondent— pal, protectress, prothonotary of the Queen’s bench — whereupon, opening the door of that close booth at the Timberlake, Darconville held out the receiver at arm’s length, deliberating what to do and letting whatever little impotent voice it was squeak on and on. Forfex, commander of thirty legions of devils, had become a ventriloquist. The conspiracy seemed school-wide. It was a concert of deceit.